Although it is probably more accurate to go back to Reagan as the 'start' of our policy changes, you should remember that the 1990's were close to unprecedented in terms of the lowering of tariffs and the signing of 'free trade' agreements.
This, more than anything, is what set in place the 'race to the bottom' in terms of wages and manufacturing costs.
We've never had lower union membership than we do today. It's around 12% of the workforce. Look at those numbers in the 70's and 80's. Much higher.
We choose to not have child labor, polluted rivers, and choose cleaner air than our cheap labor competitors. Without tariffs in place that recognize this manufacturing costs difference between us and china, of course an international market is going to race to the bottom and build things in China.
But that alone isn't the only issue. Another huge issue is that China directly subsidizes industries in order to drive out competition in other Countries. Take Solar panels for instance. The cost of labor is actually a pretty small part of the overall manufacturing cost. Yet China has overtaken US solar panel manufacturers. They produce and export something like 16,000 megawatts of panels per year, and only use 500 megawatts per year locally. They can do this, because the Chinese government directly uses tax payer money to massively subsidize solar panel production.
And of course, you'll want to read up on China's currency manipulation....
China isn't playing fair in our post 1990 "free market".
If we want a "free market" without protective tariffs, then the only way to compete with China is to artificially lower the value of the dollar, remove environmental regulation so our cities look like Hong Kong, and directly subsidize key businesses with tax payer dollars so we can undersell below our cost of production.
And this is somehow different now than say, in the 60's or 70's or 80's why?
Consumers have always, and will always, want the highest quality good at the lowest price.
There are other factors at play besides consumer desire that have encouraged the erosion of certain US manufacturing jobs. One factor is that China is now a much more attractive place to set up a factory than it was 30 years ago. Another factor are all the 'free trade' agreements that happened in the 90's. Prior to the 90's we had tariffs in place to help protect American jobs from overseas low wages. Now we have no tariffs.
And then there are policies that led to actually giving various tax breaks for overseas profits, despite being headquartered in the US. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/21/us-usa-tax-wyden-idUSTRE78K1YB20110921
One can hope that someday there will be a court that recognizes that in order for a work of art, movie, music, etc.. to promote the "Progress of Science and.... Arts" that it at least needs to be available for the public to build upon within the same generation in which it was created.
(minor example) Just think of how much more the public could have enjoyed the Star Wars universe if its copyright had expired in say...1985, and there were spinoff movies created by a wide range of (maybe more) talented directors. The time to have a copyright expire is most beneficial to the public when the public still cares about that art. Even a 10 year copyright is pushing it for the arts.
SCOTUS ruled that congress putting public domain items back under copyright is NOT unconstitutional... because it isn't.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
1) It doesn't promote Science or useful Arts. It subtracted from them, by taking something out of the public domain.
2) If something can be placed back under copyright, it's not a limited Time.
That's unconstitutional enough for me.
That is a fairly good summary of the dissenting opinion:
"The statute before us, however, does not encourage anyone to produce a single new work." "At the same time, the statute inhibits the dissemination of those works...[which prohibits] spreading knowledge throughout the world."
He also quotes the 1909 congressional author of the Copyright Act: "The granting of such exclusive rights, under the proper terms and conditions, confers a benefit upon the public that outweighs the evils of the temporary monopoly."
The monopoly was actually described as 'evil'!. It should be fairly obvious to anyone that hasn't been bought off by 'Big Media' that lifetime + 70 years for a monopoly is far, far outside the original intent of anyone involved in the original copyright laws.
Have you seen many primary races with candidates that are actually pro-consumer though? Your vote means nothing if, even in a primary, it is between corporatist candidate A and corporatist candidate B.
(I don't have that problem in Oregon. Our Congress folks are generally pretty 'pro-average-person').
People need to keep saying what you are saying: the last 30 years has seen a big shift of power away from people and towards corporations. Citizens United unlimited funding of super pacs is close to the last layer of icing on the cake.
The Tea Party and OWS are symptoms that some people are beginning to realize that something is wrong but most of them can't quite figure out what exactly, so they default to moving to a more extreme version of whatever they believed before.
Old thread, so it's likely this will never be read....but..
"All I'm saying is even if labor unions disappeared overnight, modern government regulations would prevent a return to the poor working conditions of the past."
I've seen this sentiment before, but I don't understand how anyone could believe it. The only effective force for worker conditions are unions. There is no market force or government motivation that has workers' interests in mind. You can see how slanted government is towards big business now. I don't very few politicians fear the uncollected mass of voters. It is only when unions step in and lobby, with real tangible amounts of campaign financing, that laws get passed on behalf of the workers. America is only around 12% union now, but that 12% helps to set, and more importantly maintain what is considered 'normal' in terms of pay, rights, benefits, etc..
Without any force pushing for labor, slowly but surely working conditions and pay would regress to match the lowest common denominator in the global economy.
Most digital graphic designers are almost always slaves to their customers' requirements.
Musicians also. Some musicians are trend setters, but many of them, even 'indie' ones, go to other shows and consider that part of the job: to learn about what others are doing, what crowds like, etc... you almost have to if you want to replace your real day job with music full time. Especially if you are at the small club / bar level.
You can call it a straw man just like you can claim I'm a jellyfish. But I'm not, and my comment wasn't.
Welcome to reality, deal with it. You can either care for the sick or not. If you choose to care for them, you have to pay for it. If you have to pay for it, you must determine how. If you don't want to have the state pay for the the health of those who cannot afford it themselves, then you've chosen not to care for them.
Next time, present a logical rebuttal.
Actually, you'd be more accurate if you said:
"If you choose to care for them, you have to pay for it. " "If you choose to not pay for them, you end up paying for them anyway via emergency rooms, which drives the costs up for everyone, as it is the single most inefficient and costly way of providing care to the sick".
1,2,3 do contribute to the costs, but I've never seen any study that delivered concrete numbers on their overall impact.
I can tell you, having worked in a hospital that was bought out as a solution to an impeding bankruptcy (which changed the hospital from non-profit, to for-profit, which lead to 50% downsizing and the removal of any service that wasn't making a profit), that the number one reason many hospitals go out of business is because of ER costs. You have to take care of someone, regardless of insurance or ability to pay. In communities with migrant workers, or poor populations, it is nearly impossible to break even. You either have to charge more across the board, driving up everyone's cost, or cut any service that doesn't make a healthy profit. In most cases, its both.
That means things like dialysis go bye bye. As do as sorts of 'wellness' programs, elderly education, etc...
For-profit and health care just fundamentally don't play well together. And sticking a middle man in between the actual health care and the money used to pay for it just drives the costs up even higher.
It can't be coincidence that every single modern industrialized nation has national health care. It just plain makes more sense.
I think most people who complain about military waste are (should be) referring to the horrendous waste spent on no-bid contractors. At least, I hope they are aware of how bad it has become.
Most of the people I know and associate with are under the impression that almost any push for military action is 50% to accomplish some strategic goal and 50% to funnel tax payer money to campaign contributors and/or companies that are directly or indirectly connected with some politician. Cheney-Haliburton for example.
How would you write a web app that has methods in place to detect and handle a compromised CA? Or a compromised API, like between your app and Google Apps?
For those who don't have time to read the paper, it basically says copyright should be 15 years, and that this number should go down if the cost of production goes down (for example digital copies, after production costs are taken into account).
"Political parties may receive revenue from a wide range of sources, including from the state, membership fees, donations, rents, loans and credits. There is no campaign expenditure limit. Some OSCE/ODIHR NAM interlocutors stated that campaign financing would benefit from more transparency. There is no requirement to report on campaign finances during or after an election. Political parties submit an annual financial report to parliament. Campaign expenditures are included in these reports as a separate line item, without any detailed breakdown of income or expenditure. Political party reports, thus, do not sufficiently disclose how campaigns are financed and there is no independent control of party and campaign financing. "
I read through some of that first link, and it didn't seem to provide evidence of causation, although it clearly showed correlation. Have you found a good study that gets closer to proving causation?
Yes but by a tiny amount. Culture is constantly changing. And culture 100 years ago, anywhere, is very different from that culture today. The brain evolves extremely slowly. No matter what Biological pressures are exerted that help define a culture, that culture can push back against those biological urges easily, overriding any biological pressure.
I think that is sort of the point of this report. Even if there are biological reasons x,y,z that a woman might end up doing worse in math, there are cultural reasons a,b,c that are way stronger in influencing her test scores over time. And a,b, and c are far easier for us to change than biology.
"Every country with socialized medicine has some rationing system."
Yup, and so does the US right now. Medicare has tons of situations it will pay for, and tons it won't pay for, and those lists are largely used by private insurance as well, with some variation based on different ($$) plans.
For instance, if you have pneumonia, your medicare (and likewise private insurance) will likely cover 3 days of hospital stay, but no longer, regardless if you are still sick. (I forget the exact details, but you get the point).
"Everyone has the right not to have their life taken away, but no one has a right to unlimited, state-of-the-art healthcare. Money is just a way to quantify resources, and we don't have the resources to give everyone all the healthcare that they want, when they want it"
The rest of the industrialized world disagrees with that statement and proves it wrong daily with free health care for everyone in their country. And surely the US with its money could afford it.
Like everything that society eventually accepts, nano-bots and other mergers between tech and bio will happen gradually.
Like if the first universal cure for all cancer (or even a lesser thing like the common cold) is nano-bots that go in and kill the cancer cells, surely the vast majority of religious people wouldn't have a problem with it to save a loved one.
It'll be marketed as medicine, or a mere convenience first. What if instead of vacuuming, you could buy a box that produced nanobots that crawled along every surface of your house picking up dust and undesirable dirt, and carried it back to the box.
And and work and social pressure will likely drive the later stages. The people using the technology will begin to have more and more advantage than those that don't. Not getting the neural implant for your kid in 2175, would be like refusing to let your child experience computers in 2011.
Old thread, so likely no one will read this, but...
I read around 5 pages of that pdf, and it was talking about things like MS Word pointing to recently edited files on your inner volume/deniable file system. Or the user making a shortcut to something in the hidden volume.
Surely if you are security conscious enough to create an inner, encrypted, deniable file system, you would be using non-OS interacting applications and not create shortcuts in the outer volume to things in the inner volume.
In fact, the paper specifically said that there is nothing in inherent in windows that gives the inner volume away. Everything they point to is user error.
http://occupywallst.org/forum/has-ows-made-an-official-list-of-demands/ from 2 days ago.
You probably have a proposed list of demands that was posted on their forum by one person.
The best I can come up with that probably represents the majority of the movement is a piece on HuffPo where they surveyed several occupy events to get a feel for what people wanted:
If you had to pick one thing that nearly 100% of OWS agrees on it would be: "Politicians no longer do the will of the people". Why that is true, and what can be done to fix it, will vary from protestor to protestor.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.brookings.edu/papers/2001/0629globaleconomics_brainard.aspx
Although it is probably more accurate to go back to Reagan as the 'start' of our policy changes, you should remember that the 1990's were close to unprecedented in terms of the lowering of tariffs and the signing of 'free trade' agreements.
This, more than anything, is what set in place the 'race to the bottom' in terms of wages and manufacturing costs.
We've never had lower union membership than we do today. It's around 12% of the workforce. Look at those numbers in the 70's and 80's. Much higher.
We choose to not have child labor, polluted rivers, and choose cleaner air than our cheap labor competitors. Without tariffs in place that recognize this manufacturing costs difference between us and china, of course an international market is going to race to the bottom and build things in China.
But that alone isn't the only issue. Another huge issue is that China directly subsidizes industries in order to drive out competition in other Countries. Take Solar panels for instance. The cost of labor is actually a pretty small part of the overall manufacturing cost. Yet China has overtaken US solar panel manufacturers. They produce and export something like 16,000 megawatts of panels per year, and only use 500 megawatts per year locally. They can do this, because the Chinese government directly uses tax payer money to massively subsidize solar panel production.
And of course, you'll want to read up on China's currency manipulation....
China isn't playing fair in our post 1990 "free market".
If we want a "free market" without protective tariffs, then the only way to compete with China is to artificially lower the value of the dollar, remove environmental regulation so our cities look like Hong Kong, and directly subsidize key businesses with tax payer dollars so we can undersell below our cost of production.
And this is somehow different now than say, in the 60's or 70's or 80's why?
Consumers have always, and will always, want the highest quality good at the lowest price.
There are other factors at play besides consumer desire that have encouraged the erosion of certain US manufacturing jobs. One factor is that China is now a much more attractive place to set up a factory than it was 30 years ago. Another factor are all the 'free trade' agreements that happened in the 90's. Prior to the 90's we had tariffs in place to help protect American jobs from overseas low wages. Now we have no tariffs.
And then there are policies that led to actually giving various tax breaks for overseas profits, despite being headquartered in the US. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/21/us-usa-tax-wyden-idUSTRE78K1YB20110921
One can hope that someday there will be a court that recognizes that in order for a work of art, movie, music, etc.. to promote the "Progress of Science and .... Arts" that it at least needs to be available for the public to build upon within the same generation in which it was created.
(minor example)
Just think of how much more the public could have enjoyed the Star Wars universe if its copyright had expired in say...1985, and there were spinoff movies created by a wide range of (maybe more) talented directors. The time to have a copyright expire is most beneficial to the public when the public still cares about that art. Even a 10 year copyright is pushing it for the arts.
SCOTUS ruled that congress putting public domain items back under copyright is NOT unconstitutional... because it isn't.
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
1) It doesn't promote Science or useful Arts. It subtracted from them, by taking something out of the public domain.
2) If something can be placed back under copyright, it's not a limited Time.
That's unconstitutional enough for me.
That is a fairly good summary of the dissenting opinion:
"The statute before us, however, does not encourage anyone to produce a single new work."
"At the same time, the statute inhibits the dissemination of those works...[which prohibits] spreading knowledge throughout the world."
He also quotes the 1909 congressional author of the Copyright Act:
"The granting of such exclusive rights, under the proper terms and conditions, confers a benefit upon the public that outweighs the evils of the temporary monopoly."
The monopoly was actually described as 'evil'!. It should be fairly obvious to anyone that hasn't been bought off by 'Big Media' that lifetime + 70 years for a monopoly is far, far outside the original intent of anyone involved in the original copyright laws.
Have you seen many primary races with candidates that are actually pro-consumer though? Your vote means nothing if, even in a primary, it is between corporatist candidate A and corporatist candidate B.
(I don't have that problem in Oregon. Our Congress folks are generally pretty 'pro-average-person').
People need to keep saying what you are saying: the last 30 years has seen a big shift of power away from people and towards corporations. Citizens United unlimited funding of super pacs is close to the last layer of icing on the cake.
The Tea Party and OWS are symptoms that some people are beginning to realize that something is wrong but most of them can't quite figure out what exactly, so they default to moving to a more extreme version of whatever they believed before.
Old thread, so it's likely this will never be read....but..
"All I'm saying is even if labor unions disappeared overnight, modern government regulations would prevent a return to the poor working conditions of the past."
I've seen this sentiment before, but I don't understand how anyone could believe it. The only effective force for worker conditions are unions. There is no market force or government motivation that has workers' interests in mind. You can see how slanted government is towards big business now. I don't very few politicians fear the uncollected mass of voters. It is only when unions step in and lobby, with real tangible amounts of campaign financing, that laws get passed on behalf of the workers. America is only around 12% union now, but that 12% helps to set, and more importantly maintain what is considered 'normal' in terms of pay, rights, benefits, etc..
Without any force pushing for labor, slowly but surely working conditions and pay would regress to match the lowest common denominator in the global economy.
Are 100% of drone attacks done via a remote with a human at the other end?
I suppose that distances the human pilot from the napalm, but I imagine that most sane pilots would still refuse to napalm a crowd of civilians.
Most digital graphic designers are almost always slaves to their customers' requirements.
Musicians also. Some musicians are trend setters, but many of them, even 'indie' ones, go to other shows and consider that part of the job: to learn about what others are doing, what crowds like, etc... you almost have to if you want to replace your real day job with music full time. Especially if you are at the small club / bar level.
You can call it a straw man just like you can claim I'm a jellyfish. But I'm not, and my comment wasn't.
Welcome to reality, deal with it. You can either care for the sick or not. If you choose to care for them, you have to pay for it. If you have to pay for it, you must determine how. If you don't want to have the state pay for the the health of those who cannot afford it themselves, then you've chosen not to care for them.
Next time, present a logical rebuttal.
Actually, you'd be more accurate if you said:
"If you choose to care for them, you have to pay for it. "
"If you choose to not pay for them, you end up paying for them anyway via emergency rooms, which drives the costs up for everyone, as it is the single most inefficient and costly way of providing care to the sick".
1,2,3 do contribute to the costs, but I've never seen any study that delivered concrete numbers on their overall impact.
I can tell you, having worked in a hospital that was bought out as a solution to an impeding bankruptcy (which changed the hospital from non-profit, to for-profit, which lead to 50% downsizing and the removal of any service that wasn't making a profit), that the number one reason many hospitals go out of business is because of ER costs. You have to take care of someone, regardless of insurance or ability to pay. In communities with migrant workers, or poor populations, it is nearly impossible to break even. You either have to charge more across the board, driving up everyone's cost, or cut any service that doesn't make a healthy profit. In most cases, its both.
That means things like dialysis go bye bye. As do as sorts of 'wellness' programs, elderly education, etc...
For-profit and health care just fundamentally don't play well together. And sticking a middle man in between the actual health care and the money used to pay for it just drives the costs up even higher.
It can't be coincidence that every single modern industrialized nation has national health care. It just plain makes more sense.
I think most people who complain about military waste are (should be) referring to the horrendous waste spent on no-bid contractors. At least, I hope they are aware of how bad it has become.
Most of the people I know and associate with are under the impression that almost any push for military action is 50% to accomplish some strategic goal and 50% to funnel tax payer money to campaign contributors and/or companies that are directly or indirectly connected with some politician. Cheney-Haliburton for example.
How would you write a web app that has methods in place to detect and handle a compromised CA? Or a compromised API, like between your app and Google Apps?
That was interesting, thanks.
For those who don't have time to read the paper, it basically says copyright should be 15 years, and that this number should go down if the cost of production goes down (for example digital copies, after production costs are taken into account).
I'm not seeing much of a difference in campaign finance laws for the Czech republic.
Czech Republic Page: 2
28-29 May 2010 Parliamentary Elections
OSCE/ODIHR Needs Assessment Mission Report
"Political parties may receive revenue from a wide range of sources, including from the state,
membership fees, donations, rents, loans and credits. There is no campaign expenditure limit.
Some OSCE/ODIHR NAM interlocutors stated that campaign financing would benefit from
more transparency. There is no requirement to report on campaign finances during or after an
election. Political parties submit an annual financial report to parliament. Campaign
expenditures are included in these reports as a separate line item, without any detailed
breakdown of income or expenditure. Political party reports, thus, do not sufficiently disclose
how campaigns are financed and there is no independent control of party and campaign
financing. "
Except a lot of things don't seem to work as well using OpenJDK. Heck, even Minecraft recommends Sun Java.
I read through some of that first link, and it didn't seem to provide evidence of causation, although it clearly showed correlation. Have you found a good study that gets closer to proving causation?
Biology influences culture.
Yes but by a tiny amount. Culture is constantly changing. And culture 100 years ago, anywhere, is very different from that culture today. The brain evolves extremely slowly. No matter what Biological pressures are exerted that help define a culture, that culture can push back against those biological urges easily, overriding any biological pressure.
I think that is sort of the point of this report. Even if there are biological reasons x,y,z that a woman might end up doing worse in math, there are cultural reasons a,b,c that are way stronger in influencing her test scores over time. And a,b, and c are far easier for us to change than biology.
"Every country with socialized medicine has some rationing system."
Yup, and so does the US right now. Medicare has tons of situations it will pay for, and tons it won't pay for, and those lists are largely used by private insurance as well, with some variation based on different ($$) plans.
For instance, if you have pneumonia, your medicare (and likewise private insurance) will likely cover 3 days of hospital stay, but no longer, regardless if you are still sick. (I forget the exact details, but you get the point).
"Everyone has the right not to have their life taken away, but no one has a right to unlimited, state-of-the-art healthcare. Money is just a way to quantify resources, and we don't have the resources to give everyone all the healthcare that they want, when they want it"
The rest of the industrialized world disagrees with that statement and proves it wrong daily with free health care for everyone in their country. And surely the US with its money could afford it.
Like everything that society eventually accepts, nano-bots and other mergers between tech and bio will happen gradually.
Like if the first universal cure for all cancer (or even a lesser thing like the common cold) is nano-bots that go in and kill the cancer cells, surely the vast majority of religious people wouldn't have a problem with it to save a loved one.
It'll be marketed as medicine, or a mere convenience first. What if instead of vacuuming, you could buy a box that produced nanobots that crawled along every surface of your house picking up dust and undesirable dirt, and carried it back to the box.
And and work and social pressure will likely drive the later stages. The people using the technology will begin to have more and more advantage than those that don't. Not getting the neural implant for your kid in 2175, would be like refusing to let your child experience computers in 2011.
Old thread, so likely no one will read this, but...
I read around 5 pages of that pdf, and it was talking about things like MS Word pointing to recently edited files on your inner volume/deniable file system. Or the user making a shortcut to something in the hidden volume.
Surely if you are security conscious enough to create an inner, encrypted, deniable file system, you would be using non-OS interacting applications and not create shortcuts in the outer volume to things in the inner volume.
In fact, the paper specifically said that there is nothing in inherent in windows that gives the inner volume away. Everything they point to is user error.
There is no official OWS list of demands.
http://occupywallst.org/forum/has-ows-made-an-official-list-of-demands/ from 2 days ago.
You probably have a proposed list of demands that was posted on their forum by one person.
The best I can come up with that probably represents the majority of the movement is a piece on HuffPo where they surveyed several occupy events to get a feel for what people wanted:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ali-hayat/occupy-wall-street_b_1089079.html
If you had to pick one thing that nearly 100% of OWS agrees on it would be: "Politicians no longer do the will of the people". Why that is true, and what can be done to fix it, will vary from protestor to protestor.
I found it incredible that your post was marked +5 insightful.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sit-in
And that is only a small amount of camping/sit-in protests that brought about meaningful change.
Heck this one alone should be sufficient. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army
I always thought that ZFS fragmentation was handled by adding a log device to the pool.
http://wildness.espix.org/index.php?post/2011/06/09/ZFS-Fragmentation-issue-examining-the-ZIL
Works for us.