Los Angeles predates the United States by almost two hundred years, and is the confluence of nine monasteries. It was largely grown by accident as a commercial hub during the gold rushes of 1849 and later 1861. In fact the formal urban planning of Los Angeles did not begin until 1922.
Los Angeles predates the United States by 200 years? I hope you're joking! The Spanish hadn't even arrived in California then. The Spanish hadn't even conquered what we now call California until 1769. Your "fact" would put the founding of LA during the late Reformation! Whom do you think founded it? Elizabeth I? Perhaps the city of New York was founded during the Medieval period?
Los Angeles was incorporated in 1850. You can find that information by typing "Los Angeles" into wikipedia and reading the first two paragraphs. Granted, there was a ranch there previously which later became a small town, and which had the words "Los Angeles" embedded in its name. Even if you count that as LA (which would be a stretch), LA was founded in 1781. Certainly not 200 years before the U.S. was founded!
And Los Angeles was not founded as the confluence of nine monasteries! First, they were missions, not monasteries--the two are completely different, and the nearest monastery was thousands of miles away. Second, the early missions were founded by Junipero Serra in 1768, not 200 years before the founding of the U.S.! Third, the nine "monasteries" founded by Junipero Serra were spread all over California. Only one was in Los Angeles. Another one of the missions is in Sonoma county, which is ~500 miles away! In other words, Los Angeles was not founded as a confluence of the nine "monasteries"!
In addition, Los Angeles had nothing whatsoever to do with the gold rushes of 1849 and 1861. Those rushes took place hundreds of miles to the north! At that time, Los Angeles was a small village with a few thousand people, and most certainly was not a "commercial hub" of any kind. From the wikipedia article (or practically any other source on this topic): "In the 1870s Los Angeles was still little more than a village of 5,000".
Finally, I recently worked in a building in historic core LA which was built in 1913. All the buildings on the street are of the same size and general design, as was mandated by plan. The planning began before 1922!
Los Angeles had a population of 9,519,338 at the 2000 census, and a current population estimate of 9,935,475. In 1960, the population at census was 6,038,771.
LA has a population of less than 4 million now. The second sentence in the wikipedia article on Los Angeles reads: "As of the 2005 U.S. Census estimate, the city had a population of 3.8 million.".
Neither of the links you provided contain you what claim they contain. One of the cited pages lists the population for a wide region which includes Long Beach! That is not Los Angeles!
I've got four life critical applications under active use, and have formal training in six different software engineering methodologies, two of whom are military.
Clap, clap, clap...
I see that modesty is your strong point.
You should talk...
"Agile methods involve continuous requirements gathering, and tremendous planning." Where are you getting this stuff? The phrase used over and over in all of the XP books is 'the day-to-day process of planning.'
Umm... try reading the sentence you're responding to. Try to understand it.
Microsoft is the origin of the McConnell/Sullivan method, which they used from about 1997 to about 2003. Before that, Microsoft did not have a unified internal model, and was largely a mix of iterative and monolithic design. They now use Agile extensively. This is the reason they've created Channel9. This is the reason that Visual Studio Team System is a big collection of
Philadelphia, New Beijing, Taiwan, Seoul, Londinium, Carthos, Constantinople, Phoenix, Chicago, Tampa, Rio De Janeiro, Tokyo/Kyoto, Sydney, Jakarta and Dubai were all carefully planned.
A defining feature of many of those cities is that they were completely destroyed, sometimes repeatedly, and rebuilt. As such they went through "iterations" of planning which resemble an agile process much more closely than they resemble a waterfall process. Not a single one of those cities was originally planned according to some conception when the city was founded.
Chicago seems to be the most-cited example on this thread. But Chicago is unusual in that it grew from a population of a few hundrend thousand to 3M in a few decades, thus everyone knew that it was going to be a large city. As a result, planning of the kind you describe was possible. Then it was destroyed in a great fire, and rebuilt, which is an iteration. The Chicago you see today most certainly was not planned from the beginning.
Most people don't know that one of the most carefully planned cities in the US was Los Angeles. I live there now. It's amazing to me how ridiculous were the planning assumptions, made 4 decades ago, for a city with a population 1/5th what it is now. The infrastructure of intersecting freeways is perfectly designed for a city with 1/5th the population it currently has. Los Angeles has traditionally had the most rigid zoning requirements, and the strictest building codes, of anywhere. Some of them now seem so silly (in retrospect) as to be quaint. Entire regions (like historic core in downtown LA) were carefully planned only to be virtually abandoned.
The thing is, in my admittedly limited experience, most of the people who really stand behind Agile/XP/Scrumm are people who've only ever dealt with Agile/XP/Scrumm or no methodology at all. It is frequently the case then that people see Agile/XP/Scrumm outperforming a complete lack of organization, and quickly begin to believe that to develop without Agile/XP/Scrumm is suicide. There is a reasonable parallel here in your city planning metaphor - most people who look at city planning think it's all ad-hoc, and don't know about the problems going on in city scaling right now. This turns out to be a massive repeating issue to both the Department of Agriculture and to the Department of the Interior. The case can be made that what you are suggesting amounts to Argumentum ad Antiquitatem, and that indeed though this is how it's usually and traditionally been done doesn't mean that it's how things should be done. By extension of your parallel back to software, the way it's always been done might well be described as the waterfall model or the monolithic model, or even by non-planning entirely, and I think we're all to the point of understanding how big of a mistake that would be. (Might as well do some Structured Programming in COBOL, huhuhu.)
In my own significant experience, I've learned that an incremental and iterative process is necessary in almost any project. I'm not advocating XP or FDD. However the "waterfall method", where you attempt to devise a perfect architecture once and for all, beforehand, almost always results in failure. Attempting to plan any software project as one big iteration almost always ends badly. It results in uncontrolled projects where timelines are drastically incorrect.
It has been my experience that Fred Brooks' book "The Mythical Man Month" is now almost universally ignored by experienced software professionals. From what I can gather, it was the source of this analogy between software development and construction. It was nifty for its time, but a great deal has been learned since then.
By the way, there is no opposition between agility and planning! It's a mistaken notion of agile methods, that they just "start throwing things together." Agile methods involve continuous requirements gathering, and tremendous planning. The class diagram is the
If I were to give away 85% of MY worth, I'd be homeless and relying on the charity of others. Mr. Buffet does not have that problem. He can donate billions and not suffer. because there comes a point at which having more money just means a higher number. If I had ten million dollars, I could do a lot. If I had twenty million, I could do a little more. If I had a billion, I could do pretty much anything I'd want to do. If I had ten billion, or a hundred, would anything change? What does $30 billion get me that $20 billion doesn't?
His donation is fantastic, and I'm staggered, but he does not suffer as a result of giving this gift. All this means is a lower number in a computer somewhere, and that's it. His charity is outstanding, but his sacrifice is non-existent.
It amazes me how much envy and sour grapes will lead us to denigrate the accomplishments of others. You say that Buffet has sacrificed little, but Buffet has sacrificed almost everything for his entire life. He has lived his whole adult life in the same cheap working-class house in suburban Nebraska that he bought decades ago. He hasn't spent a penny of the billions that his Berkshire stock is worth (he lives off a modest salary). He's devoted his life and his remarkable talents to raising a collosal sum which he intends to give away to charity. He's sacrificed more than I have sacrificed, and (I wager) more than you have sacrificed.
But apparently that isn't good enough. His charity has provoked nothing but vitriol here. The reason, I suspect, is because his charity--no matter how great--could never soothe the envy and resentment that most people on slashdot apparently feel toward those more successful than themselves.
(I'm not specifically talking about you here. You at least called his charity "outstanding", which is a great deal more credit than many people on this forum were willing to give him).
As far as I'm concerned, Buffet is an excellent man who should be held up as an example.
If I had the opportunity to change the language, I would make more obvious changes, like remove [sic] silent letters.
Wow - you actually used 'correctly' correctly! Awesome! Obviously, you're not an Apple user, else [sic] you'd spell it different.
BTW, for anyone who's interested, it's not "British English", it's just "English" [sic]. The Scotts [sic], Welsh and Irish each have their own language - some even use them.
I agree with some of your points. Many of the advantages listed for the U.S. in the original article are also shared by Europe. For example, the EU is filled with rich states that aren't police states.
However some of your points underestimate the differences between the two regions:
You can fire people in America: labor mobility is not a US invention. If you are faced with stifling labor laws, you can work around them. You can use contractors, bankruptcy law, subsidies, the list goes on. Plus, Anglo-Saxon countries with liberal labor laws (UK, Australia), still haven't fostered startups that well.
Labor mobility may not be an American invention but America is the place where it is currently practiced. Of course there are ways of "getting around" anti-mobility laws, as there are ways of geting around any laws, but law avoidance (like tax avoidance) is costly, difficult, and incomplete. Just saying that you can "work around" laws greatly understates the difficulty in so doing. In many countries of the EU, firing someone or laying them off is practically impossible.
The market does not favor incumbents: unless you are trying to create a new market, it's much harder to compete with incumbent competitors outside the US, as they are usually politically protected (for fear of loss of jobs, political gains, what-have-you). If you think AT&T has a strong lobby in DC, consider what would happen if say the Ministry of Communications was the one running AT&T. That still is (directly or indirectly, through equity stakes) the case in most of Europe.
There are far fewer large tech incumbents in Europe than in the US. Obviously every country has a phone company but most European countries do not have an IBM, Microsoft, or Cisco.
Failure is an option: there is less if any stigma associated with failure, making the option of going to work for a startup a much less negative one.
In my experience foreigners are as tolerant of failure as Americans. In fact foreigners are probably more tolerant of failure because career success is less important in most countries than in the U.S.
Furthermore, it has been my experience that many or most employees of silicon valley startups are Asian or European. Even some of the founders of companies in silicon valley are foreign. If foreign people were terrified of failure then they would not come to the US to fail, only to be sent slinking home. Bear in mind that many people working in silicon valley companies are employed using H1-B visas which means that if the company fails then their visa is revoked and they must return home immediately--implying to their fellows that they went to silicon valley, tried, failed, and were booted out of the place. If they were afraid of failure then they wouldn't take a risk like that.
Since foreigners are as likely as Americans to work at silicon valley startups, cultural differences between employees can't be the reason behind silicon valley's success. The fact that the employees are from all over the world, but the companies are American, suggests that the difference is economic not cultural.
I believe the primary reason there are more large startups in the US is because there is far more venture capital. It's natural that Europeans would be terrified of failing in Europe because the enterpreneurs there must bear the risk entirely by themselves. If you wish to raise money for a startup in Europe then you must risk all of your personal savings, and your house--and even then you really wouldn't have enough money to fund the startup. In America you use somebody else's money, and the risk to you is greatly decreased. Of course, if you accept venture capital then the potential rewards are also decreased, but if the startup succeeds then you'll be filthy rich anyway and you won't worry about the 33% cut of your massive fortune that must now be paid to ventu
Automobiles have been promised for a long time now. As an example, I remember that a production automobile was promised by Benz to be available in showrooms by 1880...then 1882...then 1883...then 1885... And we still wait.
Err...What? Automobiles arrived before they were promised. There were no auto showrooms in 1880.
It appears increasingly unlikely that automobiles will ever happen. Although automobile technology continues to improve, the improvement is very gradual. It's not clear that automobiles are progressing faster than new steam technology, in which case the two will never converge.
Automobiles were not in competition with steam locomotives. Furthermore, internal combustion technology was progressing much faster than steam technology, even in 1890.
Bear in mind that you wouldn't be able to refuel the automobile by just pouring in more petroleum. Petroleum is extremely poisonous even in very small amounts, and medically significant amounts are absorbed through the skin. Therefore the automobiles will require expensive and durable equipment to prevent the leakage of any fuel whatsoever. Probably the fuel tanks will be expensive and will have to be recycled and disposed of properly.
Err... What? Autos have ALWAYS been refueled by pouring petroleum into the tank, even in the very beginning.
Furthermore, petroleum is not nearly as poisonous and cannot be absorbed through the skin. In fact some people even swallow trivial amounts of petroleum (during "siphoning") without catastrophic consequences. As a result, fuel tanks for petroleum were never expensive and do not have to be recycled or disposed of.
the point is: have a little bit of vision
The point is: have a little bit of realism. Actually, there's another point too: come up with good analogies. Because the analogy you provided (fuel cells vs automobiles) was not actually analogous at all.
...By the way, fuel cells are significantly older than automobiles. True, autos have been around since 1880, but fuel cells were invented in 1839. And fuel cells weren't just invented and then forgotten about. Fuel cells have been researched extensively and continuously since the 1950s. In fact, GM first promised a fuel cell vehicle in 1965.
At a similar stage in its history (50 years since initial development) the automobile was already incredibly widespread, and auto technology was rapidly improving.
Even if fuel cells drastically improved and were suddenly competitive, they wouldn't provide anywhere near the advantage that automobiles did. Autos allowed people to go anywhere they wanted. Autos allowed easy transport of goods to far-flung places. On the other hand, fuel cells (even if they worked) would just cut down on recharging time for notebooks, which is hardly earth-shattering. Fuel cells wouldn't even benefit autos that greatly, even if they worked, because methanol fuel cells aren't more efficient than internal combustion engines and methanol has no greater energy density than petroleum.
Although automobiles were successful, that doesn't mean every other technology must be. Since the invention of the auto there have been 100 other technologies that quietly died and are now forgotten.
I agree that we should have vision, but at some point vision must yield to reality. Fuel cells have been promised for >50 years now, and the promised benefits are minor. At some point we must abandon failed technologies and move on.
Fuel cells have been promised for a long time now. As an example, I remember that a production fuel-cell car was promised by Mercedes to be available in showrooms by 2001...then 2004...then 2007...then 2009... And we still wait. And there are other examples: laptop makers have also repeatedly promised that fuel cells are right around the corner, with similar results.
It appears increasingly unlikely that fuel cells will ever happen. Although fuel cell technology continues to improve, the improvement is very gradual. It's not clear that fuel cells are progressing faster than new battery technology, in which case the two will never converge.
I should also note that the fuel cartridge (100ml) by itself, which powers the laptop for 10 hours, is not that much smaller than a battery. Even if toshiba drastically shrank the size of the surrounding electronics, making the entire cell the same size as a battery, it still would have no advantage. You would still have to carry around extra fuel cartridges (with methanol) for additional power.
Bear in mind that you wouldn't be able to recharge the cartridge by just pouring in more methanol, or buying new fuel cartridges at a convenience store. Methanol is extremely poisonous even in very small amounts, and medically significant amounts are absorbed through the skin. Therefore the fuel cartridges will require expensive and durable equipment to prevent the leakage of any fuel whatsoever when removed from the laptop. Probably the fuel cartridges will be expensive and will have to be recycled and disposed of properly.
"If you can not make your mortgage and basic bills on a little over 1/2 your income then you are living beyond your means and is a stupid thing to do."...Wow. That's the most uneducated thing I've ever heard in my life.
Many educated people live way below their means.
Did you stop to consider that a huge percentage of people in the US (and the world) lease their home or apartment? A decent one bedroom apartment in Boston, for example, will cost you perhaps $1200 a month; NYC, I'm told studios are something like $1400-1500 a month. That's $14400 a year; figure another $2k in utilities and now you're at $16,400 a year in BASIC living costs.
Boston, San Francisco, and New York are the most expensive housing markets in the nation. In expensive places like those, salaries of IT workers are higher to compensate for the expense.
Lets say you need to drive a half hour to work on the highway each way, and you get 30mpg. That's about $1500 in gas a year. Don't forget $1k in insurance.
If you have to drive 30 minutes to get to work, then you don't live in Boston, San Francisco, or New York, as you claimed earlier. In any of those cities, a car is completely unnecessary. If you have to drive 30 minutes, then you live in the suburbs where rents are far cheaper than what you indicated above.
Let's assume your employer happens to be one of those increasingly rare types that actually "employs" you, so they pay their fair share of taxes and so on. Wellllll...
If your employer doesn't pay its taxes then you should report it to the IRS and the responsible people will be imprisoned. Anyway, you're not liable for your employer's unpaid taxes.
You're certainly not married, and you sure as hell don't have children.
So let me get this straight.... You should be able to live in a nice apartment of your own in Manhattan, supporting a family and a stay-at-home wife, while saving money and investing for retirement, on a low salary. Is that right?
Perhaps your expectations are too extravagent. Perhaps you shouldn't expect to live in Manhattan on a low salary while driving a car and supporting a family with a stay-at-home wife. Perhaps your wife could get a job, especially if you insist on living in one of the most expensive cities in the nation on a low salary. Or, if your wife refuses to work, perhaps you could (gasp!) live in the suburbs.
Don't get me wrong, I understand your frustration. But the world doesn't owe you an apartment in Manhattan. If you can't afford such an apartment, then it isn't your landlord's fault.
The rest of the people in debt are there because everyone from the electric company to their landlord is a greedy little shrew and trying to bleed them out of every penny they've made.
Everyone in debt is responsible for it, with the rare exceptions of people who have extraordinary health problems. If you are in debt it's because YOU signed the credit card agreement and spent that money. Don't blame your landlord. In fact, you signed the lease agreement with your landlord--if you felt the price was unfair at the time then you shouldn't have signed it.
There are many people in the world who live off less than $3,000/yr, and they survive. They survive by having lots of room-mates, and by eating rice or tortillas, and by riding bicycles or taking buses. So don't complain too loudly.
The power of a Union is directly proportional to how capital intensive its industry is. That's because capital-intensive firms suffer huge capital costs as a result of work stoppages, strikes, and disruptions at expensive factories.
Software, however, isn't capital-intensive at all. The total investment in a software house is a few thousand dollars for PCs and servers. If you struck, then your employer could move your PCs out of the building, outsource your jobs to India, and fire you all on the spot, with very little cost to himself.
Unions in IT would accomplish one thing only: an acceleration of the outsourcing trend.
That $1000 laser printer of yesterday lasted for 10 years. The $99 printer you purchase today (and that is really stretching it for a laser printer btw, you'll pay $79 for a bottom of the line hp inkjet, a decent laser is about $500 today) will last 2 years, tops.
$99 for a laser printer is not "stretching it." You can find a $99 laser printer from Dell here. You can find similar deals elsewhere if you look around on the web.
Whereas the very cheapest laser printer from anyone 17 years ago costed almost $1,000 and had 1/2 the resolution and 1/4 the printing speed. I remember purchasing the very cheapest laser printer I could find almost 13 years ago for nearly $700.
Laser printers in general have remained reliable over the years. Granted that the old HP lasers were very reliable, but they were also very expensive, much more expensive than the cheapest $1,000 laser 17 years ago. I'll also grant that cheap inkjets are sometimes shoddy but then again they sell for $34 at Best Buy--a price far lower than any printer a decade ago.
"17 yrs ago, the standard price for RAM was $50/meg and now it's $50/gig--a difference of 1000x." Again your numbers are a bit skewed, the price for ram today is double that.
Indeed, I just looked up the prices, and $50/gig was a bit off (it's more like $85). However the $50/meg was not an inflation-adjusted figure so a fair comparison would be 75 Y2006 dollars per meg 17 years ago, versus 85 Y2006 dollars per gig now. That's nearly a factor of 1,000, before we take into account changes in RAM speed.
Unless you suggest that the market should be given credit for advancements in technology, despite the fact that these occur all over the globe in a variety of economies and that technology progresses at a reasonably predictable rate regardless of market type.
First, your original point was about price inflation and I was discussing that. Whatever the cause, prices for equivalent computer equipment have unequestionably declined rapidly over the years, and prices for most other things have declined gradually.
Although the topic being discussed was price inflation, I do think that the market should be given significant credit (but not exclusive credit) for advancements in technology, insofar as many of the advancements were made by private industries (like IBM & HP) funding R&D and making gradual improvements in process technology. Obviously government-sponsored R&D has also played a significant role, however the government-sponsored R&D in computer technology has occurred almost exclusively in capitalist countries where there's enough excess resources for the government to fund that research.
Technological advancements don't "occur all over the global in a variety of economies." They overwhelmingly occur in a few limited areas of the globe (Japan, U.S., Europe, Taiwan, & Hong Kong) where one kind of economy predominates. Those advances have not occured in (say) Cuba, North Korea, Belarus, Iran, or socialist India of the 1960's. Although some advances are now occuring in China, that's because they've abandoned their prior economic system and are adopting the successful one.
Technology progresses at a reasonably predictable rate regardless of market type.
I hope you don't intend that remark seriously, because it's clearly false. Technology doesn't progress at a predictable rate, and the rate of progress is vastly different depending on market type. For example, technology has progressed much faster in Japan than in North Korea, and much faster in Silicon Valley than in Havana.
While it is true that slave labor is employeed in making chips
Slave labor is not employed in chipmaking. Even the few fabs owned by Intel that operate in the 3rd world don't use slaves. I realize your use of the word "slave" was probably intended as an extreme exaggeration (the same way people say "Parking Nazis" in reference to garage employees), but still...
But this will drive out of business all the mom-and-pop DIY computer assembly store chains.
And Wal-Mart intends to pay me NOTHING AT ALL while I assemble my computer, which is a violation of my rights.
And don't get me STARTED about HEALTH CARE. Suppose I become injured or sick while assembling my computer?
And what about workers' rights... Suppose I want my domestic partner to help me assemble my PC? Will there by any support from Wal-Mart? NO?
It's just another way for Wal-Mart to screw over the consumer, make obscene profits, force small businesses to close, and discriminate against lesbians.
The lesson we can draw from this is perfectly simple. Wal-Mart is the earthly incarnation of Evil.
Fortunately, the local mom-and-pop store is PURER than the HOLY MOTHER VIRGIN.
The baby boomers will be 70 in 9 years. That is a major point of expenditure for health care costs, so the need for doctors and nurses will go up dramatically. Even in the most generous models, at current man-hour rates of health care, there are not enough doctors to see all the patients that there will be in another 10 years. We are not training enough, and cannot train enough... The government needs to install a socialized medical system with a reasonable transition, for cost-savings alone. Ideally the system would allow a greater doctor:patient ratio as well, and then by the time 2015 rolls around we won't have dying baby boomers who kick off before their doctor can see them.
If we "cannot train enough" doctors, then how will socialized medicine increase the doctor:patient ratio? Does socialized medicine magically increase the number of doctors, even without training more of them?
It appears you're attributing to public services a "magic force" that can create resources out of nothing. It's a very common mistake because we don't often pay attention to the circular flow of income--the government must tax for whatever it provides.
The doctor:patient ratio would not be changed in the least by socialized health care, provided the pay, conditions, and benefits remain the same for workers in that industry. Since socialized healthcare usually reduces the number of hours doctors work, that means that the doctor:patient ratio would grow worse measure in terms of doctor-hours worked.
The doctor:patient ratio is currently much worse in all the countries with socialized health care. In the U.K. it's particularly bad.
The evidence for improved medical care through socialization is very poor if you look at the doctor:patient ratio.
Oil is cheaper now than it was in 1981, although much more expensive than in 1961.
Housing is in a bubble right now but 5 yrs ago the cost of a house per square foot was similar to what it was several decades ago, after accounting for inflation. Houses have gotten more expensive over decades but they have also gotten much larger on average.
Electricty per KwH has declined in real terms almost every year for the last 70.
How about the food and electronics you pointed to? Food has not really gotten cheap, in fact food is fscking expensive.
The price of food has declined consistently (although only slightly) in real terms for decades. You can verify that fact by going to the Bureau of Labor Stats website.
A computer that is 50% the price a comparable machine cost last year is great, a computer that will last for 1/3 the length of time but is 50% less than the otherwise comparable machine cost last year is a price INCREASE... Want a comparison? Compare an HP Laserjet 3 to an HP Laserjet 4100. Every laserjet 3 I know of was removed due to upgrades not failure. Every Laserjet 4100 I know of was removed because you had to replace the fusers every few months.
I sold printers when I was a teenager at a mall store about 17 years ago. At that time, the very cheapest laser printers sold for $1,000. Today, a Dell laser printer costs $99. In inflation-adjusted prices, the price of the cheapest laser printer has declined from ~$1500 to $99. Also bear in mind that the current Dell laser printer has 600dpi and prints 17ppm, whereas the laser printer from 17 years ago had 300dpi and printed 4ppm, which is half the resolution and 1/4th the speed of the current printer.
For a laser printer of similar print quality and speed, you would have to pay more than 50x as much (in inflation-adjusted terms) if you bought one 17 years ago than if you bought one today. So your argument for printer price inflation is not very strong.
Your price comparison doesn't hold for other computer electronics either. 17 yrs ago, the standard price for RAM was $50/meg and now it's $50/gig--a difference of 1000x, and that's before we take into account inflation or improved access times.
I remeber paying $50 for my nintendo games in the 1980s... and today video games are about... $50. Please note though, $50 1985 is about $88.73 in 2005 dollars. So yes, video games have gotten cheaper in real dollars.
You should also note that the video game you purchase now is of far higher quality (in terms of graphics etc) than the Nintendo game you bought 20 yrs ago. Quality is relevant to inflation; to measure inflation you must compare the prices of items of similar quality across time.
For example, many people fondly remember the days during the 1950s when you could purchase a car for ~$1,000, versus a $21,000 average selling price today. However the $1,000 figure from 1955 is not quality-adjusted. Cars back then needed repair several times per year and lasted about 90,000 miles; cars today need repair about once every 4 years and last about 180,000 miles. So, quality-adjusted, the price of a car in 1955 was probably ~$3000 which is more than $21,000 in y2006 dollars.
It is NOT BIAS to conclude that a thing is true. In this case, Wal-Mart has indeed made a policy of annihilating unions, shutting down entire stores to do so. It has crushed suppliers into a no-win situations. It has dropped wages overall. It has pumped manufacturing overseas. It has passed health care costs onto the taxpayers. These are things that are real. They are not opinions. That the earth orbits the sun, that hemoglobin carries oxygen, that heat in ocean water powers hurricanes, these are not opinions.
What you said is absurd. Every one of the points you made was not only disputable, but obviously false. And you conclude by declaring that your own inflammatory opinions are not only true, but beyond dispute! I especially liked the sentence where you say your opinions are on par with basic facts of Astronomy and Science. "Wal-Mart is the incarnation of Satan, just like the Earth is round...."
If you're so biased and emotional that you can't distinguish between your own inflammatory opinions, and basic astronomical facts, then I don't know if anything I say could help you. After all, you could never be convinced by anything, no matter how compelling, if you believe your present opinions are so well-established as to be indisputable.
But you're not the only person on this forum, so I'll go ahead and point out a few of the inaccuracies in your analysis. Needless to say, your opinions are less well-established than the Earth rotating around the Sun.
In this case, Wal-Mart has indeed made a policy of annihilating unions, shutting down entire stores to do so.
Wal-mart has never annihilated a union, and is completely unable to do so. Unions are per indsutry in the United States, not per company, so the grocery workers' union would continue to exist even if Wal-Mart closed all its stores. Unions are voluntary associations of employees which Wal-Mart doesn't control and can't destroy. Wal-Mart may very well decide not to hire any Union member, but that's not the same as destroying the Union. Wal-Mart isn't forced to hire someone, any more than you are forced to hire someone's services.
Furthermore, Wal-mart only closed stores after the employees there joined unions for the first time. Thus, Wal-Mart didn't "destroy the union" but rather reacted to the growth of unions in its organizaion.
It has crushed suppliers into a no-win situations.
Suppliers are also greedy capitalists. Suppliers will find the highest bidders for their products. If doing business with Wal-Mart is unprofitable for them then they'll stop supplying to Wal-Mart. The only way a supplier finds itself in a no-win situation is if that supplier can't find any retailer that wishes to buy its products at prices which allow the supplier to at least break even. Wal-mart can't cause that to happen to a supplier; the supplier causes that to happen to itself.
It has dropped wages overall.
No. Wal-Mart has raised the real (not nominal) wages of people in rural areas by several percentage points on average. That is an actual fact, undisputed by economists, unlike the "facts" you mentioned.
By allowing people to buy the same products for lower prices, Wal-Mart increases the consumers' real wages. In fact, current estimates indicate that Wal-Mart has reduced national inflation by several percentage points, all by itself.
Since the pro-business side is well funded and quite well manned, they not only create a debate where none is justified, they wear down and exhaust the quite unfunded and unmanned "other side" representing reality.
How, exactly, did you gain the authority to determine when the mere existence of a debate is justified? Especially since your opinions are not exactly axiomatic, as you claim?
Don't believe for a moment that the "other side" in this
I've been doing alot of reading on this subject, and according to what I can determine, the supply of nuclear fuel is practically inexhaustible. The "50 year" figure is based on currently known reserves using once-through reactors. That 50-year figure is wildly inaccurate, for several reasons:
1. Advanced breeder reactors can use U-238 fuel, not just U-235 like conventional reactors. U-238 is much more plentiful than U235--there's more than 100x as much. And breeder reactors are not a "pie in the sky" technology. France operated a 1GW commercial breeder reactor for years; and although it wasn't cost-competitive it did power hundreds of thousands of homes. Further refinements to the technology could make it cost-competitive.
2. We haven't searched for Uranium very hard yet, because it's always been plentiful and inexpensive. If corporations started seriously searching for the stuff (in response to price increases) then they'd likely find that the available reserves are many times what we know about now.
3. Particulate uranium is present in the oceans, in massive quantities. There's thousands of times as much uranium available in seawater as in terrestrial reserves. True, Uranium extracted from seawater costs $400/kg. But the cost of Uranium is a very small portion of the cost of nuclear power as a whole (most of the cost is for the reactors), so the cost of nuclear power would increase only 10% or so if we had to gather Uranium from the oceans.
4. Uranium is not the only fissile element. Thorium can also be bred into U-233 which can be used in nuclear reactors. There's more than 3x as much thorium as uranium.
...So let's calculate how much Uranium we have. We have enough for 50 years in known reserves using once-through reactors. But breeder reactors increase that amount by 100x, leaving enough for 5,000 years. And then we can start searching for Uranium in earnest, and if we assume (conservatively) that 3x as much exists in unknown reserves, we have enough for 15,000 years. Then we can filter Uranium from ocean water, leaving enough for a few hundren thousand years. Then we can use Thorium for nuclear fuel, leaving enough for ~1 million years.
Allow me to clarify --- if someone accuses you of downloading copyrighted material, you are risking a the fine; regardless of anything so sticky as the truth of wether or nor you actually did it... The RIAA doesn't need to prove anything. They just claim it, demand a settlement, and strong-arm you into settling. They are never obligated to prove a damned thing. And since it's a civil matter, they know it's cheaper to settle even if you're innocent.
If you didn't pirate the music, then don't pay the fine--fight it in court. Of course, fighting it in court costs money, but if the RIAA loses then you can petition the court to force the RIAA to pay your attorney fees. Apparently, judges will usually force the initiator of a lawsuit to pay all attorneys fees if the iniator is a corporation and it loses the case.
Oooh, the latest Brittney SPears album didn't sell well? Fine, we'll just make up a couple of people to sue and recoup our losses. It would be no different from the complete vapour trail they provide now.
If they fabricate evidence and use it in court, then the individuals who participated in that act (including the lawyers) are personally criminally liable. You won't even have to pay the attorney fees to imprison them--the DA office handles that. Also, you could countersue the RIAA for barristry and harrassment, and the attorney fees would be taken out of the settlement.
If the RIAA were violating the law, and you felt you were too small to take them on yourself, you could initiate a class-action lawsuit. It would cost you nothing--the attorney fees would be recovered from the settlement. Personally I'm the beneficiary of settlements from class-action lawsuits all the time, and usually the corporation's guilt is far less obvious in those cases than in the hypothetical case you describe.
...Don't get me wrong, I'm not a lawyer. But I'm often the beneficiary of settlements and my family seems to be involved in lawsuits quite often. In my experience the legals system is pretty reasonable (albeit very expensive). The initiator of a lawsuit needs to have some kind of case. If they have no case at all then they can be punished in court even for filing a lawsuit.
...It's actually pretty rare for corporate officers or lawyers to violate criminal statutes directly and in person. It seems very unlikely to me that a corporate officer would direct his employees to fabricate evidence for use in court. Obviously criminal activity by corporate officers could happen. Just look at what Ken Lay did. But then again Ken Lay is being prosecuted.
Now, it sounds like the person in this article may have actually downloaded stuff. But if, and I can guaran-f'in-tee I've never downloaded music, I was accused of this same thing, I'd be left with the bullshit choice of settling and accepting guilt, or fighting it and paying through the nose.
Remember that it costs the RIAA alot of money to prosecute you, far more than they could ever recover from the case.
Recently I received phone calls from two collection agencies that demanded money for two $30 debts that are almost 10 years old. AFAIK, I may actually have forgotten to pay two bills 10 years ago. But the statute of limitation has long passed so I told them to go fuck themselves. When they threatened to sue I told them the statute of limitations had passed, therefore the lawsuits would be very brief and in my favor, and I might countersue just for fun.
in fact, the American economic system puts a burden on corporations to reduce their costs in any way possible, by exporting jobs, if necessary. Under capitalism, people exist to help corporations build capital. Supply and demand clearly changes in situations of low demand and high supply, and as more jobs go overseas and/or are replaced by silicon chips, demand for workers will fall along with wages. Sooner or later something has to give, and my guess is that Americans will have to accept a much lower standard of living in that intirim period while there are still jobs, and will have to accept no income once they are truly obsolete. Incomes, however, will rise for that shrinking number of people who have irreplaceable creative skills that are not scriptable by computers. They will do well in an atmosphere of heady prosperity. However, their days are numbered. Meanwhile, productivity will continue to rise, until no workers are producing infinite goods and services for a tiny number of elites. What is wrong with this picture?
It seems like you put some thought into the picutre.
I have a few remarks in response, as follows.
Productivity could increase indefinitely without anyone being thrown out of work. Even if machines could perform all the tedious labor people now perform, those people could compete against the machines directly. That seems implausible, so let me explain. Suppose machines could produce everything which is now produced, and suppose that the machines cost $1/hr for their operation. Suppose also that those machines can work twice as efficiently as a person. Thus, a person would have to work for $0.50/hr to compete against the machines. But we must remember that the cost of everything produced by those machines would have dropped precipitously. All products which had previously cost $10 would suddenly cost $0.50, since we're assuming all products are produced entirely by machines. As a result, the $0.50/hr unskilled wage that would be required for laborers to compete against machines, would be the same as what they make now, when measured in real (deflation-adjusted) terms.
But there are complications which I'm leaving out here. For example, the amount of capital at the disposal of those laborers would be reduced. And the wages of higher-skilled workers would rise dramatically relative to lower-skilled workers, resulting in an even greater proportion of scarce resources (like mineral wealth) being devoted to higher-skilled workers. And the cost of skilled services (like doctor visits) would increase relative to the incomes of unskilled laborers. And there are other factors.
But the wages of unskilled labor relative to production would remain the same, excepting resource contention. So laborers could afford almost the same amount of stuff (physical products) as before.
Bear in mind that all of this is a worst-case scenario where certain workers have no skills, and could do nothing beyond what a machine could do. In a more realistic scenario, unskilled humans could perform some tasks that machines couldn't do, like work in retail stores, work as security guards, work in personal services like maid services, etc. Bear in mind, that workers in those industries would become much richer if the cost of manufactured products declined dramatically.
It's clear, however, that society would be strained to the breaking point if unskilled laborers made $6/hr and skilled workers made $1,000/hr. In that case, envy would motivate political unrest. Probably, society would have to institute some kind of wage equialization, for example a "negative income tax" a la Milton Friedman.
That is one of the most naive statements I've heard in a while. Of course countries will continue to export to the US even if they import nothing. The dollar is used all over the place for international transactions. Oil, for one, is a commodity that is traded exclusively in dollars. If nothing else, China or India will just take the dollars earned from the US and send them to the middle east for oil. Those middle east countries can just turn around use those same dollars for Indian and Chinese goods, leaving the US completely out of the loop.
You mean foreigners are willing to export things to us, while importing nothing from us, in order to make use of our paper currency to trade between themselves? If so we should print dollars for export. Apparently, foreigners are willing to give us products for free ("flood our markets") with cars and computers in exchange for little slips of paper that they apparently never intend to redeem...
And apparently, foreigners won't give us free stuff just once, but continually. They don't even require a constant amount of dollars to exchange between themselves. Foreigners apparently will continually export products to us in exchange for slips of paper which they never intend to redeem. You said: "Of course countries will continue to export to the US even if they import nothing." How fortunate for us!
You are ignoring my point. What broke comparative advantage was the comparison of US, India, and China. US has absolutely NO comparative advantage over China and India combined.
I don't think you have the correct definition of comparative advantage. The U.S. can have comparative advantage over China and India combined, even if China and India produce absolutely everything cheaper. That's the entire idea of comparative advantage. It's beneficial for China and India combined to cease production of things which they can produce only 10x cheaper than us, and focus all their labor on the things which they can produce 100x cheaper than us. They should export to us the things they produce 100x cheaper, and import from us the things they would have produced 10x cheaper. Doing so maximizes the production and wealth of both countries. That's the very idea of comparative advantage. It holds true no matter how many countries are added to the mix, no matter how many things the poorer partners can produce, and no matter how wide are the wage differentials between countries.
Median income has nothing to do with minimum wage for basic industrial tasks. Also, PPP is a very tainted figure for this. The cost of a company to make something does not depend on the purchasing power of the wages they pay. The non-PPP figures are the only ones that matter for someone that wishes to determine the cost of doing business. PPP only matters when they want to buy something, not make something.
My original quote claimed that the 100x figure is incorrect both for PPP and non-PPP adjusted figures.
And the non-PPP numbers for median are about 40,000 vs 1300 (I'll let you guess which is which). That's over 30 times. It may not be exactly 100 times, but it is only 1/3 the 100, but is 5 times your difference, so he's more right than your PPP numbers.
No. The raw median wage in China is almost $2,000 and the figure for the U.S. is ~$33,000. That's ~16x. None of his figures were closer, since the figures he cited were completely incorrect and the figure I cited was correct (whether it was PPP-adjusted or not).
True, the unadjusted wage is used to determine whether outsourcing will be profitable. But it's the unadjusted wage of the potential workers in that foreign-owned factory, and not the median wage for the country, which matters. In fact, the PPP-adjusted figure probably understates the case.
Bear in mind that the median wage you cited was for China as a whole, which is very deceptive since there are tremendous wage differentials between different regions in China. Almost all of the the factories producing goods for export are along the coastline where Chinese wages are almost 3x higher than in the mainland (regulations in China prevent labor mobility). It's those workers, the coastal workers in the industrialized areas, that Americans are competing against--not peasants on collectivized farms.
Note that Chinese laborers in foreign-owned factories typically make >$1/hour (NON-PPP adjusted) which is nowhere near 100x as much as an equivalent American unskilled laborer.
Furthermore, programmers in India often make the equivalent of >$20,000/yr (NON-PPP adjusted) which is nowhere near 1/100th what an American programmer makes--more like 1/4th.
Again, we must compare American wages to the wages of those Indians he'll be competing against. Obviously a programmer isn't going to have his job outsourced to an Indian gravel-maker who works by hand, or an Indian farmer who uses a hand-plow. The American programmer won't have his job outsourced to the 99.9% of Indians who can't even program a computer, to say nothing of the >40% of Indians who aren't even literate.
Equivalent laborers in China or India earn more than 1/15th what their American counterparts earn, in raw (unadjusted) terms.
Actually, as I think about it, the US has a much greater percentage of wealth distributed through investments and other non-work activities. It could very well creep up to the 100x figure mentioned, just using the globally published and accepted figures, though I don't have enough time to run through them all and first glance shows you to be way off from the reality of the free labor in China.
No. I'm quoting median wage statistics and not per-capita GDP, therefore no adjustment is required for investments. (Not to mention, median income wouldn't much be affected by investments anyway). The median wage for a Chinese laborer along the coast who works in foreign-owned companies is closer to 1/10th what an equivalent worker makes in the U.S.
though I don't have enough time to run through them all and first glance shows you to be way off from the reality of the free labor in China.
No. Labor is not free anywhere, even in Bangladesh. Even if a laberor were property (i.e. a slave), still his labor wouldn't be free insofar as the slaveowner would have to pay for his sustenance and the sustenance of his pro
You've obviously never looked at the label on the CPUs (I've got both Intel and AMD chips that have "Made in Taiwan" or "Made in China" stamped on them). You also apparently don't know that Boeing has a plant in Bejing that makes wings, tail sections, cockpits, and seats. You don't seem to understand that most of our fabrication equipment now comes from China, that IBM is now owned by Lenovo (a Chinese company), that HP has moved its manufacturing overseas, or that Microsoft now does most of it's coding in Hydrabad. You also apparently missed the news story last week that the United States now exports so much food that we only have a two week supply for our own people. NONE of this is profitable anymore.
I realize this conversation has already gotten silly, but I feel compelled to respond...
Nothing you said was correct. AMD has two fabs--one in Texas and one in Germany. Intel has >20 fabs all around the world but a large number of its fabs are in the US, the vast majority of its employees are in the US, and most of its high-paying jobs are in the US. The vast majority of Boeing manufacturing takes place in the Northwestern United States. HP has moved only a portion of its manufacturing abroad, and almost all of its employees are in the U.S. Microsoft has <10 percent of its programmers abroad. Lenovo bought IBM? BWAHAHAHA apparently you know nothing about those two companies--IBM is vastly larger than Lenovo and is probably larger than any company in China. Lenovo bought the laptop & desktop divisions (not even x86 servers) which was ~2% of IBM's business, and IBM sold it because it was the least profitable part.
You also apparently missed the news story last week that the United States now exports so much food that we only have a two week supply for our own people. NONE of this is profitable anymore.
The US has never stockpiled food for its own people. It has nothing to do with exports--food is perishable and stockpiling it is expensive.
YES all this trade profitable--do you think companies outsource because they anticipate taking a loss from it?
Not as long as OPEC still sells it's oil in dollars or as long as the New York Stock Exchange is still willing to sell American businesses to foreigners- there's plenty they want to buy.
You mean foreigners are willing to export things to us, while importing nothing from us, in order to make use of our paper currency to trade between themselves? If so we should print dollars for export. Apparently, foreigners are willing to give us products for free ("flood our markets") with cars and computers in exchange for little slips of paper that they apparently never intend to redeem...
And what exports would those be? All of your examples except for food are made in China and India.
The United States exports ~$1 trillion in products anually, including (but not limited to) the products I listed. For comparison, all of the countries in the European Union combined (population 460 million) have exports of about ~$1.4 trillion.
The problem with comparative advantage is specifically that it only looks at two countries. Add China to the mix. China and India combined can certainly outproduce the US in both goods and services. Now, add the rest of the world to the mix.
When comparative advantage was first described almost 200 years ago, it was shown it would hold true regardless of how many nations were involved in trade.
Comparative advantage really doesn't hold any more as a theory now since even services can be done offshore for lower cost.
The entire idea of comparative advantage is that it would be true even if everything could be produced cheaper elsewhere. Ricardo originally provided examples of economies with disparate wage rates where one of those economics could make everything for less money.
The problem with comparative advantage is that it only looks at two countries, and generally two countries that are mostly equal. The problem between the US and China stretches comparative advantage to the limit. The Chinese population is roughly four times the size of the US with wages of the majority of the workers about 1/40th of the US. The Chinese can literally out-manufacture every single manufacturer in the US. The only reasons US manufacturers are still around are our IP laws and the fact that China doesn't know (yet) how to produce certain goods.
Comparative advantage doesn't just look at two countries. In fact, the very earliest explanation of comparative advantage (by Ricardo) explicitly mentions multiple economies.
Multiple economies do not alter comparative advantage at all. China will export to the U.S. what it's comparatively good at producing, and import what it's comparatively poor at producing. The same goes for India. The same goes even if India and China trade with each other.
If India and China got everything they wanted from each other, then they wouldn't import anything from the U.S., and they therefore wouldn't export anything to the U.S., since the purpose of exports is to pay for imports. The U.S. would not be affected.
Even if China exports to the United States and uses the dollars to buy products from Indians, the dollars must be redeemed by buying American products.
That three-way comparison of US, India, and China completely breaks the already strained idea of comparative advantage.
Three-way comparisons were part of the original idea of comparative advantage, and were present when the idea was first presented almost 200 years ago.
The point isn't that. The point is- they can do all of that with native labor importing nothing, so it means nothing as far as trade is concerned.
If foreign countries export things to us without importing anything from us, then they've given us things for free.
Does it matter? They've got 29% unemployment, and 1/10th our minimum wage. That's a hell of a lot of worker dollars to soak up before productivity means anything at all- and when you throw in the fact that they could be trading with China, which adds another billion workers and 1/100th our minimum wage, our productivity doesn't mean squat unless it's 100x better than the entire rest of the world in at least one item.
India doesn't have 29% unemployment--the actual figure is just 9%. And even that's exaggerated because many people in India have "unofficial" employment on the side.
China does not have 1/100th our minimum wage.
The reason China and India have much lower wages is because their labor productivity is much lower. Right now, farming in India is done with a hand plow. Yes, you can produce 10x more than the Indian farmer because you have huge tractors--and that's precisely why your wage is 10x higher.
Either that, or it will be feudalism all over again- the robots will benefit the top 1% of society and everybody else will simply starve to death.
In the coming robot-tyranny, you will be frozen in carbonite for 1,000 years as punishment for having made that remark.
Slashdot Mirror
Los Angeles predates the United States by 200 years? I hope you're joking! The Spanish hadn't even arrived in California then. The Spanish hadn't even conquered what we now call California until 1769. Your "fact" would put the founding of LA during the late Reformation! Whom do you think founded it? Elizabeth I? Perhaps the city of New York was founded during the Medieval period?
Los Angeles was incorporated in 1850. You can find that information by typing "Los Angeles" into wikipedia and reading the first two paragraphs. Granted, there was a ranch there previously which later became a small town, and which had the words "Los Angeles" embedded in its name. Even if you count that as LA (which would be a stretch), LA was founded in 1781. Certainly not 200 years before the U.S. was founded!
And Los Angeles was not founded as the confluence of nine monasteries! First, they were missions, not monasteries--the two are completely different, and the nearest monastery was thousands of miles away. Second, the early missions were founded by Junipero Serra in 1768, not 200 years before the founding of the U.S.! Third, the nine "monasteries" founded by Junipero Serra were spread all over California. Only one was in Los Angeles. Another one of the missions is in Sonoma county, which is ~500 miles away! In other words, Los Angeles was not founded as a confluence of the nine "monasteries"!
In addition, Los Angeles had nothing whatsoever to do with the gold rushes of 1849 and 1861. Those rushes took place hundreds of miles to the north! At that time, Los Angeles was a small village with a few thousand people, and most certainly was not a "commercial hub" of any kind. From the wikipedia article (or practically any other source on this topic): "In the 1870s Los Angeles was still little more than a village of 5,000".
Finally, I recently worked in a building in historic core LA which was built in 1913. All the buildings on the street are of the same size and general design, as was mandated by plan. The planning began before 1922!
LA has a population of less than 4 million now. The second sentence in the wikipedia article on Los Angeles reads: "As of the 2005 U.S. Census estimate, the city had a population of 3.8 million.".
Neither of the links you provided contain you what claim they contain. One of the cited pages lists the population for a wide region which includes Long Beach! That is not Los Angeles!
Clap, clap, clap...
You should talk...
Umm... try reading the sentence you're responding to. Try to understand it.
A defining feature of many of those cities is that they were completely destroyed, sometimes repeatedly, and rebuilt. As such they went through "iterations" of planning which resemble an agile process much more closely than they resemble a waterfall process. Not a single one of those cities was originally planned according to some conception when the city was founded.
Chicago seems to be the most-cited example on this thread. But Chicago is unusual in that it grew from a population of a few hundrend thousand to 3M in a few decades, thus everyone knew that it was going to be a large city. As a result, planning of the kind you describe was possible. Then it was destroyed in a great fire, and rebuilt, which is an iteration. The Chicago you see today most certainly was not planned from the beginning.
Most people don't know that one of the most carefully planned cities in the US was Los Angeles. I live there now. It's amazing to me how ridiculous were the planning assumptions, made 4 decades ago, for a city with a population 1/5th what it is now. The infrastructure of intersecting freeways is perfectly designed for a city with 1/5th the population it currently has. Los Angeles has traditionally had the most rigid zoning requirements, and the strictest building codes, of anywhere. Some of them now seem so silly (in retrospect) as to be quaint. Entire regions (like historic core in downtown LA) were carefully planned only to be virtually abandoned.
In my own significant experience, I've learned that an incremental and iterative process is necessary in almost any project. I'm not advocating XP or FDD. However the "waterfall method", where you attempt to devise a perfect architecture once and for all, beforehand, almost always results in failure. Attempting to plan any software project as one big iteration almost always ends badly. It results in uncontrolled projects where timelines are drastically incorrect.
It has been my experience that Fred Brooks' book "The Mythical Man Month" is now almost universally ignored by experienced software professionals. From what I can gather, it was the source of this analogy between software development and construction. It was nifty for its time, but a great deal has been learned since then.
By the way, there is no opposition between agility and planning! It's a mistaken notion of agile methods, that they just "start throwing things together." Agile methods involve continuous requirements gathering, and tremendous planning. The class diagram is the
It amazes me how much envy and sour grapes will lead us to denigrate the accomplishments of others. You say that Buffet has sacrificed little, but Buffet has sacrificed almost everything for his entire life. He has lived his whole adult life in the same cheap working-class house in suburban Nebraska that he bought decades ago. He hasn't spent a penny of the billions that his Berkshire stock is worth (he lives off a modest salary). He's devoted his life and his remarkable talents to raising a collosal sum which he intends to give away to charity. He's sacrificed more than I have sacrificed, and (I wager) more than you have sacrificed.
But apparently that isn't good enough. His charity has provoked nothing but vitriol here. The reason, I suspect, is because his charity--no matter how great--could never soothe the envy and resentment that most people on slashdot apparently feel toward those more successful than themselves.
(I'm not specifically talking about you here. You at least called his charity "outstanding", which is a great deal more credit than many people on this forum were willing to give him).
As far as I'm concerned, Buffet is an excellent man who should be held up as an example.
Your own English usage is hardly impeccable.
However some of your points underestimate the differences between the two regions:
Labor mobility may not be an American invention but America is the place where it is currently practiced. Of course there are ways of "getting around" anti-mobility laws, as there are ways of geting around any laws, but law avoidance (like tax avoidance) is costly, difficult, and incomplete. Just saying that you can "work around" laws greatly understates the difficulty in so doing. In many countries of the EU, firing someone or laying them off is practically impossible.
There are far fewer large tech incumbents in Europe than in the US. Obviously every country has a phone company but most European countries do not have an IBM, Microsoft, or Cisco.
In my experience foreigners are as tolerant of failure as Americans. In fact foreigners are probably more tolerant of failure because career success is less important in most countries than in the U.S.
Furthermore, it has been my experience that many or most employees of silicon valley startups are Asian or European. Even some of the founders of companies in silicon valley are foreign. If foreign people were terrified of failure then they would not come to the US to fail, only to be sent slinking home. Bear in mind that many people working in silicon valley companies are employed using H1-B visas which means that if the company fails then their visa is revoked and they must return home immediately--implying to their fellows that they went to silicon valley, tried, failed, and were booted out of the place. If they were afraid of failure then they wouldn't take a risk like that.
Since foreigners are as likely as Americans to work at silicon valley startups, cultural differences between employees can't be the reason behind silicon valley's success. The fact that the employees are from all over the world, but the companies are American, suggests that the difference is economic not cultural.
I believe the primary reason there are more large startups in the US is because there is far more venture capital. It's natural that Europeans would be terrified of failing in Europe because the enterpreneurs there must bear the risk entirely by themselves. If you wish to raise money for a startup in Europe then you must risk all of your personal savings, and your house--and even then you really wouldn't have enough money to fund the startup. In America you use somebody else's money, and the risk to you is greatly decreased. Of course, if you accept venture capital then the potential rewards are also decreased, but if the startup succeeds then you'll be filthy rich anyway and you won't worry about the 33% cut of your massive fortune that must now be paid to ventu
Furthermore, petroleum is not nearly as poisonous and cannot be absorbed through the skin. In fact some people even swallow trivial amounts of petroleum (during "siphoning") without catastrophic consequences. As a result, fuel tanks for petroleum were never expensive and do not have to be recycled or disposed of.
The point is: have a little bit of realism. Actually, there's another point too: come up with good analogies. Because the analogy you provided (fuel cells vs automobiles) was not actually analogous at all....By the way, fuel cells are significantly older than automobiles. True, autos have been around since 1880, but fuel cells were invented in 1839. And fuel cells weren't just invented and then forgotten about. Fuel cells have been researched extensively and continuously since the 1950s. In fact, GM first promised a fuel cell vehicle in 1965.
At a similar stage in its history (50 years since initial development) the automobile was already incredibly widespread, and auto technology was rapidly improving.
Even if fuel cells drastically improved and were suddenly competitive, they wouldn't provide anywhere near the advantage that automobiles did. Autos allowed people to go anywhere they wanted. Autos allowed easy transport of goods to far-flung places. On the other hand, fuel cells (even if they worked) would just cut down on recharging time for notebooks, which is hardly earth-shattering. Fuel cells wouldn't even benefit autos that greatly, even if they worked, because methanol fuel cells aren't more efficient than internal combustion engines and methanol has no greater energy density than petroleum.
Although automobiles were successful, that doesn't mean every other technology must be. Since the invention of the auto there have been 100 other technologies that quietly died and are now forgotten.
I agree that we should have vision, but at some point vision must yield to reality. Fuel cells have been promised for >50 years now, and the promised benefits are minor. At some point we must abandon failed technologies and move on.
It appears increasingly unlikely that fuel cells will ever happen. Although fuel cell technology continues to improve, the improvement is very gradual. It's not clear that fuel cells are progressing faster than new battery technology, in which case the two will never converge.
I should also note that the fuel cartridge (100ml) by itself, which powers the laptop for 10 hours, is not that much smaller than a battery. Even if toshiba drastically shrank the size of the surrounding electronics, making the entire cell the same size as a battery, it still would have no advantage. You would still have to carry around extra fuel cartridges (with methanol) for additional power.
Bear in mind that you wouldn't be able to recharge the cartridge by just pouring in more methanol, or buying new fuel cartridges at a convenience store. Methanol is extremely poisonous even in very small amounts, and medically significant amounts are absorbed through the skin. Therefore the fuel cartridges will require expensive and durable equipment to prevent the leakage of any fuel whatsoever when removed from the laptop. Probably the fuel cartridges will be expensive and will have to be recycled and disposed of properly.
Perhaps your expectations are too extravagent. Perhaps you shouldn't expect to live in Manhattan on a low salary while driving a car and supporting a family with a stay-at-home wife. Perhaps your wife could get a job, especially if you insist on living in one of the most expensive cities in the nation on a low salary. Or, if your wife refuses to work, perhaps you could (gasp!) live in the suburbs.
Don't get me wrong, I understand your frustration. But the world doesn't owe you an apartment in Manhattan. If you can't afford such an apartment, then it isn't your landlord's fault.
Everyone in debt is responsible for it, with the rare exceptions of people who have extraordinary health problems. If you are in debt it's because YOU signed the credit card agreement and spent that money. Don't blame your landlord. In fact, you signed the lease agreement with your landlord--if you felt the price was unfair at the time then you shouldn't have signed it.There are many people in the world who live off less than $3,000/yr, and they survive. They survive by having lots of room-mates, and by eating rice or tortillas, and by riding bicycles or taking buses. So don't complain too loudly.
The power of a Union is directly proportional to how capital intensive its industry is. That's because capital-intensive firms suffer huge capital costs as a result of work stoppages, strikes, and disruptions at expensive factories.
Software, however, isn't capital-intensive at all. The total investment in a software house is a few thousand dollars for PCs and servers. If you struck, then your employer could move your PCs out of the building, outsource your jobs to India, and fire you all on the spot, with very little cost to himself.
Unions in IT would accomplish one thing only: an acceleration of the outsourcing trend.
Whereas the very cheapest laser printer from anyone 17 years ago costed almost $1,000 and had 1/2 the resolution and 1/4 the printing speed. I remember purchasing the very cheapest laser printer I could find almost 13 years ago for nearly $700.
Laser printers in general have remained reliable over the years. Granted that the old HP lasers were very reliable, but they were also very expensive, much more expensive than the cheapest $1,000 laser 17 years ago. I'll also grant that cheap inkjets are sometimes shoddy but then again they sell for $34 at Best Buy--a price far lower than any printer a decade ago.
Indeed, I just looked up the prices, and $50/gig was a bit off (it's more like $85). However the $50/meg was not an inflation-adjusted figure so a fair comparison would be 75 Y2006 dollars per meg 17 years ago, versus 85 Y2006 dollars per gig now. That's nearly a factor of 1,000, before we take into account changes in RAM speed. First, your original point was about price inflation and I was discussing that. Whatever the cause, prices for equivalent computer equipment have unequestionably declined rapidly over the years, and prices for most other things have declined gradually.Although the topic being discussed was price inflation, I do think that the market should be given significant credit (but not exclusive credit) for advancements in technology, insofar as many of the advancements were made by private industries (like IBM & HP) funding R&D and making gradual improvements in process technology. Obviously government-sponsored R&D has also played a significant role, however the government-sponsored R&D in computer technology has occurred almost exclusively in capitalist countries where there's enough excess resources for the government to fund that research.
Technological advancements don't "occur all over the global in a variety of economies." They overwhelmingly occur in a few limited areas of the globe (Japan, U.S., Europe, Taiwan, & Hong Kong) where one kind of economy predominates. Those advances have not occured in (say) Cuba, North Korea, Belarus, Iran, or socialist India of the 1960's. Although some advances are now occuring in China, that's because they've abandoned their prior economic system and are adopting the successful one.
I hope you don't intend that remark seriously, because it's clearly false. Technology doesn't progress at a predictable rate, and the rate of progress is vastly different depending on market type. For example, technology has progressed much faster in Japan than in North Korea, and much faster in Silicon Valley than in Havana. Slave labor is not employed in chipmaking. Even the few fabs owned by Intel that operate in the 3rd world don't use slaves. I realize your use of the word "slave" was probably intended as an extreme exaggeration (the same way people say "Parking Nazis" in reference to garage employees), but still...And Wal-Mart intends to pay me NOTHING AT ALL while I assemble my computer, which is a violation of my rights.
And don't get me STARTED about HEALTH CARE. Suppose I become injured or sick while assembling my computer?
And what about workers' rights... Suppose I want my domestic partner to help me assemble my PC? Will there by any support from Wal-Mart? NO?
It's just another way for Wal-Mart to screw over the consumer, make obscene profits, force small businesses to close, and discriminate against lesbians.
The lesson we can draw from this is perfectly simple. Wal-Mart is the earthly incarnation of Evil.
Fortunately, the local mom-and-pop store is PURER than the HOLY MOTHER VIRGIN.
It appears you're attributing to public services a "magic force" that can create resources out of nothing. It's a very common mistake because we don't often pay attention to the circular flow of income--the government must tax for whatever it provides.
The doctor:patient ratio would not be changed in the least by socialized health care, provided the pay, conditions, and benefits remain the same for workers in that industry. Since socialized healthcare usually reduces the number of hours doctors work, that means that the doctor:patient ratio would grow worse measure in terms of doctor-hours worked.
The doctor:patient ratio is currently much worse in all the countries with socialized health care. In the U.K. it's particularly bad.
The evidence for improved medical care through socialization is very poor if you look at the doctor:patient ratio.
Housing is in a bubble right now but 5 yrs ago the cost of a house per square foot was similar to what it was several decades ago, after accounting for inflation. Houses have gotten more expensive over decades but they have also gotten much larger on average.
Electricty per KwH has declined in real terms almost every year for the last 70.
For a laser printer of similar print quality and speed, you would have to pay more than 50x as much (in inflation-adjusted terms) if you bought one 17 years ago than if you bought one today. So your argument for printer price inflation is not very strong.
Your price comparison doesn't hold for other computer electronics either. 17 yrs ago, the standard price for RAM was $50/meg and now it's $50/gig--a difference of 1000x, and that's before we take into account inflation or improved access times.
For example, many people fondly remember the days during the 1950s when you could purchase a car for ~$1,000, versus a $21,000 average selling price today. However the $1,000 figure from 1955 is not quality-adjusted. Cars back then needed repair several times per year and lasted about 90,000 miles; cars today need repair about once every 4 years and last about 180,000 miles. So, quality-adjusted, the price of a car in 1955 was probably ~$3000 which is more than $21,000 in y2006 dollars.
What you said is absurd. Every one of the points you made was not only disputable, but obviously false. And you conclude by declaring that your own inflammatory opinions are not only true, but beyond dispute! I especially liked the sentence where you say your opinions are on par with basic facts of Astronomy and Science. "Wal-Mart is the incarnation of Satan, just like the Earth is round...."
If you're so biased and emotional that you can't distinguish between your own inflammatory opinions, and basic astronomical facts, then I don't know if anything I say could help you. After all, you could never be convinced by anything, no matter how compelling, if you believe your present opinions are so well-established as to be indisputable.
But you're not the only person on this forum, so I'll go ahead and point out a few of the inaccuracies in your analysis. Needless to say, your opinions are less well-established than the Earth rotating around the Sun.
Wal-mart has never annihilated a union, and is completely unable to do so. Unions are per indsutry in the United States, not per company, so the grocery workers' union would continue to exist even if Wal-Mart closed all its stores. Unions are voluntary associations of employees which Wal-Mart doesn't control and can't destroy. Wal-Mart may very well decide not to hire any Union member, but that's not the same as destroying the Union. Wal-Mart isn't forced to hire someone, any more than you are forced to hire someone's services.
Furthermore, Wal-mart only closed stores after the employees there joined unions for the first time. Thus, Wal-Mart didn't "destroy the union" but rather reacted to the growth of unions in its organizaion.
Suppliers are also greedy capitalists. Suppliers will find the highest bidders for their products. If doing business with Wal-Mart is unprofitable for them then they'll stop supplying to Wal-Mart. The only way a supplier finds itself in a no-win situation is if that supplier can't find any retailer that wishes to buy its products at prices which allow the supplier to at least break even. Wal-mart can't cause that to happen to a supplier; the supplier causes that to happen to itself.
No. Wal-Mart has raised the real (not nominal) wages of people in rural areas by several percentage points on average. That is an actual fact, undisputed by economists, unlike the "facts" you mentioned.
By allowing people to buy the same products for lower prices, Wal-Mart increases the consumers' real wages. In fact, current estimates indicate that Wal-Mart has reduced national inflation by several percentage points, all by itself.
How, exactly, did you gain the authority to determine when the mere existence of a debate is justified? Especially since your opinions are not exactly axiomatic, as you claim?
Don't believe for a moment that the "other side" in this
I've been doing alot of reading on this subject, and according to what I can determine, the supply of nuclear fuel is practically inexhaustible. The "50 year" figure is based on currently known reserves using once-through reactors. That 50-year figure is wildly inaccurate, for several reasons:
1. Advanced breeder reactors can use U-238 fuel, not just U-235 like conventional reactors. U-238 is much more plentiful than U235--there's more than 100x as much. And breeder reactors are not a "pie in the sky" technology. France operated a 1GW commercial breeder reactor for years; and although it wasn't cost-competitive it did power hundreds of thousands of homes. Further refinements to the technology could make it cost-competitive.
2. We haven't searched for Uranium very hard yet, because it's always been plentiful and inexpensive. If corporations started seriously searching for the stuff (in response to price increases) then they'd likely find that the available reserves are many times what we know about now.
3. Particulate uranium is present in the oceans, in massive quantities. There's thousands of times as much uranium available in seawater as in terrestrial reserves. True, Uranium extracted from seawater costs $400/kg. But the cost of Uranium is a very small portion of the cost of nuclear power as a whole (most of the cost is for the reactors), so the cost of nuclear power would increase only 10% or so if we had to gather Uranium from the oceans.
4. Uranium is not the only fissile element. Thorium can also be bred into U-233 which can be used in nuclear reactors. There's more than 3x as much thorium as uranium.
...So let's calculate how much Uranium we have. We have enough for 50 years in known reserves using once-through reactors. But breeder reactors increase that amount by 100x, leaving enough for 5,000 years. And then we can start searching for Uranium in earnest, and if we assume (conservatively) that 3x as much exists in unknown reserves, we have enough for 15,000 years. Then we can filter Uranium from ocean water, leaving enough for a few hundren thousand years. Then we can use Thorium for nuclear fuel, leaving enough for ~1 million years.
By that time, there will be other options.
If the RIAA were violating the law, and you felt you were too small to take them on yourself, you could initiate a class-action lawsuit. It would cost you nothing--the attorney fees would be recovered from the settlement. Personally I'm the beneficiary of settlements from class-action lawsuits all the time, and usually the corporation's guilt is far less obvious in those cases than in the hypothetical case you describe.
...Don't get me wrong, I'm not a lawyer. But I'm often the beneficiary of settlements and my family seems to be involved in lawsuits quite often. In my experience the legals system is pretty reasonable (albeit very expensive). The initiator of a lawsuit needs to have some kind of case. If they have no case at all then they can be punished in court even for filing a lawsuit.
...It's actually pretty rare for corporate officers or lawyers to violate criminal statutes directly and in person. It seems very unlikely to me that a corporate officer would direct his employees to fabricate evidence for use in court. Obviously criminal activity by corporate officers could happen. Just look at what Ken Lay did. But then again Ken Lay is being prosecuted.
Remember that it costs the RIAA alot of money to prosecute you, far more than they could ever recover from the case.Recently I received phone calls from two collection agencies that demanded money for two $30 debts that are almost 10 years old. AFAIK, I may actually have forgotten to pay two bills 10 years ago. But the statute of limitation has long passed so I told them to go fuck themselves. When they threatened to sue I told them the statute of limitations had passed, therefore the lawsuits would be very brief and in my favor, and I might countersue just for fun.
I haven't heard from either of them since.
I have a few remarks in response, as follows.
Productivity could increase indefinitely without anyone being thrown out of work. Even if machines could perform all the tedious labor people now perform, those people could compete against the machines directly. That seems implausible, so let me explain. Suppose machines could produce everything which is now produced, and suppose that the machines cost $1/hr for their operation. Suppose also that those machines can work twice as efficiently as a person. Thus, a person would have to work for $0.50/hr to compete against the machines. But we must remember that the cost of everything produced by those machines would have dropped precipitously. All products which had previously cost $10 would suddenly cost $0.50, since we're assuming all products are produced entirely by machines. As a result, the $0.50/hr unskilled wage that would be required for laborers to compete against machines, would be the same as what they make now, when measured in real (deflation-adjusted) terms.
But there are complications which I'm leaving out here. For example, the amount of capital at the disposal of those laborers would be reduced. And the wages of higher-skilled workers would rise dramatically relative to lower-skilled workers, resulting in an even greater proportion of scarce resources (like mineral wealth) being devoted to higher-skilled workers. And the cost of skilled services (like doctor visits) would increase relative to the incomes of unskilled laborers. And there are other factors.
But the wages of unskilled labor relative to production would remain the same, excepting resource contention. So laborers could afford almost the same amount of stuff (physical products) as before.
Bear in mind that all of this is a worst-case scenario where certain workers have no skills, and could do nothing beyond what a machine could do. In a more realistic scenario, unskilled humans could perform some tasks that machines couldn't do, like work in retail stores, work as security guards, work in personal services like maid services, etc. Bear in mind, that workers in those industries would become much richer if the cost of manufactured products declined dramatically.
It's clear, however, that society would be strained to the breaking point if unskilled laborers made $6/hr and skilled workers made $1,000/hr. In that case, envy would motivate political unrest. Probably, society would have to institute some kind of wage equialization, for example a "negative income tax" a la Milton Friedman.
And apparently, foreigners won't give us free stuff just once, but continually. They don't even require a constant amount of dollars to exchange between themselves. Foreigners apparently will continually export products to us in exchange for slips of paper which they never intend to redeem. You said: "Of course countries will continue to export to the US even if they import nothing." How fortunate for us!
I don't think you have the correct definition of comparative advantage. The U.S. can have comparative advantage over China and India combined, even if China and India produce absolutely everything cheaper. That's the entire idea of comparative advantage. It's beneficial for China and India combined to cease production of things which they can produce only 10x cheaper than us, and focus all their labor on the things which they can produce 100x cheaper than us. They should export to us the things they produce 100x cheaper, and import from us the things they would have produced 10x cheaper. Doing so maximizes the production and wealth of both countries. That's the very idea of comparative advantage. It holds true no matter how many countries are added to the mix, no matter how many things the poorer partners can produce, and no matter how wide are the wage differentials between countries.My original quote claimed that the 100x figure is incorrect both for PPP and non-PPP adjusted figures.
No. The raw median wage in China is almost $2,000 and the figure for the U.S. is ~$33,000. That's ~16x. None of his figures were closer, since the figures he cited were completely incorrect and the figure I cited was correct (whether it was PPP-adjusted or not).
True, the unadjusted wage is used to determine whether outsourcing will be profitable. But it's the unadjusted wage of the potential workers in that foreign-owned factory, and not the median wage for the country, which matters. In fact, the PPP-adjusted figure probably understates the case.
Bear in mind that the median wage you cited was for China as a whole, which is very deceptive since there are tremendous wage differentials between different regions in China. Almost all of the the factories producing goods for export are along the coastline where Chinese wages are almost 3x higher than in the mainland (regulations in China prevent labor mobility). It's those workers, the coastal workers in the industrialized areas, that Americans are competing against--not peasants on collectivized farms.
Note that Chinese laborers in foreign-owned factories typically make >$1/hour (NON-PPP adjusted) which is nowhere near 100x as much as an equivalent American unskilled laborer.
Furthermore, programmers in India often make the equivalent of >$20,000/yr (NON-PPP adjusted) which is nowhere near 1/100th what an American programmer makes--more like 1/4th.
Again, we must compare American wages to the wages of those Indians he'll be competing against. Obviously a programmer isn't going to have his job outsourced to an Indian gravel-maker who works by hand, or an Indian farmer who uses a hand-plow. The American programmer won't have his job outsourced to the 99.9% of Indians who can't even program a computer, to say nothing of the >40% of Indians who aren't even literate.
Equivalent laborers in China or India earn more than 1/15th what their American counterparts earn, in raw (unadjusted) terms.
No. I'm quoting median wage statistics and not per-capita GDP, therefore no adjustment is required for investments. (Not to mention, median income wouldn't much be affected by investments anyway). The median wage for a Chinese laborer along the coast who works in foreign-owned companies is closer to 1/10th what an equivalent worker makes in the U.S.
No. Labor is not free anywhere, even in Bangladesh. Even if a laberor were property (i.e. a slave), still his labor wouldn't be free insofar as the slaveowner would have to pay for his sustenance and the sustenance of his pro
Nothing you said was correct. AMD has two fabs--one in Texas and one in Germany. Intel has >20 fabs all around the world but a large number of its fabs are in the US, the vast majority of its employees are in the US, and most of its high-paying jobs are in the US. The vast majority of Boeing manufacturing takes place in the Northwestern United States. HP has moved only a portion of its manufacturing abroad, and almost all of its employees are in the U.S. Microsoft has <10 percent of its programmers abroad. Lenovo bought IBM? BWAHAHAHA apparently you know nothing about those two companies--IBM is vastly larger than Lenovo and is probably larger than any company in China. Lenovo bought the laptop & desktop divisions (not even x86 servers) which was ~2% of IBM's business, and IBM sold it because it was the least profitable part.
The US has never stockpiled food for its own people. It has nothing to do with exports--food is perishable and stockpiling it is expensive.YES all this trade profitable--do you think companies outsource because they anticipate taking a loss from it?
You mean foreigners are willing to export things to us, while importing nothing from us, in order to make use of our paper currency to trade between themselves? If so we should print dollars for export. Apparently, foreigners are willing to give us products for free ("flood our markets") with cars and computers in exchange for little slips of paper that they apparently never intend to redeem... The United States exports ~$1 trillion in products anually, including (but not limited to) the products I listed. For comparison, all of the countries in the European Union combined (population 460 million) have exports of about ~$1.4 trillion.Multiple economies do not alter comparative advantage at all. China will export to the U.S. what it's comparatively good at producing, and import what it's comparatively poor at producing. The same goes for India. The same goes even if India and China trade with each other.
If India and China got everything they wanted from each other, then they wouldn't import anything from the U.S., and they therefore wouldn't export anything to the U.S., since the purpose of exports is to pay for imports. The U.S. would not be affected.
Even if China exports to the United States and uses the dollars to buy products from Indians, the dollars must be redeemed by buying American products.
Three-way comparisons were part of the original idea of comparative advantage, and were present when the idea was first presented almost 200 years ago.China does not have 1/100th our minimum wage.
The reason China and India have much lower wages is because their labor productivity is much lower. Right now, farming in India is done with a hand plow. Yes, you can produce 10x more than the Indian farmer because you have huge tractors--and that's precisely why your wage is 10x higher.
In the coming robot-tyranny, you will be frozen in carbonite for 1,000 years as punishment for having made that remark.