Users should be aware of another tool that can be used under GNU/Linux, it's called 'expect'. While normal shell programming is extremely useful and powerful, 'expect' provides a mechanism to 'talk' to interactive programs while running a shell script. 'expect' will actually expect certain known points of interaction from an interactive command line program and will provide it with input as if a user typed it by hand.
It's useful for example to code update procedures with expect if you have more than one machine to administer and you have to update something on the machine, maybe update a package or two, run some database commands, do it all from your machine over ssh without having scripts installed on the machines on the other side, things like that.
Of-course innovation can be automated, evolution proves it - innovation does not need a guiding hand.
The question is can we automate innovation? First of all we have to define what innovation is, then we have to admit that most of any type of innovation will not be useful at all.
Even if we can automate innovation, can we use this for any meaningful purpose? Evolution doesn't have an end goal, it only has the intermediate goal of copying data further and further into the future, and that goal is not even a conscious decision by anything or anybody, it's just the inherent property of the copying mechanism itself.
TFA talks about applying known solutions to problems where those solutions haven't been tried yet, what is the purpose and criteria, who is going to be doing this, how much energy will it require, what are the constraints?
Seems to me it's a fine idea in abstract to have a PhD theses on but it has very very little useful potential. No business will be trying to solve all problems by coding in all of the known solutions into some matrix. So a government then? Then it's a search for a subsidy to run a very expensive (and never ending) pet project.
So why are you throwing straw arguments at me? I am not arguing for anything that says: employees don't matter, my argument is that employees and employers (investors) have their price and their place.
Employers did not cut wages, quite the obvious. As I said in order to retain talent Ford offered doubled the wages of people, no unions, no strikes, he just wanted to retain talent.
Once again, what do minimum wages have to do with most people? Most people are paid salaries above minimum wage and the people that minimum wage hurts is the poor people, the young people, people with difficult pas, people at the lowest step of the economic ladder that can't get a foot into the door because of minimum wage and other labour related laws and taxes and because there is a huge welfare system (which is going to collapse soon enough now) and this provides just enough incentives not to bother looking for a job that is even somewhat above the minimum wage.
Government "stepping in" is the worst thing that happened to the economy, to people's freedoms and to the poor people themselves.
Also I wasn't talking about criminal activity, like burning bridges that belong to other people or lead to other businesses, that's another side argument that doesn't have anything to do even with the system that is being run, anybody can burn a bridge for their own profit motive under any system of government.
Not true, when pure capitalism as in free market capitalism was tried in America, the workers were able to increase their productivity enough over years to stop being subsistence farmers, to be able eventually to increase their experience and skills and become more valuable to their employers. Of-course the early days of industrialization were very difficult and how could they not be? The capital was in its formative years, the tools and machinery was rudimentary, the factories were really experimental.
Early industrial revolution was completely experimental, however over time the things have changed for the better. The 19th century started with a dollar that was half the value of the early 20th century, so it was a slight deflation. At the same time the conditions have improved significantly. Companies learned to satisfy the demand of their customers. That century actually built the America, the cities and infrastructure and new products that never even existed before.
Electricity, sewing machines, trains, telegraph, telephone, radio, fridges to keep food safe, various other methods of making food safer, new forms of medical treatment, entire new procedures and approaches (see history of the Mayo clinic), even insurance products that people could buy to insure against accidents and loss of limb and life started around 1850. Even with the Civil war and all the other problems (some banking problems associated mostly with the housing bubbles that the government has created over the century, especially when trying to turn the economy into command style but then reverting back after failures).
I mean there is a reason why Ford company started paying its employees 2x as much as the rest while cutting hours to 8 per day and days to 5 per week (and paying 5 bucks a day or 1.25 ounces of gold a week in those prices, which given the fact that they had no income or payroll or medicare taxes is equivalent of at least 150K today). Ford didn't allow unions in his shop, his reasons were purely from the capitalist perspective - he needed to retain talent on his more productive conveyor belt type of factory, he even hired some disabled people that nobody else would hire at the time, that's how productive people became with all that capital over the 100 years.
Today you can see China turning from the poor agrarian society to an industrial nation, first nation really, manufacturing everything that people buy. They pulled 350Million people out of poverty in 30 years, did it with capitalism, did it when they decided that their system didn't work and it didn't of-course. Their socialism/marxism/communism, whatever they had, it was basically collectivism, so that means no capitalism, no free market, only central planning. That old system murdered tens of millions, tens of millions died because of hunger.
Back in Ukraine where I was born millions died because of hunger due to the socialists taking over and expropriating the private property, the means of production. They have destroyed the productive classes of society and what was left was poor and unproductive and without capital.
This is the story of USA today, the people that are poor a running the system via the so called 'democracy', which really gives them the means to steal from the productive part of the society, and the productive people have been moving their investment capital and productivity out of USA for decades now, since the 1970s, since the default on the dollar and the open policy of inflation and thus increased growth of government power.
No, capitalism is the answer, you have to ask the proper questions to understand it.
Yeah, something is broken and it's not capitalism, it's lack of capitalism.
Of-course there shouldn't be any special subsidies by the government threat of violence to the employees at the expense of employers (minimum wage is a tax that goes directly from one person to another). People should be able to come to a mutual agreement about the terms of the employment and clearly most people are not paid minimum wage even today, when there is a law like that.
I worked as an employee for a number of years, before that I took various temporary jobs, now those temp jobs actually paid about minimum wage, but later I got a permanent position with flexible hours while was studying (and working at the same time), so that was already about 30% above the minimum wage. Most people don't get minimum wage salaries, they get paid more than that because over time they become more valuable employees, they learn the necessary skills, get the experience, etc. I think I spent about 4 or 5 years in that job and by the time I left for contracts I was making about 5 times the minimum wage. The contracts are a different matter altogether, it's all about hourly wage and you search for the best one, hopefully at least 10 times minimum wage (at least). So how does minimum wage concern most people? It doesn't on the surface, but underneath the surface it's a terrible thing for everybody.
You see, minimum wage is just a way for the government to hide the inflation. The gov't prints money and tries to hide the fact that the dollars buy less and less over time and they use the employers as the scapegoats, they put this tax on them to make it look like it's the employers that are the problem, not the value of money. Of-course by raising prices for labour to some artificial level what the government really does is it makes labour more expensive and so the demand for labour goes down in the market, many of the people who would otherwise be working now can't find jobs, they are just not productive enough at their level of skills and expertise for the employers to hire them at maybe something like 2 or 3 times their actual real market price.
Now, I saw that you wrote something like: employer owes the employee a living wage and that's also a fallacy. Have you ever needed a babysitter? Just asking. Do you owe anything to a babysitter beyond what you agree for the hours of the service? How about if you were a mechanic and owned a garage and somebody without experience asked you to hire them, would you owe them a 'living wage'? Why?
What if the person in question specifically wanted to get hired for very little money? Why, would you ask he'd do that? Because he may be smart and decided never to go to college and at the age of 14 or 15 came to your garage and asked you to teach him what you know in exchange for various help around the garage (so instead of racking up debt in college, in 3-4 years the kid would actually have useful skills and be able to get a job as a mechanic maybe, maybe in your garage or some other place and maybe he'd eventually open his own garage)?
What if there is a person who just landed into your country as an immigrant and he has no idea about anything, he needs at least some job to start looking around while he is learning things? What if a former inmate walked into your store or office or whatever and asked for help - he needs a job, he needs to restart his life, but he has no experience, etc.?
That's what the minimum wage law prevents, all these various opportunities to the people who are really starting at the bottom of the economic ladder. The minimum wage hides inflation that the government creates and it prevents people from working, in some cases it prevents people from working ever again.
That's why minimum wage is bad economically, but by a moral standard it cannot exist at all, because it's discrimination all around, it's discrimination against the employer and employee right to free association, it's against the right of people to run their o
That's not true, labour is just another product and/or service in the market.
Imagine a situation where there are more entrepreneurs than laborers, workers, employees. So this means that the system is awash in capital in investment and in people with ideas but there are just not enough people to work for them.
What will happen in that case? The exact opposite of what happens when there are 1000 employees for each position because there is not enough capital, not enough investment. There will be increased competition for labor, for employees. So prices for labor will go up and interest rates for return on capital will go down (not because of governments printing and handing out stacks of cash, which is a metaphor for what happens today, but because there is a huge supply of savings and so the price for money goes down naturally).
If then the entrepreneurs are a voting majority, then they can do the same thing that the voting majority (employees, laborers) are doing today: vote for people into the offices that would promise to "protect them".
Here is what you are complaining about: you are living in a system that has little investment capital and a very large number of people who are hoping that somebody with investment capital will hire them and pay them a salary. In this situation what was happening for 100 years now is that the majority, the employees have voted in officials that promised "employee rights".
But what are "employee rights"? They are not natural rights, they are special entitlements, which put obligations upon the minority - employers. So "employee rights" are actually a tax upon the employers.
Do you understand why the few employers that are still in business are doing everything they can to buy politicians and turn them to their side? Because they are a minority and they are being actively discriminated against by the system by law by the majority. So if this was NOT happening, if the majority didn't take over the law, didn't vote in the politicians who promised to satisfy their immediate requests at the expense of the equality of people before law (for example a progressive income tax or any form of regulation that transfers wealth from a business to an employee not based on the agreement, but because of a government legislation) then there wouldn't be such a push and there wouldn't even be a possibility for the few to try and buy the law makers to get a leg up, because the law makers would actually still be bound, limited by the chains of the law.
Constitution is supposed to ensure that all people are treated equally by the law, that there are no special people that get subsidies from others basically, so everybody's real rights (right to own and operate private property without government intervening unfairly, in a way that prefers some at the expense of the others) are observed.
But that's not what happened over the last 100 years, the opposite happened. In reality there are no group rights, there are no minority rights, there are no employee rights, there are no women's rights, there are no gay rights, there are no disabled people rights, etc.
There are only individual rights, human rights. If you take a group and position it in a way that gives it something at the expense of somebody else, that's not a right, that's an entitlement for that group and an obligation for somebody else.
So I understand your point, but you are missing the root cause of the problem that you are describing. Really, GOP shouldn't be in a position either to take or give anything from anybody and to anybody. Neither should any government official, any part, not even the POTUS.
No government official should be able to discriminate against one person and give preferential treatment to another person. They shouldn't be able to pass laws that give preferential treatment to people. That's why I find part of the the "Civil Rights Act of 1964" that forces private individuals to "not discriminate" an aberration. Nobody should be forced to deal, to associate
Sorry, I know that you, Americans have 20 words for prison, sort of like the Eskimo have for snow, because there are so many nuances in its usage due to the highest incarceration rate in the world.
I agree with you, but I would start much earlier than Bush and Cheney. At the minimum all of the living ex-potus figure heads and their cabinets. I know people like Clinton, but I can't stand him on the Yugoslavia bombings alone.
Obviously most people want to work certain number of hours, get paid a pre-negotiated pay for the hours and be done with it after work. There is nothing wrong with not wanting to do it on your own, to each his own.
- and he would be right to be worried about it, people do get raped in US prisons, which are nowhere near being "correctional" facilities. The only thing those facilities correct is the trust in the justice system.
No he did not, he finally returned some honor to his uniform by showing that there are still people that actually take the oath to defend and protect the Constitution seriously as opposed to those, who only pretend that they are there to do it.
Manning a soldier. Vastly different worlds. Swartz acted honorably. Manning dishonored himself and his uniform.
- no, the uniform that he wore was already dishonored by the actions of the organization that issued it and the organization that controlled the organization that issued it. Manning finally returned some semblance of honor to his uniform by doing what he swore to do: protect and defend the Constitution. Not the organization that issued his uniform. Not the organization that controls the organization that issued his uniform. Both of those have violated the conditions and the oath that they were supposed to uphold.
They are similar situations, both cases have to do with people fighting the system, where the system is in the wrong in all of these cases and the system then crushed the people fighting it.
So? Everybody has problems, again, are you telling me that having government go after you, cause you to lose all of your savings and promise to jail you for your entire foreseeable future does not cause depression? Sure, the guy might have been depressed before as well, so what? He didn't kill himself previously.
Also, being attacked by the government did NOT 'give him depression'.
- so are you saying that a guy, who spent his savings (a million or so) in court because government wouldn't stop with false claims, which by the way had no reason to be brought up even. JSTOR didn't want to press charges, the company that the documents were lifted off.
He was forced into poverty and he was facing something that would amount to life in prison (30 years) in the eyes of a 26 year old.
Yes, I am not a doctor, but I would have been depressed under such circumstances as well.
Comments that draw attention to the political angle of this story (and it's all political) are moded as "overrated", there are people who don't like this simple truth: the government is attacking dissidents, Aaron Swartz, Bradley Manning are dissidents. There are many others as well.
Here is an excerpt FTFA
The estate of Aaron Swartz, the Internet activist who was charged with hacking by the federal government and later committed suicide
- see, the very first sentence. What is the tone of TFA?
1. Aaron was an Internet hacker. 2. He committed suicide.
That's the first sentence. That's the tone. That's the soundbite.
Here is what is not the tone and it should be:
1. Aaron was standing up against illegal grab of power by Congress.
2. Aaron was attacked by the government, lost all of his money that he made from his businesses in that legal battle and was facing what could amount to life in prison (really, 30 years is life AFAIC) and that's what gave him this depression. He was not paranoid, they were after him, he became the enemy of the state.
No, but Amazon is trying hard to apply its resources, they have all the equipment, personnel to run this as part of their store and they are probably eating their own dog food here. So for Amazon AWS is probably central to their actual business model, because they are using the platform to run their business.
For Google this computational platform is really a side business, they can run it and stop it and run it and stop it and it has nothing to do with their main business.
My point is that there is no reason for the Chinese to attempt and damage Apple at all, it's an international label that produces in China and sells all over the world, including China. Apple's business in China brings money to China. If this is a government related activity at all, this has to be someone trying to use government for his own private gain in order to sell his own product, but I don't think it's an overall Chinese government strategy to attempt and hurt Apple as a business.
Yes, China is USA's "most favored trading partner", because what it actually means is that China is willing to subsidize USA consumption by providing vendor financing. So the Chinese work in the factories that produce various products and ship them outside of China and in return the foreigners ship in USD or Euro or whatever, and Chinese government takes these currencies off the hands of the exporters and to do it, Chinese monetary authority prints renminbi. So this is direct inflation in China, which immediately results in higher commodity prices and various asset class bubbles (housing as an example). This hurts the Chinese economy by not allowing the Chines laborers to get the productivity growth that they actually achieved, all of their productivity is being used to subsidize foreign consumption.
Actually it is China that would gain tremendously if the Chinese government allowed renminbi to float, because all of a sudden all of these foreign economies would not be able to afford Chinese made products. To USA for example this spells disaster in the short run. The 500 Billion / year trade deficit means that USA would have to go without all of those products. I am saying 'in the short run', as in for a few years, until USA manages to rebuild some of its production capacity (and it won't be easy). But for example look at the seafood products, 90% of it is imported into USA from Asia. You think it's easy to restart the process, once you have no equipment, no industrial processes, no supply chain even to manage the catch? No, that would take real austerity, as in huge cuts to government, enormous cuts, huge reduction in taxes and in social welfare state payouts. The private industry would have to save a lot of money before it could restart production in USA. In the long run that is the correct thing to do, but in the short while it would spell enormous shift in the economy, away from service and government and away from the financial sectors, back to the manufacturing, back to agriculture, mining, shipping, all that stuff that USA decided it was above as it lived on inflation and borrowing.
But I can easily see another possible situation, as the things get really bad in USA the government would declare some form of 'emergency' and one thing we know about government declared 'emergencies', they are really good to hold power (Egypt, Libya come to mind). In an emergency a government can easily declare a huge tax increase and straight out nationalization of resources and companies, but in case of Apple, GE and such, they are well positioned to escape such calamity, as they have huge reserves outside of USA.
Who would really suffer would be the middle class and the poorest of people in that situation, they probably wouldn't even be allowed to leave the country (unless they pay out their portion of the national and unfunded debt for example). Already the USA government made it harder to just drop citizenship by increasing the form fee from 0 to 400USD and what's to stop it from raising that number to any arbitrary amount? IRS can take away people's passports or prevent them from getting passports if they owe 20K or more in back taxes (so you can't even go for a vacation or on a business trip if IRS says you owe taxes).
That fence on the border... you think it's a good policy to 'bring manufacturing home', yes it is, but the way it just may happen is by closing that fence and not letting you out and forcing you into labor camps of some sort. Remember, everybody in USSR had a job....
Yes, 2 is better then 1. But 3 is better then 2 and 20 is better then 3.
- only if they exist in the market that is free of regulations, that help one business to get a leg up against another. If it's the free market that provides competition, then yes. If it's done the way it was done in (for example) case of Standard Oil, then no. Standard Oil had plenty of competition and it was pushing prices down for 40 years before it was broken up. In these 40 years the company made very good profits, helping to make Rockefeller one of the richest people in the entire history of the world (10 times as wealthy as the wealthiest dollar top billionaires of today). But in the process that company created so many efficiencies to push the prices down, that once it was broken down, the artificial "competition" promoted by the government could never match their scale again, the prices for oil products never went down again, they only went up since then.
You are mistaking competition for the sake of competition with the best choice that market can provide to the customers. In fact it doesn't matter if you are getting your product from a market with 10 players in it or with only 3 or 2 or 1 if you are getting the best deal.
However you know that you are not getting the best deal when the "competition" is artificially created by government, what you end up with is inefficiency and higher prices and lower quality. At that point the choices are non-existing, you have no price competition, that's something that really hurts the clients and the market in general by sucking money out of it into something that shouldn't be there.
It's far past time we dropped China as a Most Favored Nation trading partner, and brought our manufacturing back home.
- what does it mean, 'we' in this context? Apple is not a government enterprise (yet!) So unless you are talking about nationalization of successful international businesses, then your comment has no meaning. The only way it would make sense is if you suggested that US government should turn around and actually provide a business friendly environment inside the country (or if you suggested nationalizing Apple and such, but that would only ensure that foreign Apple business and money would never return to USA).
The question to Google is: what is the long term perspective here? Will this shut down if it doesn't generate some level of revenue/profit? What is that level?
Is it possible to have a dynamically generated graph somewhere on Google that would show how far away is the break even point for this service, when will it become profitable (and this graph should be updated once in a while, every week or month to get a feel as to its long term prospect)? If it's a profit center on its own, at least there is a good chance it will stay in business.
Except that if there was Chinese only business in this case that would be comparable to Apple, Foxconn would have been working with it already. To Foxconn it doesn't matter whether it's Apple or Dell or some Chinese company ordering parts and assembly of finished product, Foxconn is not going to make more money from a Chinese only business than it makes from Apple, which sells its products around the world.
Apple is a world wide label, it's not only selling in China, it's selling everywhere, on every continent. For the Chinese to achieve the same level of market penetration, they would have to have a similar brand and by hurting Apple only within its own borders, China would only lose a some percentage of Apple/Foxconn revenues derived from the Chinese market.
Slashdot Mirror
Then you will have reached communism.
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well, you want to read this comment then, the whole thing to the end.
Users should be aware of another tool that can be used under GNU/Linux, it's called 'expect'. While normal shell programming is extremely useful and powerful, 'expect' provides a mechanism to 'talk' to interactive programs while running a shell script. 'expect' will actually expect certain known points of interaction from an interactive command line program and will provide it with input as if a user typed it by hand.
It's useful for example to code update procedures with expect if you have more than one machine to administer and you have to update something on the machine, maybe update a package or two, run some database commands, do it all from your machine over ssh without having scripts installed on the machines on the other side, things like that.
Of-course innovation can be automated, evolution proves it - innovation does not need a guiding hand.
The question is can we automate innovation? First of all we have to define what innovation is, then we have to admit that most of any type of innovation will not be useful at all.
Even if we can automate innovation, can we use this for any meaningful purpose? Evolution doesn't have an end goal, it only has the intermediate goal of copying data further and further into the future, and that goal is not even a conscious decision by anything or anybody, it's just the inherent property of the copying mechanism itself.
TFA talks about applying known solutions to problems where those solutions haven't been tried yet, what is the purpose and criteria, who is going to be doing this, how much energy will it require, what are the constraints?
Seems to me it's a fine idea in abstract to have a PhD theses on but it has very very little useful potential. No business will be trying to solve all problems by coding in all of the known solutions into some matrix. So a government then? Then it's a search for a subsidy to run a very expensive (and never ending) pet project.
So why are you throwing straw arguments at me? I am not arguing for anything that says: employees don't matter, my argument is that employees and employers (investors) have their price and their place.
Employers did not cut wages, quite the obvious. As I said in order to retain talent Ford offered doubled the wages of people, no unions, no strikes, he just wanted to retain talent.
Once again, what do minimum wages have to do with most people? Most people are paid salaries above minimum wage and the people that minimum wage hurts is the poor people, the young people, people with difficult pas, people at the lowest step of the economic ladder that can't get a foot into the door because of minimum wage and other labour related laws and taxes and because there is a huge welfare system (which is going to collapse soon enough now) and this provides just enough incentives not to bother looking for a job that is even somewhat above the minimum wage.
Government "stepping in" is the worst thing that happened to the economy, to people's freedoms and to the poor people themselves.
Also I wasn't talking about criminal activity, like burning bridges that belong to other people or lead to other businesses, that's another side argument that doesn't have anything to do even with the system that is being run, anybody can burn a bridge for their own profit motive under any system of government.
Not true, when pure capitalism as in free market capitalism was tried in America, the workers were able to increase their productivity enough over years to stop being subsistence farmers, to be able eventually to increase their experience and skills and become more valuable to their employers. Of-course the early days of industrialization were very difficult and how could they not be? The capital was in its formative years, the tools and machinery was rudimentary, the factories were really experimental.
Early industrial revolution was completely experimental, however over time the things have changed for the better. The 19th century started with a dollar that was half the value of the early 20th century, so it was a slight deflation. At the same time the conditions have improved significantly. Companies learned to satisfy the demand of their customers. That century actually built the America, the cities and infrastructure and new products that never even existed before.
Electricity, sewing machines, trains, telegraph, telephone, radio, fridges to keep food safe, various other methods of making food safer, new forms of medical treatment, entire new procedures and approaches (see history of the Mayo clinic), even insurance products that people could buy to insure against accidents and loss of limb and life started around 1850. Even with the Civil war and all the other problems (some banking problems associated mostly with the housing bubbles that the government has created over the century, especially when trying to turn the economy into command style but then reverting back after failures).
I mean there is a reason why Ford company started paying its employees 2x as much as the rest while cutting hours to 8 per day and days to 5 per week (and paying 5 bucks a day or 1.25 ounces of gold a week in those prices, which given the fact that they had no income or payroll or medicare taxes is equivalent of at least 150K today). Ford didn't allow unions in his shop, his reasons were purely from the capitalist perspective - he needed to retain talent on his more productive conveyor belt type of factory, he even hired some disabled people that nobody else would hire at the time, that's how productive people became with all that capital over the 100 years.
Today you can see China turning from the poor agrarian society to an industrial nation, first nation really, manufacturing everything that people buy. They pulled 350Million people out of poverty in 30 years, did it with capitalism, did it when they decided that their system didn't work and it didn't of-course. Their socialism/marxism/communism, whatever they had, it was basically collectivism, so that means no capitalism, no free market, only central planning. That old system murdered tens of millions, tens of millions died because of hunger.
Back in Ukraine where I was born millions died because of hunger due to the socialists taking over and expropriating the private property, the means of production. They have destroyed the productive classes of society and what was left was poor and unproductive and without capital.
This is the story of USA today, the people that are poor a running the system via the so called 'democracy', which really gives them the means to steal from the productive part of the society, and the productive people have been moving their investment capital and productivity out of USA for decades now, since the 1970s, since the default on the dollar and the open policy of inflation and thus increased growth of government power.
No, capitalism is the answer, you have to ask the proper questions to understand it.
Yeah, something is broken and it's not capitalism, it's lack of capitalism.
Of-course there shouldn't be any special subsidies by the government threat of violence to the employees at the expense of employers (minimum wage is a tax that goes directly from one person to another). People should be able to come to a mutual agreement about the terms of the employment and clearly most people are not paid minimum wage even today, when there is a law like that.
I worked as an employee for a number of years, before that I took various temporary jobs, now those temp jobs actually paid about minimum wage, but later I got a permanent position with flexible hours while was studying (and working at the same time), so that was already about 30% above the minimum wage. Most people don't get minimum wage salaries, they get paid more than that because over time they become more valuable employees, they learn the necessary skills, get the experience, etc. I think I spent about 4 or 5 years in that job and by the time I left for contracts I was making about 5 times the minimum wage. The contracts are a different matter altogether, it's all about hourly wage and you search for the best one, hopefully at least 10 times minimum wage (at least). So how does minimum wage concern most people? It doesn't on the surface, but underneath the surface it's a terrible thing for everybody.
You see, minimum wage is just a way for the government to hide the inflation. The gov't prints money and tries to hide the fact that the dollars buy less and less over time and they use the employers as the scapegoats, they put this tax on them to make it look like it's the employers that are the problem, not the value of money. Of-course by raising prices for labour to some artificial level what the government really does is it makes labour more expensive and so the demand for labour goes down in the market, many of the people who would otherwise be working now can't find jobs, they are just not productive enough at their level of skills and expertise for the employers to hire them at maybe something like 2 or 3 times their actual real market price.
Now, I saw that you wrote something like: employer owes the employee a living wage and that's also a fallacy. Have you ever needed a babysitter? Just asking. Do you owe anything to a babysitter beyond what you agree for the hours of the service? How about if you were a mechanic and owned a garage and somebody without experience asked you to hire them, would you owe them a 'living wage'? Why?
What if the person in question specifically wanted to get hired for very little money? Why, would you ask he'd do that? Because he may be smart and decided never to go to college and at the age of 14 or 15 came to your garage and asked you to teach him what you know in exchange for various help around the garage (so instead of racking up debt in college, in 3-4 years the kid would actually have useful skills and be able to get a job as a mechanic maybe, maybe in your garage or some other place and maybe he'd eventually open his own garage)?
What if there is a person who just landed into your country as an immigrant and he has no idea about anything, he needs at least some job to start looking around while he is learning things? What if a former inmate walked into your store or office or whatever and asked for help - he needs a job, he needs to restart his life, but he has no experience, etc.?
That's what the minimum wage law prevents, all these various opportunities to the people who are really starting at the bottom of the economic ladder. The minimum wage hides inflation that the government creates and it prevents people from working, in some cases it prevents people from working ever again.
That's why minimum wage is bad economically, but by a moral standard it cannot exist at all, because it's discrimination all around, it's discrimination against the employer and employee right to free association, it's against the right of people to run their o
That's not true, labour is just another product and/or service in the market.
Imagine a situation where there are more entrepreneurs than laborers, workers, employees. So this means that the system is awash in capital in investment and in people with ideas but there are just not enough people to work for them.
What will happen in that case? The exact opposite of what happens when there are 1000 employees for each position because there is not enough capital, not enough investment. There will be increased competition for labor, for employees. So prices for labor will go up and interest rates for return on capital will go down (not because of governments printing and handing out stacks of cash, which is a metaphor for what happens today, but because there is a huge supply of savings and so the price for money goes down naturally).
If then the entrepreneurs are a voting majority, then they can do the same thing that the voting majority (employees, laborers) are doing today: vote for people into the offices that would promise to "protect them".
Here is what you are complaining about: you are living in a system that has little investment capital and a very large number of people who are hoping that somebody with investment capital will hire them and pay them a salary. In this situation what was happening for 100 years now is that the majority, the employees have voted in officials that promised "employee rights".
But what are "employee rights"? They are not natural rights, they are special entitlements, which put obligations upon the minority - employers. So "employee rights" are actually a tax upon the employers.
Do you understand why the few employers that are still in business are doing everything they can to buy politicians and turn them to their side? Because they are a minority and they are being actively discriminated against by the system by law by the majority. So if this was NOT happening, if the majority didn't take over the law, didn't vote in the politicians who promised to satisfy their immediate requests at the expense of the equality of people before law (for example a progressive income tax or any form of regulation that transfers wealth from a business to an employee not based on the agreement, but because of a government legislation) then there wouldn't be such a push and there wouldn't even be a possibility for the few to try and buy the law makers to get a leg up, because the law makers would actually still be bound, limited by the chains of the law.
Constitution is supposed to ensure that all people are treated equally by the law, that there are no special people that get subsidies from others basically, so everybody's real rights (right to own and operate private property without government intervening unfairly, in a way that prefers some at the expense of the others) are observed.
But that's not what happened over the last 100 years, the opposite happened. In reality there are no group rights, there are no minority rights, there are no employee rights, there are no women's rights, there are no gay rights, there are no disabled people rights, etc.
There are only individual rights, human rights. If you take a group and position it in a way that gives it something at the expense of somebody else, that's not a right, that's an entitlement for that group and an obligation for somebody else.
So I understand your point, but you are missing the root cause of the problem that you are describing. Really, GOP shouldn't be in a position either to take or give anything from anybody and to anybody. Neither should any government official, any part, not even the POTUS.
No government official should be able to discriminate against one person and give preferential treatment to another person. They shouldn't be able to pass laws that give preferential treatment to people. That's why I find part of the the "Civil Rights Act of 1964" that forces private individuals to "not discriminate" an aberration. Nobody should be forced to deal, to associate
Sorry, I know that you, Americans have 20 words for prison, sort of like the Eskimo have for snow, because there are so many nuances in its usage due to the highest incarceration rate in the world.
I agree with you, but I would start much earlier than Bush and Cheney. At the minimum all of the living ex-potus figure heads and their cabinets. I know people like Clinton, but I can't stand him on the Yugoslavia bombings alone.
Obviously most people want to work certain number of hours, get paid a pre-negotiated pay for the hours and be done with it after work. There is nothing wrong with not wanting to do it on your own, to each his own.
he was going to get raped by a terrorist
- and he would be right to be worried about it, people do get raped in US prisons, which are nowhere near being "correctional" facilities. The only thing those facilities correct is the trust in the justice system.
Of-course the supposed 'terrorists' in US prisons also do get raped and the people doing the rape are the government representatives, sometimes proxy government representatives.
So? Again, he didn't kill himself before the government bankrupted him and actively worked to throw him to jail for most of the rest of his life.
No he did not, he finally returned some honor to his uniform by showing that there are still people that actually take the oath to defend and protect the Constitution seriously as opposed to those, who only pretend that they are there to do it.
Manning a soldier. Vastly different worlds. Swartz acted honorably. Manning dishonored himself and his uniform.
- no, the uniform that he wore was already dishonored by the actions of the organization that issued it and the organization that controlled the organization that issued it. Manning finally returned some semblance of honor to his uniform by doing what he swore to do: protect and defend the Constitution. Not the organization that issued his uniform. Not the organization that controls the organization that issued his uniform. Both of those have violated the conditions and the oath that they were supposed to uphold.
They are similar situations, both cases have to do with people fighting the system, where the system is in the wrong in all of these cases and the system then crushed the people fighting it.
So? Everybody has problems, again, are you telling me that having government go after you, cause you to lose all of your savings and promise to jail you for your entire foreseeable future does not cause depression? Sure, the guy might have been depressed before as well, so what? He didn't kill himself previously.
Also, being attacked by the government did NOT 'give him depression'.
- so are you saying that a guy, who spent his savings (a million or so) in court because government wouldn't stop with false claims, which by the way had no reason to be brought up even. JSTOR didn't want to press charges, the company that the documents were lifted off.
He was forced into poverty and he was facing something that would amount to life in prison (30 years) in the eyes of a 26 year old.
Yes, I am not a doctor, but I would have been depressed under such circumstances as well.
Comments that draw attention to the political angle of this story (and it's all political) are moded as "overrated", there are people who don't like this simple truth: the government is attacking dissidents, Aaron Swartz, Bradley Manning are dissidents. There are many others as well.
Here is an excerpt FTFA
The estate of Aaron Swartz, the Internet activist who was charged with hacking by the federal government and later committed suicide
- see, the very first sentence. What is the tone of TFA?
1. Aaron was an Internet hacker.
2. He committed suicide.
That's the first sentence. That's the tone. That's the soundbite.
Here is what is not the tone and it should be:
1. Aaron was standing up against illegal grab of power by Congress.
2. Aaron was attacked by the government, lost all of his money that he made from his businesses in that legal battle and was facing what could amount to life in prison (really, 30 years is life AFAIC) and that's what gave him this depression. He was not paranoid, they were after him, he became the enemy of the state.
Entrepreneurs never stop working, off hours, weekends, holidays, those are just words, they don't mean anything when you run a business.
No, but Amazon is trying hard to apply its resources, they have all the equipment, personnel to run this as part of their store and they are probably eating their own dog food here. So for Amazon AWS is probably central to their actual business model, because they are using the platform to run their business.
For Google this computational platform is really a side business, they can run it and stop it and run it and stop it and it has nothing to do with their main business.
My point is that there is no reason for the Chinese to attempt and damage Apple at all, it's an international label that produces in China and sells all over the world, including China. Apple's business in China brings money to China. If this is a government related activity at all, this has to be someone trying to use government for his own private gain in order to sell his own product, but I don't think it's an overall Chinese government strategy to attempt and hurt Apple as a business.
Yes, China is USA's "most favored trading partner", because what it actually means is that China is willing to subsidize USA consumption by providing vendor financing. So the Chinese work in the factories that produce various products and ship them outside of China and in return the foreigners ship in USD or Euro or whatever, and Chinese government takes these currencies off the hands of the exporters and to do it, Chinese monetary authority prints renminbi. So this is direct inflation in China, which immediately results in higher commodity prices and various asset class bubbles (housing as an example). This hurts the Chinese economy by not allowing the Chines laborers to get the productivity growth that they actually achieved, all of their productivity is being used to subsidize foreign consumption.
Actually it is China that would gain tremendously if the Chinese government allowed renminbi to float, because all of a sudden all of these foreign economies would not be able to afford Chinese made products. To USA for example this spells disaster in the short run. The 500 Billion / year trade deficit means that USA would have to go without all of those products. I am saying 'in the short run', as in for a few years, until USA manages to rebuild some of its production capacity (and it won't be easy). But for example look at the seafood products, 90% of it is imported into USA from Asia. You think it's easy to restart the process, once you have no equipment, no industrial processes, no supply chain even to manage the catch? No, that would take real austerity, as in huge cuts to government, enormous cuts, huge reduction in taxes and in social welfare state payouts. The private industry would have to save a lot of money before it could restart production in USA. In the long run that is the correct thing to do, but in the short while it would spell enormous shift in the economy, away from service and government and away from the financial sectors, back to the manufacturing, back to agriculture, mining, shipping, all that stuff that USA decided it was above as it lived on inflation and borrowing.
But I can easily see another possible situation, as the things get really bad in USA the government would declare some form of 'emergency' and one thing we know about government declared 'emergencies', they are really good to hold power (Egypt, Libya come to mind). In an emergency a government can easily declare a huge tax increase and straight out nationalization of resources and companies, but in case of Apple, GE and such, they are well positioned to escape such calamity, as they have huge reserves outside of USA.
Who would really suffer would be the middle class and the poorest of people in that situation, they probably wouldn't even be allowed to leave the country (unless they pay out their portion of the national and unfunded debt for example). Already the USA government made it harder to just drop citizenship by increasing the form fee from 0 to 400USD and what's to stop it from raising that number to any arbitrary amount? IRS can take away people's passports or prevent them from getting passports if they owe 20K or more in back taxes (so you can't even go for a vacation or on a business trip if IRS says you owe taxes).
That fence on the border... you think it's a good policy to 'bring manufacturing home', yes it is, but the way it just may happen is by closing that fence and not letting you out and forcing you into labor camps of some sort. Remember, everybody in USSR had a job....
Yes, 2 is better then 1. But 3 is better then 2 and 20 is better then 3.
- only if they exist in the market that is free of regulations, that help one business to get a leg up against another. If it's the free market that provides competition, then yes. If it's done the way it was done in (for example) case of Standard Oil, then no. Standard Oil had plenty of competition and it was pushing prices down for 40 years before it was broken up. In these 40 years the company made very good profits, helping to make Rockefeller one of the richest people in the entire history of the world (10 times as wealthy as the wealthiest dollar top billionaires of today). But in the process that company created so many efficiencies to push the prices down, that once it was broken down, the artificial "competition" promoted by the government could never match their scale again, the prices for oil products never went down again, they only went up since then.
You are mistaking competition for the sake of competition with the best choice that market can provide to the customers. In fact it doesn't matter if you are getting your product from a market with 10 players in it or with only 3 or 2 or 1 if you are getting the best deal.
However you know that you are not getting the best deal when the "competition" is artificially created by government, what you end up with is inefficiency and higher prices and lower quality. At that point the choices are non-existing, you have no price competition, that's something that really hurts the clients and the market in general by sucking money out of it into something that shouldn't be there.
It's far past time we dropped China as a Most Favored Nation trading partner, and brought our manufacturing back home.
- what does it mean, 'we' in this context? Apple is not a government enterprise (yet!) So unless you are talking about nationalization of successful international businesses, then your comment has no meaning. The only way it would make sense is if you suggested that US government should turn around and actually provide a business friendly environment inside the country (or if you suggested nationalizing Apple and such, but that would only ensure that foreign Apple business and money would never return to USA).
The question to Google is: what is the long term perspective here? Will this shut down if it doesn't generate some level of revenue/profit? What is that level?
Is it possible to have a dynamically generated graph somewhere on Google that would show how far away is the break even point for this service, when will it become profitable (and this graph should be updated once in a while, every week or month to get a feel as to its long term prospect)? If it's a profit center on its own, at least there is a good chance it will stay in business.
Except that if there was Chinese only business in this case that would be comparable to Apple, Foxconn would have been working with it already. To Foxconn it doesn't matter whether it's Apple or Dell or some Chinese company ordering parts and assembly of finished product, Foxconn is not going to make more money from a Chinese only business than it makes from Apple, which sells its products around the world.
Apple is a world wide label, it's not only selling in China, it's selling everywhere, on every continent. For the Chinese to achieve the same level of market penetration, they would have to have a similar brand and by hurting Apple only within its own borders, China would only lose a some percentage of Apple/Foxconn revenues derived from the Chinese market.
No, this sounds petty, not government like.