Yep, all that stuff is gone. Only 10-15 years ago I think, Porter-Cable tools were still made in the US, but that's been moved to Mexico..
However, if you want to find some American-made stuff at Home Depot, go to the electrical aisle, and look at all the dirt-cheap electrical sockets (the kind you install in your walls) and light switches (again, the kind you install in house walls). They usually cost less than a dollar each (unless you get some fancy kind), and they all said "made in USA" last time I checked. Of course, those products are not made for a global market (they're only usable in North America: Canada and Mexico has the same standards; not sure about South America, but everywhere else uses entirely different electrical hardware), and since this is easily the largest market for construction goods like that, and also since there's probably a large amount of automation involved in their manufacture, it probably hasn't made sense to move production offshore yet.
There's actually still a lot of stuff being made in the US these days, it just depends. US manufacturing today is generally heavily automated, so it doesn't involve much labor; anything requiring too much labor gets moved offshore to where labor is cheap. But here's a few things off the top of my head that are still made here: - Tesla cars (california of all places) - Many other cars (I heard Volvo is opening a new plant in South Carolina I think; lots of foreign automakers have plants in the southern states) - manufactured homes (too big to transport across the ocean) - specialty/high-end products (here's an article I ran across, lots of stuff like custom-make bicycles, high-end clothing/bags, etc.: http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/13/...) - here's a whole website for you: http://www.stillmadeinusa.com/
FWD.us is a corporatist organization; its whole raison d'etre is to promote open borders so that corporations can get access to the cheapest workers possible.
True leftists, historically, have usually been in favor of worker protections, unionization, things like that.
It is interesting, however, that today's Democrat Party, which claims to be on "the left", has actually been working against such things in recent years.
Germany has historically had extremely strong unions, and their economy is doing just fine. It isn't unionization that screws up economies, it's having overly-generous government pension programs (with people retiring in their 40s or whatever it was in Greece), too much business going on under-the-table and no taxes being paid on it (a huge problem in Greece), and people not doing much productive work in general (another big problem in Greece, where it seems most people work for the government, and the rest working in tourism, and no real industry to speak of; when was the last time you bought something that said "Made in Greece"? I think they make some cheese, and that's all I can think of.).
It depends on how long the SDK is supported, or how easy it is to migrate from one to another. With Linux, usually stuff stays supported for an eternity; even if it becomes unpopular, it usually still works on newer releases.
Even as late as the 1980s, cars did not have a 6th digit on the odometer, so you couldn't go 100k miles without rolling over. I'm old enough to remember what cars were like in the 70s, and to have driven 80s cars. It was rare for cars to exceed 100k, rare enough that they didn't bother with the 6th digit on American cars. It was the Japanese cars in the 80s, as I recall, where they started putting that extra digit in, and it actually got used a lot. A mid-80s American car simply wouldn't last that long unless someone was really serious about upkeep and repairs and doing engine rebuilds. I do have a relative with a couple of 60s-era pickups still running, but he replaces the engines every so often and it's his hobby to do constant upkeep on them, but that is not a normal case at all.
I realize that England is not an independent nation, however England during the early 1900s was absolutely in control of the UK and its activities overseas, and things aren't much different these days. You will not convince me that the Welsh or Channel Islanders had any significant hand in what happened in Ireland or anywhere else.
I never said the US was always nice to everyone around the world, I was just pointing out that (at least since Castro took over in the 50s), the US didn't have a record of military involvement in Cuba.
you may not want to admit, but some pretty shitty things did happen in Cuba, and in the rest of the Caribbean, at the behest of the US government.
I'm only talking about Cuba here, not the rest of the Caribbean. Similarly, England's actions in Ireland were of no concern to people in France, even though it's a short distance away.
Anyway, I just related the textbook version; I wasn't aware of any US military deployments in Cuba (besides them leasing the Guantanamo Bay facility). If you'd like to fill in some details I missed, feel free.
Whether or not the corporations were receiving special treatment, it's a government's responsibility to protect their citizens' right to property, so it wasn't a stretch to demand compensation.
You can demand all you want, but when you own property in a *foreign nation*, which has different laws, you can't expect your demands to necessarily be met. If you're not a citizen of a foreign nation, you have zero rights there. A foreign government has every right to seize foreign(to them)-owned property; they make the laws, so if they write the laws to that effect, that gives them the right.
Remember, many private citizens also lost their properties.
Were they Cuban citizens? No? Too bad. That's the risk you take buying property in a foreign nation.
The bottom line is you have no rights in a foreign country besides whatever their laws say. If a new government takes over and changes the laws there, your property claims are subject to those new laws, and may not go well.
So, if you want to own land and not worry much about it being seized or lost through some crazy antics, make sure to buy that land in a country with an extremely stable government where you don't have to worry much about it being taken over by a bunch of leftists, not some small island nation where the government isn't very stable. It also helps a lot to simply buy land in your own country, and not in foreign countries.
Look, this is a medical device. People carry it around with them. Sometimes, a technician may need to make changes to it. They do that by plugging into an ethernet port on the device. Otherwise, it is never plugged in.
Wrong.
These devices (and lots more medical devices) are now all being WiFi-enabled, so that they can be monitored from the central nursing station. These devices keep people alive, so just waiting until it breaks and you find the patient lying on the floor somewhere isn't good enough; they have to be actively monitored.
That's a little different. AFAIK, the US never had a bunch of rich people go and seize all the prime real estate there, use it for farming and send all the profits to the US, then go through a drought and send all the food to the US leaving Cubans to starve to death (literally), and then send in paramilitary forces to beat up on the general population and get into an actual shooting war with them. Ireland has every right to be pissed at England; England's actions were absolutely despicable. Have they ever even apologized for all that?
As I understand it, our history with Cuba is rather different, and mostly non-violent. US corporations owned a bunch of prime farming land, Casto got together a bunch of revolutionaries and seized control of the island, and created a new government. They nationalized a bunch of things, including all those US-owned farms. The US government was pissed about that because it works for the corporations, so they spewed a bunch of hot air. They eventually decided to help out some counter-revolutionaries in their bid to retake the island, but at the last minute the US forces decided to not show up ("Bay of Pigs"), so the counter-revolutionaries lost quickly. Ever since then, the US has only had a big embargo in place, though of course they only have so much power since some other countries ignore this embargo.
But CO2 wise taxis are a lot worse since they have lots of dead mileage when they aren't transportning anything.
That's the thing: this simply isn't true in NYC. They aren't ever not transporting anything there: as soon as they drop off one person, a new rider is right around the corner.
In other American cities, taxis are horrible ecologically because they spend so much time empty, just like you say. Not in NYC, because the ridership is very high.
Ironically, one of the few things that I will say that Microsoft, to this point, has done right on their desktop computers.
Not really. They did OK with handling updates to their own software, but for anything 3rd-party, it's a complete and utter mess, with every application having its own update checker process running constantly looking for updates. There should have been some kind of update service (like Windows Update already is) but which 3rd-party applications can hook into easily and use to keep that software updated.
Using taxis for everything because the lower classes take the train is a lifestyle choice.
That's still a lot more efficient than what most other Americans do, which is drive 30-60 minutes each way on their daily commute, using their own car. The NYers who do take cabs tend to take them short distances (since everything is closer together there), and they're sharing the same vehicles, instead of all having their own, and then needing giant parking lots for them all.
Yes, it'd be better if everyone just took the subway, but if you compare to any other American metropolis, NYC is very efficient. And yes, NYC is probably more wasteful than a lot of other non-American cities, but that's apples and oranges.
I don't know much about Rust besides that the Wikipedia entry says, however just because some other people use it for comparisons with some other languages doesn't mean you can bash Rush just because it isn't as good as some other language at some arbitrary feature; you're just doing the exact same thing as them in that case. Besides, what other languages are they comparing to anyway?
It's one thing to compare Rust to a language which maybe it was intended to compete against, such as C++. It's another thing to compare it to some entirely different language, such as Lisp or Haskell or COBOL or even Perl; Rust certainly wasn't intended to directly compete against any of these.
When pretty much every other language out there, including C and C++, can do string handling better than Rust can, the problem isn't with the fact that competition is happening. The problem is solely that Rust's string handling is total shit.
You're kidding, right? I've never used Rust, so I can't testify to its string handling, but I'm very familiar with C and C++ and using strings in both, and they both completely suck. C is absolutely horrible, and C++ is terrible too if you use the standard library. You only get good string-handling in C++ by switching to a library like Qt.
As for what it's competing against, that's just ridiculous. No language is competing against every language out there; every language has its strengths and weaknesses. C is really good at low-level programming that's one step above assembly, but it sucks at a lot of things (including string handling). Perl is excellent at string parsing, but sucks at performance and readability. R is really good at math, but completely unusable for writing an OS. I'm sure Rust fits in there too somehow. The point is, you can't just compare Rust, or any language, against any other arbitrary language and then bash it because it fails. Is C unusable because it sucks at text parsing? If text parsing is what you need, then yes, but if you're writing an OS kernel, then no.
I never thought that C++'s standard library was very good, but it's a pleasure to work with compared to Rust's.
Rust's string handling is a particularly bad disaster, and this permeates throughout the entire standard library.
Rust's standard library is pretty pathetic compared to C#'s, or Python's
I just don't see why Rust is getting as much hype as it currently is getting.
I'm not a Rust expert, but I think you're trying to use a hammer to turn a screw here. As I understand it, Rust was never meant to compete with C# or Python; it's supposed to be a system-level language, which means it competes with C and C++. Both of those have pretty lame standard libraries and absolutely horrible string handling. If you want to do real string handling in C++, for instance, you'd be an idiot to use the standard library, and really should use a different library. My personal preference is Qt; string handling in Qt is wonderful and easy, and extremely readable unlike some other C++ libraries I've seen.
From what I read on Rust's wikipedia entry, it appears to be intended to serve much like C or C++, but with memory safety. Null pointers aren't allowed.
I wonder how your performance would compare if you wrote that code (the production code I mean) in C++ rather than C. C is missing all those features, whereas in C++ you can get most of them using the appropriate library. Lots of C++ libraries have hashes (I like Qt's implementation personally), and it also has autovivification.
One big factor, here, however, is how similar the language is to ones you already know.
For instance, if you already are well-versed in C and C++, looking at some D or Rust code probably isn't going to be hard for you. However, looking at something in Haskell or Lisp is. A lot of languages these days are very C-like and either imperative or object-oriented (in an imperative way), so to me it's really rather trivial to learn them; it's just a matter of learning what's different. But if you start looking at languages which are really different from ones you know, then it becomes much more challenging. Looking at one with syntax unlike C will be one factor (like with Python), but looking at something entirely different like a functional language will be even harder.
The theory also gives you the tools necessary to refine your designs so that you can build something better without having to resort to so much trial-and-error.
It was cool that Faraday was able to build some primitive electric engines for demonstration purposes in his day, but with Maxwell's theories, Tesla was able to build far better electric engines which had significant real-world applications (Tesla's generators were used for power plants).
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly.
Here in America, most people consider Democrats to be "leftists".
Yep, all that stuff is gone. Only 10-15 years ago I think, Porter-Cable tools were still made in the US, but that's been moved to Mexico..
However, if you want to find some American-made stuff at Home Depot, go to the electrical aisle, and look at all the dirt-cheap electrical sockets (the kind you install in your walls) and light switches (again, the kind you install in house walls). They usually cost less than a dollar each (unless you get some fancy kind), and they all said "made in USA" last time I checked. Of course, those products are not made for a global market (they're only usable in North America: Canada and Mexico has the same standards; not sure about South America, but everywhere else uses entirely different electrical hardware), and since this is easily the largest market for construction goods like that, and also since there's probably a large amount of automation involved in their manufacture, it probably hasn't made sense to move production offshore yet.
There's actually still a lot of stuff being made in the US these days, it just depends. US manufacturing today is generally heavily automated, so it doesn't involve much labor; anything requiring too much labor gets moved offshore to where labor is cheap. But here's a few things off the top of my head that are still made here:
- Tesla cars (california of all places)
- Many other cars (I heard Volvo is opening a new plant in South Carolina I think; lots of foreign automakers have plants in the southern states)
- manufactured homes (too big to transport across the ocean)
- specialty/high-end products (here's an article I ran across, lots of stuff like custom-make bicycles, high-end clothing/bags, etc.: http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/13/...)
- here's a whole website for you: http://www.stillmadeinusa.com/
Where did you get that idea?
FWD.us is a corporatist organization; its whole raison d'etre is to promote open borders so that corporations can get access to the cheapest workers possible.
True leftists, historically, have usually been in favor of worker protections, unionization, things like that.
It is interesting, however, that today's Democrat Party, which claims to be on "the left", has actually been working against such things in recent years.
Germany has historically had extremely strong unions, and their economy is doing just fine. It isn't unionization that screws up economies, it's having overly-generous government pension programs (with people retiring in their 40s or whatever it was in Greece), too much business going on under-the-table and no taxes being paid on it (a huge problem in Greece), and people not doing much productive work in general (another big problem in Greece, where it seems most people work for the government, and the rest working in tourism, and no real industry to speak of; when was the last time you bought something that said "Made in Greece"? I think they make some cheese, and that's all I can think of.).
It depends on how long the SDK is supported, or how easy it is to migrate from one to another. With Linux, usually stuff stays supported for an eternity; even if it becomes unpopular, it usually still works on newer releases.
Yeah, as I said to someone else here, I basically started right when Castro took over.
Even as late as the 1980s, cars did not have a 6th digit on the odometer, so you couldn't go 100k miles without rolling over. I'm old enough to remember what cars were like in the 70s, and to have driven 80s cars. It was rare for cars to exceed 100k, rare enough that they didn't bother with the 6th digit on American cars. It was the Japanese cars in the 80s, as I recall, where they started putting that extra digit in, and it actually got used a lot. A mid-80s American car simply wouldn't last that long unless someone was really serious about upkeep and repairs and doing engine rebuilds. I do have a relative with a couple of 60s-era pickups still running, but he replaces the engines every so often and it's his hobby to do constant upkeep on them, but that is not a normal case at all.
I realize that England is not an independent nation, however England during the early 1900s was absolutely in control of the UK and its activities overseas, and things aren't much different these days. You will not convince me that the Welsh or Channel Islanders had any significant hand in what happened in Ireland or anywhere else.
I never said the US was always nice to everyone around the world, I was just pointing out that (at least since Castro took over in the 50s), the US didn't have a record of military involvement in Cuba.
I see. I really didn't understand all the pre-Castro history, I was just starting with Castro's revolution.
you may not want to admit, but some pretty shitty things did happen in Cuba, and in the rest of the Caribbean, at the behest of the US government.
I'm only talking about Cuba here, not the rest of the Caribbean. Similarly, England's actions in Ireland were of no concern to people in France, even though it's a short distance away.
Anyway, I just related the textbook version; I wasn't aware of any US military deployments in Cuba (besides them leasing the Guantanamo Bay facility). If you'd like to fill in some details I missed, feel free.
Whether or not the corporations were receiving special treatment, it's a government's responsibility to protect their citizens' right to property, so it wasn't a stretch to demand compensation.
You can demand all you want, but when you own property in a *foreign nation*, which has different laws, you can't expect your demands to necessarily be met. If you're not a citizen of a foreign nation, you have zero rights there. A foreign government has every right to seize foreign(to them)-owned property; they make the laws, so if they write the laws to that effect, that gives them the right.
Remember, many private citizens also lost their properties.
Were they Cuban citizens? No? Too bad. That's the risk you take buying property in a foreign nation.
The bottom line is you have no rights in a foreign country besides whatever their laws say. If a new government takes over and changes the laws there, your property claims are subject to those new laws, and may not go well.
So, if you want to own land and not worry much about it being seized or lost through some crazy antics, make sure to buy that land in a country with an extremely stable government where you don't have to worry much about it being taken over by a bunch of leftists, not some small island nation where the government isn't very stable. It also helps a lot to simply buy land in your own country, and not in foreign countries.
Look, this is a medical device. People carry it around with them. Sometimes, a technician may need to make changes to it. They do that by plugging into an ethernet port on the device. Otherwise, it is never plugged in.
Wrong.
These devices (and lots more medical devices) are now all being WiFi-enabled, so that they can be monitored from the central nursing station. These devices keep people alive, so just waiting until it breaks and you find the patient lying on the floor somewhere isn't good enough; they have to be actively monitored.
That's a little different. AFAIK, the US never had a bunch of rich people go and seize all the prime real estate there, use it for farming and send all the profits to the US, then go through a drought and send all the food to the US leaving Cubans to starve to death (literally), and then send in paramilitary forces to beat up on the general population and get into an actual shooting war with them. Ireland has every right to be pissed at England; England's actions were absolutely despicable. Have they ever even apologized for all that?
As I understand it, our history with Cuba is rather different, and mostly non-violent. US corporations owned a bunch of prime farming land, Casto got together a bunch of revolutionaries and seized control of the island, and created a new government. They nationalized a bunch of things, including all those US-owned farms. The US government was pissed about that because it works for the corporations, so they spewed a bunch of hot air. They eventually decided to help out some counter-revolutionaries in their bid to retake the island, but at the last minute the US forces decided to not show up ("Bay of Pigs"), so the counter-revolutionaries lost quickly. Ever since then, the US has only had a big embargo in place, though of course they only have so much power since some other countries ignore this embargo.
But CO2 wise taxis are a lot worse since they have lots of dead mileage when they aren't transportning anything.
That's the thing: this simply isn't true in NYC. They aren't ever not transporting anything there: as soon as they drop off one person, a new rider is right around the corner.
In other American cities, taxis are horrible ecologically because they spend so much time empty, just like you say. Not in NYC, because the ridership is very high.
Ironically, one of the few things that I will say that Microsoft, to this point, has done right on their desktop computers.
Not really. They did OK with handling updates to their own software, but for anything 3rd-party, it's a complete and utter mess, with every application having its own update checker process running constantly looking for updates. There should have been some kind of update service (like Windows Update already is) but which 3rd-party applications can hook into easily and use to keep that software updated.
Using taxis for everything because the lower classes take the train is a lifestyle choice.
That's still a lot more efficient than what most other Americans do, which is drive 30-60 minutes each way on their daily commute, using their own car. The NYers who do take cabs tend to take them short distances (since everything is closer together there), and they're sharing the same vehicles, instead of all having their own, and then needing giant parking lots for them all.
Yes, it'd be better if everyone just took the subway, but if you compare to any other American metropolis, NYC is very efficient. And yes, NYC is probably more wasteful than a lot of other non-American cities, but that's apples and oranges.
I don't know much about Rust besides that the Wikipedia entry says, however just because some other people use it for comparisons with some other languages doesn't mean you can bash Rush just because it isn't as good as some other language at some arbitrary feature; you're just doing the exact same thing as them in that case. Besides, what other languages are they comparing to anyway?
It's one thing to compare Rust to a language which maybe it was intended to compete against, such as C++. It's another thing to compare it to some entirely different language, such as Lisp or Haskell or COBOL or even Perl; Rust certainly wasn't intended to directly compete against any of these.
When pretty much every other language out there, including C and C++, can do string handling better than Rust can, the problem isn't with the fact that competition is happening. The problem is solely that Rust's string handling is total shit.
You're kidding, right? I've never used Rust, so I can't testify to its string handling, but I'm very familiar with C and C++ and using strings in both, and they both completely suck. C is absolutely horrible, and C++ is terrible too if you use the standard library. You only get good string-handling in C++ by switching to a library like Qt.
As for what it's competing against, that's just ridiculous. No language is competing against every language out there; every language has its strengths and weaknesses. C is really good at low-level programming that's one step above assembly, but it sucks at a lot of things (including string handling). Perl is excellent at string parsing, but sucks at performance and readability. R is really good at math, but completely unusable for writing an OS. I'm sure Rust fits in there too somehow. The point is, you can't just compare Rust, or any language, against any other arbitrary language and then bash it because it fails. Is C unusable because it sucks at text parsing? If text parsing is what you need, then yes, but if you're writing an OS kernel, then no.
I don't get your meaning here. "Venial" means "pardonable".
Not true, C# has been off of Windows for a long time by way of Mono.
The conventional wisdom here has been that Mono is always a few steps behind MS's implementation of C#, so it's not fully compatible.
I don't know if that still holds true, but it used to be the general understanding.
I never thought that C++'s standard library was very good, but it's a pleasure to work with compared to Rust's.
Rust's string handling is a particularly bad disaster, and this permeates throughout the entire standard library.
Rust's standard library is pretty pathetic compared to C#'s, or Python's
I just don't see why Rust is getting as much hype as it currently is getting.
I'm not a Rust expert, but I think you're trying to use a hammer to turn a screw here. As I understand it, Rust was never meant to compete with C# or Python; it's supposed to be a system-level language, which means it competes with C and C++. Both of those have pretty lame standard libraries and absolutely horrible string handling. If you want to do real string handling in C++, for instance, you'd be an idiot to use the standard library, and really should use a different library. My personal preference is Qt; string handling in Qt is wonderful and easy, and extremely readable unlike some other C++ libraries I've seen.
From what I read on Rust's wikipedia entry, it appears to be intended to serve much like C or C++, but with memory safety. Null pointers aren't allowed.
I wonder how your performance would compare if you wrote that code (the production code I mean) in C++ rather than C. C is missing all those features, whereas in C++ you can get most of them using the appropriate library. Lots of C++ libraries have hashes (I like Qt's implementation personally), and it also has autovivification.
One big factor, here, however, is how similar the language is to ones you already know.
For instance, if you already are well-versed in C and C++, looking at some D or Rust code probably isn't going to be hard for you. However, looking at something in Haskell or Lisp is. A lot of languages these days are very C-like and either imperative or object-oriented (in an imperative way), so to me it's really rather trivial to learn them; it's just a matter of learning what's different. But if you start looking at languages which are really different from ones you know, then it becomes much more challenging. Looking at one with syntax unlike C will be one factor (like with Python), but looking at something entirely different like a functional language will be even harder.
Sounds a lot like Edison: a great intuitive grasp of mechanical things, but poor math ability so unable to analyze things that way.
The theory also gives you the tools necessary to refine your designs so that you can build something better without having to resort to so much trial-and-error.
It was cool that Faraday was able to build some primitive electric engines for demonstration purposes in his day, but with Maxwell's theories, Tesla was able to build far better electric engines which had significant real-world applications (Tesla's generators were used for power plants).