While the end question of fairness is irrelevant (fairness is not and should not be considered in a capitalist society) (perhaps the younger developer is simply a better negotiator of salary and pressed the employer for more?)
Why not? It would be immoral for management not to give raise to everyone, once they got new developer who does worse job yet managed to negotiate a better salary with them. Unless your argument is that Capitalist society requires everyone to act in immoral manner, your claims are baseless.
Of course, immoral behavior is widespread, however no one in his right mind can claim that someone SHOULD act immorally.
Public can not benefit from increasing supply of medical oxygen, so there is no point of having more suppliers. No one cares about your desire to start a business.
Oh, don't bet on it! USA is unique when it comes to the amount of people in government and business who would sabotage the lives of hundreds of millions to get some trivial amount of benefit for themselves.
But they don't decide which car I buy, which programs I use, what cell phone scheme I buy or if I even buy one of those. Imagine if we had to vote on what cell phone plans we wanted and then everyone would get what the majority decided. What if I didn't want a cellphone, or I wanted a cheaper plan or a more expensive one? I would have no choice but to accept what the majority decided for me. Even worse, we rarely vote on direct issues like that. We only vote for who is going to decide for us, leaving us with even less choice on how to run our own lives.
Oh yes we do! The inevitable result of "free market" is total monopolization, that can be broken only if monopolist makes some truly suicidal move.
Genetic material is not a person. Living cell is not a person.
Yes, it is possible for something to be both human and alive, and not in any way constitute a human life -- a blood in a bag would be the most obvious example.
Nothing, other than an organism with fully functioning human brain, or a functional equivalent of such, is a person.
Anyone who questions that, is trying to justify some kind of superstition. It has nothing to do with science, or non-religious philosophy, and would have nothing to do with valid religious philosophy if there was such a thing as a valid religion in the first place.
Hell, when a baby is born it's not really a "person" so much as a "screaming ugly ball reflexively reacting on pure wired instinctual response to stimulus"; maybe it's not even "a person" until around 4 years old (do you remember anything before you were 4? Could you remember being 3 when you were 6?).
It doesn't matter. Relatively soon after a baby is born, brain starts interacting with an environment in recognizably human-like manner. It's quite possible that the idea of mixing together newborns and developed humans, is stupid, and we should recognize "person in early development" as something significantly different from a regular person. In many ways, we already do, as most people would roll their eyes at lavish funerals for dead newborns but not for dead five years old kids.
However this is not what you, and similar "philosophers" are trying to prove. You, just like each and every of them, are trying to assign "personhood" to something that is absolutely, definitely is not a person by any stretch of imagination -- fertilized egg, embryo or fetus. For all practical purposes, those things are as much "person" as a coffee mug. There are no other answers, as far as superstitions are not involved.
Between 2006 and 2008, Morozov was director of new media for Transitions Online, a Prague-based media development NGO working in 29 countries of the former Soviet Bloc, and has also been a fellow at the Open Society Institute. In addition to being a Schwartz fellow, Morozov will be a visiting scholar at Stanford University as of Sept 2010.
This is apparently one of "oppressed Russian journalists" who would write anything as long as it's against Putin, and someone pays for it.
1. What year did you start to personally notice big shortages in consumer goods?
1989, when economic part of "Perestoika" was already under way.
2. Do you believe the USSR economy would've been viable with better planning?
It would be fine even if planning remained as it was at the end of 80's, as forecasts shown slow but steady expansion, and likely it would be accelerated by adoption of new technology that no one could take into account at the time, but without investment scams of 90's.
The only thing they needed was to keep things going, and actually maintain the balance between infrastructure expansion and consumer products, something that would be already done.
3. What is your opinion of Gorbachev and his reforms?
Political reforms -- very positive, removed plenty of outdated paranoid crap that had no effect but pissing people off and placating some dinosaurs in Politburo.
Economy -- negative, he basically decided to travel to the least developed parts of the country, freaked out seeing how different it is from picture he had in his mind. So he made some extremely shortsighted initiatives, discredited himself and his administration's policy, thus paving the way for even worse hacks.
He and his Supreme Soviet made more political blunders by refusing to make any decisions on either political or economical part of the system in any reasonable time, and keeping some horrible dinosaurs in power despite trying to implement reforms. Dinosaurs lost patience and revolted (August 19 1991 coup), coup was defeated by Gorbachev's opponent Yeltsin, Gorbachev's popularity sunk, Yeltsin and two other USSR memeber states' leaders decided that it's easier to dissolve USSR than to keep Gorbachev as their boss.
Yeltsin, being even less competent in anything related to economy than Gorbachev, hired the economists who promised the best outcome of their plans -- who happened to be a Russian equivalent of Libertarians, and performed one of the largest and sloppiest privatization campaigns ever. At that point a massive crisis started -- it lasted through 90's, covering the whole Yeltsin's tenure.
If one is to believe that Gosplan's predictions for 90's were the worst case scenario (no faster adoption of new technology as Gosplan could not have reliable information on it in 80's), leaving economy as it was would produce a far superior outcome. Gosplan, despite being often derided for arrogance, was actually good at planning and predicting things, they were one of the first organizations in the world that used computer simulation for large-scale processes in economy, and they worked pretty well over the whole history of USSR -- it could be best described as a management of a very large nonprofit conglomerate that encompassed most of country's economy.
With less political/ideological control (what Gorbachev already accomplished) and having production base for domestic electronics industry, things would likely go much better if USSR remained in place but Gorbachev simply listened to people who already were doing economic planning. However once government let Libertarians to control economic policy, the disaster was the only possible outcome, and it happened in the most dramatic way possible.
What did you think at the time?
I welcomed political reforms, however I was not aware how bad their economic reforms were until it was too late. Seeing how splitting USSR and destroying the economy made it impossible for most people to benefit from any improvements in political system, I can say that the whole thing, political reforms and all taken together, was NOT FUCKING WORTH IT.
I also have strong suspicion that even without loudly proclaimed reforms, political system would have to become less oppressive. With oldest Party ideologues already dying, it would not be unthinkable for Communists to keep censorship in place for TV and print media but leave alone
This is politics, not philosophy. All political movements have their answers to each and every of those "questions", and absolutely nothing to back any of them. This is why the only way to decide is through... politics. What amounts to hot air, propaganda and occasionally violence.
Obviously I hate you, along with plenty of other people.
However I do not try to kill or injure you, and would not enjoy doing so if for any reason I would have to do it. It's a fundamental difference that is apparently too difficult for idiots such as yourself to understand.
Did they count "investments", like Goldman Sachs crap, as revenue?
For a pyramid scheme it would be valid, as this is the only way they get any revenue. As for marketing data, I am sure, census bureau provides more useful and reliable information when it comes to predicting consumers' behavior.
Which very likely makes you biased and not a representative sample. If you're consciously or unconsciously misinterpreting your own experience or were lucky I'm not quite sure.
Still much closer to the truth than knowing it entirely from hostile propaganda.
I also lived in that region for a while, my grandfather had a good standard of living, for example, while most of my family didn't. Helped that he was a high ranking stooge for the government.
What kind of "stooge for the government"? Only top officials had significantly different standard of living, most people were within a rather narrow (and decent) range. Any comparison with, say, modern US where you have extreme luxury on one end, extreme poverty on the other, and ridiculously low standards for majority, would be still in their favor.
That's a silly comparison, you're putting absurd weight on one area while ignoring everything else. You can take a light rail to work instead of driving, how nice.
This reveals your complete ignorance of actual infrastructure there. Light rail was almost unheard of -- it makes no sense at that scale -- and driving was usually unnecessary. Within the city high density requires diesel and electric buses on the ground and subway lines.
Outside of the city one would be insane to lay special light rail tracks -- trains going to the edge and outside of a large urban area used same wide-gauge tracks as long-distance trains. Without US-style urban sprawl, suburban travel was limited, so any special infrastructure for it would be pointless. Some very intelligent people planned all those things, and with economy of scale and density of infrastructure available in large, compact cities, it worked very well.
Of course, the time is offset by needing to stand in line for food, my mother still vividly remembers that part.
Today I "had to stand in line for food" in a checkout line in a grocery store in US. In 80's those were exactly the same kind of "lines" people found annoying in USSR. The long "lines" Americans are shown in grainy photos, are from 40's-50's, when the country was literally in ruins after WWII.
I remember very clearly how pro-Capitalist propaganda in late 80's claimed that "there are no lines in US stores!", and how surprised I was to find exactly the same kind of lines right after arriving in US. This is actually a very sore point for people in former USSR -- they were promised a Libertarian utopia if only they allowed politicians to dismantle Societ-style economy. What they found was not only that their own country's economy deteriorated but also that supposedly perfect US had all the problems they were complaining about in the first place, so it was obviously a deception from the very beginning.
The car, if you have one, is a death trap so you wouldn't want to take it.
This is just stupid. First of all, as I have mentioned, cities were specifically designed so cars would not be necessary for vast majority of people living there. Second, there may be various complaints about cars produced in USSR -- VAZ(Zhiguli/Niva/Lada), Moskvitch, GAZ/Volga, etc., but safety was not one of them. The only low-quality extra-cheap car was Zaporozhetz, but anti-Communist propaganda is probably the only place where it was popular, along with some shit from East Germany that I wouldn't know about because it was shit from East Germany, not USSR. Yes, my dear Americans, people can dislike inferior products and avoid buying them even in complete absence of Capitalism.
And yes, there is a difference between USSR and its poor imitations such as East Germany, soviet-era Poland, Romania, etc. Those places were run by nutcases, and it was far outside of USSR government's power to affect them beyond having a Communist government. Modern Germany and EU as a whole have just as much trouble in those places now, and not for the lack of trying.
Why are people are so negative about this kind of thing? If you don't believe in it, that's fine, but just because people have different beliefs doesn't make them loons. God bless you all anyway.
They are still loonies for attributing things to ghosts. Looking for potentially hazardous conditions in a building (that infrasonic vibrations certainly qualify as) is a legitimate research. As a bonus, it can have useful applications -- explaining the origin of mental diseases in some people (including the above mentioned loonies), updating building codes to avoid those problems, development of building inspection and retrofitting guidelines, etc.
It's also quite possible that such research already was performed with those very purposes, however people are not aware of it.
They'd pretend to pay their employees. In return, their employees would pretend to work. That worked out really well for them, didn't it? Oh, wait...
You are doing an equivalent of Microsoft printing a bunch of jwz rants and presenting them as an evidence of Netscape failing entirely on its own merits.
Yes, people write all kinds of witty things about their governments. No, it does not mean that it all has to be taken literally, and governments are all that horrible.
Slashdot Mirror
MEEPT! would not approve.
You are welcome to work among people whom you recognize as your enemies.
I can only imagine how accidents are going to look like.
While the end question of fairness is irrelevant (fairness is not and should not be considered in a capitalist society) (perhaps the younger developer is simply a better negotiator of salary and pressed the employer for more?)
Why not? It would be immoral for management not to give raise to everyone, once they got new developer who does worse job yet managed to negotiate a better salary with them. Unless your argument is that Capitalist society requires everyone to act in immoral manner, your claims are baseless.
Of course, immoral behavior is widespread, however no one in his right mind can claim that someone SHOULD act immorally.
I think, that was the point -- to make player aware of how bad some things are.
Most people who benefit from roads are ones who do not drive on them. This is why roads are treated as infrastructure.
Enjoy 4chan posters combining their funds to commission goatse on the moon.
Public can not benefit from increasing supply of medical oxygen, so there is no point of having more suppliers. No one cares about your desire to start a business.
Oh, don't bet on it! USA is unique when it comes to the amount of people in government and business who would sabotage the lives of hundreds of millions to get some trivial amount of benefit for themselves.
But they don't decide which car I buy, which programs I use, what cell phone scheme I buy or if I even buy one of those. Imagine if we had to vote on what cell phone plans we wanted and then everyone would get what the majority decided. What if I didn't want a cellphone, or I wanted a cheaper plan or a more expensive one? I would have no choice but to accept what the majority decided for me. Even worse, we rarely vote on direct issues like that. We only vote for who is going to decide for us, leaving us with even less choice on how to run our own lives.
Oh yes we do! The inevitable result of "free market" is total monopolization, that can be broken only if monopolist makes some truly suicidal move.
Soviet Russia has nothing to do with WGA and UAC.
Genetic material is not a person.
Living cell is not a person.
Yes, it is possible for something to be both human and alive, and not in any way constitute a human life -- a blood in a bag would be the most obvious example.
Nothing, other than an organism with fully functioning human brain, or a functional equivalent of such, is a person.
Anyone who questions that, is trying to justify some kind of superstition. It has nothing to do with science, or non-religious philosophy, and would have nothing to do with valid religious philosophy if there was such a thing as a valid religion in the first place.
Hell, when a baby is born it's not really a "person" so much as a "screaming ugly ball reflexively reacting on pure wired instinctual response to stimulus"; maybe it's not even "a person" until around 4 years old (do you remember anything before you were 4? Could you remember being 3 when you were 6?).
It doesn't matter. Relatively soon after a baby is born, brain starts interacting with an environment in recognizably human-like manner. It's quite possible that the idea of mixing together newborns and developed humans, is stupid, and we should recognize "person in early development" as something significantly different from a regular person. In many ways, we already do, as most people would roll their eyes at lavish funerals for dead newborns but not for dead five years old kids.
However this is not what you, and similar "philosophers" are trying to prove. You, just like each and every of them, are trying to assign "personhood" to something that is absolutely, definitely is not a person by any stretch of imagination -- fertilized egg, embryo or fetus. For all practical purposes, those things are as much "person" as a coffee mug. There are no other answers, as far as superstitions are not involved.
gb2/b/, n00bz!
Exhibit A.
Exhibit B.
And here is how his employers describe his career, in particular:
Between 2006 and 2008, Morozov was director of new media for Transitions Online, a Prague-based media development NGO working in 29 countries of the former Soviet Bloc, and has also been a fellow at the Open Society Institute. In addition to being a Schwartz fellow, Morozov will be a visiting scholar at Stanford University as of Sept 2010.
This is apparently one of "oppressed Russian journalists" who would write anything as long as it's against Putin, and someone pays for it.
MPEG-LA, that is.
What about legalized abortion? Is a fertilized egg a person? Or a blastocyst?
This is about as much "philosophy" as asking if a coffee mug is a person.
1. What year did you start to personally notice big shortages in consumer goods?
1989, when economic part of "Perestoika" was already under way.
2. Do you believe the USSR economy would've been viable with better planning?
It would be fine even if planning remained as it was at the end of 80's, as forecasts shown slow but steady expansion, and likely it would be accelerated by adoption of new technology that no one could take into account at the time, but without investment scams of 90's.
The only thing they needed was to keep things going, and actually maintain the balance between infrastructure expansion and consumer products, something that would be already done.
3. What is your opinion of Gorbachev and his reforms?
Political reforms -- very positive, removed plenty of outdated paranoid crap that had no effect but pissing people off and placating some dinosaurs in Politburo.
Economy -- negative, he basically decided to travel to the least developed parts of the country, freaked out seeing how different it is from picture he had in his mind. So he made some extremely shortsighted initiatives, discredited himself and his administration's policy, thus paving the way for even worse hacks.
He and his Supreme Soviet made more political blunders by refusing to make any decisions on either political or economical part of the system in any reasonable time, and keeping some horrible dinosaurs in power despite trying to implement reforms. Dinosaurs lost patience and revolted (August 19 1991 coup), coup was defeated by Gorbachev's opponent Yeltsin, Gorbachev's popularity sunk, Yeltsin and two other USSR memeber states' leaders decided that it's easier to dissolve USSR than to keep Gorbachev as their boss.
Yeltsin, being even less competent in anything related to economy than Gorbachev, hired the economists who promised the best outcome of their plans -- who happened to be a Russian equivalent of Libertarians, and performed one of the largest and sloppiest privatization campaigns ever. At that point a massive crisis started -- it lasted through 90's, covering the whole Yeltsin's tenure.
If one is to believe that Gosplan's predictions for 90's were the worst case scenario (no faster adoption of new technology as Gosplan could not have reliable information on it in 80's), leaving economy as it was would produce a far superior outcome. Gosplan, despite being often derided for arrogance, was actually good at planning and predicting things, they were one of the first organizations in the world that used computer simulation for large-scale processes in economy, and they worked pretty well over the whole history of USSR -- it could be best described as a management of a very large nonprofit conglomerate that encompassed most of country's economy.
With less political/ideological control (what Gorbachev already accomplished) and having production base for domestic electronics industry, things would likely go much better if USSR remained in place but Gorbachev simply listened to people who already were doing economic planning. However once government let Libertarians to control economic policy, the disaster was the only possible outcome, and it happened in the most dramatic way possible.
What did you think at the time?
I welcomed political reforms, however I was not aware how bad their economic reforms were until it was too late. Seeing how splitting USSR and destroying the economy made it impossible for most people to benefit from any improvements in political system, I can say that the whole thing, political reforms and all taken together, was NOT FUCKING WORTH IT.
I also have strong suspicion that even without loudly proclaimed reforms, political system would have to become less oppressive. With oldest Party ideologues already dying, it would not be unthinkable for Communists to keep censorship in place for TV and print media but leave alone
Another paid Microsoft advocate.
Seriously, THAT talking point was dead before Microsoft invented it.
Look what Rick Belluzzo did to HP and SGI -- but then caused no harm to Microsoft while working there.
Of course, a more realistic explanation is that he worked for Microsoft all along.
This is politics, not philosophy. All political movements have their answers to each and every of those "questions", and absolutely nothing to back any of them. This is why the only way to decide is through... politics. What amounts to hot air, propaganda and occasionally violence.
Obviously I hate you, along with plenty of other people.
However I do not try to kill or injure you, and would not enjoy doing so if for any reason I would have to do it. It's a fundamental difference that is apparently too difficult for idiots such as yourself to understand.
Did they count "investments", like Goldman Sachs crap, as revenue?
For a pyramid scheme it would be valid, as this is the only way they get any revenue. As for marketing data, I am sure, census bureau provides more useful and reliable information when it comes to predicting consumers' behavior.
Which very likely makes you biased and not a representative sample. If you're consciously or unconsciously misinterpreting your own experience or were lucky I'm not quite sure.
Still much closer to the truth than knowing it entirely from hostile propaganda.
I also lived in that region for a while, my grandfather had a good standard of living, for example, while most of my family didn't. Helped that he was a high ranking stooge for the government.
What kind of "stooge for the government"? Only top officials had significantly different standard of living, most people were within a rather narrow (and decent) range. Any comparison with, say, modern US where you have extreme luxury on one end, extreme poverty on the other, and ridiculously low standards for majority, would be still in their favor.
That's a silly comparison, you're putting absurd weight on one area while ignoring everything else. You can take a light rail to work instead of driving, how nice.
This reveals your complete ignorance of actual infrastructure there. Light rail was almost unheard of -- it makes no sense at that scale -- and driving was usually unnecessary. Within the city high density requires diesel and electric buses on the ground and subway lines.
Outside of the city one would be insane to lay special light rail tracks -- trains going to the edge and outside of a large urban area used same wide-gauge tracks as long-distance trains. Without US-style urban sprawl, suburban travel was limited, so any special infrastructure for it would be pointless. Some very intelligent people planned all those things, and with economy of scale and density of infrastructure available in large, compact cities, it worked very well.
Of course, the time is offset by needing to stand in line for food, my mother still vividly remembers that part.
Today I "had to stand in line for food" in a checkout line in a grocery store in US. In 80's those were exactly the same kind of "lines" people found annoying in USSR. The long "lines" Americans are shown in grainy photos, are from 40's-50's, when the country was literally in ruins after WWII.
I remember very clearly how pro-Capitalist propaganda in late 80's claimed that "there are no lines in US stores!", and how surprised I was to find exactly the same kind of lines right after arriving in US. This is actually a very sore point for people in former USSR -- they were promised a Libertarian utopia if only they allowed politicians to dismantle Societ-style economy. What they found was not only that their own country's economy deteriorated but also that supposedly perfect US had all the problems they were complaining about in the first place, so it was obviously a deception from the very beginning.
The car, if you have one, is a death trap so you wouldn't want to take it.
This is just stupid. First of all, as I have mentioned, cities were specifically designed so cars would not be necessary for vast majority of people living there. Second, there may be various complaints about cars produced in USSR -- VAZ(Zhiguli/Niva/Lada), Moskvitch, GAZ/Volga, etc., but safety was not one of them. The only low-quality extra-cheap car was Zaporozhetz, but anti-Communist propaganda is probably the only place where it was popular, along with some shit from East Germany that I wouldn't know about because it was shit from East Germany, not USSR. Yes, my dear Americans, people can dislike inferior products and avoid buying them even in complete absence of Capitalism.
And yes, there is a difference between USSR and its poor imitations such as East Germany, soviet-era Poland, Romania, etc. Those places were run by nutcases, and it was far outside of USSR government's power to affect them beyond having a Communist government. Modern Germany and EU as a whole have just as much trouble in those places now, and not for the lack of trying.
Why are people are so negative about this kind of thing? If you don't believe in it, that's fine, but just because people have different beliefs doesn't make them loons. God bless you all anyway.
lol
They are still loonies for attributing things to ghosts. Looking for potentially hazardous conditions in a building (that infrasonic vibrations certainly qualify as) is a legitimate research. As a bonus, it can have useful applications -- explaining the origin of mental diseases in some people (including the above mentioned loonies), updating building codes to avoid those problems, development of building inspection and retrofitting guidelines, etc.
It's also quite possible that such research already was performed with those very purposes, however people are not aware of it.
They'd pretend to pay their employees. In return, their employees would pretend to work. That worked out really well for them, didn't it? Oh, wait...
You are doing an equivalent of Microsoft printing a bunch of jwz rants and presenting them as an evidence of Netscape failing entirely on its own merits.
Yes, people write all kinds of witty things about their governments. No, it does not mean that it all has to be taken literally, and governments are all that horrible.