Actually, most people (except for the hermits) fall on one side: for almost all your wants, you do buy and use other people's labor, as embodied in the products you buy off the supermarket shelves. Anything that lowers the prices you see there makes you better off.
As for losing one sector or the other, the US long ago lost its agricultural sector (as far as jobs go, not actual production). Do you still weep that you don't have to get up before the sun to milk the cows, sweep out the barn etc?
I'd submit that it's you who just doesn't get it. Most people don't work hard in a high-wage position because they want to. They work hard in a high-wage position so that they can make lots of money and use it to buy the things they really want. If you can get the same things cheaper, your standard of living goes up, not down. It is impossible for trade to make your entire economy worse off: that's like saying you're worse off after you buy a $30,000 car because you're out $30k - it's ludicrous. Both you and the car dealer are better off: you bought the car because you prefered the car to $30k, and he sold it because he prefered the $30k to the car. Similarly, trade wouldn't happen unless both parties, in this case, the two nations involved are better off for it. Incredible as it may seem to you, America is better off throwing programmers out of work and getting software cheaply coded abroad, or for that matter, shutting down automobile factories and getting Japanese imports instead. Cheap Chinese-made or Indian-made t-shirts don't make Americans poorer, they make them richer, even though the Chinese and the Indians are getting richer at the same time.
You're right, of course, that if the US got all its cars made in Japan for instance, then it would be subject to blackmail by Japan. That's just the normal effect of a monopoly. However, it's exceedingly unlikely that anything of the sort would happen in the real world. GM, Ford, Volkswagen, Daimler-Chrysler and all the rest aren't going to just disappear, even if you let the market take its course.
Similarly, it isn't as if the situation is going to become so dire anytime soon that India would be able to blackmail the US by threatening to not patch the latest bug in Windows(tm), for eg. The notion is a joke: what will obviously happen is that wages for Indian programmers will be increased if you become more and more dependent on them, or as Indian standards of living go up; and wages for American programmers will fall, until Indians no longer look cheaper than comparable American programmers.
I won't address your cheap slur against third world doctors, except to note that most of them do their jobs under far worse conditions than American doctors, and the presumption would therefore be that they are far better at doctoring than comparable Americans would be.
Finally, assuming that your worst fears come true and the sky does fall down, if Americans are perfectly happy to specialize in flipping burgers and letting all their higher-tech needs be taken care of by outsiders, who are you to stop them?
I don't understand how to explain this in any simpler terms. My advice is to pick up an introductory economics textbook, and study the first few chapters.
Regarding skilled occupations, do you seriously think that making it harder for doctors from abroad to practise in the United States gives you a better health care outcome? No, it leaves you with less doctors who are a lot more expensive than they need to be. You, not being a medical professional, would be very much better off if it were easier for foreign doctors to practise in the US. It would be terrible for the current members of the profession in the US.
Expanding your horizon from programmers to engineers makes no difference: it's no great loss to anyone (except present-day engineers) if engineering is no longer a lucrative occupation in the United States. Moreover, if you can get cheaper F-16's from abroad, you can trade the military budget for education, or R&D in biotech, or countless other things, and it isn't by any means obvious that engineering will go down the drain simply because some subfields are now cheaper to get done abroad.
My point is that in a first-world economy, or indeed in any economy other than one arranged along the lines of the Soviet Union, it is impossible that people as a whole get wages that leave them unable to afford the goods they are producing. In other words, there ain't no such beast as an America in which everyone earns minimum wage, and this has nothing to do with the fact that it's first-world, even.
The nice things that you mention exist because the US is a first-world nation and can afford them. The cheaper software gets, the more money people have for spending on nice things like that, and the higher the US standard of living. It doesn't matter if software gets cheaper because programmers get smarter or because $7/hr monkeys overseas do the programming.
The only people to whom it makes a difference are the US programmers, who, like it or not, form a small minority of the population - their loss is more than offset by everyone else's gains.
To take an example that perhaps doesn't cut so close to home, consider again those burger-flippers and suppose McD's replaces them all by a machine that can flip burgers at half the cost, resulting in cheaper burgers. There should be no question that America benefits, and equally no question that the people suddenly laid off are worse off. There is also no question that the benefits would be the same if the "machine" were actually immigrants willing to work at half the wages of the American burger-flippers, in fact, if you included the benefits to the immigrants, this might be even better than before.
This is precisely what I mean about not having an understanding of market economics: the beauty of this country is that a bunch of individuals, none of whom gives a damn about anyone else, still end up doing what benefits the country as a whole.
Sure, it's hard to lose your job, and perhaps even harder to see it go to a guy who produces lower quality output just because he's cheaper, but that is irrelevant to the question of whether the wider economy benefits or not: I'm sure weavers and spinners were pretty pissed off to be replaced by a warehouse full of machinery that probably produced lower quality cloth just because it was cheaper, but the world has a whole has benefited.
You seem to forget that an economy is interconnected: if everybody was getting burger-flipper wages, then burgers would have to be a lot cheaper as well.
If high-wage jobs go overseas and get done for lower wages, as far as most Americans are concerned, they're getting software (or cars, or planes etc) for much less money than before - a benefit. Sure there are a small minority of Americans (the techies: who are a large majority on/.) who get screwed over badly, but guess what: your average burger-flipping American doesn't give a damn, and is happy to finally have a car or a cell-phone he can afford.
Why does it seem that/.'ers have no understanding of rudimentary international economics?
Cheaper labor is not bad for the American economy, it's obviously good. You can argue that techies are getting screwed by H1B's or jobs being exported, and that is probably true. But the American economy overall benefits - and if you argue otherwise, you have zero understanding of how a market economy works.
The lawyers/doctors etc who are protecting their jobs and preventing immigrants from taking on their work for less pay are actually damaging the overall economy in order to line their personal pockets.
McDonald's burger-flippers also live here and spend at least some money here, but overall they really don't help the economy a whole lot because their wages are so low
Duh. If their wages weren't low, you'd be paying through your nose for burgers. Considering the number of cheap burgers sold by McD's, I'd say that the burger-flippers are probably doing a hell of a lot for the economy.
... it's not illegal since it's not a hormone that occurs naturally in the human body
Why would the legal status of a hormone supplement depend on whether or not it occurs naturally in the human body? If it did, I would have thought the dependence should go the other way: if something doesn't occur naturally in the body, it has more reason to be illegal, surely?
This is dist*CC*. problems like this will come up only when your source files depend on something else being already compiled, and the Makefile doesn't state this dependency. Exceedingly unlikely, in other words. Linking object files together with libraries is *not* parallelized.
It takes (0.5+0.05)*10=5.5 seconds to compile 10 source files. When did you ever see a project compile 10 source files with a single invocation of gcc?
The first and most important point: when you sign up with a wedding photographer, you enter a contract, and 99% of the time, it will say that the photographer owns the negs and the photos./. readers may think they know more about professional photography as a business than the guys/gals who make a living doing it, but don't they at least believe in the free market? If you want a different contract, negotiate it up front!
This guy says he wants digital photos to view on the computer and to send to friends/relatives, for them to view on computer, and doesn't want prints; and then complains he isn't going to get the highest quality digital images? Why do you need a drum scan of a 6x6 neg when all you want to do is look at a (max)1600x1200 image on the screen?
He thinks the photos from his digicam are better than those he can take with an SLR? You need to spend at least a grand on a digicam before you will approach the quality of a $300-$400 SLR. The advantages of digital have nothing to do with quality of the image - it's more immediate, it's the route you want to go if you want pictures on your computer, but it is not the way to get photographs that look better.
He seems to think that 5mp digicams are closing the gap between amateur photography and professional wedding photographers - has he actually looked at the prints? There's a reason why professional cameras and lenses cost as much as they do: there is much more of a quality difference than between a walmart pc and your uber gaming box. Another post gives some figures about camera and lens costs that are grossly underestimated, btw: medium format lenses will set you back 1-1.5k$ each, and those are the cheaper ones.
He compares software to photographs, but omits a crucial detail: even the mediocre software professional is making $50k plus per year, probably more. Even if a wedding photographer shoots a wedding a week, he'd have to make a profit of $1000 per wedding to match that, and he has a much higher capital and material cost. Would you seriously pay more than $1500 for a CD of your wedding from a mediocre photographer?
For those of you planning to make prints from negatives that you buy from your photographer: you should consider that to get prints comparable to those in your album, you will pay a minimum of $10-$20 per print: the prints that a wedding photographer gives you don't come from Walmart.
Professional photographs cost serious money: it's generally accepted that if a magazine loses someone's original slide, for eg, that it will cough up about 1.5k$ as the going rate.
It's true that general relativity raises some thorny issues to do with conservation of energy, but your example isn't actually one of them, since according to GTR, it is impossible for the sun to "suddenly disappear". This was one of the most beautiful things about GTR which distinguishes it from other field theories: the equations of motion follow from the equations of the gravitational field, rather than being tacked on later. In electromagnetism, on the other hand, there are equations describing the field, and then the equation qE+qv\cross B = m dv/dt that follows from Newton's laws and describes the motion of the charges. Thus it's possible to have a consistent EM field with stationary charges, raising questions of what holds the charges stationary, whereas it is not possible to have a consistent gravitational field with stationary masses.
And I don't know why you subscribe with religious fervor to the "free market". The free market is not an end in itself, it is a means to the end of efficient uitilization of resources. If it fails in that goal, it has no purpose.
Your example of inventions lowering barriers to entry can work only in a marketplace governed by the rule of law: otherwise AT&T (which wouldn't have been broken up) would just hire out the local mafia goons to take care of the "trouble-maker" who invented cell phones.
You will need damages. You can't sue without showing damages.
This doesn't make sense. Are you saying that, to take a purely hypothetical example, if Ford releases a car that has the nasty habit of shutting its engine off randomly while driving, I actually have to be in an accident before I can sue? I mean, simply coasting onto the shoulder of a highway surely doesn't count as damage.
That's not what a monopoly means. Porsche isn't considered to be a monopoly because they're the only people who make 911's, for example. If you continue the line of argument you're taking, you'll end up saying the neighbourhood mom-and-pop is a monopoly because "they're the only store on 5th and Main". Apple is in the business of making general-purpose PC's, and there are a hell of a lot of competitors in that business.
Microsoft owns the OS market for general-purpose PC's, because Apple/free unices/misc alternatives are such a small part of the market. They use that market share to force OEM's into restrictive license agreements (or at least, used to, dunno if they've stopped). Apple can't pull that kind of stunt because they simply don't have the market power to do so, so they don't have to be prevented by the law.
I see this comment a lot on/., and I was just wondering what happens if you try to lift a retail box from a store? Can you argue that you only stole a buck of merchandise, and the rest is copyright infringement, except it didn't happen because they caught you when you were trying to walk out the door?
come on, it seems like the Chinese government is up to something fishy here. In the US, no municipal government would allow such a widespread violation of building codes if it knows about it.
Bull. Case in point: it isn't as if it was a big secret that airport security in the US was a joke. Nobody did anything before Sep 11, did they?
I think what most people are trying to tell you is that it isn't actually a bug, because according to the USPS, you _do_ live in Appleville as far as mail is concerned. I.E. if it were addressed to Apricotland, the postal service would have a harder time figuring out where to deliver it. This may be counter-intuitive, but that's the way it is: for me, for eg. my phone company thinks I live in one town and the post office thinks I live in another. It's not a bug until the TR actively screws up and mails the mag to your twin who lives in Appleville instead of to you.
In Jackie Chan's autobio, he mentions that while shooting one of his movies, he jumped off the top of a bus through a real window by mistake (he was supposed to go through a prop). He survived, tho.
I'm surprised there aren't a lot of his movies on that site, btw - the physics have to be good, because almost all his stunts are real.
Re:If keys get stolen I want to know
on
Ethical Obligations
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The solution here is obvious: tell the tenant, and change the locks asap. The tenant will feel much better about the apt management if this is done - also, if you keep quiet about it, what happens if the apt is burgled, and the fact that the keys were in an insecure location comes out later? You could potentially face liability.
Slashdot Mirror
As for losing one sector or the other, the US long ago lost its agricultural sector (as far as jobs go, not actual production). Do you still weep that you don't have to get up before the sun to milk the cows, sweep out the barn etc?
I'd submit that it's you who just doesn't get it. Most people don't work hard in a high-wage position because they want to. They work hard in a high-wage position so that they can make lots of money and use it to buy the things they really want. If you can get the same things cheaper, your standard of living goes up, not down. It is impossible for trade to make your entire economy worse off: that's like saying you're worse off after you buy a $30,000 car because you're out $30k - it's ludicrous. Both you and the car dealer are better off: you bought the car because you prefered the car to $30k, and he sold it because he prefered the $30k to the car. Similarly, trade wouldn't happen unless both parties, in this case, the two nations involved are better off for it. Incredible as it may seem to you, America is better off throwing programmers out of work and getting software cheaply coded abroad, or for that matter, shutting down automobile factories and getting Japanese imports instead. Cheap Chinese-made or Indian-made t-shirts don't make Americans poorer, they make them richer, even though the Chinese and the Indians are getting richer at the same time.
You're right, of course, that if the US got all its cars made in Japan for instance, then it would be subject to blackmail by Japan. That's just the normal effect of a monopoly. However, it's exceedingly unlikely that anything of the sort would happen in the real world. GM, Ford, Volkswagen, Daimler-Chrysler and all the rest aren't going to just disappear, even if you let the market take its course.
Similarly, it isn't as if the situation is going to become so dire anytime soon that India would be able to blackmail the US by threatening to not patch the latest bug in Windows(tm), for eg. The notion is a joke: what will obviously happen is that wages for Indian programmers will be increased if you become more and more dependent on them, or as Indian standards of living go up; and wages for American programmers will fall, until Indians no longer look cheaper than comparable American programmers.
I won't address your cheap slur against third world doctors, except to note that most of them do their jobs under far worse conditions than American doctors, and the presumption would therefore be that they are far better at doctoring than comparable Americans would be.
Finally, assuming that your worst fears come true and the sky does fall down, if Americans are perfectly happy to specialize in flipping burgers and letting all their higher-tech needs be taken care of by outsiders, who are you to stop them?
I don't understand how to explain this in any simpler terms. My advice is to pick up an introductory economics textbook, and study the first few chapters.
Regarding skilled occupations, do you seriously think that making it harder for doctors from abroad to practise in the United States gives you a better health care outcome? No, it leaves you with less doctors who are a lot more expensive than they need to be. You, not being a medical professional, would be very much better off if it were easier for foreign doctors to practise in the US. It would be terrible for the current members of the profession in the US.
Expanding your horizon from programmers to engineers makes no difference: it's no great loss to anyone (except present-day engineers) if engineering is no longer a lucrative occupation in the United States. Moreover, if you can get cheaper F-16's from abroad, you can trade the military budget for education, or R&D in biotech, or countless other things, and it isn't by any means obvious that engineering will go down the drain simply because some subfields are now cheaper to get done abroad.
My point is that in a first-world economy, or indeed in any economy other than one arranged along the lines of the Soviet Union, it is impossible that people as a whole get wages that leave them unable to afford the goods they are producing. In other words, there ain't no such beast as an America in which everyone earns minimum wage, and this has nothing to do with the fact that it's first-world, even.
The nice things that you mention exist because the US is a first-world nation and can afford them. The cheaper software gets, the more money people have for spending on nice things like that, and the higher the US standard of living. It doesn't matter if software gets cheaper because programmers get smarter or because $7/hr monkeys overseas do the programming.
The only people to whom it makes a difference are the US programmers, who, like it or not, form a small minority of the population - their loss is more than offset by everyone else's gains.
To take an example that perhaps doesn't cut so close to home, consider again those burger-flippers and suppose McD's replaces them all by a machine that can flip burgers at half the cost, resulting in cheaper burgers. There should be no question that America benefits, and equally no question that the people suddenly laid off are worse off. There is also no question that the benefits would be the same if the "machine" were actually immigrants willing to work at half the wages of the American burger-flippers, in fact, if you included the benefits to the immigrants, this might be even better than before.
This is precisely what I mean about not having an understanding of market economics: the beauty of this country is that a bunch of individuals, none of whom gives a damn about anyone else, still end up doing what benefits the country as a whole.
Sure, it's hard to lose your job, and perhaps even harder to see it go to a guy who produces lower quality output just because he's cheaper, but that is irrelevant to the question of whether the wider economy benefits or not: I'm sure weavers and spinners were pretty pissed off to be replaced by a warehouse full of machinery that probably produced lower quality cloth just because it was cheaper, but the world has a whole has benefited.
If high-wage jobs go overseas and get done for lower wages, as far as most Americans are concerned, they're getting software (or cars, or planes etc) for much less money than before - a benefit. Sure there are a small minority of Americans (the techies: who are a large majority on /.) who get screwed over badly, but guess what: your average burger-flipping American doesn't give a damn, and is happy to finally have a car or a cell-phone he can afford.
Why does it seem that /.'ers have no understanding of rudimentary international economics?
Cheaper labor is not bad for the American economy, it's obviously good. You can argue that techies are getting screwed by H1B's or jobs being exported, and that is probably true. But the American economy overall benefits - and if you argue otherwise, you have zero understanding of how a market economy works.
The lawyers/doctors etc who are protecting their jobs and preventing immigrants from taking on their work for less pay are actually damaging the overall economy in order to line their personal pockets.
Duh. If their wages weren't low, you'd be paying through your nose for burgers. Considering the number of cheap burgers sold by McD's, I'd say that the burger-flippers are probably doing a hell of a lot for the economy.
Why would the legal status of a hormone supplement depend on whether or not it occurs naturally in the human body? If it did, I would have thought the dependence should go the other way: if something doesn't occur naturally in the body, it has more reason to be illegal, surely?
Bugtraq used to be a moderated list, isn't it anymore?
This is dist*CC*. problems like this will come up only when your source files depend on something else being already compiled, and the Makefile doesn't state this dependency. Exceedingly unlikely, in other words. Linking object files together with libraries is *not* parallelized.
It takes (0.5+0.05)*10=5.5 seconds to compile 10 source files. When did you ever see a project compile 10 source files with a single invocation of gcc?
It's true that general relativity raises some thorny issues to do with conservation of energy, but your example isn't actually one of them, since according to GTR, it is impossible for the sun to "suddenly disappear". This was one of the most beautiful things about GTR which distinguishes it from other field theories: the equations of motion follow from the equations of the gravitational field, rather than being tacked on later. In electromagnetism, on the other hand, there are equations describing the field, and then the equation qE+qv\cross B = m dv/dt that follows from Newton's laws and describes the motion of the charges. Thus it's possible to have a consistent EM field with stationary charges, raising questions of what holds the charges stationary, whereas it is not possible to have a consistent gravitational field with stationary masses.
And I don't know why you subscribe with religious fervor to the "free market". The free market is not an end in itself, it is a means to the end of efficient uitilization of resources. If it fails in that goal, it has no purpose.
Your example of inventions lowering barriers to entry can work only in a marketplace governed by the rule of law: otherwise AT&T (which wouldn't have been broken up) would just hire out the local mafia goons to take care of the "trouble-maker" who invented cell phones.
This doesn't make sense. Are you saying that, to take a purely hypothetical example, if Ford releases a car that has the nasty habit of shutting its engine off randomly while driving, I actually have to be in an accident before I can sue? I mean, simply coasting onto the shoulder of a highway surely doesn't count as damage.
That's not what a monopoly means. Porsche isn't considered to be a monopoly because they're the only people who make 911's, for example. If you continue the line of argument you're taking, you'll end up saying the neighbourhood mom-and-pop is a monopoly because "they're the only store on 5th and Main". Apple is in the business of making general-purpose PC's, and there are a hell of a lot of competitors in that business.
Microsoft owns the OS market for general-purpose PC's, because Apple/free unices/misc alternatives are such a small part of the market. They use that market share to force OEM's into restrictive license agreements (or at least, used to, dunno if they've stopped). Apple can't pull that kind of stunt because they simply don't have the market power to do so, so they don't have to be prevented by the law.
See section 1008. It protects non-commercial use of a digital recording device by a consumer. Besides, the link you provide is not the entire AHRA.
I see this comment a lot on /., and I was just wondering what happens if you try to lift a retail box from a store? Can you argue that you only stole a buck of merchandise, and the rest is copyright infringement, except it didn't happen because they caught you when you were trying to walk out the door?
Bull. Case in point: it isn't as if it was a big secret that airport security in the US was a joke. Nobody did anything before Sep 11, did they?
An ugly hack is not complexity, it's poor engineering.
I think what most people are trying to tell you is that it isn't actually a bug, because according to the USPS, you _do_ live in Appleville as far as mail is concerned. I.E. if it were addressed to Apricotland, the postal service would have a harder time figuring out where to deliver it. This may be counter-intuitive, but that's the way it is: for me, for eg. my phone company thinks I live in one town and the post office thinks I live in another. It's not a bug until the TR actively screws up and mails the mag to your twin who lives in Appleville instead of to you.
In Jackie Chan's autobio, he mentions that while shooting one of his movies, he jumped off the top of a bus through a real window by mistake (he was supposed to go through a prop). He survived, tho.
I'm surprised there aren't a lot of his movies on that site, btw - the physics have to be good, because almost all his stunts are real.
The solution here is obvious: tell the tenant, and change the locks asap. The tenant will feel much better about the apt management if this is done - also, if you keep quiet about it, what happens if the apt is burgled, and the fact that the keys were in an insecure location comes out later? You could potentially face liability.
Um, in most recent systems, rm doesn't let you delete .. .