Polls show that 60-70% of Americans would prefer a universal healthcare system, which is what Canadians have, and what Brits have, and French have etc etc etc
Several polls have been taken asking canadians which system they prefer. They are familiar with our system. Yet about 92% of Canadians prefer their healthcare system to ours.
Yeah, and every time sometime tried to build the first boat, the first car, the first plane, the first organ transplant, etc etc, then if it did not go too well, then it should have never been tried again.
As for who should pay for it--the rich should pay: they own most of the assets.
you wroteL While we're at it, why don't we save the whales, cure cancer, and establish world peace as well?
Yeah, I was talking crazy talk, wasn't I? Instead let's let the healthcare industry extort Americans with exobitant costs while just about every other western nation have a longstanding, well working national healthcare plan paid for by taxes. I am some kind of crazy nut, huh? Yeah, me and the Canadians and the Brits and the French and the Swedes and the Danes, etc etc etc.
And the media tells people what to do, one way or another. In reality, most people don't really think much about such things, because the media doesn't pay much attention to such things. So, you may thingk you are in some sort of vanguard, pushing the envelope here with this "outspoken" view of yours. But in reality, you are just going along with what TeeVee tells you to do.
Sorry to put it that way, but that is my honest opinion....
Why not? Is this a country "for the people, by the people", or is it a country "for the corporation, by the corporation"?
We can make it happen, people, if only we want to make it happen, and believe in ourselves.
Create laws so that the citizens are the owners, and that our time is valuable. Pay a basic minimum income to all citizens. Slow down immigration. Offer tax-funded national healtcare. Build public subsidized housing. And make all these govt programs transparent and effective. Government is just a machines. Machines can be improved.
THEN you will have a situation where busineses have to bid for employees.
Of course, it may not be in our best interests to have certain vital industries/businesses hurting for labor. Hospitals, as part of nationalized healthcare, might be due for special consideration.
Wow. You really know that OS geekery has gone mainstream when big players like Newsweeks are writing articles that start off like this:
Open-source geeks are devout in their belief that software should be free to all, and hold as their icon the Linux alternative to the Microsoft commercial empire. As unpaid volunteers who collaborate to develop open source code, they tend to be anti-corporate types.
You conformists never can quite get clear of logical fallacies, can you.
Social indoctrination via propaganda can be used for many purposes. A society might, for some reason, indoctrinate its young to stand on their heads whenever they hear a cricket chirping. Or whatever. Or these institutions might crank out propaganda to indoctrinate its young people to give up their lives in war, thus providing great profits for munitions makers, etc. Now we cannot find any examples of THAT in world history. Can we?
Or, they might be indoctrinated to be good consumers, and to work as hard as possible and spend as much money as possible, and also to heap derision and scorn on those who would advocate anti-consumerist thinking.
The evil corporation has become to the left what the physical embodiment of Satan became to the born agains: the external excuse for all the choices people make that they don't agree with.
So? An empty accusation with no reasoning or evidence?
We have this ability to chase our tails with the endless pursuit of bling-bling precisely because will DON'T have a socialist worker's paradise and universal health care.
Is that a tautology, circular reasoning, that I see before my eyes?
The nature of our country filters our population towards the entrepreneurial, puritan, workaholic, tightasses. Our consumer culture is the result of this, not some evil ad firm.
Oh, "the nature of our country"? Thanks for the trenchant insight.....
I'm all for ditching the endless debt and ceaseless work hours for a few new baubles, but claiming the American consumer is not making a choice and is merely another corporate victim, is false.
I ask you to look at history. Look at the wartime cultures of Japan and Germany. Look at what happened in those countries. Look at kamikaze pilots, at death camps. Why is it that those populations allowed such things, why would a young man go to his death? Why do people do things that are clearly against their own best interests? Is it possible that they were manipulated to do so against their best interests by powerful institutional entities?
Oh, but that could never happen here in America. We're special.
I have not read the paper (it seems to be slashdotted), but with respect to the author's reference to "derision", this is something I am interested in, so I will go ahead and comment on it.
Some who tries to conserving energy may be said to be an "anti-consumer", because if one conserves energy, then that person is not being the best possible consumer.
The reason such persons are objects of derision is because we Americans have been socialized to be the best possible consumers we can be: years of corporate media propaganda have been directed towards encouraging us to spend as much on food as possible, as much on transportation as possible, as much on healthcare as possible.
But encouraging consumption is only one side of pro-consumer propaganda--those of us who resist the consumerist religion are held up for derision: people who advocate environmentalism, socialism, universal healthcare, and other viewpoint that are less than all-out friendly to consumerism, they are all objects of derision.
Also, viewpoints that advocate a more relaxed workplace and more leisure time off for Americans, they are also objects of derision among the consumerists. For example, European countries taht mandate 35 hour work weeks and 4 weeks or more a year of vacation, such as France. No, France wouldn't be an object of derision, would it.
And this is why America does not have universal healthcare, good public transportation, worker-friendly labor laws, etc etc etc.
Dig this excerpt from the end of that article: But the idea may be premature, according to the Direct Marketing Association, the largest trade group for direct and interactive marketers.
The group believes it would be wise to give the law and law enforcement efforts more time to work before "rushing into a system like this," spokesman Louis Mastria said.
Seems like the corporate media is always willing to give corporations and their lobbies plenty of slack, always ready to bend over backwards for them.
corporate media & corporations, sittin' in a tree K-I-S-S-I-N-G
So the gap between the rich and the poor grows - so what? Suppose you earn $10,000 a year and I earn $100,000 year, working for the same company. The boss comes in and says that due to increased sales, you and I both get a raise. I'm now making $10,000,000 a year, while you make $100,000 a year. You used to be earning 1/10 of what I made, but now it's 1/100th. The gap between us got bigger, but so what ? You're still a hell of a lot better off than you were. Does it affect you, in any way, shape or form, how much money I make? No! All that matters if how much you make and what you can buy with that money
THat is not what is happening. What is happening is that an ever-decreasing percent of the population (Group A) is obtaining an ever-increasing amount of money (Amount M) . And conversely and ever-increasing percent of the population (Group B) is obtaining an ever-decreasing amount of money (Amount N). That is the very essence of neoliberal econonics/lasseiz faire economics/corporate capitalism. It is a system designed to place an ever increasing amount of wealth in a ever-decreasing number of hands. Witness it happening before your eyes.
Yes, the overall pot is increasing because Amount A is growing faster than Amount B is decreasing. But so what?
Also, since this is The Law of Jungle, i.e., that is the basis of Neoliberalism/Lassiez Faire economics, we can see what effects this will have by looking at animal behavior when the balance of power shifts dramatically. What happens in the nest of certain types of birds when one of the chicks gets bigger than the other chicks? The bigger chick pushes the smaller one out of the nest. Or when one of the young male lions gets bigger than the others? It runs off the rest.
So when some humans get more resources than the others, they exploit the ones who have less resources. There is no "rising tide lifting all boats," but instead suddenly powerful entities that inexorably impoverish, enslave, and eventually push out of the nest, all the little ones. THe means of control are many. Wherever there is animal entity that gains more power than its competitors, it uses that power to improve its own position. And when these powerful entities exist in a democracy, they use propaganda to lull the lesser humans, to fool them by whispering sweet, lasseiz-faire nothings into their ears. "Hey, Little Red Riding Hood, look at my Cornucopianism Religion I created for you. A rising tide lifts all boats, Little Red Riding Hood. I would never hurt you."
You wrote: Even the poorest of the poor have cell phones, air conditioning, automobiles, refridgerators, color TV's and 2000 calorie diets. They don't have to worry about dying of typhus, malaria, diptheria, diaherra, the flu, measles, mumps, smallpox, or rubela. A man can work just 40 hours and a week and easily support himself. Roman Emperors couldn't possiblly have imagined the life of luxury that the poorest of americans enjoys.
This is simply the result of an accretion of knowledge. We stand on the shoulders of giants. And by the way, a lot of the basic research to obtain these improvements were funded by taxes. But the profits were taken by corporations. Hmm. Sounds like a peculiar form of socialism to me.
They are doing to us IT workers what they did to advanced, capital-intensive manufacturing jobs in America (as opposed to "assembly jobs"): they spirited it away to Asia. And we could have stopped it with trade barriers. But they sold us on neoliberal trade policies with $24 worth of trinkets.
Read here:
>>>>>>>> commentator Eamonn Fingleton speaks bluntly about what he sees as the frittering away of the United States' manufacturing base and what he regards as the consequent stagnation of the American standard of living. For those who believe in the superiority of the current U.S. postindustrial strategy, a reading of the OECD Economic Yearbook makes for a distinctly chastening study. As Fingleton puts it: "The United States trails no fewer than eight other nations, all of which devote a larger share of their labor force to manufacturing."
Fingleton, who distinguishes between high-end and low-end jobs, insists that the former, advanced manufacturing, must be reconstituted if the United States wants to remain a superpower. And what are these eroded industries? Semiconductor materials, ceramic packaging for semiconductors, charge-coupled devices (CCD), industrial robotics, numerically controlled machine tools, laser diodes and carbon fibers, to name only a few.
Where did the manufacturing of these items go? In most cases, Japan now dominates the more advanced areas of these industries, says Fingleton, who lives in Tokyo. Moreover, he argues, by dint of superior know-how and large capital investments Japan now enjoys a global lock on key manufacturing processes.
Fingleton recalls an America where men and women went to work and made the nation great, the old-fashioned way, by producing products people wanted and needed. And he juxtaposes the loss of advanced manufacturing jobs in this country with what he regards as the overvalued dollar, America's compulsion to borrow huge sums of money to fund its deficits and an illusionary U.S. prosperity based on unsustainable debt. For now Japan and China, both running huge trade surpluses, pay the United States' bills, he says. Where does this leave the American worker? He puts the answer simply: Out of work!
It is not true that Japan is in dire economic straits, Fingleton maintains. In a recent article in the London journal Prospect entitled "Japan's Fake Funk," he writes: "The Western consensus is that Japan is a basket case: It is not. That is a misreading by the West."
Meanwhile, he says, ill-conceived U.S. policies have failed to protect home-based American industries, leading to the transference of the most advanced technologies known to mankind. Fingleton says flatly that Japan has built up its industrial base at the expense of the United States, and that China now is chomping at the bit to do the same.....
Eamonn Fingleton: I mean those engaged in advanced manufacturing. Specifically, industries that are both highly capital intensive and highly know-how intensive. They typically are many orders of magnitude more capital-intensive and know-how intensive than the most advanced of "New Economy" services, such as computer software developed in the last three decades.
Although Japan is known in the West for its leadership in certain consumer products such as cars and television sets, its area of greatest leadership is in much more advanced industries that largely are invisible to the consumer. Specifically, Japan leads almost right across the board in the sort of advanced materials, high-tech components and production machinery that are driving the electronic revolution. Some products may be assembled in the United States, but their key manufacture - the manufacture of the advanced components and materials - is done in Japan.....
much more here: http://www.pushhamburger.com/edge.htmEconomic
Whoa! I heard that reforms were looming in Germany, but i had no idea it was this bad! But, I know that MANY times I have read of how Germans work about 1600 hours per years, as compared to 1850-2000 for Americans. How do you explain the discrepancy between these widely published statistics and your and your girlfriend's experiences?
I see on your blog you had to pay 200 EU for glasses. WTF? I thought Germans had socialized healthcare???
You would have loved it back in the slavery days...IF you were one of the top five percent who could afford to own slaves. Otherwise, it sucked. The poor whites had to compete with free slave labor, and the slaves had it worst of all.
C'mon....ADMIT IT. Please. Our government sold us out a long time ago. Our elected officials and high level bureaucrats can do whatever they want. You know it. I know it.
And of course, OF COURSE, there is money to be made by eliminating competition for corporations.
And protecting the corporations or the wealthy at the expense of the little guy is what America is all about. In fact America was basically built on slavery, which was an official part of the government. And slavery ended not that long ago. THere were people who were born slaves who died just a few decades ago. And of course we had indentured servants, too. And of course tenant farmers were extant until just recently. 16 tons, and whattaya get, indeed....
And if institutional slavery is not the perfect example of a government SPECIFICALLY BUILT for looking after the interests of the Big Guy at the expense of the Little Guy, then what the hell IS a good example of that type of government?
I will say it again: America was BUILT to EXPLOIT the Little Guy in order to BENEFIT the Big Guy (the wealthy, corporations, etc).
And how SHOCKING that we now see that our government is continually protecting large successful corporations from competition in order to extract higher fees from us, The Little Guy. What a shock; what a surprise!
I live in a condo complex in SW Houston. We have no gates on our parking lots. For years, our cars have been subject to break ins. Most of us just leave our doors unlocked. The car alarms do not seem to deter them, at least in one parking lot that is secluded, and not visible to any of the apartment windows.
One solution I have experimented with is using X10 motion sensors (MS13a). For 67$ I bought an activehome kit from x10 that has 3 motion sensors with a wireless receiver which is linked to a serial port computer interface. The distance from my condo and the reciever is greater than teh 30 ft or so that the ms13a wireless motion detectors will transmit. But I solved that by using a long piece of speaker wire looped around detector and run back to my condo and the antenna of the receiver. With that setup I was able to detect motion in the parking lot. However, the activehome software is crippled and will not allow me to execute a program upon detection (they want more money).
So what I think I will do is just find some VB or C code or perl or something that will monitor the port of that serial port and just execute an audio file when motion is detected after midnight and before 6 AM.
I think the audio file will just have to be some sort of sounds like a two way radio saying 10-4, and something else? But I need to place a speaker out on the balcony. And I don't have a speaker to spare!
Anyone know where I can lay my hands on that code? And may be a more elegant solution?
Our American government colludes with business to rape the consumer. I see only one solution--make the politicians accountable to public opinion, and then start indicting, trying and hanging some politicians.
Slashdot Mirror
Like most media "news" stories.....
all of them! gooogle it!
I bet you are still paying your utility bill. Why not grow your own with this overunity device?
Polls show that 60-70% of Americans would prefer a universal healthcare system, which is what Canadians have, and what Brits have, and French have etc etc etc
Several polls have been taken asking canadians which system they prefer. They are familiar with our system.
Yet about 92% of Canadians prefer their healthcare system to ours.
Q.E.D.
Yeah, and every time sometime tried to build the first boat, the first car, the first plane, the first organ transplant, etc etc, then if it did not go too well, then it should have never been tried again.
As for who should pay for it--the rich should pay: they own most of the assets.
you wroteL
While we're at it, why don't we save the whales, cure cancer, and establish world peace as well?
Yeah, I was talking crazy talk, wasn't I? Instead let's let the healthcare industry extort Americans with exobitant costs while just about every other western nation have a longstanding, well working national healthcare plan paid for by taxes. I am some kind of crazy nut, huh? Yeah, me and the Canadians and the Brits and the French and the Swedes and the Danes, etc etc etc.
And the media tells people what to do, one way or another. In reality, most people don't really think much about such things, because the media doesn't pay much attention to such things. So, you may thingk you are in some sort of vanguard, pushing the envelope here with this "outspoken" view of yours. But in reality, you are just going along with what TeeVee tells you to do.
Sorry to put it that way, but that is my honest opinion....
Why not? Is this a country "for the people, by the people", or is it a country "for the corporation, by the corporation"?
We can make it happen, people, if only we want to make it happen, and believe in ourselves.
Create laws so that the citizens are the owners, and that our time is valuable. Pay a basic minimum income to all citizens. Slow down immigration. Offer tax-funded national healtcare. Build public subsidized housing. And make all these govt programs transparent and effective. Government is just a machines. Machines can be improved.
THEN you will have a situation where busineses have to bid for employees.
Of course, it may not be in our best interests to have certain vital industries/businesses hurting for labor. Hospitals, as part of nationalized healthcare, might be due for special consideration.
Wow. You really know that OS geekery has gone mainstream when big players like Newsweeks are writing articles that start off like this:
Open-source geeks are devout in their belief that software should be free to all, and hold as their icon the Linux alternative to the Microsoft commercial empire. As unpaid volunteers who collaborate to develop open source code, they tend to be anti-corporate types.
I have heard it disables Kazaa, BTW
You conformists never can quite get clear of logical fallacies, can you.
Social indoctrination via propaganda can be used for many purposes. A society might, for some reason, indoctrinate its young to stand on their heads whenever they hear a cricket chirping. Or whatever. Or these institutions might crank out propaganda to indoctrinate its young people to give up their lives in war, thus providing great profits for munitions makers, etc. Now we cannot find any examples of THAT in world history. Can we?
Or, they might be indoctrinated to be good consumers, and to work as hard as possible and spend as much money as possible, and also to heap derision and scorn on those who would advocate anti-consumerist thinking.
No, THAT could never happen. Or could it?
you wrote:
The evil corporation has become to the left what the physical embodiment of Satan became to the born agains: the external excuse for all the choices people make that they don't agree with.
So? An empty accusation with no reasoning or evidence?
We have this ability to chase our tails with the endless pursuit of bling-bling precisely because will DON'T have a socialist worker's paradise and universal health care.
Is that a tautology, circular reasoning, that I see before my eyes?
The nature of our country filters our population towards the entrepreneurial, puritan, workaholic, tightasses. Our consumer culture is the result of this, not some evil ad firm.
Oh, "the nature of our country"? Thanks for the trenchant insight.....
I'm all for ditching the endless debt and ceaseless work hours for a few new baubles, but claiming the American consumer is not making a choice and is merely another corporate victim, is false.
I ask you to look at history. Look at the wartime cultures of Japan and Germany. Look at what happened in those countries. Look at kamikaze pilots, at death camps. Why is it that those populations allowed such things, why would a young man go to his death? Why do people do things that are clearly against their own best interests? Is it possible that they were manipulated to do so against their best interests by powerful institutional entities?
Oh, but that could never happen here in America. We're special.
I have not read the paper (it seems to be slashdotted), but with respect to the author's reference to "derision", this is something I am interested in, so I will go ahead and comment on it.
Some who tries to conserving energy may be said to be an "anti-consumer", because if one conserves energy, then that person is not being the best possible consumer.
The reason such persons are objects of derision is because we Americans have been socialized to be the best possible consumers we can be: years of corporate media propaganda have been directed towards encouraging us to spend as much on food as possible, as much on transportation as possible, as much on healthcare as possible.
But encouraging consumption is only one side of pro-consumer propaganda--those of us who resist the consumerist religion are held up for derision: people who advocate environmentalism, socialism, universal healthcare, and other viewpoint that are less than all-out friendly to consumerism, they are all objects of derision.
Also, viewpoints that advocate a more relaxed workplace and more leisure time off for Americans, they are also objects of derision among the consumerists. For example, European countries taht mandate 35 hour work weeks and 4 weeks or more a year of vacation, such as France. No, France wouldn't be an object of derision, would it.
And this is why America does not have universal healthcare, good public transportation, worker-friendly labor laws, etc etc etc.
Dig this excerpt from the end of that article:
But the idea may be premature, according to the Direct Marketing Association, the largest trade group for direct and interactive marketers.
The group believes it would be wise to give the law and law enforcement efforts more time to work before "rushing into a system like this," spokesman Louis Mastria said.
Seems like the corporate media is always willing to give corporations and their lobbies plenty of slack, always ready to bend over backwards for them.
corporate media & corporations,
sittin' in a tree
K-I-S-S-I-N-G
You wrote:
So the gap between the rich and the poor grows - so what? Suppose you earn $10,000 a year and I earn $100,000 year, working for the same company. The boss comes in and says that due to increased sales, you and I both get a raise. I'm now making $10,000,000 a year, while you make $100,000 a year. You used to be earning 1/10 of what I made, but now it's 1/100th. The gap between us got bigger, but so what ? You're still a hell of a lot better off than you were. Does it affect you, in any way, shape or form, how much money I make? No! All that matters if how much you make and what you can buy with that money
THat is not what is happening. What is happening is that an ever-decreasing percent of the population (Group A) is obtaining an ever-increasing amount of money (Amount M) . And conversely and ever-increasing percent of the population (Group B) is obtaining an ever-decreasing amount of money (Amount N). That is the very essence of neoliberal econonics/lasseiz faire economics/corporate capitalism. It is a system designed to place an ever increasing amount of wealth in a ever-decreasing number of hands. Witness it happening before your eyes.
Yes, the overall pot is increasing because Amount A is growing faster than Amount B is decreasing. But so what?
Also, since this is The Law of Jungle, i.e., that is the basis of Neoliberalism/Lassiez Faire economics, we can see what effects this will have by looking at animal behavior when the balance of power shifts dramatically. What happens in the nest of certain types of birds when one of the chicks gets bigger than the other chicks? The bigger chick pushes the smaller one out of the nest. Or when one of the young male lions gets bigger than the others? It runs off the rest.
So when some humans get more resources than the others, they exploit the ones who have less resources. There is no "rising tide lifting all boats," but instead suddenly powerful entities that inexorably impoverish, enslave, and eventually push out of the nest, all the little ones. THe means of control are many. Wherever there is animal entity that gains more power than its competitors, it uses that power to improve its own position. And when these powerful entities exist in a democracy, they use propaganda to lull the lesser humans, to fool them by whispering sweet, lasseiz-faire nothings into their ears. "Hey, Little Red Riding Hood, look at my Cornucopianism Religion I created for you. A rising tide lifts all boats, Little Red Riding Hood. I would never hurt you."
They do this with a vast array of think tanks and foundations that have been created with over $2 billion dollars of funding over the last 30 years or so. Read Tentacles of Rage from this month's Harper Magazine to find out more.
I used to be under their spell, too.
You wrote:
Even the poorest of the poor have cell phones, air conditioning, automobiles, refridgerators, color TV's and 2000 calorie diets. They don't have to worry about dying of typhus, malaria, diptheria, diaherra, the flu, measles, mumps, smallpox, or rubela. A man can work just 40 hours and a week and easily support himself. Roman Emperors couldn't possiblly have imagined the life of luxury that the poorest of americans enjoys.
This is simply the result of an accretion of knowledge. We stand on the shoulders of giants. And by the way, a lot of the basic research to obtain these improvements were funded by taxes. But the profits were taken by corporations. Hmm. Sounds like a peculiar form of socialism to me.
See my home page for ideas on how the Europeans used strikes to build their welfare states.
This process actually accelerated under CLinton. Clinton was a better Republican than Eisenhower, or maybe even Nixon.
They are doing to us IT workers what they did to advanced, capital-intensive manufacturing jobs in America (as opposed to "assembly jobs"): they spirited it away to Asia. And we could have stopped it with trade barriers. But they sold us on neoliberal trade policies with $24 worth of trinkets.
....
....
Read here:
>>>>>>>>
commentator Eamonn Fingleton speaks bluntly about what he sees as the frittering away of the United States' manufacturing base and what he regards as the consequent stagnation of the American standard of living. For those who believe in the superiority of the current U.S. postindustrial strategy, a reading of the OECD Economic Yearbook makes for a distinctly chastening study. As Fingleton puts it: "The United States trails no fewer than eight other nations, all of which devote a larger share of their labor force to manufacturing."
Fingleton, who distinguishes between high-end and low-end jobs, insists that the former, advanced manufacturing, must be reconstituted if the United States wants to remain a superpower. And what are these eroded industries? Semiconductor materials, ceramic packaging for semiconductors, charge-coupled devices (CCD), industrial robotics, numerically controlled machine tools, laser diodes and carbon fibers, to name only a few.
Where did the manufacturing of these items go? In most cases, Japan now dominates the more advanced areas of these industries, says Fingleton, who lives in Tokyo. Moreover, he argues, by dint of superior know-how and large capital investments Japan now enjoys a global lock on key manufacturing processes.
Fingleton recalls an America where men and women went to work and made the nation great, the old-fashioned way, by producing products people wanted and needed. And he juxtaposes the loss of advanced manufacturing jobs in this country with what he regards as the overvalued dollar, America's compulsion to borrow huge sums of money to fund its deficits and an illusionary U.S. prosperity based on unsustainable debt. For now Japan and China, both running huge trade surpluses, pay the United States' bills, he says. Where does this leave the American worker? He puts the answer simply: Out of work!
It is not true that Japan is in dire economic straits, Fingleton maintains. In a recent article in the London journal Prospect entitled "Japan's Fake Funk," he writes: "The Western consensus is that Japan is a basket case: It is not. That is a misreading by the West."
Meanwhile, he says, ill-conceived U.S. policies have failed to protect home-based American industries, leading to the transference of the most advanced technologies known to mankind. Fingleton says flatly that Japan has built up its industrial base at the expense of the United States, and that China now is chomping at the bit to do the same.
Eamonn Fingleton: I mean those engaged in advanced manufacturing. Specifically, industries that are both highly capital intensive and highly know-how intensive. They typically are many orders of magnitude more capital-intensive and know-how intensive than the most advanced of "New Economy" services, such as computer software developed in the last three decades.
Although Japan is known in the West for its leadership in certain consumer products such as cars and television sets, its area of greatest leadership is in much more advanced industries that largely are invisible to the consumer. Specifically, Japan leads almost right across the board in the sort of advanced materials, high-tech components and production machinery that are driving the electronic revolution. Some products may be assembled in the United States, but their key manufacture - the manufacture of the advanced components and materials - is done in Japan.
much more here: http://www.pushhamburger.com/edge.htmEconomic
Whoa! I heard that reforms were looming in Germany, but i had no idea it was this bad! But, I know that MANY times I have read of how Germans work about 1600 hours per years, as compared to 1850-2000 for Americans. How do you explain the discrepancy between these widely published statistics and your and your girlfriend's experiences?
I see on your blog you had to pay 200 EU for glasses. WTF? I thought Germans had socialized healthcare???
You would have loved it back in the slavery days...IF you were one of the top five percent who could afford to own slaves. Otherwise, it sucked. The poor whites had to compete with free slave labor, and the slaves had it worst of all.
Umm, by DEFINITION, only a small fraction of people can be "rich". Period.
C'mon....ADMIT IT. Please. Our government sold us out a long time ago. Our elected officials and high level bureaucrats can do whatever they want. You know it. I know it.
And of course, OF COURSE, there is money to be made by eliminating competition for corporations.
And protecting the corporations or the wealthy at the expense of the little guy is what America is all about. In fact America was basically built on slavery, which was an official part of the government. And slavery ended not that long ago. THere were people who were born slaves who died just a few decades ago. And of course we had indentured servants, too. And of course tenant farmers were extant until just recently. 16 tons, and whattaya get, indeed....
And if institutional slavery is not the perfect example of a government SPECIFICALLY BUILT for looking after the interests of the Big Guy at the expense of the Little Guy, then what the hell IS a good example of that type of government?
I will say it again: America was BUILT to EXPLOIT the Little Guy in order to BENEFIT the Big Guy (the wealthy, corporations, etc).
And how SHOCKING that we now see that our government is continually protecting large successful corporations from competition in order to extract higher fees from us, The Little Guy. What a shock; what a surprise!
I live in a condo complex in SW Houston. We have no gates on our parking lots. For years, our cars have been subject to break ins. Most of us just leave our doors unlocked. The car alarms do not seem to deter them, at least in one parking lot that is secluded, and not visible to any of the apartment windows.
One solution I have experimented with is using X10 motion sensors (MS13a). For 67$ I bought an activehome kit from x10 that has 3 motion sensors with a wireless receiver which is linked to a serial port computer interface. The distance from my condo and the reciever is greater than teh 30 ft or so that the ms13a wireless motion detectors will transmit. But I solved that by using a long piece of speaker wire looped around detector and run back to my condo and the antenna of the receiver. With that setup I was able to detect motion in the parking lot. However, the activehome software is crippled and will not allow me to execute a program upon detection (they want more money).
So what I think I will do is just find some VB or C code or perl or something that will monitor the port of that serial port and just execute an audio file when motion is detected after midnight and before 6 AM.
I think the audio file will just have to be some sort of sounds like a two way radio saying 10-4, and something else? But I need to place a speaker out on the balcony. And I don't have a speaker to spare!
Anyone know where I can lay my hands on that code? And may be a more elegant solution?
Our American government colludes with business to rape the consumer. I see only one solution--make the politicians accountable to public opinion, and then start indicting, trying and hanging some politicians.