True. Average wages are inching upwards, but that glosses over the fact that wages are skyrocketing for the top 1%, and actually falling for the bottom 20%.*
I'm sorry I made that statement, because I really can't back it up with a source. But the claim does make intuitive sense to me, because if every one dollar of salary exported raised Indian wages by one dollar, then what would be the point? In my mind, I was only talking about the relative fortunes of the Indian and American IT sectors, but I didn't make that explicit.
* Some would argue that the standard inflation index doesn't reflect reality, because it fails to account for how much we get for what we spend. For example, health care: we spend five times as much per capita as we did in the 1950's (adjusted for inflation), but in the 1950's a lot of very effective treatments weren't available. So we were getting less overall. Of course, the counterpunch is that when you happen to be an uninsured person dying of X, in the 1950s you could take some solace knowing that everyone who gets X dies of it. Dying knowing that the world just didn't see fit to save you must be a somewhat different experience.
"Does anyone know of a good existing proposal out there?"
William Grieder's "One World, Ready or Not" proposes something very much like this towards the end of the book. It's about ten years old, but he was already seeing these trends very clearly. It's a long book, but you sound like the sort of person who would find it absolutely gripping.
I'm looking forward to reading this book by the same author.
Anyhow, I think it would be very much worth your time to read.
While IT workers aren't 'abused' in the sweatshop sense, don't trivialize the challenges American IT workers face. We're not complaining about jobs without free soft drinks, but about jobs where we're doing the work of two or three people for 60% of the salary we could command five years ago. American wages are being eroded much faster than Indian wages are going up, with the difference being pocketed by employers, and any attempt by American workers to ask for more jobs, better wages, or better working conditions are discouraged by the threat of jobs moving to India.
What I fear is something called 'wage arbitrage.' Transnational corporations can go anywhere to take advantage of low cost labor, and skilled workers trapped behind national borders cannot follow. So wherever corporations have jobs, they can keep costs down by threatening to move workers overseas. Governments are desperate to keep these jobs, so they're happy to pass laws at the behest of the corporations, giving them tax breaks or making it illegal for workers to unionize.
So I really don't see it as "America is hurting, but India is turning into a technological superpower." If it were that simple, I'd probably just start looking into migrating. India's day in the sun will only last as long as they don't do anything stupid, like try and tax the corporations to pay for the education system that benefits them or improve the lot of the rural poor. The moment that happens, you'll see a massive shift away from India towards some more compliant country.
Of course, that will raise wages in Sierra Leone, or wherever the jobs move to. But not nearly as much as wages will fall in India, and again, corporations will pocket the difference. It's all a huge shell game designed to transfer as much of the wealth created by labor into the coffers of owners, while giving as little back as possible. Wage arbitrage gives capital a huge advantage in any negotiations with labor. But in the long run, this destroys the middle class, and erodes nations' abilities to invest in the health and education of their citizens, which are necessary for businesses to run successfully. So big business is reaping short term profits while undercutting both demand for their products and the ability of labor to create those products.
IOW, I'm happy to see India doing well, but I think it's part of a long-term trend that is going to hurt everyone.
You were supposed to call me a hippie traitor. Keep the joke going, you know?
The impression I got from the article was that Ken Blackwell is a greedy thief, and that he has the support of a good chunk of the RNC. It seems pretty clear that Blackwell was working as hard as he could within the color of law to favor Republican voters.
But you're right, politics has gotten far too nasty, and RFK's article is only fanning the flames. Blackwell's is just the sort of behavior you can expect when you start believing that your political opposition is an enemy to America which must be defeated at any cost.
So, Mister Theocratic Fascist, can we both agree to try and work towards a more civil national dialogue?:)
What's all this talk about disenfranchisin' the poor? It should be obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that the wealthy need efficient, convenient voting infrastructure far more than the poor do. After all, the rich are out there doing the real work in this country, and their time is valuable. They need to be able to drive up to their polling station in their Hummers, hop out, run in, and boom boom boom lay out their Republican votes so they can tear out of there and get back to being the engine of American prosperity.
Meanwhile, as we all know, the poor are shiftless and lazy, and probably unemployed. So where's the loss if they have to sit around for a few hours waiting for a machine to open up? You give a poor person free time, they'll just spend it on cigarettes and booze.
[remember, moderators, just because it isn't funny doesn't mean it's not satire.:) ]
Now that that's over with, can we please get to the issues? 1) Just because you said it, and it got modded down, doesn't make it true. 2) Just because one person modded you down doesn't mean that all liberals favor censorship of right-wing ideas. 3) Your claims that 'no system is perfect' are irrelevant to the underlying premise of all the whole anti-Diebold meme: that electronic voting allows for centralized voting fraud that allows a very small number of people to secretly alter votes in numbers that would never have been possible under older systems.
Explain to me where I--where in fact anyone--suggested that we should "stop worrying about looking for people" who want to harm the U.S.? What we're discussing here isn't whether or not we should be trying to protect ourselves from terrorists, but whether we should give the government all sorts of new and scary powers in order to do it.
I don't want to believe that Americans are as spineless as you claim. It's one thing to think of your child going through something like Belsan, and getting that terrible feeling like your gut just fell through your body and hit the floor. But I can imagine lots and lots of situations that can cause such feelings. It's not enough that it's a scary thought. Before you start basing policy on such a possibility, you have to think how likely it is that such a situation will come your way. Your kid is probably a hundred times more likely to die in a bus accident than a terrorist-related incident, but you still put him on the bus. More important, if your government said they could guarantee safe bus rides in exchange for all those pesky freedoms you enjoy, you'd tell them to go to hell.
September 11th was terrible and tragic. But I think we've lashed out in fear and anger, and forgotten the best principles that this country once aspired to. In doing so, we've dishonored that day and those victims.
P.S.: Cuban Missile Crisis. The possibility of actually fighting a nuclear war was very much an issue. Our country has survived more dangerous times than Al-Qaeda could ever hope to create.
You're honestly trying to tell me that the stakes are higher against a loose network of terrorists on a shoestring budget than they were against an entire nation that had the ability to rain down thousands of nuclear weapons on our cities? Cowardice, thy name is Republican. They're the ones who spent decades convincing us that we had to stop the Red Menace or risk nuclear annihilation. Now they're coming out of the woodwork saying, "Nah, it was never a big deal, because the Ruskies knew that nobody 'wins' a nuclear war. But these terrorists, man, you should be *really* scared of them! Pissin' your pants scared!"
"Remember all those freedoms we took during the Cold War, the ones we never actually gave back after it ended? Well, we'll need a few more of them. To keep you safe, understand."
Consider that a long, roundabout way of saying, yes, I bloody well can see the difference.
You can't 'build a foundation for yourself and your family' on sweatshop wages. If you could, it would just be called a 'job.' But even if these people somehow manage to build wealth by hiding pennies under a rock, American corporations are receiving 99% of the profit on their labor, and that's simply it's simply not justifiable to treat another human being that way (or to let some corporation do it on your behalf).
Admitting that conspicuous consumption is wrong or unhealthy isn't the same thing as adding, "and the government should have the power to stop those evil conspicuous consumers, using torture and rendition if necessary." I accept that I can't stop many behaviors I disagree with. You can't seem to accept that the free market doesn't always lead to the most moral or self-interested behavior. I'm flexible in my thinking. You're a one-note ideologue. Which is why you're not convincing to me.
It's not a 'pseudo-moral' idea to say that there is such a thing as a 'fair share,' or that there is such a thing as 'too rich' in a world where 800 million people are in the act of slowly dying of poverty. It's a moral one. The idea that your freedom to buy yourself a third yacht trumps another person's freedom to eat is also a moral one. Economics is very much a field of applied ethics. The thing is, your moral ideas aren't very good, because they don't approach anything normal people recognize as moral.
Think about it: If the government knows Osama bin Laden's cell phone number, do you think there is any judge in the world who wouldn't authorize a phone tap on it? Since FISA warrants can be granted retroactively, this shouldn't slow law enforcement down at all.
We have to make one of the following assumptions to make your hypothetical possible: A) We're listening in on Achmed. B) We're listening in on Osama bin Laden. C) We're listening in on every phone call made to Pakistan. C is unconscionable and needless. Unconscionable because there is no probable cause to justify it. Needless because it will give all manner of false hits. We already know why we want to listen in on B, and any judge presented with "Osama called Achmed" would authorize a warrant to listen in on Achmed as well.
So we're left with the question: What justifies spying on Achmed? Because he's a Pakistani living in America? No. Because he's a Pakistani making phone calls to Pakistan? No. Because he's making phone calls to Pakistan and was seen at a meeting with a suspected terrorist? Maybe they were just been talking about their pet boa constrictors. Maybe not. The point is, it shouldn't be the FBI's judgment call. There has to be a reality check inside the loop, to guard against both violations of civil liberties and wasteful, self-serving witch hunts. Which is exactly what the requirement for a warrant does.
By your logic, why stop at Pakistan? Why not also listen in on Saudi Arabia? Fourteen of the hijackers came from there, right? And London. I hear London is a hotbed for terr'ists, so we should listen to all those calls too. And we should listen in on reporters' phone calls, because Ann Coulter told me that they're trying to destroy America too. Slippery slope arguments are only valid if the slope is truly slippery, and the bottom of the slope is an awful place to be. In this case, I think it's quite valid.
Final point: Do you really think law enforcement will clear Achmed because he called his "grandmother" about buying "goats?" Sounds like evil terr'ist codespeak, if you ask me. Or maybe Achmed just isn't calling his handlers in Pakistan right now. But he will, sooner or later, and we need to keep watching him. Oh, and heaven help Achmed if NSA's new Terrorist MySpace program finds six degrees of separation between his grandmother and Osama. People have been imprisoned and tortured for less.
So they keep telling us, Citizen. So they keep telling us. And so long as there is no oversight by any other branch of government, they're free to tell us whatever they think we should hear.
As to how it might affect your life, for the feds to listen in on phone calls to Pakistan. It wouldn't. You don't make phone calls to Pakistan. You don't have any interest in Pakistan. But if you're selfish enough to not care about the government's ability to interfere with the work of reporters and aid workers and political activists who actually *do* take an interest in Pakistan, then why should your narrow and selfish opinion have any effect on me?
Just wait until 2008. You right wingers will be mighty red in the face when you discover that you've given Hillary the right to tap all your phone calls.
You're a true "Great American"* if you can't see the difference between 'this can be abused, so we should get rid of it,' and 'this can be abused, so we should install iron-clad safeguards to prevent its abuse.' I understand that the government might have a very real need to listen in on one of my phone calls, to protect the lives and safety of other Americans. What I don't understand is how the government might have that very real need, but not be able to explain to a judge why they need to do it.
There are valid reasons for needing a warrant, and nobody to the right of Joe Lieberman has been able to give me a valid reason for not needing a warrant. If Bush gets his way, you will never see the abuse, because any reports of abuse are classified, and anyone who tries to leak a report of abuse is an enemy combatant.
* I listened to a few hours of the Sean Hannity radio show a few weeks back, and it seems to be secret code for 'blathering idiot'.
No, that's not the point. Small government has never been anything but a means to an end, and that end varies from person to person. Some people think that a small government will mean an end to government interference in our lives, thus increasing the scope for individual freedom. Especially given today's government, I can see the appeal of the idea.
But it's not going to happen. I think that even today, government power is primarily a proxy for corporate power. You take away that level of indirection today, and all you do is open the gates. Behind the gates are the salivating, sharp-toothed dogs of Big Business, and when the gates open, they're not coming out to lick our hands and get scritchies behind the ears.
Why is the 'proxy' situation any better? I would say that at least the government has to pay lip service to the idea that it is there for the good of that amorphous blob of hope, fear, need, and daily struggle that we call 'the people.'
I would also argue that Big Business is doing its level best to end government power. At least, those aspects of its power that can be used to help the have-nots and the have-not-quite-a-billion-dollars. That's why we're running up huge federal deficits (destroying our government's ability to provide the services that people actually want), vastly underfunding any government agency whose purpose isn't to kill and imprison people while spending lavishly on the military, etc. All they want government to do is protect their wealth from the rest of us, use their power of taxation to funnel more money from the middle class into wasteful no-bid corporte contracts, and use its treaty making power to open the rest of the world for their exploitation.
Okay, enough ranting from me. The point is, the size of the government has an effect on personal freedom, but so does the function of it. I believe that a government can be transparent, efficient, responsive to the needs of society, and respectful of our personal freedoms. I believe that corporations can be all these things as well. But both require an active, well educated, and engaged citizenry that demands better from both. In my mind, that requires a vast improvement in public services. Public education, so that citizens will have the skills they need to be part of a healthy society. Living wage laws, so that 'the masses' can support themselves while still having the time and energy to engage their government more than once every two years. Publicly financed campaigns, so that we can take this 'one dollar, one vote' garbage out behind the chemical shed and shoot it. Health care guarantees for the currently uninsured, so that they become more fit to work, to pursue education and other opportunities, and to raise their voices when government steps over the line.
When you eliminate the government's ability to do evil by eliminating its ability to do anything, then you open a gaping power vacuum which the wealthy are in the best position to take over. But if we work for condorcet voting and publicly financed elections on a local level, then I think we'll end up with the candidates that the voters actually want, rather than the candidates the powermongers want us to want. They have public financing of elections in Arizona, and John McCain (despite some recent right-wing pandering, and some positions I thoroughly detest) is one of the more able and idealistic senators out there. It's just one data point, but I've a hunch it's not a coincidence.
Parody is in the eye of the beholder. Do you know just how many people out there think Stephen Colbert is a straight-up right winger?
Actually, neither do I. But I can't imagine it's zero.
As we all learned from The Onion's coverage of Rowling's efforts to get children to worship Satan, there is no parody so outlandish that someone, somewhere won't mistake it for the thing being parodied.
If you think GTA would inspire any normal person to commit real life violence, you don't know GTA. But if you think GTA wouldn't inspire *anybody* to commit violence, you don't know people. I find these lawsuits legally frivolous, yet ethically thought-provoking.
I'm sorry, but just because a person would prefer working in a Nike sweatshop to starving to death, that's hardly a reason to say that those sweatshops 'advance the human condition.' Sweatshops aren't just about manual labor. They're about working people to the breaking point and beyond, limiting their freedoms, forbidding them from unionizing or fighting for better wages and conditions. They're about governments looking the other way, or even assisting in the oppression of their own people, because somebody is getting bribed or because somebody realizes that the moment they ask for a few pennies more the factories will pack up and move to Zimbabwe (or wherever else people are poor and desperate enough to break their backs for a dollar a day to build us luxury goods). I ask again, how does this advance the human condition?
Nor do I see how making tons of money for people who already have ungodly sums advances the human condition. What jobs did Michael Jordan's basketballing create? Sweatshop jobs for making shoes and jerseys, crap retail jobs taking tickets and selling clothes. A relative handful of jobs that could actually support a family, with most of those being team managers and personal trainers. Michael Jordan was worth billions to the team owners, tens of millions to broadcasters and advertisers, but we're asking how his basketballing feats were helpful to society as a whole?
Using him, Nike was able to convince lots of kids that their shoes were worth paying a huge premium for, based on no objective measure of quality but on the sort of prestige that can only come from having a beloved celebrity endorse one's wares. I don't see the social benefit in turning mere foot protection into a huge expense for families, or a huge feeling of inadequacy for kids whose parents couldn't afford them. The only value in having Nike shoes was in that they were something that some kids had and other kids didn't. Economists call this 'conspicuous consumption,' which in my mind has negative social value. But I can see how it would make Nike rich, and since you seem to cling to the delusion that the free market always gives everyone what they really want, you would likely call it good.
Which brings us to the final argument, the "quality entertainment for millions." Admittedly, I'm biased because I don't care much for sports. But I also have an axe to grind against mass consumption culture (as opposed to participatory culture), especially when someone is making money turning millions of people into mere spectators of their culture, rather than participants. It's not healthy for so many of us to be so used to sitting on our asses and letting other people be creative on our behalves (behalfs?)
Well, for someone who devoted his entire life to playing a child's game, he did do it very well, and very entertainingly. But what did he do that was worth the hundreds of millions of dollars he was paid over his life?
The simple answer: make buckets of money for people who could afford to pay him that well. Oh, yeah, and star in 'Space Jam.' Cinematic masterpiece, that.
Sorry, but while selling sweatshop shoes at absurd premiums may make certain people very wealthy, it does nothing to advance the human condition.
I'd delve into detail, but if you're too lazy to explain why Michael Jordan was worth more than 150K a year, I'm not going to put much effort into disabusing you.
There aren't nearly as many craters on Mars as there are on, say, the Moon. One reason is that, yes, the atmosphere protects Mars from a lot of the smaller impacts. But more important, the atmosphere generates dust and moves it around the planet like a big ol' scouring pad, so eventually erosion gets rid of a lot of traces.
But the atmosphere is much, much thinner (I think just a few percent of Earth's atmosphere). Plus, Earth has a lot of other erosion effects (water and plate tectonics) that are absent from modern Mars.
A good point. But you have to remember that the vast, vast majority of those boxen are going to be replaced within ten years anyways. So the question is, when we replace a box, do we want to replace it with this new (supposedly more efficient) standard, or stick with the old way of doing things?
In short, you can ignore any upfront cost, and just replace the boxes as they die.
Since we're being all snarky and all, maybe it's more difficult to beat the game when you have--what are those pesky things called, again? Oh yeah, a *LIFE*!
You go on vacation for a week with your beautiful wife, you're going to have a hard time remembering where you left of in your World of Warcraft quests, or which items you need to up your tailoring skills. You put it down for six months, and you forget how to feed and control your pet. It takes a while to get all that information back in your mental cache.
So if you can only devote a half hour or so every other night, and the game mercilessly punishes you for not having your fingers programmed to respond to twitch like so when monster X jumps out from behind door Y, it's going to be a frustrating experience.
No, it's not just 'the code.' It's the whole bloody software ecosystem, and the licenses are what keeps it alive and vibrant. If everyone just took the nearsighted advice of ignoring infringements and not worrying about the details of the GPL, eventually somebody *would* find a way to get the masses using their own, incompatible, proprietary version. Then, the developers find themselves in the position of paying out the nose in order to buy their own software, while the sellers are profiting by killing off a good chunk of the OSS ecosystem.
Saying that developers should get back to coding and not worry about 'license minutiae' or the political implications of their work is like complaining that all the resources your body wastes on its immune system could have been better spent growing you a second penis. As much fun as it might be to have, you need to be not dead before it serves any use.
Complaints about egotism and developer-centric attitudes are completely orthogonal to this, and you only confuse things by conflating this issue with all those others.
That's actually one of the things that worries me about e-cars. If they're all that quiet, how are people going to hear them coming and know not to walk into the road?
My solution is to have every electric car have a bagpipe player walking alongside it, playing 'Scotland the Brave.' This will ensure that electric cars are just as safe as the quality cars that are currently on the road.
I think you are taking a rather harsh and uncompromising stance (though I'm not sure where people got 'elitist' from). People usually go where they believe they are doing the most good, if you define 'doing good' according to their own values. For example, the person you're responding to might think he is promoting the greater good by supporting his family comfortably, by working on some exciting project in his company that will make life better for lots of people, by promoting consumer-friendly and responsible attitudes within his company, and by putting his education to good use.
We could argue all day about whether he is being effective in his efforts, whether his family could live happily on a smaller paycheck, whether his current project is really going to benefit society, and a whole bunch of other things. It's difficult, though, because peoples' values differ, because we're all masters of rationalization, and because we generally don't like it when our lifestyle choices are questioned, especially by strangers.
You're never going to find any large, complex organization which does nothing but good all the time. Nor are you going to have a lot of success convincing people that they should jump ship at the first sign of corruption. But I sympathize with you; we've become rather too comfortable with corporate evilness, and that's at least partly because so many of us have a job or own a tiny bit of stock in the companies. And if a company's misdeeds will reflect on you personally and professionally, it's an incentive for you to demand the highest standard of behavior from that company.
-> If you find a corpse next to the road with one of these cameras, you can tell if they were standing in the road taking pictures when they got hit or if the car had to swerve off the road to hit them
GPS doesn't have nearly the resolution that would be required for that. Plus, if the shot was taken at 3:15:30, and the time of death was 3:15:45, you don't know where the photographer moved in those fifteen seconds. More likely, though, you'll have a time of death of 'a little after 3PM' or 'between two and four o'clock'.
Ultimately, who really cares if the students cheat? They're only hurting themselves.
On this point, I have to strongly disagree. If a school certifies that somebody has learned a field of study, when in fact he slunk through using BS and borrowed magic, then his future performance is going to damage the reputation of the school. Further, at least in high school, I don't think it's reasonable to assume that students fully grasp the consequences of their actions.
As to the rest of it, there is both wide room for disagreement and a lot of technolegalese that I'm not qualified to comment on.
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True. Average wages are inching upwards, but that glosses over the fact that wages are skyrocketing for the top 1%, and actually falling for the bottom 20%.*
I'm sorry I made that statement, because I really can't back it up with a source. But the claim does make intuitive sense to me, because if every one dollar of salary exported raised Indian wages by one dollar, then what would be the point? In my mind, I was only talking about the relative fortunes of the Indian and American IT sectors, but I didn't make that explicit.
* Some would argue that the standard inflation index doesn't reflect reality, because it fails to account for how much we get for what we spend. For example, health care: we spend five times as much per capita as we did in the 1950's (adjusted for inflation), but in the 1950's a lot of very effective treatments weren't available. So we were getting less overall. Of course, the counterpunch is that when you happen to be an uninsured person dying of X, in the 1950s you could take some solace knowing that everyone who gets X dies of it. Dying knowing that the world just didn't see fit to save you must be a somewhat different experience.
I'm looking forward to reading this book by the same author.
Anyhow, I think it would be very much worth your time to read.
While IT workers aren't 'abused' in the sweatshop sense, don't trivialize the challenges American IT workers face. We're not complaining about jobs without free soft drinks, but about jobs where we're doing the work of two or three people for 60% of the salary we could command five years ago. American wages are being eroded much faster than Indian wages are going up, with the difference being pocketed by employers, and any attempt by American workers to ask for more jobs, better wages, or better working conditions are discouraged by the threat of jobs moving to India.
What I fear is something called 'wage arbitrage.' Transnational corporations can go anywhere to take advantage of low cost labor, and skilled workers trapped behind national borders cannot follow. So wherever corporations have jobs, they can keep costs down by threatening to move workers overseas. Governments are desperate to keep these jobs, so they're happy to pass laws at the behest of the corporations, giving them tax breaks or making it illegal for workers to unionize.
So I really don't see it as "America is hurting, but India is turning into a technological superpower." If it were that simple, I'd probably just start looking into migrating. India's day in the sun will only last as long as they don't do anything stupid, like try and tax the corporations to pay for the education system that benefits them or improve the lot of the rural poor. The moment that happens, you'll see a massive shift away from India towards some more compliant country.
Of course, that will raise wages in Sierra Leone, or wherever the jobs move to. But not nearly as much as wages will fall in India, and again, corporations will pocket the difference. It's all a huge shell game designed to transfer as much of the wealth created by labor into the coffers of owners, while giving as little back as possible. Wage arbitrage gives capital a huge advantage in any negotiations with labor. But in the long run, this destroys the middle class, and erodes nations' abilities to invest in the health and education of their citizens, which are necessary for businesses to run successfully. So big business is reaping short term profits while undercutting both demand for their products and the ability of labor to create those products.
IOW, I'm happy to see India doing well, but I think it's part of a long-term trend that is going to hurt everyone.
You were supposed to call me a hippie traitor. Keep the joke going, you know?
:)
The impression I got from the article was that Ken Blackwell is a greedy thief, and that he has the support of a good chunk of the RNC. It seems pretty clear that Blackwell was working as hard as he could within the color of law to favor Republican voters.
But you're right, politics has gotten far too nasty, and RFK's article is only fanning the flames. Blackwell's is just the sort of behavior you can expect when you start believing that your political opposition is an enemy to America which must be defeated at any cost.
So, Mister Theocratic Fascist, can we both agree to try and work towards a more civil national dialogue?
What's all this talk about disenfranchisin' the poor? It should be obvious to anyone with two brain cells to rub together that the wealthy need efficient, convenient voting infrastructure far more than the poor do. After all, the rich are out there doing the real work in this country, and their time is valuable. They need to be able to drive up to their polling station in their Hummers, hop out, run in, and boom boom boom lay out their Republican votes so they can tear out of there and get back to being the engine of American prosperity.
:) ]
Meanwhile, as we all know, the poor are shiftless and lazy, and probably unemployed. So where's the loss if they have to sit around for a few hours waiting for a machine to open up? You give a poor person free time, they'll just spend it on cigarettes and booze.
[remember, moderators, just because it isn't funny doesn't mean it's not satire.
You called us Communists first, you fascist pig.
Now that that's over with, can we please get to the issues? 1) Just because you said it, and it got modded down, doesn't make it true. 2) Just because one person modded you down doesn't mean that all liberals favor censorship of right-wing ideas. 3) Your claims that 'no system is perfect' are irrelevant to the underlying premise of all the whole anti-Diebold meme: that electronic voting allows for centralized voting fraud that allows a very small number of people to secretly alter votes in numbers that would never have been possible under older systems.
Back. To. The. Issues.
Please, Mr. President. You've done enough already.
Explain to me where I--where in fact anyone--suggested that we should "stop worrying about looking for people" who want to harm the U.S.? What we're discussing here isn't whether or not we should be trying to protect ourselves from terrorists, but whether we should give the government all sorts of new and scary powers in order to do it.
I don't want to believe that Americans are as spineless as you claim. It's one thing to think of your child going through something like Belsan, and getting that terrible feeling like your gut just fell through your body and hit the floor. But I can imagine lots and lots of situations that can cause such feelings. It's not enough that it's a scary thought. Before you start basing policy on such a possibility, you have to think how likely it is that such a situation will come your way. Your kid is probably a hundred times more likely to die in a bus accident than a terrorist-related incident, but you still put him on the bus. More important, if your government said they could guarantee safe bus rides in exchange for all those pesky freedoms you enjoy, you'd tell them to go to hell.
September 11th was terrible and tragic. But I think we've lashed out in fear and anger, and forgotten the best principles that this country once aspired to. In doing so, we've dishonored that day and those victims.
P.S.: Cuban Missile Crisis. The possibility of actually fighting a nuclear war was very much an issue. Our country has survived more dangerous times than Al-Qaeda could ever hope to create.
You're honestly trying to tell me that the stakes are higher against a loose network of terrorists on a shoestring budget than they were against an entire nation that had the ability to rain down thousands of nuclear weapons on our cities? Cowardice, thy name is Republican. They're the ones who spent decades convincing us that we had to stop the Red Menace or risk nuclear annihilation. Now they're coming out of the woodwork saying, "Nah, it was never a big deal, because the Ruskies knew that nobody 'wins' a nuclear war. But these terrorists, man, you should be *really* scared of them! Pissin' your pants scared!"
"Remember all those freedoms we took during the Cold War, the ones we never actually gave back after it ended? Well, we'll need a few more of them. To keep you safe, understand."
Consider that a long, roundabout way of saying, yes, I bloody well can see the difference.
You're not being terribly convincing.
You can't 'build a foundation for yourself and your family' on sweatshop wages. If you could, it would just be called a 'job.' But even if these people somehow manage to build wealth by hiding pennies under a rock, American corporations are receiving 99% of the profit on their labor, and that's simply it's simply not justifiable to treat another human being that way (or to let some corporation do it on your behalf).
Admitting that conspicuous consumption is wrong or unhealthy isn't the same thing as adding, "and the government should have the power to stop those evil conspicuous consumers, using torture and rendition if necessary." I accept that I can't stop many behaviors I disagree with. You can't seem to accept that the free market doesn't always lead to the most moral or self-interested behavior. I'm flexible in my thinking. You're a one-note ideologue. Which is why you're not convincing to me.
It's not a 'pseudo-moral' idea to say that there is such a thing as a 'fair share,' or that there is such a thing as 'too rich' in a world where 800 million people are in the act of slowly dying of poverty. It's a moral one. The idea that your freedom to buy yourself a third yacht trumps another person's freedom to eat is also a moral one. Economics is very much a field of applied ethics. The thing is, your moral ideas aren't very good, because they don't approach anything normal people recognize as moral.
Think about it: If the government knows Osama bin Laden's cell phone number, do you think there is any judge in the world who wouldn't authorize a phone tap on it? Since FISA warrants can be granted retroactively, this shouldn't slow law enforcement down at all.
We have to make one of the following assumptions to make your hypothetical possible: A) We're listening in on Achmed. B) We're listening in on Osama bin Laden. C) We're listening in on every phone call made to Pakistan. C is unconscionable and needless. Unconscionable because there is no probable cause to justify it. Needless because it will give all manner of false hits. We already know why we want to listen in on B, and any judge presented with "Osama called Achmed" would authorize a warrant to listen in on Achmed as well.
So we're left with the question: What justifies spying on Achmed? Because he's a Pakistani living in America? No. Because he's a Pakistani making phone calls to Pakistan? No. Because he's making phone calls to Pakistan and was seen at a meeting with a suspected terrorist? Maybe they were just been talking about their pet boa constrictors. Maybe not. The point is, it shouldn't be the FBI's judgment call. There has to be a reality check inside the loop, to guard against both violations of civil liberties and wasteful, self-serving witch hunts. Which is exactly what the requirement for a warrant does.
By your logic, why stop at Pakistan? Why not also listen in on Saudi Arabia? Fourteen of the hijackers came from there, right? And London. I hear London is a hotbed for terr'ists, so we should listen to all those calls too. And we should listen in on reporters' phone calls, because Ann Coulter told me that they're trying to destroy America too. Slippery slope arguments are only valid if the slope is truly slippery, and the bottom of the slope is an awful place to be. In this case, I think it's quite valid.
Final point: Do you really think law enforcement will clear Achmed because he called his "grandmother" about buying "goats?" Sounds like evil terr'ist codespeak, if you ask me. Or maybe Achmed just isn't calling his handlers in Pakistan right now. But he will, sooner or later, and we need to keep watching him. Oh, and heaven help Achmed if NSA's new Terrorist MySpace program finds six degrees of separation between his grandmother and Osama. People have been imprisoned and tortured for less.
As to how it might affect your life, for the feds to listen in on phone calls to Pakistan. It wouldn't. You don't make phone calls to Pakistan. You don't have any interest in Pakistan. But if you're selfish enough to not care about the government's ability to interfere with the work of reporters and aid workers and political activists who actually *do* take an interest in Pakistan, then why should your narrow and selfish opinion have any effect on me?
Just wait until 2008. You right wingers will be mighty red in the face when you discover that you've given Hillary the right to tap all your phone calls.
You're a true "Great American"* if you can't see the difference between 'this can be abused, so we should get rid of it,' and 'this can be abused, so we should install iron-clad safeguards to prevent its abuse.' I understand that the government might have a very real need to listen in on one of my phone calls, to protect the lives and safety of other Americans. What I don't understand is how the government might have that very real need, but not be able to explain to a judge why they need to do it.
There are valid reasons for needing a warrant, and nobody to the right of Joe Lieberman has been able to give me a valid reason for not needing a warrant. If Bush gets his way, you will never see the abuse, because any reports of abuse are classified, and anyone who tries to leak a report of abuse is an enemy combatant.
* I listened to a few hours of the Sean Hannity radio show a few weeks back, and it seems to be secret code for 'blathering idiot'.
No, that's not the point. Small government has never been anything but a means to an end, and that end varies from person to person. Some people think that a small government will mean an end to government interference in our lives, thus increasing the scope for individual freedom. Especially given today's government, I can see the appeal of the idea.
But it's not going to happen. I think that even today, government power is primarily a proxy for corporate power. You take away that level of indirection today, and all you do is open the gates. Behind the gates are the salivating, sharp-toothed dogs of Big Business, and when the gates open, they're not coming out to lick our hands and get scritchies behind the ears.
Why is the 'proxy' situation any better? I would say that at least the government has to pay lip service to the idea that it is there for the good of that amorphous blob of hope, fear, need, and daily struggle that we call 'the people.'
I would also argue that Big Business is doing its level best to end government power. At least, those aspects of its power that can be used to help the have-nots and the have-not-quite-a-billion-dollars. That's why we're running up huge federal deficits (destroying our government's ability to provide the services that people actually want), vastly underfunding any government agency whose purpose isn't to kill and imprison people while spending lavishly on the military, etc. All they want government to do is protect their wealth from the rest of us, use their power of taxation to funnel more money from the middle class into wasteful no-bid corporte contracts, and use its treaty making power to open the rest of the world for their exploitation.
Okay, enough ranting from me. The point is, the size of the government has an effect on personal freedom, but so does the function of it. I believe that a government can be transparent, efficient, responsive to the needs of society, and respectful of our personal freedoms. I believe that corporations can be all these things as well. But both require an active, well educated, and engaged citizenry that demands better from both. In my mind, that requires a vast improvement in public services. Public education, so that citizens will have the skills they need to be part of a healthy society. Living wage laws, so that 'the masses' can support themselves while still having the time and energy to engage their government more than once every two years. Publicly financed campaigns, so that we can take this 'one dollar, one vote' garbage out behind the chemical shed and shoot it. Health care guarantees for the currently uninsured, so that they become more fit to work, to pursue education and other opportunities, and to raise their voices when government steps over the line.
When you eliminate the government's ability to do evil by eliminating its ability to do anything, then you open a gaping power vacuum which the wealthy are in the best position to take over. But if we work for condorcet voting and publicly financed elections on a local level, then I think we'll end up with the candidates that the voters actually want, rather than the candidates the powermongers want us to want. They have public financing of elections in Arizona, and John McCain (despite some recent right-wing pandering, and some positions I thoroughly detest) is one of the more able and idealistic senators out there. It's just one data point, but I've a hunch it's not a coincidence.
Parody is in the eye of the beholder. Do you know just how many people out there think Stephen Colbert is a straight-up right winger?
Actually, neither do I. But I can't imagine it's zero.
As we all learned from The Onion's coverage of Rowling's efforts to get children to worship Satan, there is no parody so outlandish that someone, somewhere won't mistake it for the thing being parodied.
If you think GTA would inspire any normal person to commit real life violence, you don't know GTA. But if you think GTA wouldn't inspire *anybody* to commit violence, you don't know people. I find these lawsuits legally frivolous, yet ethically thought-provoking.
I'm sorry, but just because a person would prefer working in a Nike sweatshop to starving to death, that's hardly a reason to say that those sweatshops 'advance the human condition.' Sweatshops aren't just about manual labor. They're about working people to the breaking point and beyond, limiting their freedoms, forbidding them from unionizing or fighting for better wages and conditions. They're about governments looking the other way, or even assisting in the oppression of their own people, because somebody is getting bribed or because somebody realizes that the moment they ask for a few pennies more the factories will pack up and move to Zimbabwe (or wherever else people are poor and desperate enough to break their backs for a dollar a day to build us luxury goods). I ask again, how does this advance the human condition?
Nor do I see how making tons of money for people who already have ungodly sums advances the human condition. What jobs did Michael Jordan's basketballing create? Sweatshop jobs for making shoes and jerseys, crap retail jobs taking tickets and selling clothes. A relative handful of jobs that could actually support a family, with most of those being team managers and personal trainers. Michael Jordan was worth billions to the team owners, tens of millions to broadcasters and advertisers, but we're asking how his basketballing feats were helpful to society as a whole?
Using him, Nike was able to convince lots of kids that their shoes were worth paying a huge premium for, based on no objective measure of quality but on the sort of prestige that can only come from having a beloved celebrity endorse one's wares. I don't see the social benefit in turning mere foot protection into a huge expense for families, or a huge feeling of inadequacy for kids whose parents couldn't afford them. The only value in having Nike shoes was in that they were something that some kids had and other kids didn't. Economists call this 'conspicuous consumption,' which in my mind has negative social value. But I can see how it would make Nike rich, and since you seem to cling to the delusion that the free market always gives everyone what they really want, you would likely call it good.
Which brings us to the final argument, the "quality entertainment for millions." Admittedly, I'm biased because I don't care much for sports. But I also have an axe to grind against mass consumption culture (as opposed to participatory culture), especially when someone is making money turning millions of people into mere spectators of their culture, rather than participants. It's not healthy for so many of us to be so used to sitting on our asses and letting other people be creative on our behalves (behalfs?)
Well, for someone who devoted his entire life to playing a child's game, he did do it very well, and very entertainingly. But what did he do that was worth the hundreds of millions of dollars he was paid over his life?
The simple answer: make buckets of money for people who could afford to pay him that well. Oh, yeah, and star in 'Space Jam.' Cinematic masterpiece, that.
Sorry, but while selling sweatshop shoes at absurd premiums may make certain people very wealthy, it does nothing to advance the human condition.
I'd delve into detail, but if you're too lazy to explain why Michael Jordan was worth more than 150K a year, I'm not going to put much effort into disabusing you.
There aren't nearly as many craters on Mars as there are on, say, the Moon. One reason is that, yes, the atmosphere protects Mars from a lot of the smaller impacts. But more important, the atmosphere generates dust and moves it around the planet like a big ol' scouring pad, so eventually erosion gets rid of a lot of traces.
But the atmosphere is much, much thinner (I think just a few percent of Earth's atmosphere). Plus, Earth has a lot of other erosion effects (water and plate tectonics) that are absent from modern Mars.
A good point. But you have to remember that the vast, vast majority of those boxen are going to be replaced within ten years anyways. So the question is, when we replace a box, do we want to replace it with this new (supposedly more efficient) standard, or stick with the old way of doing things?
In short, you can ignore any upfront cost, and just replace the boxes as they die.
Since we're being all snarky and all, maybe it's more difficult to beat the game when you have--what are those pesky things called, again? Oh yeah, a *LIFE*!
You go on vacation for a week with your beautiful wife, you're going to have a hard time remembering where you left of in your World of Warcraft quests, or which items you need to up your tailoring skills. You put it down for six months, and you forget how to feed and control your pet. It takes a while to get all that information back in your mental cache.
So if you can only devote a half hour or so every other night, and the game mercilessly punishes you for not having your fingers programmed to respond to twitch like so when monster X jumps out from behind door Y, it's going to be a frustrating experience.
No, it's not just 'the code.' It's the whole bloody software ecosystem, and the licenses are what keeps it alive and vibrant. If everyone just took the nearsighted advice of ignoring infringements and not worrying about the details of the GPL, eventually somebody *would* find a way to get the masses using their own, incompatible, proprietary version. Then, the developers find themselves in the position of paying out the nose in order to buy their own software, while the sellers are profiting by killing off a good chunk of the OSS ecosystem.
Saying that developers should get back to coding and not worry about 'license minutiae' or the political implications of their work is like complaining that all the resources your body wastes on its immune system could have been better spent growing you a second penis. As much fun as it might be to have, you need to be not dead before it serves any use.
Complaints about egotism and developer-centric attitudes are completely orthogonal to this, and you only confuse things by conflating this issue with all those others.
That's actually one of the things that worries me about e-cars. If they're all that quiet, how are people going to hear them coming and know not to walk into the road?
My solution is to have every electric car have a bagpipe player walking alongside it, playing 'Scotland the Brave.' This will ensure that electric cars are just as safe as the quality cars that are currently on the road.
Just a thought,
General Motors
I think you are taking a rather harsh and uncompromising stance (though I'm not sure where people got 'elitist' from). People usually go where they believe they are doing the most good, if you define 'doing good' according to their own values. For example, the person you're responding to might think he is promoting the greater good by supporting his family comfortably, by working on some exciting project in his company that will make life better for lots of people, by promoting consumer-friendly and responsible attitudes within his company, and by putting his education to good use.
We could argue all day about whether he is being effective in his efforts, whether his family could live happily on a smaller paycheck, whether his current project is really going to benefit society, and a whole bunch of other things. It's difficult, though, because peoples' values differ, because we're all masters of rationalization, and because we generally don't like it when our lifestyle choices are questioned, especially by strangers.
You're never going to find any large, complex organization which does nothing but good all the time. Nor are you going to have a lot of success convincing people that they should jump ship at the first sign of corruption. But I sympathize with you; we've become rather too comfortable with corporate evilness, and that's at least partly because so many of us have a job or own a tiny bit of stock in the companies. And if a company's misdeeds will reflect on you personally and professionally, it's an incentive for you to demand the highest standard of behavior from that company.
Sorry, just feeling rambly today.
As to the rest of it, there is both wide room for disagreement and a lot of technolegalese that I'm not qualified to comment on.