This will become less of an issue as the dollar weakens, and other factors also point to emerging-market wages 'levelling out' with those in the first world.
Though it seems to me plumbers are super-expensive, perhaps more people should become plumbers instead of programmers.
I "had an idea" for Kinect over a decade ago. Having toyed with VR stuff and motion capture and the like I though "Man, it'd be really awesome to have a device that does visual and shape capture at the same time, to be able to get a full 3D capture of a world in to an editor."
I'll go one better, I actually *implemented* such a system well over a decade ago (I think it must've been around '98-ish?), as I did actual work in the VR field. A camera with 'artificial vision' algorithms tracked humans in the room, even what they were doing, which direction they were looking, their position. In a 3D reconstruction a virtual avatar did what they were doing simultaneously, in real time. Funny thing is, we didn't really think of games. The application was a niche research project for a major mining firm and the intended purpose was security-related.
Unless your implementation is at least an order of magnitude better than the competition, the first one with traction wins. Look at Twitter, and the dozens of twitter clones that came out shortly thereafter - none of them went anywhere because they didn't have the users
In Facebook's case, we often forget now that there WAS a primary competitor with a massive userbase already (MySpace), but then I guess you are categorizing that under "order of magnitude better". What you are referring to though is called "network effects", and it's inherently stronger for certain types of software products, less so for others.
Much as us programmers like to think we are _the_ critical component.. I really don't think we are in a lot of cases. The idea and the marketing are what makes the product successful. HR tends to think of programmers as production line workers.. and as much as I hate to admit it, there really is truth in that.
I own a small ISV, and let me tell you, I must disagree with you --- what took me some time to realise is that the vast majority of programmers suck balls, and that you can make REAL money with 'rockstar programmers', and that such talented programmers are really as scarce as hen's teeth. Sure, the majority of crappy average programmers are replace-able like production line workers if you're talking about day-to-day stuff like C# database frontends, but if you're talking about big serious money-making development, you need a team that includes people who have a very rare combination of talent and drive. The second-most important thing is indeed excellent marketing and with that, good *strategies*. The idea is worth almost nothing. I've had a million people throw ideas at me over the years. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Social networking wasn't a new idea when Facebook was created. Search engines weren't a new idea when Google was created.
The Winklevoss twins should be bloody happy they got away with what they got --- they are set for life as millionaires, but their actual "value contribution" to the success of Facebook was far, far less than they received (and I'm being generous), and if they were such brilliant entrepreneurs that wanted to own what Zuckerberg created, why didn't they think to even have so much as a contract with him?
Apparently most slashdotters do math on a daily basis. I can't recall the last time I needed to do integrals - in fact, if you had asked me 5 minutes ago how to calculate the area under a curve, I would have needed a trip to google/wolfram to look it up.
Can't really fault someone who isn't doing it on a daily basis for not knowing the "obvious" answer.
I've also long since forgotten most of the details too, however, if I *did* encounter a real-world problem in which I needed the area under the graph, I would've remembered that I had already learned how to do that sort of thing, and go look it up - like you - and there is a vast difference between knowing this is a basic solved problem you can just look up, and thinking you've come up with something new. So yes, you can fault someone even for not "doing" it on a daily basis. Forgetting the details of how to do it doesn't mean forgetting that it can be done at all.
The only aspect where we might be forgiving here is the fact that Internet search engines were almost non-existent in 1993, so he couldn't "just Google it", and Googling a physical library is a bit harder.
Domestic violence is serious and the vast majority of it is man-on-woman.
That is a common myth, there is a significant percentage of women-on-men violence, and many studies and meta-studies suggest the rates may be equal.
"Martin S. Fiebert of the Department of Psychology at California State University, Long Beach, provides an annotated bibliography of over two hundred scholarly works which demonstrate that women and men often exhibit comparable levels of IPV violence.[110] In a Los Angeles Times article about male victims of domestic violence, Fiebert suggests that "...consensus in the field is that women are as likely as men to strike their partner but that—as expected—women are more likely to be injured than men."[111] However, he noted, men are seriously injured in 38% of the cases in which "extreme aggression" is used." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence#Gender_aspects_of_abuse)
Women-on-men violence is both common, and extremely serious. In fact, in some ways it is more serious, because society not only all but ignores it, there is a tendency to regard it as funny, so men are additionally humiliated.
This is not about conversion of us heathens, I guess. This is just a part of the evangelical fundamentalist echo chamber.
It's neither, this is about money, plain and simple. It is expected to have "a $250 million annual impact on the state’s economy", 1.6 million visitors a year, and a for-profit organization is investing $150,000,000 to help build it. It's a business. that's all (like many churches are too, after all). Some entrepreneurs have apparently realized that in America, there is a huge market for this sort of thing waiting to be tapped.
Governments will happily pass it either way because it means more income for the region to tax.
As a result they are more than welcome to give it to the govt., police, or any party they like.
But are they giving it voluntarily? The article is not clear on this but suggests they are in fact being ordered to give up the information, which is completely different, and absolutely not OK.
I don't disagree that the US has also done bad things in its history, just like every other country. But crack open a history book sometime. Virtually every nation on the planet is founded on massive bloodshed and oppression and turmoil.
If you're going to "hate the US", rationally, it would only be fair to hate everyone else at least as much.
If you ever care to learn a little history, look at the overall picture of America against all of human history and all other nations, I suspect you might well eventually start to gain a very different perspective on things. Google 'Rape of Nanking' to see the sort of horrors the Chinese did, do you hate the Chinese too? Google 'Holocaust' to see the sort of horrific nightmares the Germans unleashed on this earth, do you hate Germany too? How about the South Africans under Apartheid? Or the British, who've killed countless many? Or before that, the Bantu who literally committed genocide on the native peoples as they spread through Africa? How about Cambodia and Pot Pol? Heard of Idi Amin? Ruwanda? Do you know the Mayans used to sacrifice humans regularly? Do you know what the Spanish conquerers did in South America? Do you know Malaysia fought a war with Indonesia? Do you know what the Chinese did to their own people during the "great" "Cultural Revolution"? Do you know the Australians used to issue hunting licenses to hunt down the Aboriginal people? You show me the nation founded on peace and cooperation, please.
Not to belittle them, but in reality, and this is just a sad fact, but the bad things America has done are truly but miniscule, tiny insignificant droplets in an ocean --- and then weigh them against the massive amounts of good America has done. Iraq war dead is what, 100,000? Pol Pot, Idi Amin, the Germans, the Japanese, the Chinese, they've all killed that many in a good day before lunch. Do you know that Germany was executing 75,000 Jews PER DAY at the height of their little "final solution"? And that's not all they did, go further back, you'll find atrocities in every corner of the world, like when the Germans murdered hundreds of indigenous folk in Namibia. Oh, let's not forget what certain Belgians unleashed in the Congo - millions, literally millions died and the death and mayhem continues today.
And yet no other major superpower, or any nation on earth for that matter, has ever done so much to establish and spread and market the concepts of human liberties and democracy. In fact, even 230 years after being the only nation founded on the philosophical ideals of inalienable rights, not one other country has even bothered to follow suit. It's fashionable to be anti-US, but it most certainly is not rational upon examination of the facts.
That's the best you could come up with? Thanks for helping prove my point. Now please, try to honestly convince me, with a straight face too please, that the average person who publicly criticizes the US, fears or has legitimate reason to fear they'll be targeted for murder by Americans, like Theo van Gogh.
Anti-Americanism.. sigh. I don't think most people in the world hates America, but certainly a percentage do, and some of those I've met go on like nut-jobs. I think most of the criticism America gets is unfair, undue, and way out of proportion especially compared to other countries... the type of person who is anti-American tends to be rabidly so, and will go on and on while totally ignoring truly egregious cases like China, North Korea etc.... frankly I suspect in some cases it may be a kind of mental illness, as that's the same symptom you see with rabid anti-Semites. However, like Jews, people also hate Americans partly because American is successful, and there seems to a stupid success-hating gene in our gene pool (probably it's the same social hierarchy resentment when you're not the alpha dog). Then America is also a lot more "in our faces" than other countries, which is in fact due to its success... people don't care about North Korea because it doesn't enter the average person's life in any way on a daily basis. Then there is also an element of America's negatives being amplified by the perception of hypocrisy relative to the hype: America "markets itself" as "great", so naturally people will look for reasons to say it's not, kind of like Google and their 'do no evil', they draw attention and analysis to their behavior. Finally, we've all been brainwashed by anti-Westernism, and finally finally, the critics are cowards, they criticize America because nobody will kill them for doing so, they don't criticize Islamic countries because they'd get a fatwa and get killed.
There will be never be a shortage of corruption to expose, so "competitor" is simply the wrong word in this context. The more information outlets, the better.
Only problem is the built-in moral hazard: When a company gets into debt with private capital, it's on the hook. When the government gets into excessive debt, the taxpaying public is on the hook.
The largest companies and those still making money are showing so-called high profits because they're sitting on cash because of a number of reasons that ALL suck, trust me: Interest rates are very low and it looks like the economy has landed in a liquidity trap (that is likely to see flat growth for a long time, a la Japan), plus there is overcapacity in the economy, plus it's a highly uncertain investment environment, plus there is dollar uncertainty, plus there is potential hyper-inflation, plus equities may be in a bubble, plus even Asia may be in a bubble. The sovereign debt dominoes are still falling in the second-biggest economic zone, Europe, and everyone's pretty much waiting to see what the hell is going to happen before they make major expenditure decisions. That's why businesses with cash aren't hiring aggressively, and believe me, it's no fun for them. The fact that some corporations have a lot of money also doesn't mean ALL of them have a lot of money, in fact, hundreds of thousands of small and medium size businesses are still struggling. Demand remains weak because global economies have an oversupply (over-capacity) - too little money chasing after too many goods. Hence the ramp-down in production. It's a lot more complex than just looking at the numbers. Trust me, there is not one business (not counting the cronies) who actually likes the current situation, no matter how much cash they might seem to have. Hyperinflation can destroy cash value quickly. The global economy is still fragile and on a knife edge. Government's between a rock and a hard place; they can try prop up the housing market etc. with 'stimulus' (weakening the dollar, push into a liquidity trap, fail to rein in national debt), or push the economy into depression if they don't or if they over-aggressively cut public expenditure. If they don't, more weakening in the housing market could trigger more defaults and foreclosures which could lead to more bank solvency problems.
So apparently, over-regulation, the deficit and national debt aren't causing businesses any problem at all.
No problem at all? WTF!? In the current environment, such a statement is absurd on the face of it - do you even know there is a Euro crisis, and what it's about? It is 100% caused precisely by national debt ratios going through the roof and governments spending themselves into bankruptcy, and millions of businesses and individuals are suffering as unemployment skyrockets. Western economies are a MESS and businesses most certainly ALL suffer as a result (except the cronies). Have a look at what's happened to Greece and Ireland, and is happening to Portugal, Spain, and you'll also note the exact same causative factors show the same path for the UK and the US. It's not clear to me how you can say this when so many businesses have had to lay off staff and/or go under. Do you think the owners of those business that have been hit, that have had to shrink, take paycuts, watch their revenues shrink, lay off their staff (millions of people laid off), you think they feel good right now? Trust me, almost every legitimate business owner feels horrid about the current climate.
Maybe. A lot of stories were also put on ice when the government visited an editor or publisher and asked real nice.
Sure, yes. Still happens. Governments and private entities have always and will both continue to practice corruption and in probably most cases will continue to successfully get away with it and cover it up or prevent things from leaking. This hasn't changed. What we see exposed is the tip of the iceberg, always has been, probably always will, but that doesn't mean it isn't crucial to keep exposing that tip. But people have always worked to expose that tip. The question is whether or not the overall percentage of corrupt behavior that gets exposed has increased thanks to the Internet; I take the more pessimistic or perhaps realistic view that that percentage has not changed significantly, massive amounts of corrupt and disgusting behavior continues unabated.
And yes, there is a huge failure of "private enterprise". That's why the US in a short 30 years, has become a second-rate nation. Because of the power moving into the hands of "private enterprise".
This isn't really true (unless by "private enterprise" you mean "crony businesses", which I do not count as "private enterprises" since they have nothing to do with the system of private enterprise and do not resemble the system of private enterprise). The last 30 years has in fact seen the bulk of the power shift to the state, and mostly the federal state in the US. MOST private enterprises have in fact been every bit as much victim of this as the man on the street. You think private businesses like it when they shrink and have to lay off employees? I don't think so. Yet the whole fiscal and monetary system is designed specifically to drain private enterprises and individuals of their money and feed the money to the state. Over-regulation and the ongoing massive deficit and rising national debt are the things driving the US down.
If by "private enterprise" you mean "individuals doing things" then of course you are correct.
That's what "private enterprise" is, yes; it's not clear to me but it sounds like what you are referring to is "crony capitalism", which is basically one of the opposites of an actual "private enterprise" system. Words and phrases mean specific things. The Corporate Right practice crony capitalism, but that is again completely not what libertarians mean either, so I'm not sure if you are mistakenly conflating the two.
Respectfully, Wikileaks simply does the kind of job that used to be performed by guys like Woodward and Bernstein back in the days when the word "journalism" still meant something and newspapers did that job.
Leaks are not new. Government's dirty secrets were leaking with regularity long before the Internet existed. Guys like Julian Assange are just filling a gap that newspapers created when they collectively decided to stop doing journalism.
There is no failure of "private enterprise"; The Washington Post was a "private enterprise" when they exposed Nixon's administration, and the Internet is mostly run and built by "private enterprise", moreover, "private enterprise" isn't trying to cover up these leaks, GOVERNMENTS are, I don't see how you make the leap from that to "private enterprise". If anything the 'ordinary folk' that run private enterprises are just as interested in seeing government's dirty secrets exposed, not least of the reasons being that private enterprise requires accurate information on what's happening in the world to make sound business decisions.
Or be's a passenger in a car. Thanks Amouth, now my wife won't be able to phone ahead to the hospital when I'm driving her there to give birth, smart thinking.
With a 14 trillion dollar national debt and a fiscal deficit in the trillions, even the guys at the top are starting to realise and admit that there literally isn't enough money to pay for a good chunk of that military, let alone add any new spending. There is no money to do this. The money doesn't exist to do this. It isn't there. The government can't afford it. The taxpayer can't afford it. Do the math, really. Which part of "There Is No Money" don't you understand. At the current rate the US is literally going to broke within a decade or two (which is NOT going to be pretty), and it's because of elected leaders who seem to have the same concept of economics as you).
Sigh. It's not just the cost of the equipment, it's also the cost of the bureaucracies and enforcement that will have to go along with this. So yes, yes, it is expensive. Especially considering it's deficit spending, i.e. money the government doesn't even have, so there are further administrative costs relating to borrowing the money, and then worse, paying the interest on that money, and compound interest, for decades to come.
No, flying has become commonplace all over the world, thanks to capitalism, and is still growing like crazy. My point is that some countries will inherently prefer to purchase the Chinese airplanes for various reasons, such as the Chinese, while African airlines will choose whatever's cheapest because they don't care about safety.
Slashdot Mirror
This will become less of an issue as the dollar weakens, and other factors also point to emerging-market wages 'levelling out' with those in the first world.
Though it seems to me plumbers are super-expensive, perhaps more people should become plumbers instead of programmers.
I "had an idea" for Kinect over a decade ago. Having toyed with VR stuff and motion capture and the like I though "Man, it'd be really awesome to have a device that does visual and shape capture at the same time, to be able to get a full 3D capture of a world in to an editor."
I'll go one better, I actually *implemented* such a system well over a decade ago (I think it must've been around '98-ish?), as I did actual work in the VR field. A camera with 'artificial vision' algorithms tracked humans in the room, even what they were doing, which direction they were looking, their position. In a 3D reconstruction a virtual avatar did what they were doing simultaneously, in real time. Funny thing is, we didn't really think of games. The application was a niche research project for a major mining firm and the intended purpose was security-related.
I agree with GP, ideas are a dime a dozen.
Unless your implementation is at least an order of magnitude better than the competition, the first one with traction wins. Look at Twitter, and the dozens of twitter clones that came out shortly thereafter - none of them went anywhere because they didn't have the users
In Facebook's case, we often forget now that there WAS a primary competitor with a massive userbase already (MySpace), but then I guess you are categorizing that under "order of magnitude better". What you are referring to though is called "network effects", and it's inherently stronger for certain types of software products, less so for others.
Much as us programmers like to think we are _the_ critical component.. I really don't think we are in a lot of cases. The idea and the marketing are what makes the product successful. HR tends to think of programmers as production line workers.. and as much as I hate to admit it, there really is truth in that.
I own a small ISV, and let me tell you, I must disagree with you --- what took me some time to realise is that the vast majority of programmers suck balls, and that you can make REAL money with 'rockstar programmers', and that such talented programmers are really as scarce as hen's teeth. Sure, the majority of crappy average programmers are replace-able like production line workers if you're talking about day-to-day stuff like C# database frontends, but if you're talking about big serious money-making development, you need a team that includes people who have a very rare combination of talent and drive. The second-most important thing is indeed excellent marketing and with that, good *strategies*. The idea is worth almost nothing. I've had a million people throw ideas at me over the years. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Social networking wasn't a new idea when Facebook was created. Search engines weren't a new idea when Google was created.
The Winklevoss twins should be bloody happy they got away with what they got --- they are set for life as millionaires, but their actual "value contribution" to the success of Facebook was far, far less than they received (and I'm being generous), and if they were such brilliant entrepreneurs that wanted to own what Zuckerberg created, why didn't they think to even have so much as a contract with him?
Apparently most slashdotters do math on a daily basis. I can't recall the last time I needed to do integrals - in fact, if you had asked me 5 minutes ago how to calculate the area under a curve, I would have needed a trip to google/wolfram to look it up.
Can't really fault someone who isn't doing it on a daily basis for not knowing the "obvious" answer.
I've also long since forgotten most of the details too, however, if I *did* encounter a real-world problem in which I needed the area under the graph, I would've remembered that I had already learned how to do that sort of thing, and go look it up - like you - and there is a vast difference between knowing this is a basic solved problem you can just look up, and thinking you've come up with something new. So yes, you can fault someone even for not "doing" it on a daily basis. Forgetting the details of how to do it doesn't mean forgetting that it can be done at all.
The only aspect where we might be forgiving here is the fact that Internet search engines were almost non-existent in 1993, so he couldn't "just Google it", and Googling a physical library is a bit harder.
Domestic violence is serious and the vast majority of it is man-on-woman.
That is a common myth, there is a significant percentage of women-on-men violence, and many studies and meta-studies suggest the rates may be equal.
"Martin S. Fiebert of the Department of Psychology at California State University, Long Beach, provides an annotated bibliography of over two hundred scholarly works which demonstrate that women and men often exhibit comparable levels of IPV violence.[110] In a Los Angeles Times article about male victims of domestic violence, Fiebert suggests that "...consensus in the field is that women are as likely as men to strike their partner but that—as expected—women are more likely to be injured than men."[111] However, he noted, men are seriously injured in 38% of the cases in which "extreme aggression" is used." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domestic_violence#Gender_aspects_of_abuse)
Women-on-men violence is both common, and extremely serious. In fact, in some ways it is more serious, because society not only all but ignores it, there is a tendency to regard it as funny, so men are additionally humiliated.
http://www.dvrc-or.org/domestic/violence/resources/C61/#mal
Surveys find that men and women assault one another and strike the first blow at approximately equal rates.
Men and women engage in overall comparable levels of abuse and control
http://www.oregoncounseling.org/Handouts/DomesticViolenceMen.htm
In 100 domestic violence situations approximately 40 cases involve violence by women against men.
http://www.silentwitness.net/sub/violences.htm
Never assume something is a fact just because you've heard it repeated a billion times before.
+1 Thank you. If I had mod points, I'd mod you up.
This is not about conversion of us heathens, I guess. This is just a part of the evangelical fundamentalist echo chamber.
It's neither, this is about money, plain and simple. It is expected to have "a $250 million annual impact on the state’s economy", 1.6 million visitors a year, and a for-profit organization is investing $150,000,000 to help build it. It's a business. that's all (like many churches are too, after all). Some entrepreneurs have apparently realized that in America, there is a huge market for this sort of thing waiting to be tapped.
Governments will happily pass it either way because it means more income for the region to tax.
As a result they are more than welcome to give it to the govt., police, or any party they like.
But are they giving it voluntarily? The article is not clear on this but suggests they are in fact being ordered to give up the information, which is completely different, and absolutely not OK.
"Germans murdered hundreds of indigenous folk in" => should've read "hundreds of thousands"
I don't disagree that the US has also done bad things in its history, just like every other country. But crack open a history book sometime. Virtually every nation on the planet is founded on massive bloodshed and oppression and turmoil.
If you're going to "hate the US", rationally, it would only be fair to hate everyone else at least as much.
If you ever care to learn a little history, look at the overall picture of America against all of human history and all other nations, I suspect you might well eventually start to gain a very different perspective on things. Google 'Rape of Nanking' to see the sort of horrors the Chinese did, do you hate the Chinese too? Google 'Holocaust' to see the sort of horrific nightmares the Germans unleashed on this earth, do you hate Germany too? How about the South Africans under Apartheid? Or the British, who've killed countless many? Or before that, the Bantu who literally committed genocide on the native peoples as they spread through Africa? How about Cambodia and Pot Pol? Heard of Idi Amin? Ruwanda? Do you know the Mayans used to sacrifice humans regularly? Do you know what the Spanish conquerers did in South America? Do you know Malaysia fought a war with Indonesia? Do you know what the Chinese did to their own people during the "great" "Cultural Revolution"? Do you know the Australians used to issue hunting licenses to hunt down the Aboriginal people? You show me the nation founded on peace and cooperation, please.
Not to belittle them, but in reality, and this is just a sad fact, but the bad things America has done are truly but miniscule, tiny insignificant droplets in an ocean --- and then weigh them against the massive amounts of good America has done. Iraq war dead is what, 100,000? Pol Pot, Idi Amin, the Germans, the Japanese, the Chinese, they've all killed that many in a good day before lunch. Do you know that Germany was executing 75,000 Jews PER DAY at the height of their little "final solution"? And that's not all they did, go further back, you'll find atrocities in every corner of the world, like when the Germans murdered hundreds of indigenous folk in Namibia. Oh, let's not forget what certain Belgians unleashed in the Congo - millions, literally millions died and the death and mayhem continues today.
And yet no other major superpower, or any nation on earth for that matter, has ever done so much to establish and spread and market the concepts of human liberties and democracy. In fact, even 230 years after being the only nation founded on the philosophical ideals of inalienable rights, not one other country has even bothered to follow suit. It's fashionable to be anti-US, but it most certainly is not rational upon examination of the facts.
That's the best you could come up with? Thanks for helping prove my point. Now please, try to honestly convince me, with a straight face too please, that the average person who publicly criticizes the US, fears or has legitimate reason to fear they'll be targeted for murder by Americans, like Theo van Gogh.
Anti-Americanism.. sigh. I don't think most people in the world hates America, but certainly a percentage do, and some of those I've met go on like nut-jobs. I think most of the criticism America gets is unfair, undue, and way out of proportion especially compared to other countries ... the type of person who is anti-American tends to be rabidly so, and will go on and on while totally ignoring truly egregious cases like China, North Korea etc. ... frankly I suspect in some cases it may be a kind of mental illness, as that's the same symptom you see with rabid anti-Semites. However, like Jews, people also hate Americans partly because American is successful, and there seems to a stupid success-hating gene in our gene pool (probably it's the same social hierarchy resentment when you're not the alpha dog). Then America is also a lot more "in our faces" than other countries, which is in fact due to its success ... people don't care about North Korea because it doesn't enter the average person's life in any way on a daily basis. Then there is also an element of America's negatives being amplified by the perception of hypocrisy relative to the hype: America "markets itself" as "great", so naturally people will look for reasons to say it's not, kind of like Google and their 'do no evil', they draw attention and analysis to their behavior. Finally, we've all been brainwashed by anti-Westernism, and finally finally, the critics are cowards, they criticize America because nobody will kill them for doing so, they don't criticize Islamic countries because they'd get a fatwa and get killed.
There will be never be a shortage of corruption to expose, so "competitor" is simply the wrong word in this context. The more information outlets, the better.
Only problem is the built-in moral hazard: When a company gets into debt with private capital, it's on the hook. When the government gets into excessive debt, the taxpaying public is on the hook.
The largest companies and those still making money are showing so-called high profits because they're sitting on cash because of a number of reasons that ALL suck, trust me: Interest rates are very low and it looks like the economy has landed in a liquidity trap (that is likely to see flat growth for a long time, a la Japan), plus there is overcapacity in the economy, plus it's a highly uncertain investment environment, plus there is dollar uncertainty, plus there is potential hyper-inflation, plus equities may be in a bubble, plus even Asia may be in a bubble. The sovereign debt dominoes are still falling in the second-biggest economic zone, Europe, and everyone's pretty much waiting to see what the hell is going to happen before they make major expenditure decisions. That's why businesses with cash aren't hiring aggressively, and believe me, it's no fun for them. The fact that some corporations have a lot of money also doesn't mean ALL of them have a lot of money, in fact, hundreds of thousands of small and medium size businesses are still struggling. Demand remains weak because global economies have an oversupply (over-capacity) - too little money chasing after too many goods. Hence the ramp-down in production. It's a lot more complex than just looking at the numbers. Trust me, there is not one business (not counting the cronies) who actually likes the current situation, no matter how much cash they might seem to have. Hyperinflation can destroy cash value quickly. The global economy is still fragile and on a knife edge. Government's between a rock and a hard place; they can try prop up the housing market etc. with 'stimulus' (weakening the dollar, push into a liquidity trap, fail to rein in national debt), or push the economy into depression if they don't or if they over-aggressively cut public expenditure. If they don't, more weakening in the housing market could trigger more defaults and foreclosures which could lead to more bank solvency problems.
So apparently, over-regulation, the deficit and national debt aren't causing businesses any problem at all.
No problem at all? WTF!? In the current environment, such a statement is absurd on the face of it - do you even know there is a Euro crisis, and what it's about? It is 100% caused precisely by national debt ratios going through the roof and governments spending themselves into bankruptcy, and millions of businesses and individuals are suffering as unemployment skyrockets. Western economies are a MESS and businesses most certainly ALL suffer as a result (except the cronies). Have a look at what's happened to Greece and Ireland, and is happening to Portugal, Spain, and you'll also note the exact same causative factors show the same path for the UK and the US. It's not clear to me how you can say this when so many businesses have had to lay off staff and/or go under. Do you think the owners of those business that have been hit, that have had to shrink, take paycuts, watch their revenues shrink, lay off their staff (millions of people laid off), you think they feel good right now? Trust me, almost every legitimate business owner feels horrid about the current climate.
Maybe. A lot of stories were also put on ice when the government visited an editor or publisher and asked real nice.
Sure, yes. Still happens. Governments and private entities have always and will both continue to practice corruption and in probably most cases will continue to successfully get away with it and cover it up or prevent things from leaking. This hasn't changed. What we see exposed is the tip of the iceberg, always has been, probably always will, but that doesn't mean it isn't crucial to keep exposing that tip. But people have always worked to expose that tip. The question is whether or not the overall percentage of corrupt behavior that gets exposed has increased thanks to the Internet; I take the more pessimistic or perhaps realistic view that that percentage has not changed significantly, massive amounts of corrupt and disgusting behavior continues unabated.
And yes, there is a huge failure of "private enterprise". That's why the US in a short 30 years, has become a second-rate nation. Because of the power moving into the hands of "private enterprise".
This isn't really true (unless by "private enterprise" you mean "crony businesses", which I do not count as "private enterprises" since they have nothing to do with the system of private enterprise and do not resemble the system of private enterprise). The last 30 years has in fact seen the bulk of the power shift to the state, and mostly the federal state in the US. MOST private enterprises have in fact been every bit as much victim of this as the man on the street. You think private businesses like it when they shrink and have to lay off employees? I don't think so. Yet the whole fiscal and monetary system is designed specifically to drain private enterprises and individuals of their money and feed the money to the state. Over-regulation and the ongoing massive deficit and rising national debt are the things driving the US down.
If by "private enterprise" you mean "individuals doing things" then of course you are correct.
That's what "private enterprise" is, yes; it's not clear to me but it sounds like what you are referring to is "crony capitalism", which is basically one of the opposites of an actual "private enterprise" system. Words and phrases mean specific things. The Corporate Right practice crony capitalism, but that is again completely not what libertarians mean either, so I'm not sure if you are mistakenly conflating the two.
Why not start a Wikileaks2? The internet seems big enough for both, and there will never be a shortage of corruption to expose.
Respectfully, Wikileaks simply does the kind of job that used to be performed by guys like Woodward and Bernstein back in the days when the word "journalism" still meant something and newspapers did that job.
Leaks are not new. Government's dirty secrets were leaking with regularity long before the Internet existed. Guys like Julian Assange are just filling a gap that newspapers created when they collectively decided to stop doing journalism.
There is no failure of "private enterprise"; The Washington Post was a "private enterprise" when they exposed Nixon's administration, and the Internet is mostly run and built by "private enterprise", moreover, "private enterprise" isn't trying to cover up these leaks, GOVERNMENTS are, I don't see how you make the leap from that to "private enterprise". If anything the 'ordinary folk' that run private enterprises are just as interested in seeing government's dirty secrets exposed, not least of the reasons being that private enterprise requires accurate information on what's happening in the world to make sound business decisions.
Yes, because nothing makes governments want to set you free, like continuing to piss them off further by releasing ever more of their dirty secrets.
Or be's a passenger in a car. Thanks Amouth, now my wife won't be able to phone ahead to the hospital when I'm driving her there to give birth, smart thinking.
With a 14 trillion dollar national debt and a fiscal deficit in the trillions, even the guys at the top are starting to realise and admit that there literally isn't enough money to pay for a good chunk of that military, let alone add any new spending. There is no money to do this. The money doesn't exist to do this. It isn't there. The government can't afford it. The taxpayer can't afford it. Do the math, really. Which part of "There Is No Money" don't you understand. At the current rate the US is literally going to broke within a decade or two (which is NOT going to be pretty), and it's because of elected leaders who seem to have the same concept of economics as you).
Sigh. It's not just the cost of the equipment, it's also the cost of the bureaucracies and enforcement that will have to go along with this. So yes, yes, it is expensive. Especially considering it's deficit spending, i.e. money the government doesn't even have, so there are further administrative costs relating to borrowing the money, and then worse, paying the interest on that money, and compound interest, for decades to come.
I wasn't being critical.
No, flying has become commonplace all over the world, thanks to capitalism, and is still growing like crazy. My point is that some countries will inherently prefer to purchase the Chinese airplanes for various reasons, such as the Chinese, while African airlines will choose whatever's cheapest because they don't care about safety.