Here you have Slashdotters who get all outraged about the DMCA et al. yet are quite happy to trample on us poor filthy stinkin' rotten furrriners (as they say around here). What an incredible double-standard.
Actually, opinion tends to run the range from the immature to the more rational who look at the entire H-1B process as a bad idea, and who wouldn't mind scrapping it for something better--and more open at the same time. It's pretty clear to most of us who oppose the H-1B process that it provides plenty of room for abuse--such as the web development firm down the street from me who exclusively uses Indian programmers, and threatens those who don't work 80 hour weeks with immediate deportation. (True story; was there at a meeting when he threatened one fellow who wanted to take off early--8:00pm--on a Friday.)
My concern is that because of H-1B abuse, the prevailing wages paid IS will be artifically pushed down--not because of a "glut" in technology savvy foreigners, but because the terms of the H-1B permits someone to be deported at will--and this could be used to hold wages artifically low.
Where I work, I have seen no evidence that foreigners are treated any different to their US-born (not US-indigenous - we only have ONE so-called "native Indian" working here, and she's only half-native) counterparts.
Unfortunately I have seen it at that aformentioned web development company (whose name I will not provide here). Perhaps it's the exception, but to those who oppose H-1B (and who want immegration reform, such as making it easier to grant green cards instead of upping the H-1B limits), it should be the poster child of everything that we're afraid of.
Some complaints about foreign workers are somewhat valid - I wish some of my fellow foreigners spoke better English - but I'm willing to give and take, work with them, and understand them. For someone who can understand C++, Perl, Java, Linux, and the Windoze NT GINA module, it really *isn't* that hard to do. I don't complain about it. After all: how many Americans speak foreign languages that well? I have met very few US citizens who can speak any foreign language (and Spanish would be useful down here). It's like the old joke:
What do you call someone who speaks many languages? Multilingual. What do you call someone who speaks only one language? American!
Funny. And bullshit, of course. Aside from the large number of spanish speakers I personally know (who I envy, having taken 8 years of spanish clases and having little stick), I live around and know quite a few Persian, Armenian, and Korean speakers. Several years ago, during the Northridge earthquake, the mayor of Glendale (where I live) got on television and gave emergency information in Armenian.
Of course there are those in the US who aren't all that happy with "foreigners"--but then, there are those in Europe who feel the same way. (From what I hear, most of them are known as "the French.") But then idiots and fools with large mouths and small brains exist throughout the world. And fortunately, they are the minority.
I do sometimes wish my neighbor spoke better English--his heavy Armenian accent makes some of his words hard for me to follow. But I'm getting the hang of it--and I'm glad he's making the effort to speak to me in English because I don't know a lick of Armenian. (My language skills aren't all that great, not that I haven't tried.)
What I see here is mainly thinly veiled prejudice.
Yeah, I know--all that American-bashing and anti-American feelings running around...oh, sorry, wrong post.
(Meaning if you are going to complain about prejudice, don't participate, especially in the same damned post!)
Friends back home - in fact, I used to say this myself - say that the US has no culture.
And some of your best friends are black, too? (Meaning if you are going to complain about prejudice, don't participate, especially in the same damned post! For the terminally clueless, the phrase "some of my best friends are black" is often used by racist biggots trying to convince us they're not racist. Not that I'm calling the above poster racist--just prejudiced against Americans.)
First, its 'USA', not 'USia'--or are you saying that the phrase "of America" should be abbreviated "ia", and perhaps not 'oA'? (Note the abbreviation "USofA" or "USoA" have been used in the past in liew of "USA" by people trying to make the same assertion you are making.) And by abbreviating "America" with a lower-case 'a', are you suggesting that "America" the landmass is somehow "inferior?"
Second, given the history of the name "United States of America", using the term "American" to refer to a citizen of the United States is not unreasonable. Prior to the US Civil War, the US was known as "these united States of America". (Note capitalization--or lack thereof, with the "united".) The federal government governing the various united States located in America really didn't have a name--it was refered to as a matter of course either as the Federal Government, or by an apropos description: "these various united states of America."
The term "American", thus, is derived from the fact that citizens of the various states (who are refered to first and foremost as members of their local state--so, for example, I'm a Californian) also happen to live in North America.
Of course things changed after the Civil War. Canadians and Mexicans refer to themselves as such in the same way that Oregonians and Californians do. But the term "American", used commonly to refer to a citizen of the United States (note the "the" preceeding "United") stuck, in part because we still don't really have a name for our Federal Government--just a working description which we capitalize differently.
Just as soon as we come up with a real name for our country, I'm sure the term "American" will be dropped in liew of the new name...
Frankly, given this later article on SlashDot, it's pretty clear that the notion that US schools are not keeping up is bullshit. Or are y'all saying that High Schools in the United States are so good that people can be hired directly from them, while Colleges are so poor that they can actually set back someone's High School experience?
Or is this simply a case where High School students and H-1B Indians work cheaper than someone frol College--and the lack of College graduates in scientific fields reflect the fact that many people in High School know their chances of landing a job after getting a College education is less than their chances of landing the same job out of High School because of cheap employers?
If this thing runs at a billion degrees, we'll need a very large heat sink. And I'll be damned if I'm putting a black hole on my lap. OTOH, there is something to be said about being able to simulate the neural net of a human being by simulating the location of every atom inside someone's head...
Hrm. CA law isn't clear that in-state purchases should get sales tax?
I believe that the situation is this: when a business has a presence in the state of California, and an order is made with that business, the business must collect sales tax even if fufillment of that product comes from out of state. That is, if I go to my local B&N bookstore and order a book to be shipped to my home, they collect sales tax even if the book was shipped from a warehouse in Nevada.
The law is not quite so clear when dealing with a subsidiary who does not have a presence in California, but who is owned by a company with a presence in California. In particular, B&N the web site is a subsidiary of B&N the bookstore chain, and so it is not as clear if the subsidiary should be required to collect California sales tax.
Some web presences of brick and mortar operations have been collecting sales tax, even though the wholely owned subsidiary providing that web presence is located out of the state of California. Some have not. The law clarifies this.
That won't be sufficient. For a company like Barnes & Noble to claim exception from this tax (which appears to be a clarification of the existing law, rather than a brand spanking new tax), they would have to relocate or close all B&N storefronts as well. That is, they would have to close all their retail outlets that are within the state as well as relocate their offices.
You know, not to be an obnoxious twit or anything (*grin*), but why can't someone create a bunch of source files which look like CSS but isn't (by changing a key or something)? Or distribute a file called 'DeCSS.zip' which contains a program 'DeCSS.exe' which is actually a version of "whack-a-mole" with various MPAA figure's heads?
The idea is that right now, I suspect the MPAA is simply throwing "DeCSS" into a search engine and sending threatening letters to everyone whose name pops up out of the list. By having a number of files out there which are not the CSS descrambler sources or executables, but are called 'DeCSS', we could theoretically tie up the MPAA in a bunch of potentially losing lawsuits as they in turn sue the wrong people, and are thus forced to spend more resources than they currently are.
Hey, if the MPAA wants to sue every person on the planet, let them--just remember to countersue for legal costs, lost wages and other costs related to protecting yourself against a frivolous suit.
Frankly, I believe that the Macintosh OS and Linux, as operating systems, have completely different strengths and weaknesses which allow each to co-exist. That is, there is no reason why we shouldn't have two operating systems "overtaking Microsoft" instead of one, with one (the Macintosh) used in markets such as desktop publishing, where ease of use is paramount, and the other (Linux) used for serving up web pages and other server-related and compute-bound related areas--where reliability and stability is important.
So I would say that, even if Linux "overtakes" the Mac as the main "opponent" of Microsoft, it's not really a sign of the Mac's demise.
You have to keep in mind that everyone and their dog has predicted the Macintosh's demise "within 6 months to a year at most" almost since the first day the Macintosh was released in 1984. I still remember my college roommates showing me articles about how the Mac was doomed to die in 1986. I can recall the critical articles indicating Apple's virtually immediate death in 1989-1990, and of course we all remember when everyone predicted Apple's death just before Steve Jobs came back to Apple.
I think this has to do with the fact that you either love Apple (and/or want to play catchup), or hate Apple (and complain bitterly about the "dumbing down" of computers). Because everyone has an opinion, everyone has an opinion about when (not if) Apple will die.\
I wonder how people will think Apple will die in 5 years?
either it's good or it's not. either it does what you want or it doesn't.
Actually, if the author knew what he was talking about, this would read "either it's good for the purpose it's serving or it's not."
Different operating systems serve different purposes. I wouldn't want to serve up web pages on the Macintosh, nor would I want to give Linux to my mother--two different operating systems with two different sets of strengths and weaknesses which make them ideal in two different circumstances.
I'd sure as hell trust them better than a bunch of lacky press who can't even tell the difference between Linux programmers and antisocial highschool geeks. And I'd sure as hell trust them a hell of a lot more than a bunch of politicians who couldn't care less what's going on, so long as the crisis gives them some additional power in Congress.
Unfortunately, it's the latter two, and not the PhDs, who are dictating what we watch and the policies which may or may not help, but which will screw us.
The things I observed which give me pause include the admission by one climatologist who admitted in a lecture I attended that as the climate is a chaotic system, they were still having problems getting their computer models to predict anything with any real accuracy beyond a week. Further, they are assuming (at least as I hear it) that mankind has caused damage to the climate by contributing a very small percentage change, which has had a cascading effect on overall weather patterns.
However, the anthropology employed was complete bullshit: the study I listened to basically assumed that mankind's CO2 and methane contributions were 0 until the beginning of the Industrial Age. Yet it's pretty clear from anthropological reports that (a) man used a lot of wood to burn in various fireplaces, campfires, and the like, (b) ancient man had no problems setting fire to an entire forest if it suited him during a war, or for clearcutting, or for farming purposes. (The contribution is set to 0 because it's assumed that the CO2 released from these renewable sources are absorbed by renewed biomass elsewhere in the world--which begs the question why climatologists presume that biomass absorbption of excess CO2 stopped working after 1820.)
The other thing that gave me pause was while I was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the whole ozone layer stuff was coming to the limelight. It was at a budget discussion to figure out how our group was going to go to congress to get additional funding. At the meeting we briefly toyed with the idea of hitching our fortunes to the recently discovered evidence for a growing ozone hole (note that we never observed from space a time when there was no ozone hole--the alarmists are concerned the existing hole is growing). After all, a growing ozone layer may indicate an environmental crisis--and as was acknowledged at the meeting, it's easier to convince congress critters of coughing up funding when there is an immediate concern. (Why do you think we send probes to Venus? Because it's an excellent model of the greenhouse effect here on Earth!)
Bah.
Don't get me wrong: these things need to be researched. And we do need to institute pollution curbs on a global scale so we don't destroy the air we breathe--but we need to do these things sensably, rather than giving into the passions of the extremist left who suggest we should simply dismantle our modern industrial society in favor of some sort of "primitivist nature revival" that never existed in the first place.
Yes, I am a skeptic of scientific reporting. All I know for sure is that the Mount Pinatubo eruption last decade released more CO2 into the atmosphere in one week then the entire history of human industry. Maybe, just maybe, if there really is some global warming, it is due to that volcano rather than the fact that I don't carpool.
That's the part that fascinates me a lot--if the earth was so fragile that all the CO2 we released since the Industrial age (and notice that no-one blames pre-industrial man's use of fireplaces for any damage at all) was causing substantial damage, then life as we know it should have ended when Mount Pinatubo blew it's top.
Obviously we shouldn't pee in our drinking water. And it's not like anyone here who wanders about the validity of the global warming reports are supporting polluted air or fecal contamination along our beaches or in eliminating recycling programs which are used to reduce landfill. And it's not like I'm against programs to reduce CO2 emissions because they're generally tied to emissions of other atmospheric pollution.
There is a danger, however, in tying all of these programs to global warming: if global warming is proven to be invalid for whatever reason, and we have all of our ecosphere saving measures in that basket, then will people feel free to pollute more?
"Think Global: Act Local"--what a line of bullshit! I'd rather "Think Local: Act Global", such as getting Mexico to enact better pollution controls so that their air pollution doesn't drift across the US/Mexico Border and pollute Texas...
Actually, there are three questions that haven't been settled, at least the last time I was reading the journals a couple of years ago.
(1) Are the computer models accurate? Remember, we're modeling a chaotic system here, and even the best computer models of a chaotic system can be so far off that they're worthless. (Remember the butterfly in Brazil causing thunderstorms in the United States notion from chaos theory? Well, it's impossible for a computer program modeling the weather to also model all the butterflies in Brazil. That's why weather reports are only good for at best 5 to 7 days.)
(2) Is there an actual net increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Granted, mankind has been burning crap for a hell of a long time (think campfires and man-made forest fires and stuff), but we also know that one good volcanic eruption can pump out more carbon dioxide in an afternoon than our modern civilization pumps out in a year. Further, carbon dioxide is not inert; it's the stuff plants breath--and it's unclear if there is more plant biomass now than there is a hundred years ago. (Ironically, due largely to tree planting initiatives and conservation plans in the United States, there are more trees and tree biomass now than there was 50 years ago.)
(3) Are there other gasses we are pumping out which counteracts carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses? That is, are we doing other things which affect absorption of energy into the atmosphere? We presume that the answer to this is true--after all, ancidotal evidence seems to suggest things are getting warmer now than they were 20 or 40 years ago. And even if things aren't warmer, we can at least point to how the weather seems more "energetic"--so that way, even if things are actually cooler this month, it's due to greenhouse warming.
But...is this part of greenhouse warming, and is this part of man's influence on the environment? And is this part of man's influence that is new this century that wasn't true a few hundred years ago when people would burn several logs to have light to cook and read by?
Keep in mind that scientists in the 70's believed that all the polution created by mankind due to our industrial modern age was causing global "cooling", not global warming. And also keep in mind that these same scientists believed that the overall CO2 polution output of a Europe who was practically deforesting entire landmasses just to have wood to build cooking fires and the like was doing less damage than a modern oil-burning electrical power plant.
I'm not saying we're not doing damage. And I'm certainly NOT advocating we continue our current practice of peeing in our drinking water and shitting on our food. I'm just saying that global warming is not as cut and dry as some people say it is.
And before anyone says "we need to do something now before it's too late!", just keep in mind that this is EXACTLY what conservatives have been saying about censoring the pornography on the Internet: that while all the scientific data may still be "out" regarding the effects of pornography on the development of children, we need to do something now before it's too late.
Now consider the fact that over these last 40 years, mankind has been at war with nature, consuming and polluting and otherwise raping this planet.
Actually, we've been at war with the planet for a lot longer than 40 years. Think of the evolution of black spotted moths in England due to rampant polution (such as soot) in the last century. It was routine for some Native American tribes to completely burn down the forests they lived in, such as was done by California Indians when an area of forest stopped producing adequate amounts of acorns to support the tribe. (The tribe itself would move out of the forest and bug the neighbors for a year or two while the forest healed itself.) It's also believed that it was ancient man who at least contributed to the creation of the Sahara Desert through overgrazing.
There is a commonly accepted "truth" by many that modern man is more destructive than ancient man because we have so much more. But the reality is that ancient man was extremely wasteful--not understanding as we do the value of not destroying an entire forest or no driving an entire heard of buffalo off a cliff for one or two pelts. And no matter how "in tune" or "spiritually connected" (or some other bullshit) ancient man was supposed to be with nature, ancient man did not know the value of land preservation or conservation.
My point is that mankind has been fucking with the environment in ways which make Los Angeles look like a picnic, for much longer than records have been kept. The only difference between conditions today and conditions a thousand years ago is that there is a larger population--but we are more efficient in supporting that larger population through better farming practices and land management than we ever have been before.
*shrug*
If this means we are affecting the environment or not, I dunno. But mankind has been fucking with things for more than just 40, or even a hundred years. We wiped out the mastadons and overgrazed the Sahara looooonnnng before the Industrial Age...
He's talking about MP3 ripping and encoding, which is accelerated by Altivec. Altivec is basically vector math processing, which allows you to perform a number of (certain types of) math operations simultaneously. Granted the main use for this is graphics operations which are CPU intensive, but there are other things (like MP3 encoding) which Altivec can also help.
Where Altivec doesn't help is in straightforward integer operations or logic operations, such as the code behind a device driver. And of course it doesn't help with programs that haven't been compiled for Altivec...
The paradox also applies in an analogous way to time travel - if time travel is possible, where are "they"?
I always figured there was no time travel because a universe with time travel is unstable--the past keeps changing as future events go backwards in time. And that instability persists until one time traveler goes back and *poof*! undoes whatever event that caused the invention of time travel in the first place.
I seem to recall reading a science fiction short story that used this, but it was so long ago I don't really recall.
Look at the medical system in the USA. Doctors are so well-paid that medicine attracts not the people who want to cure people, but those who want to get rich quick. So? You get doctors who want to process as many patients as they can, suboptimally, and recommend more treatment than is reasonable just to make a buck. To get an idea of who is treating you, look at how many honest med students there are. They're out there, for sure, but they're hard to find!
And this process has so gutted the quality of the medical system in the United States that people routinely fly abroad to have medically necessary procedures rather than risk their lives with the medi....
Oh, wait: they come to the United States to have medically necessary operations, rathern than leave. Hmmmm... Guess your theory has a few holes in it, doesn't it?
While it is true a lot of people go into medicine because it seems "lucrative" (until you get hit with astronomically high student loan bills), medicine is a meritocracy: you only get rich if you're good at a specialization that pays well. And sometimes not even then: a friend of mine who just became partner in an existing medical practice is still living in a tiny little two bedroom apartment she shares with her husband because her student loan bills are absolutely astronomical. (My father's payments on his Ferrari is smaller than her student loan bills.)
If you are going to knock capitalism, go for it--there's a lot of precidence. However, I would strongly recommend not insulting whole groups of people, such as med students, in order to support a half-baked thesis.
You dummy! The corporations produce X and shove into your head that you want it!
*wow!* I just had an insight about how all that food I've been eating from agribusiness is not what I really want: I've been programmed by agribusiness to eat from the day I was born!
Look at drug commercials (TV/magazines), or any commercials for that matter: they don't inform you about the product - they persuade you that "X is the best thing since sliced bread"... and the next day or week you are sheepishly buying it.
Lousy example of what you're trying to prove, as it requires a prescription from your doctor to buy most drugs now being advertised. Mostly why the drug companies are advertising is because they want patients with pre-existing problems (who are already taking drugs) to ask their doctor if there are better alternatives. But having people shift what medically necessary drugs they are already on to a different drug which may work better is hardly having product shoved down their throat--as often the alternative is to suffer.
And what judicial system? Such a good judicial system that I can sue you for the color of your roof until you have to sell it to pay your lawyers?
Well...the alternative is to have the government confiscate your roof in the name of the "greater good"...
One farmer at the beginning of this century could feed about forty. One farmer now can feed ten times that many. What allowed this miraculous development? Technology! Fertilizers, improved equipment, better processing and distribution systems (though not to those ucky third-world folks, I concede) and the like.
Footnote: it is for this reason that the small family farms are being destroyed: because farming and distribution operations have become so successful that small farmers are simply redundant.
I will note also that we aren't feeding third world countries not because of a lack of desire to try. The United States has attempted repeatedly to set up distribution centers to sell food overseas to third world countries--after all, if we can export food across the Pacific to Japan, we certainly can export food across the Atlantic to Africa. (The latter is a shorter trip.) However, so far, all attempts to set up such distribution systems has failed in large part because of the local politics of those third-world countries.
The United States would love to feed the entire world. And between the United States and other food exporting countries, we could feed the entire world easily. Other countries just don't want the food, or are insufficiently stable (politically) to allow us to set up a distribution center that wouldn't result in 95% of the food rotting on the unloading docks. (And it's not for a lack of trying by any means: I've seen and heard of agribusiness leaders regularly flying to both China and Africa in order to crack the nut of successfully exporting food to those countries.)
People in third world countries are starving to death largely because the local political environment would rather they starve than provide any sort of stability to the local region.
Perhaps "captilism" hasn't taken into account natural resources, but capitalism does. Further, capitalism does not require "continuous growth"; this is simply a strawman argument constructed by critics of capitalism to somehow "prove" that capitalism is somehow evil.
Capitalism, by the way, is simply the free economic exchange between large groups of individuals who are (largely) free to act as their own agents without (undue) influence by the State.
This is as opposed to Socialism, where the State controls means of production (meaning it would be illegal for you in a pure socialist state to buy a pottery wheel and kiln and start making your own pottery to sell). And this is as opposed to "Communism" where the State also attempts to control consumption as well.
Idiologists and philosophers who support these systems presume that socialism and communism are "natural states" that people would eventually gravitate to for the "greater good"--but in practice, to set up either means passing laws which restrict your ability to interact economically with other people. (Read: passing laws which would make it illegal for me to buy something you made with your own two hands.)
Capitalism, however, does take into account natural resources--though it does so imperfectly. It is possible by passing various laws to take into account the destruction of the ecosystem caused by pollution--in fact, it has been done here in Southern California. The reason why I say "imperfectly" is because (a) it's sometimes hard to agree upon a value for the air we breath and the senery we enjoy, and (b) even if we place a value on these things, shortages may temporarly make the value of digging for oil (for example) greater than the value of a natural park. Because of this, sometimes it's necessary to simply bypass economics alltogether and take land out of play, as has been done with natural parks. (Socialism and communism doesn't save the ecology as anyone who has visited Eastern Europe can attest to.)
Capitalism does not require continuous growth, by the way: while some people are greedy and thus desire more and more things and are not satisified, this does not mean they necessarly need to succeed otherwise the entire system collapses. The only reason why we have had continuous growth is because we've had continuous population growth (and they've got to live somewhere), and because until recently we've priced the "new" over the "old." But here in Southern California, for example, right now "McMansions" are now passee: it's "in" to live in a small bungalo than building a 6,000 sqft box to live in. People's desire to live in "older" neighborhoods has done more to curb growth than just about any other factor, including lack of water resources and lack of land close to existing transportation corridors.
But even without constant population growth and a constant drive for something "new" doesn't mean you cannot (or should not) set up a pottery wheel and make pottery for others. Dispite living with a fixed population for centuries, and dispite living with few material posessions, my ancestors (the Salinan tribe of Indians in Northern California) had money and economics and used a capitalist system for interacting within people of our own tribe, and with outsiders that we would trade with. Granted, trade was more in small things like arrow heads and mortar bowls, but it was capitalism.
Dispite being a band of capitalists, and dispite having things like property (and land property!), I think you'd be damned hard pressed to find a bleeding-heart liberal who would say that the Salinan Indians were bio-sphere unfriendly...
everyday it gets harder to be an indevidual, I get questioned about wearing all black, wearing a cape or trench coat, more times then I care to think about, and most inquireys are less then polite.
But this isn't new. Perhaps it's new to you, but wearing all black and a black cape would have gotten me dirty stares in high school some 20 years ago. And I suspect it would have gotten people dirty stares 50 years ago.
It's not getting more dangerous to be different--it's always been dangerous to be different. In fact, I'd suggest that this is the first time in history that people who have been different have demanded respect from others, rather than hiding in the underground and pretending to be normal to anyone who wasn't their closest friends and/or families.
By demanding respect, the popular culture is fighting back by answering with a resounding voice: "No!" Do you blaim them? Only 40 years ago, teenagers who got pregnant were shipped off to "homes" on the outskirts of town and everyone pretended she was "visiting relatives" rather than being shuffled off to the shadows so no-one would know that things weren't picture perfect.
In fact, I would even go so far as to suggest that what we are seeing now is a rebellion by an older generation who was raised to believe that a centralized command and control system was the only way to do things. They were raised to believe that centralization, conformity, and central planning were the only ways to crack the nut of happiness and prosperity--and they're scared shitless that we're quickly migrating to an Internet Just-In-Time decentralized technological economy which can support individuality and efficiency simultaneously. A world where short manufacturing runs allow us to cost-effectively produce goods we never thought we could before. Efficient logistics which allow us to ship goods from tribes in Puru to shops in middle America. Virtually free information exchange.
Scary stuff.
We've taken away the need to centralize in order to achieve efficiency, and we have created the technology to support radical individuality where differences are not only prized, but sought out by a young generation who are sick and tired of a pre-processed white-paste "culture." Now it's just a matter for the older people of the last "command and control" culture to either adopt, or die out.
Ah. I see. A troll. Well, that's interesting in that I never said that I was against the political protests or that I was trolling to piss people off. I was just giving an honest assessment of the mood in Los Angeles, including the mood of a couple of police officers who I know who will be working the DNC convention.
But of course just mark this whole thing down. Ignore me. Ignore the fact that after what happened in Seattle and what recently happened in Los Angeles that the general population is within a hair of gutting the entire First Amendment just so they can get a good night's sleep for a change.
Come on down to Los Angeles and protest to your heart's content. Pretend the police here aren't feeling itchy about the WTO or about the Lakers incident. Pretend the police don't still have in it's institional memory the Rodney King riots, or the fact that the LAPD has been practicing riot control for the past two months on the theory that the riots here may be worse than what happened after the Rodney King trials. (Not my theory, the LAPD's.) Pretend that the LAPD hasn't asked for (and received promises of assistance from) every major law enforcement agency within two hours drive from here.
And pretend that the public is so apathetic about the First Amendment after all the other riots we've had here that the only organization who even gives a damn if the protesters are permitted within the Los Angeles city limits is the ACLU, and even they seem a little leary when they are interviewed on local television.
Forget that it's all just a powder keg waiting to go off, and come on down for the party!
Every news outlet I've seen called them the WTO riots in Seattle. Hell, even the protesters who got shut down on eBay a few months back selling "WTO riot souviners" didn't refer to what happened in Seattle as the "WTO peaceful protests" or the "WTO political meetings" but the "WTO riots."
A few idiots broke some windows in a Starbucks.
And this excuses what, exactly?
The fact of the matter is that people don't remember the political protests against the abuse of workers in third world countries. What they remember (and what was televised, and what the police reacted to) was "a few idiots [who] broke some windows in a Starbucks."
When you call them riot you might as well call the Boston Tea Party a riot!
To be quite blunt, people around here in Los Angeles are sick and tired of "protests" turning violent and destructive, and frankly don't give a flying fuck how red, white and blue you want to make it. And personally, I've heard justifications used like "let's take away their nice things and see how they like being abused, just as they abused poor Chinese workers in the sweat shops."
Property damage is property damage. Out of control mobs are out of control mobs. And people who watch the news are so sick to death of long lens shots of burning buildings with roaming mobs of hundreds or thousands threatening passing motorists that they're more than happy to hang my right or your right to free speech out to dry just so they can get a good night's rest.
That's not a troll, by the way. That is a statement of the sentiment of Angelenos who still have vivid memories of the Rodney King and the Lakers riots.
Something changed in America after the WTO riots. Somehow the police think they have carte blanche to treat citizens like animals for utilizing their right of free assembly and free speech.
And if you think things were bad in Phili, wait until the DNC's little get together in Los Angeles. That's because right after the Lakers won something or another (I don't usually follow sports), the riots at the Staples center (where the DNC convention will take place) caused millions in damage, including burning a couple of squad cars and breaking glass and looting at several area businesses.
There were no protests, no political agenda, no demonstrators promising to "shut things down" to get their message out. Just some sports fans. And the damage they caused was absolutely unreasonable.
Let's face it. Our rights as citizens are not free; they come at the price of acting in a civil manner. Today people seem to be forgetting the fact that our right to free speech, while in theory protected by our Constitution, in practice can be taken away at the drop of a hat by a police force too weary at risking their lives to try to control an out of control mob bent on destruction and harm.
From the LAPD's perspective, downtown Los Angeles will not become another Seattle. And if your rights get trampled on--too fucking bad, you shouldn't have rioted after the Lakers win or during the WTO or after the Rodney King trials. At least that's the prevalent attitude of most law enforcement down here.
And don't expect the public to give a crap, either: most people here have seen just too many helicopter shots of burned out businesses, cars being destroyed, malatov coctails being thrown into buildings and taxes and insurance rates raised to pay for damage to give a fuck about what a bunch of "hippie extremists" have to say.
Of course some Federal judge will overturn some high bail rates, release some people after the DNC convention is over, and chastise a few overzelous commanders who ordered random bystanders arrested in order to cut the heart out of a potential forming mob. And we'll all sigh a sigh of relief that we don't have to live in a police state where anyone who doesn't agree with the prevailing view of the poeple in power, just so we can go to sleep secure in the knowledge that our city isn't going to be reduced to rubble.
Let's face it: the WTO riots fucked up a lot of stuff. And frankly I have absolutely no sympathy with the organizers who put that little party together--'cause the next time someone comes along wanting to protest Dubya's gutting of the Texas ecology or putting innocent people to death, the police will think they are just out to throw a few malatov coctails in some cockeyed interpretation of the First Amendment.
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And the fellow who immigrated to France to work is also a taxpayer--so this is a dumb argument at best.
Here you have Slashdotters who get all outraged about the DMCA et al. yet are quite happy to trample on us poor filthy stinkin' rotten furrriners (as they say around here). What an incredible double-standard.
Actually, opinion tends to run the range from the immature to the more rational who look at the entire H-1B process as a bad idea, and who wouldn't mind scrapping it for something better--and more open at the same time. It's pretty clear to most of us who oppose the H-1B process that it provides plenty of room for abuse--such as the web development firm down the street from me who exclusively uses Indian programmers, and threatens those who don't work 80 hour weeks with immediate deportation. (True story; was there at a meeting when he threatened one fellow who wanted to take off early--8:00pm--on a Friday.)
My concern is that because of H-1B abuse, the prevailing wages paid IS will be artifically pushed down--not because of a "glut" in technology savvy foreigners, but because the terms of the H-1B permits someone to be deported at will--and this could be used to hold wages artifically low.
Where I work, I have seen no evidence that foreigners are treated any different to their US-born (not US-indigenous - we only have ONE so-called "native Indian" working here, and she's only half-native) counterparts.
Unfortunately I have seen it at that aformentioned web development company (whose name I will not provide here). Perhaps it's the exception, but to those who oppose H-1B (and who want immegration reform, such as making it easier to grant green cards instead of upping the H-1B limits), it should be the poster child of everything that we're afraid of.
Some complaints about foreign workers are somewhat valid - I wish some of my fellow foreigners spoke better English - but I'm willing to give and take, work with them, and understand them. For someone who can understand C++, Perl, Java, Linux, and the Windoze NT GINA module, it really *isn't* that hard to do. I don't complain about it. After all: how many Americans speak foreign languages that well? I have met very few US citizens who can speak any foreign language (and Spanish would be useful down here). It's like the old joke:
What do you call someone who speaks many languages? Multilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks only one language? American!
Funny. And bullshit, of course. Aside from the large number of spanish speakers I personally know (who I envy, having taken 8 years of spanish clases and having little stick), I live around and know quite a few Persian, Armenian, and Korean speakers. Several years ago, during the Northridge earthquake, the mayor of Glendale (where I live) got on television and gave emergency information in Armenian.
Of course there are those in the US who aren't all that happy with "foreigners"--but then, there are those in Europe who feel the same way. (From what I hear, most of them are known as "the French.") But then idiots and fools with large mouths and small brains exist throughout the world. And fortunately, they are the minority.
I do sometimes wish my neighbor spoke better English--his heavy Armenian accent makes some of his words hard for me to follow. But I'm getting the hang of it--and I'm glad he's making the effort to speak to me in English because I don't know a lick of Armenian. (My language skills aren't all that great, not that I haven't tried.)
What I see here is mainly thinly veiled prejudice.
Yeah, I know--all that American-bashing and anti-American feelings running around...oh, sorry, wrong post.
(Meaning if you are going to complain about prejudice, don't participate, especially in the same damned post!)
Friends back home - in fact, I used to say this myself - say that the US has no culture.
And some of your best friends are black, too? (Meaning if you are going to complain about prejudice, don't participate, especially in the same damned post! For the terminally clueless, the phrase "some of my best friends are black" is often used by racist biggots trying to convince us they're not racist. Not that I'm calling the above poster racist--just prejudiced against Americans.)
Well, this is a crock.
First, its 'USA', not 'USia'--or are you saying that the phrase "of America" should be abbreviated "ia", and perhaps not 'oA'? (Note the abbreviation "USofA" or "USoA" have been used in the past in liew of "USA" by people trying to make the same assertion you are making.) And by abbreviating "America" with a lower-case 'a', are you suggesting that "America" the landmass is somehow "inferior?"
Second, given the history of the name "United States of America", using the term "American" to refer to a citizen of the United States is not unreasonable. Prior to the US Civil War, the US was known as "these united States of America". (Note capitalization--or lack thereof, with the "united".) The federal government governing the various united States located in America really didn't have a name--it was refered to as a matter of course either as the Federal Government, or by an apropos description: "these various united states of America."
The term "American", thus, is derived from the fact that citizens of the various states (who are refered to first and foremost as members of their local state--so, for example, I'm a Californian) also happen to live in North America.
Of course things changed after the Civil War. Canadians and Mexicans refer to themselves as such in the same way that Oregonians and Californians do. But the term "American", used commonly to refer to a citizen of the United States (note the "the" preceeding "United") stuck, in part because we still don't really have a name for our Federal Government--just a working description which we capitalize differently.
Just as soon as we come up with a real name for our country, I'm sure the term "American" will be dropped in liew of the new name...
Frankly, given this later article on SlashDot, it's pretty clear that the notion that US schools are not keeping up is bullshit. Or are y'all saying that High Schools in the United States are so good that people can be hired directly from them, while Colleges are so poor that they can actually set back someone's High School experience?
Or is this simply a case where High School students and H-1B Indians work cheaper than someone frol College--and the lack of College graduates in scientific fields reflect the fact that many people in High School know their chances of landing a job after getting a College education is less than their chances of landing the same job out of High School because of cheap employers?
If this thing runs at a billion degrees, we'll need a very large heat sink. And I'll be damned if I'm putting a black hole on my lap. OTOH, there is something to be said about being able to simulate the neural net of a human being by simulating the location of every atom inside someone's head...
Hrm. CA law isn't clear that in-state purchases should get sales tax?
I believe that the situation is this: when a business has a presence in the state of California, and an order is made with that business, the business must collect sales tax even if fufillment of that product comes from out of state. That is, if I go to my local B&N bookstore and order a book to be shipped to my home, they collect sales tax even if the book was shipped from a warehouse in Nevada.
The law is not quite so clear when dealing with a subsidiary who does not have a presence in California, but who is owned by a company with a presence in California. In particular, B&N the web site is a subsidiary of B&N the bookstore chain, and so it is not as clear if the subsidiary should be required to collect California sales tax.
Some web presences of brick and mortar operations have been collecting sales tax, even though the wholely owned subsidiary providing that web presence is located out of the state of California. Some have not. The law clarifies this.
Of course this is AFAIK, IANAL, YMMV, etc.
That won't be sufficient. For a company like Barnes & Noble to claim exception from this tax (which appears to be a clarification of the existing law, rather than a brand spanking new tax), they would have to relocate or close all B&N storefronts as well. That is, they would have to close all their retail outlets that are within the state as well as relocate their offices.
You know, not to be an obnoxious twit or anything (*grin*), but why can't someone create a bunch of source files which look like CSS but isn't (by changing a key or something)? Or distribute a file called 'DeCSS.zip' which contains a program 'DeCSS.exe' which is actually a version of "whack-a-mole" with various MPAA figure's heads?
The idea is that right now, I suspect the MPAA is simply throwing "DeCSS" into a search engine and sending threatening letters to everyone whose name pops up out of the list. By having a number of files out there which are not the CSS descrambler sources or executables, but are called 'DeCSS', we could theoretically tie up the MPAA in a bunch of potentially losing lawsuits as they in turn sue the wrong people, and are thus forced to spend more resources than they currently are.
Hey, if the MPAA wants to sue every person on the planet, let them--just remember to countersue for legal costs, lost wages and other costs related to protecting yourself against a frivolous suit.
Thank you for a well reasoned article.
Frankly, I believe that the Macintosh OS and Linux, as operating systems, have completely different strengths and weaknesses which allow each to co-exist. That is, there is no reason why we shouldn't have two operating systems "overtaking Microsoft" instead of one, with one (the Macintosh) used in markets such as desktop publishing, where ease of use is paramount, and the other (Linux) used for serving up web pages and other server-related and compute-bound related areas--where reliability and stability is important.
So I would say that, even if Linux "overtakes" the Mac as the main "opponent" of Microsoft, it's not really a sign of the Mac's demise.
You have to keep in mind that everyone and their dog has predicted the Macintosh's demise "within 6 months to a year at most" almost since the first day the Macintosh was released in 1984. I still remember my college roommates showing me articles about how the Mac was doomed to die in 1986. I can recall the critical articles indicating Apple's virtually immediate death in 1989-1990, and of course we all remember when everyone predicted Apple's death just before Steve Jobs came back to Apple.
I think this has to do with the fact that you either love Apple (and/or want to play catchup), or hate Apple (and complain bitterly about the "dumbing down" of computers). Because everyone has an opinion, everyone has an opinion about when (not if) Apple will die.\
I wonder how people will think Apple will die in 5 years?
either it's good or it's not. either it does what you want or it doesn't.
Actually, if the author knew what he was talking about, this would read "either it's good for the purpose it's serving or it's not."
Different operating systems serve different purposes. I wouldn't want to serve up web pages on the Macintosh, nor would I want to give Linux to my mother--two different operating systems with two different sets of strengths and weaknesses which make them ideal in two different circumstances.
I'd sure as hell trust them better than a bunch of lacky press who can't even tell the difference between Linux programmers and antisocial highschool geeks. And I'd sure as hell trust them a hell of a lot more than a bunch of politicians who couldn't care less what's going on, so long as the crisis gives them some additional power in Congress.
Unfortunately, it's the latter two, and not the PhDs, who are dictating what we watch and the policies which may or may not help, but which will screw us.
The things I observed which give me pause include the admission by one climatologist who admitted in a lecture I attended that as the climate is a chaotic system, they were still having problems getting their computer models to predict anything with any real accuracy beyond a week. Further, they are assuming (at least as I hear it) that mankind has caused damage to the climate by contributing a very small percentage change, which has had a cascading effect on overall weather patterns.
However, the anthropology employed was complete bullshit: the study I listened to basically assumed that mankind's CO2 and methane contributions were 0 until the beginning of the Industrial Age. Yet it's pretty clear from anthropological reports that (a) man used a lot of wood to burn in various fireplaces, campfires, and the like, (b) ancient man had no problems setting fire to an entire forest if it suited him during a war, or for clearcutting, or for farming purposes. (The contribution is set to 0 because it's assumed that the CO2 released from these renewable sources are absorbed by renewed biomass elsewhere in the world--which begs the question why climatologists presume that biomass absorbption of excess CO2 stopped working after 1820.)
The other thing that gave me pause was while I was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the whole ozone layer stuff was coming to the limelight. It was at a budget discussion to figure out how our group was going to go to congress to get additional funding. At the meeting we briefly toyed with the idea of hitching our fortunes to the recently discovered evidence for a growing ozone hole (note that we never observed from space a time when there was no ozone hole--the alarmists are concerned the existing hole is growing). After all, a growing ozone layer may indicate an environmental crisis--and as was acknowledged at the meeting, it's easier to convince congress critters of coughing up funding when there is an immediate concern. (Why do you think we send probes to Venus? Because it's an excellent model of the greenhouse effect here on Earth!)
Bah.
Don't get me wrong: these things need to be researched. And we do need to institute pollution curbs on a global scale so we don't destroy the air we breathe--but we need to do these things sensably, rather than giving into the passions of the extremist left who suggest we should simply dismantle our modern industrial society in favor of some sort of "primitivist nature revival" that never existed in the first place.
Yes, I am a skeptic of scientific reporting. All I know for sure is that the Mount Pinatubo eruption last decade released more CO2 into the atmosphere in one week then the entire history of human industry. Maybe, just maybe, if there really is some global warming, it is due to that volcano rather than the fact that I don't carpool.
That's the part that fascinates me a lot--if the earth was so fragile that all the CO2 we released since the Industrial age (and notice that no-one blames pre-industrial man's use of fireplaces for any damage at all) was causing substantial damage, then life as we know it should have ended when Mount Pinatubo blew it's top.
Obviously we shouldn't pee in our drinking water. And it's not like anyone here who wanders about the validity of the global warming reports are supporting polluted air or fecal contamination along our beaches or in eliminating recycling programs which are used to reduce landfill. And it's not like I'm against programs to reduce CO2 emissions because they're generally tied to emissions of other atmospheric pollution.
There is a danger, however, in tying all of these programs to global warming: if global warming is proven to be invalid for whatever reason, and we have all of our ecosphere saving measures in that basket, then will people feel free to pollute more?
"Think Global: Act Local"--what a line of bullshit! I'd rather "Think Local: Act Global", such as getting Mexico to enact better pollution controls so that their air pollution doesn't drift across the US/Mexico Border and pollute Texas...
Actually, there are three questions that haven't been settled, at least the last time I was reading the journals a couple of years ago.
(1) Are the computer models accurate? Remember, we're modeling a chaotic system here, and even the best computer models of a chaotic system can be so far off that they're worthless. (Remember the butterfly in Brazil causing thunderstorms in the United States notion from chaos theory? Well, it's impossible for a computer program modeling the weather to also model all the butterflies in Brazil. That's why weather reports are only good for at best 5 to 7 days.)
(2) Is there an actual net increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere? Granted, mankind has been burning crap for a hell of a long time (think campfires and man-made forest fires and stuff), but we also know that one good volcanic eruption can pump out more carbon dioxide in an afternoon than our modern civilization pumps out in a year. Further, carbon dioxide is not inert; it's the stuff plants breath--and it's unclear if there is more plant biomass now than there is a hundred years ago. (Ironically, due largely to tree planting initiatives and conservation plans in the United States, there are more trees and tree biomass now than there was 50 years ago.)
(3) Are there other gasses we are pumping out which counteracts carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses? That is, are we doing other things which affect absorption of energy into the atmosphere? We presume that the answer to this is true--after all, ancidotal evidence seems to suggest things are getting warmer now than they were 20 or 40 years ago. And even if things aren't warmer, we can at least point to how the weather seems more "energetic"--so that way, even if things are actually cooler this month, it's due to greenhouse warming.
But...is this part of greenhouse warming, and is this part of man's influence on the environment? And is this part of man's influence that is new this century that wasn't true a few hundred years ago when people would burn several logs to have light to cook and read by?
Keep in mind that scientists in the 70's believed that all the polution created by mankind due to our industrial modern age was causing global "cooling", not global warming. And also keep in mind that these same scientists believed that the overall CO2 polution output of a Europe who was practically deforesting entire landmasses just to have wood to build cooking fires and the like was doing less damage than a modern oil-burning electrical power plant.
I'm not saying we're not doing damage. And I'm certainly NOT advocating we continue our current practice of peeing in our drinking water and shitting on our food. I'm just saying that global warming is not as cut and dry as some people say it is.
And before anyone says "we need to do something now before it's too late!", just keep in mind that this is EXACTLY what conservatives have been saying about censoring the pornography on the Internet: that while all the scientific data may still be "out" regarding the effects of pornography on the development of children, we need to do something now before it's too late.
Now consider the fact that over these last 40 years, mankind has been at war with nature, consuming and polluting and otherwise raping this planet.
Actually, we've been at war with the planet for a lot longer than 40 years. Think of the evolution of black spotted moths in England due to rampant polution (such as soot) in the last century. It was routine for some Native American tribes to completely burn down the forests they lived in, such as was done by California Indians when an area of forest stopped producing adequate amounts of acorns to support the tribe. (The tribe itself would move out of the forest and bug the neighbors for a year or two while the forest healed itself.) It's also believed that it was ancient man who at least contributed to the creation of the Sahara Desert through overgrazing.
There is a commonly accepted "truth" by many that modern man is more destructive than ancient man because we have so much more. But the reality is that ancient man was extremely wasteful--not understanding as we do the value of not destroying an entire forest or no driving an entire heard of buffalo off a cliff for one or two pelts. And no matter how "in tune" or "spiritually connected" (or some other bullshit) ancient man was supposed to be with nature, ancient man did not know the value of land preservation or conservation.
My point is that mankind has been fucking with the environment in ways which make Los Angeles look like a picnic, for much longer than records have been kept. The only difference between conditions today and conditions a thousand years ago is that there is a larger population--but we are more efficient in supporting that larger population through better farming practices and land management than we ever have been before.
*shrug*
If this means we are affecting the environment or not, I dunno. But mankind has been fucking with things for more than just 40, or even a hundred years. We wiped out the mastadons and overgrazed the Sahara looooonnnng before the Industrial Age...
He's talking about MP3 ripping and encoding, which is accelerated by Altivec. Altivec is basically vector math processing, which allows you to perform a number of (certain types of) math operations simultaneously. Granted the main use for this is graphics operations which are CPU intensive, but there are other things (like MP3 encoding) which Altivec can also help.
Where Altivec doesn't help is in straightforward integer operations or logic operations, such as the code behind a device driver. And of course it doesn't help with programs that haven't been compiled for Altivec...
The paradox also applies in an analogous way to time travel - if time travel is possible, where are "they"?
I always figured there was no time travel because a universe with time travel is unstable--the past keeps changing as future events go backwards in time. And that instability persists until one time traveler goes back and *poof*! undoes whatever event that caused the invention of time travel in the first place.
I seem to recall reading a science fiction short story that used this, but it was so long ago I don't really recall.
Look at the medical system in the USA. Doctors are so well-paid that medicine attracts not the people who want to cure people, but those who want to get rich quick. So? You get doctors who want to process as many patients as they can, suboptimally, and recommend more treatment than is reasonable just to make a buck. To get an idea of who is treating you, look at how many honest med students there are. They're out there, for sure, but they're hard to find!
And this process has so gutted the quality of the medical system in the United States that people routinely fly abroad to have medically necessary procedures rather than risk their lives with the medi....
Oh, wait: they come to the United States to have medically necessary operations, rathern than leave. Hmmmm... Guess your theory has a few holes in it, doesn't it?
While it is true a lot of people go into medicine because it seems "lucrative" (until you get hit with astronomically high student loan bills), medicine is a meritocracy: you only get rich if you're good at a specialization that pays well. And sometimes not even then: a friend of mine who just became partner in an existing medical practice is still living in a tiny little two bedroom apartment she shares with her husband because her student loan bills are absolutely astronomical. (My father's payments on his Ferrari is smaller than her student loan bills.)
If you are going to knock capitalism, go for it--there's a lot of precidence. However, I would strongly recommend not insulting whole groups of people, such as med students, in order to support a half-baked thesis.
You dummy! The corporations produce X and shove into your head that you want it!
*wow!* I just had an insight about how all that food I've been eating from agribusiness is not what I really want: I've been programmed by agribusiness to eat from the day I was born!
Look at drug commercials (TV/magazines), or any commercials for that matter: they don't inform you about the product - they persuade you that "X is the best thing since sliced bread"... and the next day or week you are sheepishly buying it.
Lousy example of what you're trying to prove, as it requires a prescription from your doctor to buy most drugs now being advertised. Mostly why the drug companies are advertising is because they want patients with pre-existing problems (who are already taking drugs) to ask their doctor if there are better alternatives. But having people shift what medically necessary drugs they are already on to a different drug which may work better is hardly having product shoved down their throat--as often the alternative is to suffer.
And what judicial system? Such a good judicial system that I can sue you for the color of your roof until you have to sell it to pay your lawyers?
Well...the alternative is to have the government confiscate your roof in the name of the "greater good"...
One farmer at the beginning of this century could feed about forty. One farmer now can feed ten times that many. What allowed this miraculous development? Technology! Fertilizers, improved equipment, better processing and distribution systems (though not to those ucky third-world folks, I concede) and the like.
Footnote: it is for this reason that the small family farms are being destroyed: because farming and distribution operations have become so successful that small farmers are simply redundant.
I will note also that we aren't feeding third world countries not because of a lack of desire to try. The United States has attempted repeatedly to set up distribution centers to sell food overseas to third world countries--after all, if we can export food across the Pacific to Japan, we certainly can export food across the Atlantic to Africa. (The latter is a shorter trip.) However, so far, all attempts to set up such distribution systems has failed in large part because of the local politics of those third-world countries.
The United States would love to feed the entire world. And between the United States and other food exporting countries, we could feed the entire world easily. Other countries just don't want the food, or are insufficiently stable (politically) to allow us to set up a distribution center that wouldn't result in 95% of the food rotting on the unloading docks. (And it's not for a lack of trying by any means: I've seen and heard of agribusiness leaders regularly flying to both China and Africa in order to crack the nut of successfully exporting food to those countries.)
People in third world countries are starving to death largely because the local political environment would rather they starve than provide any sort of stability to the local region.
Perhaps "captilism" hasn't taken into account natural resources, but capitalism does. Further, capitalism does not require "continuous growth"; this is simply a strawman argument constructed by critics of capitalism to somehow "prove" that capitalism is somehow evil.
Capitalism, by the way, is simply the free economic exchange between large groups of individuals who are (largely) free to act as their own agents without (undue) influence by the State.
This is as opposed to Socialism, where the State controls means of production (meaning it would be illegal for you in a pure socialist state to buy a pottery wheel and kiln and start making your own pottery to sell). And this is as opposed to "Communism" where the State also attempts to control consumption as well.
Idiologists and philosophers who support these systems presume that socialism and communism are "natural states" that people would eventually gravitate to for the "greater good"--but in practice, to set up either means passing laws which restrict your ability to interact economically with other people. (Read: passing laws which would make it illegal for me to buy something you made with your own two hands.)
Capitalism, however, does take into account natural resources--though it does so imperfectly. It is possible by passing various laws to take into account the destruction of the ecosystem caused by pollution--in fact, it has been done here in Southern California. The reason why I say "imperfectly" is because (a) it's sometimes hard to agree upon a value for the air we breath and the senery we enjoy, and (b) even if we place a value on these things, shortages may temporarly make the value of digging for oil (for example) greater than the value of a natural park. Because of this, sometimes it's necessary to simply bypass economics alltogether and take land out of play, as has been done with natural parks. (Socialism and communism doesn't save the ecology as anyone who has visited Eastern Europe can attest to.)
Capitalism does not require continuous growth, by the way: while some people are greedy and thus desire more and more things and are not satisified, this does not mean they necessarly need to succeed otherwise the entire system collapses. The only reason why we have had continuous growth is because we've had continuous population growth (and they've got to live somewhere), and because until recently we've priced the "new" over the "old." But here in Southern California, for example, right now "McMansions" are now passee: it's "in" to live in a small bungalo than building a 6,000 sqft box to live in. People's desire to live in "older" neighborhoods has done more to curb growth than just about any other factor, including lack of water resources and lack of land close to existing transportation corridors.
But even without constant population growth and a constant drive for something "new" doesn't mean you cannot (or should not) set up a pottery wheel and make pottery for others. Dispite living with a fixed population for centuries, and dispite living with few material posessions, my ancestors (the Salinan tribe of Indians in Northern California) had money and economics and used a capitalist system for interacting within people of our own tribe, and with outsiders that we would trade with. Granted, trade was more in small things like arrow heads and mortar bowls, but it was capitalism.
Dispite being a band of capitalists, and dispite having things like property (and land property!), I think you'd be damned hard pressed to find a bleeding-heart liberal who would say that the Salinan Indians were bio-sphere unfriendly...
everyday it gets harder to be an indevidual, I get questioned about wearing all black, wearing a cape or trench coat, more times then I care to think about, and most inquireys are less then polite.
But this isn't new. Perhaps it's new to you, but wearing all black and a black cape would have gotten me dirty stares in high school some 20 years ago. And I suspect it would have gotten people dirty stares 50 years ago.
It's not getting more dangerous to be different--it's always been dangerous to be different. In fact, I'd suggest that this is the first time in history that people who have been different have demanded respect from others, rather than hiding in the underground and pretending to be normal to anyone who wasn't their closest friends and/or families.
By demanding respect, the popular culture is fighting back by answering with a resounding voice: "No!" Do you blaim them? Only 40 years ago, teenagers who got pregnant were shipped off to "homes" on the outskirts of town and everyone pretended she was "visiting relatives" rather than being shuffled off to the shadows so no-one would know that things weren't picture perfect.
In fact, I would even go so far as to suggest that what we are seeing now is a rebellion by an older generation who was raised to believe that a centralized command and control system was the only way to do things. They were raised to believe that centralization, conformity, and central planning were the only ways to crack the nut of happiness and prosperity--and they're scared shitless that we're quickly migrating to an Internet Just-In-Time decentralized technological economy which can support individuality and efficiency simultaneously. A world where short manufacturing runs allow us to cost-effectively produce goods we never thought we could before. Efficient logistics which allow us to ship goods from tribes in Puru to shops in middle America. Virtually free information exchange.
Scary stuff.
We've taken away the need to centralize in order to achieve efficiency, and we have created the technology to support radical individuality where differences are not only prized, but sought out by a young generation who are sick and tired of a pre-processed white-paste "culture." Now it's just a matter for the older people of the last "command and control" culture to either adopt, or die out.
Frankly, I'm excited to be living in this age!
Ah. I see. A troll. Well, that's interesting in that I never said that I was against the political protests or that I was trolling to piss people off. I was just giving an honest assessment of the mood in Los Angeles, including the mood of a couple of police officers who I know who will be working the DNC convention.
But of course just mark this whole thing down. Ignore me. Ignore the fact that after what happened in Seattle and what recently happened in Los Angeles that the general population is within a hair of gutting the entire First Amendment just so they can get a good night's sleep for a change.
Come on down to Los Angeles and protest to your heart's content. Pretend the police here aren't feeling itchy about the WTO or about the Lakers incident. Pretend the police don't still have in it's institional memory the Rodney King riots, or the fact that the LAPD has been practicing riot control for the past two months on the theory that the riots here may be worse than what happened after the Rodney King trials. (Not my theory, the LAPD's.) Pretend that the LAPD hasn't asked for (and received promises of assistance from) every major law enforcement agency within two hours drive from here.
And pretend that the public is so apathetic about the First Amendment after all the other riots we've had here that the only organization who even gives a damn if the protesters are permitted within the Los Angeles city limits is the ACLU, and even they seem a little leary when they are interviewed on local television.
Forget that it's all just a powder keg waiting to go off, and come on down for the party!
It'll be a real mess. Mark my words.
WTO riots? are you out of you fscking mind?
Every news outlet I've seen called them the WTO riots in Seattle. Hell, even the protesters who got shut down on eBay a few months back selling "WTO riot souviners" didn't refer to what happened in Seattle as the "WTO peaceful protests" or the "WTO political meetings" but the "WTO riots."
A few idiots broke some windows in a Starbucks.
And this excuses what, exactly?
The fact of the matter is that people don't remember the political protests against the abuse of workers in third world countries. What they remember (and what was televised, and what the police reacted to) was "a few idiots [who] broke some windows in a Starbucks."
When you call them riot you might as well call the Boston Tea Party a riot!
To be quite blunt, people around here in Los Angeles are sick and tired of "protests" turning violent and destructive, and frankly don't give a flying fuck how red, white and blue you want to make it. And personally, I've heard justifications used like "let's take away their nice things and see how they like being abused, just as they abused poor Chinese workers in the sweat shops."
Property damage is property damage. Out of control mobs are out of control mobs. And people who watch the news are so sick to death of long lens shots of burning buildings with roaming mobs of hundreds or thousands threatening passing motorists that they're more than happy to hang my right or your right to free speech out to dry just so they can get a good night's rest.
That's not a troll, by the way. That is a statement of the sentiment of Angelenos who still have vivid memories of the Rodney King and the Lakers riots.
Something changed in America after the WTO riots. Somehow the police think they have carte blanche to treat citizens like animals for utilizing their right of free assembly and free speech.
And if you think things were bad in Phili, wait until the DNC's little get together in Los Angeles. That's because right after the Lakers won something or another (I don't usually follow sports), the riots at the Staples center (where the DNC convention will take place) caused millions in damage, including burning a couple of squad cars and breaking glass and looting at several area businesses.
There were no protests, no political agenda, no demonstrators promising to "shut things down" to get their message out. Just some sports fans. And the damage they caused was absolutely unreasonable.
Let's face it. Our rights as citizens are not free; they come at the price of acting in a civil manner. Today people seem to be forgetting the fact that our right to free speech, while in theory protected by our Constitution, in practice can be taken away at the drop of a hat by a police force too weary at risking their lives to try to control an out of control mob bent on destruction and harm.
From the LAPD's perspective, downtown Los Angeles will not become another Seattle. And if your rights get trampled on--too fucking bad, you shouldn't have rioted after the Lakers win or during the WTO or after the Rodney King trials. At least that's the prevalent attitude of most law enforcement down here.
And don't expect the public to give a crap, either: most people here have seen just too many helicopter shots of burned out businesses, cars being destroyed, malatov coctails being thrown into buildings and taxes and insurance rates raised to pay for damage to give a fuck about what a bunch of "hippie extremists" have to say.
Of course some Federal judge will overturn some high bail rates, release some people after the DNC convention is over, and chastise a few overzelous commanders who ordered random bystanders arrested in order to cut the heart out of a potential forming mob. And we'll all sigh a sigh of relief that we don't have to live in a police state where anyone who doesn't agree with the prevailing view of the poeple in power, just so we can go to sleep secure in the knowledge that our city isn't going to be reduced to rubble.
Let's face it: the WTO riots fucked up a lot of stuff. And frankly I have absolutely no sympathy with the organizers who put that little party together--'cause the next time someone comes along wanting to protest Dubya's gutting of the Texas ecology or putting innocent people to death, the police will think they are just out to throw a few malatov coctails in some cockeyed interpretation of the First Amendment.