I guess I have one point, said two ways
1 - You aren't garunteed the job you want at the wage you like.
2 - It is your job to learn a skill other people are willing to pay you for.
That said I think software engineers in the US will be safe for a long time to come. There is still a general shortage in the US (it doesn't feel like it, but there is a reason you can get $75k a year with a bechelor's degree). US software companies will always have easier access to capital than Indian companies. Full disclosure, I'm a software engineer. Things were peachy in '98 so today seems difficult, but in reality it is just no longer silly.
I propose we give government subsidies to corporations who choose the cheapest labor possible.
We need to do more business with countries where child labor is encouraged, and where prisoners provide more skilled work for free. The United States needs to take the lead in encouraging nations to avoid imposing socialist employee safety laws on employers.
You kid, but this would actually be a good way to develop the third world. You have to build factories and infrastructure to use cheap labor. You also have to train them. The country you relocate to gets income it didn't have before. By definition the people who work at your factory work there because it pays more than whatever they were doing before.
[This of course ignores the child & prisoner comment. Prisoners doing labor I have no general moral problem with, but that if we're talking about tribes with flags and petty dictatorships the prisoners will likely be political prisoners. Child labor is a bit murkier, but it will always be a bootstrap problem. Once the first generation gets a bit of money in its pocket things tend to stabalize b/c parents want their kids to have the education they never did etc]
If we set a global wage for industry X (here software) by using tarrifs to up all the prices of goods so they reflect the global wage it will have several shitty side effects. What you are suggesting is that if the US pays $10 an hour for workings making X, and India pays workers $1, and both take 10 hours to make X, set the tarrif so the Indian version costs $100, just like the US version. Some people advocate this for another reason -- to raise wages in the third world.
So now someone in the US cannot buy the cheaper version of a product. Some people will buy the $100 Indian version, some people the $100 US version. The US makers of X don't have to compete with India on price, so there are still jobs.
What about the people that would buy X if it cost less than $100? It would help their business $50, so they would be willing to spend $49 for it. But they can't buy one because of the tariffs.
So the people who would buy X at less than $100 get screwed. And the Indians who would be employed making cheaper Xs get screwed because they aren't allowed to sell cheaper Xs. The US workers aren't much better off, they are now sharing the market with the Indians.
So you get collateral damage to US consumers, and Indian programmers. For the benefit of a few workers who are now garunteed a job for life by the government's tarriffs. As other posters have pointed out, this is what happened recently with US steel. US companies that use steel went belly up because the price of steel was set artificially high through tarriffs.
Do all the tax payers a favor and go straight to welfare. You'll take fewer people down with you. Or do them a bigger favor and learn a different skill. You might not like the job as much, but the idea that you are garunteed a high paying job you like is silly.
This same idea also goes by the names 'living wage' and 'ENVY'
Wha? I pay $150 for a quarter rack of space, and $200 per 256kbits/sec ($700 for a full T1) of pipe. Granted, there is a premium b/c it is at a hosting facility on eight different backbones with garunteed 100% uptime (where they define 'up' as less than 100% packet loss, but in reality it is always up).
Are you saying I got a raw deal? The premium name-brand folks wanted $800+ for the same thing (asking price, of course, not what they would really settle for).
> We already know that there is a cultural bias in the SATs.
A statistical correlation between race or ethnicity and scores isn't the same as a 'bias' in the common sense of the word. Blacks and hispanics are, on average, poorer in the US than whites and asians. That is a very hard thing to correct for in statistics because a whole host of things go along with it (parent's education, better local schools, even better nutrition!). People that want to show a 'bias' with statistics will do so, garunteed.
Looking at groups you can always find something that isn't perfectly equally represented between them. That's OK because the SATs _are taken by individuals_ and schools look at applicants _as individuals_. If they averaged your score with everyone else in your 'group' I would cry foul, but they don't becuase it would be silly. [admissions offices do other silly things based on ethnicity, but thats a whole nother kettle of fish]
To the orignal poster, walk away. If HR is large enough for this beaurocracy to creep in the company as a whole must be a Dilbertian nightmare.
an FTP session has two connections, the control which is TCP/IP and data which is UDP. The latency (time to auth etc) is longer on FTP but not really 'slower'
For the actual benefits and tradeoffs of each just read some of the other posts in the thread.
Boycotts are notoriously ineffective at doing economic damage, but still good publicity. What to boycott?
1) Pick your preferred term of copyright, say 26 years. 2) Only buy/watch/listen to materials published in the last 26 years and works in the public domain (eg read penguin classics)
The most effective things would be capital intensive (isn't that always the way?). Start a business that only sells things acceptable for the boycott and advertise as so. Book stores would have the best luck, books seem to hold their relevance longer. Or start a record store selling an awkward mix of classicial and pop, I suppose. A movie theater would be indistinguishable from a regular one, but you could promote it as boycott-friendly.
If you want to be a purist you should narrow the boycott to public domain works, stick to books.
He didn't use a computer back in the mid 80s when he wrote Neuromancer, but then not many people did. He now uses them as much as your average joe, though he is still no technophile. The idea that Mr Cyberpunk doesn't use a computer is so man-bites-dog, however, that it still gets reported as fact.
The question is which approach works better in practice. Is there a real difference between exhaustive unit tests and exhaustive design by contract?
Computer Science profs lean towards the exhaustive mathematical. Engineers lean towards either (depending on personal preference) but not exhaustively. They just do it until it meets spec.
I can't find a link to the joke, but it reminds me about the your-country-here engineer and the French engineer. The punch line is the French engineer looking at the working thingy made by the other guy and saying "Yes, but does it work in Theory?"
the only reason these outsourcing projects look enticing - any kind of them, white collar work, blue collar work, that's irrellevant - is because the wealth in the world is distributed unevenly.
And what happens when the work is outsourced? The wealth moves to the 'exploited' country from the rich one.
As long as coders are being forced to work unpaid overtime You can't be forced to do this; you can Quit. There is no Cartel in the IT industry, no black list. You can find another job.
having technical requirements set by inept managers, I don't even know what to make of this. Would you pass a law that says managers must be competent? put it in the union by-laws? This is a fact of life masquerading as a point.
being forced to compete with exported jobs Surely you don't suggest that Indians shouldn't be allowed to get the best paying jobs they can and sell software overseas? Maybe we should do just that, keeping prices high at home. Then we can tax the wages and send India international aid.
Don't take a job that requires an 80 hour work week. If somehow you didn't know 80 hours was expected, or if you were lied to in the job interview then quit.
You say as much, you have a family and value the time you spend with them so you have a job that doesn't require more than 40 hours a week. That is a mature decision, you made a choice between available alternatives.
Declaring that there should be justice and plenty for all and the man is trying to keep us down is just plain childish. Ditto for the vague idea that everyone is entitled to their dream job. It doesn't exist, you pick between what is available.
We have a thing over here, it is called "Vote with your feet"
Leave, get another job on better terms. If you can't get a job on terms you like better, tough cookies. You are not entitled to one. The idea that if everyone banded together then more money to pay workers would magically appear is rediculous.
You can complain that you get less of the company profits as an employee than the investors. Again, vote with your feet and start a company. People do it everyday. Most millionaires in the US got that way by starting their own business which is still a small business.
If you pass a law that says 6 weeks vacation for everyone you disallow people to _choose_ to take a job that offers more pay in exchange for less than six weeks of vacation.
Weakly typed languages don't detect type errors at compile time. check.
If you actaully run the program and try and concat an int and a string you get an error. If you try and call ob.my_method() and the object doesn't define it, you get an error. keystrokes are moved from the source to the unit tests. As long as the passed in object defines the appropriate interface weakly typed languages don't care if it doesn't actually inherit or explicitly support the interface.
It is a matter of taste, if you like strongly typed languages then by all means stick with them. There are even a range of weakly typed languages. Perl will try as hard as it can to get two types to play together, you can even add an int and a list and it will give you an answer. Python (Guido's baby) will throw an exception because there isn't any remotely intuitive answer to that operation.
Carter is an honest man. Carter has nothing but good intentions. Carter is widely respected.
That said, Carter has zero humility and a desire to be lionized by historians. North Korea, Cuba. There isn't a country this man won't flatter or apologize for to try to build a legacy. He has offered to fly down to Venezuala to smooth things out.
I've invested lots of personal time swinging hammers and doing general manual labor for Habitat For Humanity. Great organization. Carter isn't evil or mean, he just doesn't know where to draw the line when it comes to lending his name to a cause.
The scorecard so far
on
Using the FOIA
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
I understand the press' position, they are used to constant gushing leaks. 'Test Baloons' are a great way to take a position without taking a position. This administration hasn't done that.
Timing is everything, to point: If indeed the white house has the skinny on Iraq's weapons program, had they released the info at the start of inspections it could be dismissed with "We already knew that". Instead, assuming they do have a card up their sleeve, they can now say "You think we're overreacting, what about X!?"
The practice of politics is in general deplorable, but since every country does it it is nice to see your guy do it better.
fuzzy results aren't good enough for ALMOST EVERYTHING we use computers for. If I want to calculate a number I want that same result EVERY TIME I do the same calculation and not something in the ballpark.
The author describes a paradigm where computers give results that are good enough. For most problem spaces good enough means 'exactly what I want' Most of computing is scientific (for some definition of the word) and will be for a long time to come. It is simply what computers do well, so it is what we use computers for.
'Phenotropic' programming might be great for artificial life/AI or pattern recognition. I wouldn't recoment it for calculating payroll.
What everyone forgets about, if they knew of it in the first place, is the free rider effect.
The US bears most of the cost for most of the technological innovation for the entire world. Other countries producing things at a commodity price is easy -- once those things are already commodities.
Countries without a copper telco infrastructure are going pure wireless. Not because they put in the R&D, but because the R&D is already done. The infrastructure can be bought at commodity prices and a wireless infrastructure is cheaper than one made from copper strings & trees.
Drug prices are the primo example. US consumers pay the cost and the rest of the world reaps the benefits. The marginal cost of making a bottle of pills is low, manufacturing the chemicals once you know which ones to make is cheap. Selling at a low price in a poor country makes sense, if you charged $1 more no one would buy it and you would make no profits. But once 1st world countries say your choices are sell at the government approved price (which is similar to the 3rd world price) or we will copy your invention and sell it at that price anyway, you are screwed. The cost of R&D isn't recouped and it isn't worthwhile to make the next useful drug.
Or more exactly, the countries that agree to pay the/real/ price are screwed, and you get a freebie. For a little bit, then the drug companies go out of business and everyone loses.
1) Class Warfar is not inherently implied. There are rich people who are not running corporations (royalty, hedonistic heirs, etc.), and their are quite poor people grunting away in the back rooms of many large corps
So class warfare is not implied.. but there are evil rich people in addition to those in corporations, and poor distressed slaves who work at corporations. Good rebuttal that sure doesn't sound like class warfare rhetoric to me.
2a Corporations are indeed made up of people, but so too was the apparatus... [list of bad things/groups here, 2 corporate, most governments]
Good point, people are quite capable of being evil. Your list is correct in that governments have historically done much greater harm more frequently than mere businesses that live under the laws of governments (the evil of a government tends to be a cap for how bad any association in its territory can be). Your examples of evil corps (British vice monopolies, I'll include the slave trade to boot) were upheld if not created by governments.
A point on rhetoric, saying "Stalin, Hitler, Mao" and then talking about a ham sandwich does not say anything about the ham sandwich. I think I'll make that my sig.
2b [something about revolution] God bless SouthPark and the 1.2?3! episode. Every ass clown with a grudge has a philosiphy that goes 1. I hate life/I want more stuff for [me|others] 2? revolution 3! utopia
No explanation neccessary, just say things are bad, things will get worse until the point of revolution, and then we'll have something better. If revolution produces a better life then the French would be gods by now.
3) Corporations have a very dehumanizing effect on people.. Activities that people as individuals would never consider in any other context are routine, accepted, even encouraged in the corporate context
Quite true. Organizations have a dehumanizing effect on people. Its a damn good thing we're talking about mere businesses and not governments as governments make the laws [see above about the evilness of a government being the cap for the evilness of associations living under it].
Again, please let me know what you intend on replacing businesses and the free market with. Again, if it is government then you are a very wishful thinker. If it is some communal thingy, then please point to some large scale example that worked [heck, point to a small scale example even].
Until we have something better we'll just chug along with the current system. Put people in jail when we catch them doing something nasty, support Ben & Jerry's instead of Hagen Daas because you think they are better citizens. Perfect? hell no. Better than any alternative ever put forward by anyone in history that has actually been tried? hell yes.
btw, lobbying is not just the province of evil corporations. Every organization of every stripe does it, from charities to unions to academia. You are apt to see this as good lobying (yeah charities!) and bad lobying (Booo capitalist pig dogs!). The fact is all these groups, charities included, are going to the government because it is easier to get at money than convincing individuals to give it to them.
This is fscked up, it means they couldn't convince people individually to give them money (or at least as much). Taxes are a bait and switch, promise to meet your every need and then fork it over to groups you wouldn't have dreamed of giving it to if you had to give yourself.
People make large campaign contributions because $1 to a politician before election day will net you $10 when they pass a favorable bill.
The problem isn't solved by outlawing the contribution. The government will still have hundreds of billions of dollars to spend. As long as you can get more for your buck by advertising to the government (lobbying) than advertising to the public or making your company more efficient everyone will do it. They would be insane not to. The problem is the money in the hands of people who's main concern is staying in office. They want to disburse the money in a way that gives them the best chance of getting elected again. They have every incentive to aquire and spend tax dollars as much as possible. Outlawing campaign contributions would shift how they advertise themselves, but unless you want to repeal the 1st amendment, advertise themselves they will.
All cries of corporate fascism are a nifty combination of class warfare and attacking a straw man. Class warfare is obviously implied. The straw man is that corporations are made up of people, but are not easilly seen as people. It is therefore easy to sympathise with people who hate them (we see their faces) and hard to sympathise with the coporation (the employees and shareholders are represted by a logo). If a paper company lays off 100 people, we see them on TV protesting and weeping. The millions that save $0.05 on each roll of toilet paper are really hard to see.
Let me know what you propose that will replace corporations and provide the same or better services at the same or lower cost. If you answered government, please go back to the top. You are asking people to provide services who have very little incentive to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
I know I can't tell em apart most of the time. And who knew they had so maaany?
Field Guide to Fox Blondes
I guess I have one point, said two ways
1 - You aren't garunteed the job you want at the wage you like.
2 - It is your job to learn a skill other people are willing to pay you for.
That said I think software engineers in the US will be safe for a long time to come. There is still a general shortage in the US (it doesn't feel like it, but there is a reason you can get $75k a year with a bechelor's degree). US software companies will always have easier access to capital than Indian companies. Full disclosure, I'm a software engineer. Things were peachy in '98 so today seems difficult, but in reality it is just no longer silly.
I propose we give government subsidies to corporations who choose the cheapest labor possible.
We need to do more business with countries where child labor is encouraged, and where prisoners provide more skilled work for free. The United States needs to take the lead in encouraging nations to avoid imposing socialist employee safety laws on employers.
You kid, but this would actually be a good way to develop the third world. You have to build factories and infrastructure to use cheap labor. You also have to train them. The country you relocate to gets income it didn't have before. By definition the people who work at your factory work there because it pays more than whatever they were doing before.
[This of course ignores the child & prisoner comment. Prisoners doing labor I have no general moral problem with, but that if we're talking about tribes with flags and petty dictatorships the prisoners will likely be political prisoners. Child labor is a bit murkier, but it will always be a bootstrap problem. Once the first generation gets a bit of money in its pocket things tend to stabalize b/c parents want their kids to have the education they never did etc]
If we set a global wage for industry X (here software) by using tarrifs to up all the prices of goods so they reflect the global wage it will have several shitty side effects. What you are suggesting is that if the US pays $10 an hour for workings making X, and India pays workers $1, and both take 10 hours to make X, set the tarrif so the Indian version costs $100, just like the US version. Some people advocate this for another reason -- to raise wages in the third world.
So now someone in the US cannot buy the cheaper version of a product. Some people will buy the $100 Indian version, some people the $100 US version. The US makers of X don't have to compete with India on price, so there are still jobs.
What about the people that would buy X if it cost less than $100? It would help their business $50, so they would be willing to spend $49 for it. But they can't buy one because of the tariffs.
So the people who would buy X at less than $100 get screwed. And the Indians who would be employed making cheaper Xs get screwed because they aren't allowed to sell cheaper Xs. The US workers aren't much better off, they are now sharing the market with the Indians.
So you get collateral damage to US consumers, and Indian programmers. For the benefit of a few workers who are now garunteed a job for life by the government's tarriffs. As other posters have pointed out, this is what happened recently with US steel. US companies that use steel went belly up because the price of steel was set artificially high through tarriffs.
Do all the tax payers a favor and go straight to welfare. You'll take fewer people down with you. Or do them a bigger favor and learn a different skill. You might not like the job as much, but the idea that you are garunteed a high paying job you like is silly.
This same idea also goes by the names 'living wage' and 'ENVY'
Try about $350 for a dedicated T1
Wha? I pay $150 for a quarter rack of space, and $200 per 256kbits/sec ($700 for a full T1) of pipe.
Granted, there is a premium b/c it is at a hosting facility on eight different backbones with garunteed 100% uptime (where they define 'up' as less than 100% packet loss, but in reality it is always up).
Are you saying I got a raw deal? The premium name-brand folks wanted $800+ for the same thing (asking price, of course, not what they would really settle for).
> We already know that there is a cultural bias in the SATs.
A statistical correlation between race or ethnicity and scores isn't the same as a 'bias' in the common sense of the word. Blacks and hispanics are, on average, poorer in the US than whites and asians. That is a very hard thing to correct for in statistics because a whole host of things go along with it (parent's education, better local schools, even better nutrition!). People that want to show a 'bias' with statistics will do so, garunteed.
Looking at groups you can always find something that isn't perfectly equally represented between them. That's OK because the SATs _are taken by individuals_ and schools look at applicants _as individuals_. If they averaged your score with everyone else in your 'group' I would cry foul, but they don't becuase it would be silly.
[admissions offices do other silly things based on ethnicity, but thats a whole nother kettle of fish]
To the orignal poster, walk away. If HR is large enough for this beaurocracy to creep in the company as a whole must be a Dilbertian nightmare.
I could be wrong though.
You were right on that one point...
an FTP session has two connections, the control which is TCP/IP and data which is UDP. The latency (time to auth etc) is longer on FTP but not really 'slower'
For the actual benefits and tradeoffs of each just read some of the other posts in the thread.
Boycotts are notoriously ineffective at doing economic damage, but still good publicity. What to boycott?
1) Pick your preferred term of copyright, say 26 years.
2) Only buy/watch/listen to materials published in the last 26 years and works in the public domain (eg read penguin classics)
The most effective things would be capital intensive (isn't that always the way?). Start a business that only sells things acceptable for the boycott and advertise as so. Book stores would have the best luck, books seem to hold their relevance longer. Or start a record store selling an awkward mix of classicial and pop, I suppose. A movie theater would be indistinguishable from a regular one, but you could promote it as boycott-friendly.
If you want to be a purist you should narrow the boycott to public domain works, stick to books.
google for a recent interview with Gibson
He didn't use a computer back in the mid 80s when he wrote Neuromancer, but then not many people did. He now uses them as much as your average joe, though he is still no technophile. The idea that Mr Cyberpunk doesn't use a computer is so man-bites-dog, however, that it still gets reported as fact.
The question is which approach works better in practice. Is there a real difference between exhaustive unit tests and exhaustive design by contract?
Computer Science profs lean towards the exhaustive mathematical. Engineers lean towards either (depending on personal preference) but not exhaustively. They just do it until it meets spec.
I can't find a link to the joke, but it reminds me about the your-country-here engineer and the French engineer. The punch line is the French engineer looking at the working thingy made by the other guy and saying "Yes, but does it work in Theory?"
the only reason these outsourcing projects look enticing - any kind of them, white collar work, blue collar work, that's irrellevant - is because the wealth in the world is distributed unevenly.
And what happens when the work is outsourced? The wealth moves to the 'exploited' country from the rich one.
As long as coders are being forced to work unpaid overtime
You can't be forced to do this; you can Quit.
There is no Cartel in the IT industry, no black list. You can find another job.
having technical requirements set by inept managers,
I don't even know what to make of this. Would you pass a law that says managers must be competent? put it in the union by-laws? This is a fact of life masquerading as a point.
being forced to compete with exported jobs
Surely you don't suggest that Indians shouldn't be allowed to get the best paying jobs they can and sell software overseas? Maybe we should do just that, keeping prices high at home. Then we can tax the wages and send India international aid.
Don't take a job that requires an 80 hour work week.
If somehow you didn't know 80 hours was expected, or if you were lied to in the job interview then quit.
You say as much, you have a family and value the time you spend with them so you have a job that doesn't require more than 40 hours a week. That is a mature decision, you made a choice between available alternatives.
Declaring that there should be justice and plenty for all and the man is trying to keep us down is just plain childish. Ditto for the vague idea that everyone is entitled to their dream job. It doesn't exist, you pick between what is available.
We have a thing over here, it is called
"Vote with your feet"
Leave, get another job on better terms. If you can't get a job on terms you like better, tough cookies. You are not entitled to one. The idea that if everyone banded together then more money to pay workers would magically appear is rediculous.
You can complain that you get less of the company profits as an employee than the investors. Again, vote with your feet and start a company. People do it everyday. Most millionaires in the US got that way by starting their own business which is still a small business.
If you pass a law that says 6 weeks vacation for everyone you disallow people to _choose_ to take a job that offers more pay in exchange for less than six weeks of vacation.
Weakly typed languages don't detect type errors
at compile time. check.
If you actaully run the program and try and concat an int and a string you get an error. If you try and call ob.my_method() and the object doesn't define it, you get an error. keystrokes are moved from the source to the unit tests. As long as the passed in object defines the appropriate interface weakly typed languages don't care if it doesn't actually inherit or explicitly support the interface.
It is a matter of taste, if you like strongly typed languages then by all means stick with them. There are even a range of weakly typed languages. Perl will try as hard as it can to get two types to play together, you can even add an int and a list and it will give you an answer. Python (Guido's baby) will throw an exception because there isn't any remotely intuitive answer to that operation.
I don't speak german, but the link labeled
'BierBrauen' might just be 'Beer Brewing'
And maybe the one labeled 'BierBrauMaschine'
might be 'Beer Brewing Machine'
A more classic translation for engineers:
Druken makin vit de spinin maschine.
Ven de blinkenlights stoppen, achtung!
Startin vit de parte haven.
Isn't
"Read more about it on NPR"
akin to saying
"Smelled more about it on TV?"
Umm, is something lost in the translation or is 'Helmet Painter' really a profession in France?
Most requested Helmet themes:
Welcome Germans!
I *heart* cheese [or mimes or Jerry Lewis]
Does this scarf make me look gay? good.
Carter is an honest man.
Carter has nothing but good intentions.
Carter is widely respected.
That said, Carter has zero humility and a desire to be lionized by historians. North Korea, Cuba. There isn't a country this man won't flatter or apologize for to try to build a legacy. He has offered to fly down to Venezuala to smooth things out.
I've invested lots of personal time swinging hammers and doing general manual labor for Habitat For Humanity. Great organization. Carter isn't evil or mean, he just doesn't know where to draw the line when it comes to lending his name to a cause.
I understand the press' position, they are used to constant gushing leaks. 'Test Baloons' are a great way to take a position without taking a position.
This administration hasn't done that.
Timing is everything, to point:
If indeed the white house has the skinny on Iraq's weapons program, had they released the info at the start of inspections it could be dismissed with "We already knew that". Instead, assuming they do have a card up their sleeve, they can now say "You think we're overreacting, what about X!?"
The practice of politics is in general deplorable, but since every country does it it is nice to see your guy do it better.
fuzzy results aren't good enough for ALMOST EVERYTHING we use computers for. If I want to calculate a number I want that same result EVERY TIME I do the same calculation and not something in the ballpark.
The author describes a paradigm where computers give results that are good enough. For most problem spaces good enough means 'exactly what I want' Most of computing is scientific (for some definition of the word) and will be for a long time to come. It is simply what computers do well, so it is what we use computers for.
'Phenotropic' programming might be great for artificial life/AI or pattern recognition. I wouldn't recoment it for calculating payroll.
-spred
What everyone forgets about, if they knew of it in the first place, is the free rider effect.
/real/ price are screwed, and you get a freebie. For a little bit, then the drug companies go out of business and everyone loses.
The US bears most of the cost for most of the technological innovation for the entire world. Other countries producing things at a commodity price is easy -- once those things are already commodities.
Countries without a copper telco infrastructure are going pure wireless. Not because they put in the R&D, but because the R&D is already done. The infrastructure can be bought at commodity prices and a wireless infrastructure is cheaper than one made from copper strings & trees.
Drug prices are the primo example. US consumers pay the cost and the rest of the world reaps the benefits. The marginal cost of making a bottle of pills is low, manufacturing the chemicals once you know which ones to make is cheap. Selling at a low price in a poor country makes sense, if you charged $1 more no one would buy it and you would make no profits. But once 1st world countries say your choices are sell at the government approved price (which is similar to the 3rd world price) or we will copy your invention and sell it at that price anyway, you are screwed. The cost of R&D isn't recouped and it isn't worthwhile to make the next useful drug.
Or more exactly, the countries that agree to pay the
1) Class Warfar is not inherently implied. There are rich people who are not running corporations (royalty, hedonistic heirs, etc.), and their are quite poor people grunting away in the back rooms of many large corps
.. but there are evil rich people in addition to those in corporations, and poor distressed slaves who work at corporations. Good rebuttal that sure doesn't sound like class warfare rhetoric to me.
... [list of bad things/groups here, 2 corporate, most governments]
.. Activities that people as individuals would never consider in any other context are routine, accepted, even encouraged in the corporate context
So class warfare is not implied
2a Corporations are indeed made up of people, but so too was the apparatus
Good point, people are quite capable of being evil. Your list is correct in that governments have historically done much greater harm more frequently than mere businesses that live under the laws of governments (the evil of a government tends to be a cap for how bad any association in its territory can be). Your examples of evil corps (British vice monopolies, I'll include the slave trade to boot) were upheld if not created by governments.
A point on rhetoric, saying "Stalin, Hitler, Mao" and then talking about a ham sandwich does not say anything about the ham sandwich. I think I'll make that my sig.
2b [something about revolution]
God bless SouthPark and the 1.2?3! episode. Every ass clown with a grudge has a philosiphy that goes
1. I hate life/I want more stuff for [me|others]
2? revolution
3! utopia
No explanation neccessary, just say things are bad, things will get worse until the point of revolution, and then we'll have something better. If revolution produces a better life then the French would be gods by now.
3) Corporations have a very dehumanizing effect on people
Quite true. Organizations have a dehumanizing effect on people. Its a damn good thing we're talking about mere businesses and not governments as governments make the laws [see above about the evilness of a government being the cap for the evilness of associations living under it].
Again, please let me know what you intend on replacing businesses and the free market with. Again, if it is government then you are a very wishful thinker. If it is some communal thingy, then please point to some large scale example that worked [heck, point to a small scale example even].
Until we have something better we'll just chug along with the current system. Put people in jail when we catch them doing something nasty, support Ben & Jerry's instead of Hagen Daas because you think they are better citizens.
Perfect? hell no.
Better than any alternative ever put forward by anyone in history that has actually been tried? hell yes.
btw, lobbying is not just the province of evil corporations. Every organization of every stripe does it, from charities to unions to academia. You are apt to see this as good lobying (yeah charities!) and bad lobying (Booo capitalist pig dogs!). The fact is all these groups, charities included, are going to the government because it is easier to get at money than convincing individuals to give it to them.
This is fscked up, it means they couldn't convince people individually to give them money (or at least as much). Taxes are a bait and switch, promise to meet your every need and then fork it over to groups you wouldn't have dreamed of giving it to if you had to give yourself.
Dear Troll,
People make large campaign contributions because $1 to a politician before election day will net you $10 when they pass a favorable bill.
The problem isn't solved by outlawing the contribution. The government will still have hundreds of billions of dollars to spend. As long as you can get more for your buck by advertising to the government (lobbying) than advertising to the public or making your company more efficient everyone will do it. They would be insane not to. The problem is the money in the hands of people who's main concern is staying in office. They want to disburse the money in a way that gives them the best chance of getting elected again. They have every incentive to aquire and spend tax dollars as much as possible. Outlawing campaign contributions would shift how they advertise themselves, but unless you want to repeal the 1st amendment, advertise themselves they will.
All cries of corporate fascism are a nifty combination of class warfare and attacking a straw man. Class warfare is obviously implied. The straw man is that corporations are made up of people, but are not easilly seen as people. It is therefore easy to sympathise with people who hate them (we see their faces) and hard to sympathise with the coporation (the employees and shareholders are represted by a logo). If a paper company lays off 100 people, we see them on TV protesting and weeping. The millions that save $0.05 on each roll of toilet paper are really hard to see.
Let me know what you propose that will replace corporations and provide the same or better services at the same or lower cost. If you answered government, please go back to the top. You are asking people to provide services who have very little incentive to do so.