I see so-called "Hardship" visas and overseas outsourcing as an imperial system in reverse. The concept is the same: siphoning off the target country's resources for the benefit of another country. That's not free trade -- that's exploitation. Unfortunately, countries that were once occupied by imperial powers sometimes learned the exploitation game all too well.
Then, we should get rid of specialty visas and let anyone who wants to work in the US work here. Foreign countries should be given full soveriegn rights to accept or reject any US company on their terms. Imperialism, in any form, is extremely arrogant and unacceptable in the context of free trade.
I'm not saying I speak for the Green Party!
I didn't think I made that assumption (I used the word "if"). Regardless, I find the Green Party interesting, but, after visiting their site a while back, I decided some of their views were not compatible with libertarianism. The Green Party appears to take some aspects of socialists and tries to meld them with some aspects of libertarians (universal healthcare...but decentralization?!?). Still, I concede the Greens would be better in the White House than the Elephants or the Asses we have now.
As I said, read "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair to see what the world was like with little government regulation.
I glanced at a summary of "The Jungle", and it appears to be a story of some people whose expectations were too great, at first, and whose naivte led them to make quite a few bad decisions. The meeting of socialists at the end appears somewhat contrived, sort of like a Democrat's campaign speech.
You also have to understand that the economy present in that book took place 100 years ago. These were the very early years of industrialization, before enough wealth was generated for people to begin escaping their poverty (today's economy, for example, is thousands of times bigger for only three times as many people!). Also note the portion in the book about how a philanthopist helped them out. As wealth grows there are more opportunities for charity, and people who are really unable to get by can go stay at the YMCA or at mission somewhere.
Stabilizing forces will appear in an economy without federally subsidized welfare, especially as the people and businesses in that economy become more diverse. For every asshole out there is someone who is not, and the reality of suffering does not pass unnoticed. As there are more people and more businesses, things can only bet better.
Also note in all this is a requirement for personal accountability. For example, companies like the meat packing plant from the book and even modern companies like Monsanto, Phillip Morris, Firestone, etc. should be held fully accountable for any damage they do to their communtities. It seems my statements about minimal government should have been clearer to show that they definitely did not mean no government.
I'll never understand apologists, such as yourself, who will lie in the gutter defending those who put them there.
It isn't so much that I am defending slave-drivers; instead, it is the idea that all things are temporary. When people are oppressed by fellow citizens rather than the government, then the wrong-doing is localized rather than nationalized and there is greater opportunity for the community to deal with it. It doesn't happen in a day, but over years things would get better, especially as population grows and more competing businesses start up.
There is no such thing as pure captialism. However, the goal is to maintain only the minimal amount of government necessary to prevent people from killing each other and to protect our nation's borders. This is really the only long-term hedge against tyranny, where a large and ultra-powerful government can be replaced only by a civil war that destroys an entire nation before renewing it. I argue that this minimalism in government is actually very pacifistic and benefits everyone, even those beyond the nation's borders.
The truth is it isn't a level playing field. India has no minimum wage, no labor laws, no standards.
So, why did the US politicians put in place a minimum wage and labor laws? Let's not put the cart before the horse, here. Slave labor doesn't last long in a maturing economy, anyway. Eventually, Indonesia will come around, as will India. Eventually, the playing field will be even, but benefiting far more people than just the US.
unfair advantage.
It isn't unfair--it is reality.
racism?
Racism is culturalism in disguise.
Free trade is not an old concept, it is a very new one.
The Libertarian party started in the early 1970s. I think their ideals go back much further.
Free trade has already devastated our manufacturing industry.
Labor unions did much more damage. Federally-mandated standards like the FDA, USDA, OSHA, IRS, etc. did much more damage.
How much destruction has to occur before you decide to take some type of measure to limit the damage?
An industry that is falling apart means the US has to renew itself. This means things we never even imagined will probably take the place of basic manufacturing and basic IT as mainstays of the US economy. Also, if the rest of the world was allowed to grow with us--not under us--then manufacturing probably would still be around for those of us that enjoy it, instead of fleeing our pent up fantasy of living making $30/hr. as a union screw-driver operator somewhere.
Re:Just out of curiosity....
on
Grid Processing
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Good examples of parallel processing are the ones we know...
On a coarser level this also includes any multi-user UNIX system that is actually used by multiple users. While not allowing per-person scaling, it allows very significant institutional scaling.
we can't afford to export our jobs and livelihoods.
Why? Are we somehow fundametally better than other humans? Are people in India somehow less deserving of a chance at building wealth and success for themselves?
Face it, the USA needs to evolve with the world and not beside it. It's unfortunate the Green Party, if what you say is true, has choses a rather short-sighted stance on this issue.
For me, jobs going offshore exposes the fault in our economic system, and shows how in many ways it is very primitive.
How? All the offshore "scandal" shows is that a very specific segment of US labor is overpriced. In a few years that will no longer be true.
So, how is the truth an indication of a fault?
in our system, in order to be able to have stuff, you need money, and to get money you have to work.
Damn, it's so crazy it just might work!
But of course it doesn't work like that - I loose my job and have no money.
You're right, because you have to adapt.
Human beigns are still much too close to our animal roots for idealistic socialistic societies to function well. People are most motivated and successful in light of some threat of deficiency, whether it is food, housing, or status. Simple fact: humans have more in common with wolves and bull frogs than angels, and it will be a long time before that changes significantly. There is plenty of life left in free market systems--we will know when their usefulness wanes, because it will seem utterly obvious and natural to adopt an alternative system.
"look at those idiots working most of their lives when they've already most of the tools to live a life of luxury!"
Okay, first, I challenge you to devise a home building material that lasts forever, in spite of earthquakes, mudslides, changing coastlines, rifts forming in the Earth, volcanic eruptions, etc. Until we can live with no contact with natural challenges, we will not see your idealistic life of all play and no work. We even still have to grow our own food.
I think the society you envision will be here in the 24th century (food replicators and warp technology take much of the natural burdens off of our shoulders).
Until then, I hope you at least gather the motivation to go to the unemployment office!
Either drop all import tariffs or enforce tariffs on exported jobs.
Then, drop the tarriffs, albeit slowly, so the markets have time to react. Eventually--given appropriate time--the lack of tarriffs will only bolster international trade making the USA better off for it.
Lets set up tariffs. They want to farm there work offshore, lets make it so expensive to do so that they will lose money outsourcing.
Is this a joke? Do you really want the USA to stagnate in its little corner of the world while everyone else just rolls their eyes and laughs at us while progressing far beyond us in every respect?
Free trade is the long-term normalizer of the world. It levels the playing field so THE TRUTH and the FREE MARKET runs business, not some politically contrived fantasy of keeping the jobs at home.
Your statement reeks of isolationism, culturalism, racism, and a whole bunch of other -isms that are simply inappropriate for members of a FREE COUNTRY to speak of lest they put them into practice.
Third world nations can't get their markets started by themselves because the first world nations don't want them to industrialize outside of their control, and the first world citizens get their careers continuously destroyed by their supposed leaders.
Taking the politics out of business would allow India to do whatever it pleases. The fact is that the "first world" is currently experiening a bout of corruption and interventionism that is very short-sighted. If the USA left things more to their inherent mechanisms, we would be seeing much more wealth being generated throughout the world as friendly governments reinforce eachother through open trade. If this had started decades ago in lieu of tarriffs and domestic subsidies, we would see a much more level playing field internationally--and much fewer rogue states.
Does it improve the quality of support? Arguably no.
Does it improve the quality and tightness of the product? Arguably no.
Does it strengthen the company from within? No.
Very short-sighted. Think these things over when you drive your car that needs maintaince only twice a year (as opposed to four times twenty years ago and almost daily 100 years ago). How about when you add that 512MB of RAM for under $100 to your PC? How about when you can fly across the US (3000 miles!) for only a few hundred dollars? How about when you can buy a quartz-driven wristwatch that loses less than a second a month? How about when you choose OpenOffice.org over Microsoft Office? How about when you can go out and buy almost limitless amounts of pure bacteria-free water? How about when you take an aspirin or Tylenol for a headache?
People that bitch about the way things are take for granted that freedom and a free market took away everything else people used to bitch about. People that bitch about losing jobs overseas don't see that the whole world is gaining ground, not losing it, and don't see that losses at home are very temporary.
Sit back and be a little patient. Things will be just fine (as long as the self-perpetuated "war on terrorism" doesn't do us in, first--who are the terrorists, anyway?).
I'm not sure it matters. The greatest innovation occurs when people are left only to the limits of their own imagination. The early USA was mostly wilderness with the federal government only remotely intervening in peoples lives. That's when the big boom occurred taking people from two-room shacks to the skylines of cities. Recently, the absence of massive regulation took garage-made computers and made them into the gigahertz fault-tolerant-yet-affordable behemoths of today. Software, being even more complex in nature will take even longer to mature (right now I think it is in the early adolescent years), but it will become an industry that people aren't ashamed of...perhaps they will even be proud of it. Imagine how sad it would be if software were mandated to halt where it is today, when there is decades of innovation left (beyond Windows; beyond UNIX).
Some economists and historians have claimed that this was one of the major reasons the US became the world's biggest economic power. Of course, now this has mostly been cancelled by recent laws extending patent and copyright indefinitely, and allowing them for rather silly "inventions".
Thus, opening up an opportunity for the USA to re-discover its libertarian roots. Much of the calls for regulation, it seems, are for codifying the status quo causing ultimate stagnation. Tarriffs will not stop job migration, subsidies will not save failing industries, copyright extensions do not benefit artists, a rigid national medical system will not benefit patients, etc.
The only form of government that is not doomed to failure is one that is so small, transparent, and managable that there is no chance for it to fail. Businsesses come and go, but large governments fall only in war. Why let it come to that?
A restructuring of the concept of files, getting rid of "drive letters" and such. Everything from the ability to add and remove RAM without rebooting, to XML scripted modular custom installations.
Nice, that Microsoft is catching up to where UNIX was years ago.
BTW, it is extemely likely that the RAM removal neato-nifto feature requires hardware support (i.e., no $499 Dell will allow it...more like a $5,500 IBM, at least). It is absolutely amazing how Microsoft's marketing leads people to believe they have things when they really don't (sort of like flawless DOS support in Win 95).
Also consider checking out websites like www.openoffice.org, and www.sunsource.net. Sun is a non-trivial member of the Open Source community.
In this interview with Scott McNealy, McNealy mentions he is a libertarian. As is ESR. We shouldn't underestimate Sun's attitude towards giving people the tools they need to excersize choice.
Does anyone else get the impression that M$ is getting other folk to code up, for free, their bait in a massive bait-and-switch operation?
Actually, I think they are trying to inflate the "moist towelette" industry. Imagine the cry of millions of developers whose hands are dirty after working with C#/.NET, and Microsoft steps right in with a sample pack and a big smile on their faces.
We'd need to kill of the proprietary CL vendors, first. From what I've seen, even after decades, Lisp still suffers from wide differences in implementation. I'd much rather see "Works best with Common Lisp (2005 ANSI standard edition)" than "Allegro CL version XYZ (everyone else is SOL)".
...we had used a closed-source component in a very central way (in a lot of places) in a very large project. On at least one occasion we ran into a bug in the component that was difficult to work around. Since we didn't have the source, we couldn't fix it ourselves.
Even more entertaining is when the vendor of that widely-embedded proprietary component goes belly-up.
If Microsoft pulled an Enron next week, imagine how many people would be cut off with no way forward but to either stagnate with an end-of-life development platform or reimplement everything in some other technology base.
I think the "Microsoft is the infallible rock" attitude that is so common among IT people is totally naive. Hell, all it takes is a magnitude 7 earthquake in western Washington to put a big damper on your "mission critical" project.
Slashdot Mirror
Government agencies do not need to defend their existence once formed. Get him!
(sound of IIZENII saying "Who?!?! What are you..." then silence)
I see so-called "Hardship" visas and overseas outsourcing as an imperial system in reverse. The concept is the same: siphoning off the target country's resources for the benefit of another country. That's not free trade -- that's exploitation. Unfortunately, countries that were once occupied by imperial powers sometimes learned the exploitation game all too well.
Then, we should get rid of specialty visas and let anyone who wants to work in the US work here. Foreign countries should be given full soveriegn rights to accept or reject any US company on their terms. Imperialism, in any form, is extremely arrogant and unacceptable in the context of free trade.
I'm not saying I speak for the Green Party!
I didn't think I made that assumption (I used the word "if"). Regardless, I find the Green Party interesting, but, after visiting their site a while back, I decided some of their views were not compatible with libertarianism. The Green Party appears to take some aspects of socialists and tries to meld them with some aspects of libertarians (universal healthcare...but decentralization?!?). Still, I concede the Greens would be better in the White House than the Elephants or the Asses we have now.
As I said, read "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair to see what the world was like with little government regulation.
I glanced at a summary of "The Jungle", and it appears to be a story of some people whose expectations were too great, at first, and whose naivte led them to make quite a few bad decisions. The meeting of socialists at the end appears somewhat contrived, sort of like a Democrat's campaign speech.
You also have to understand that the economy present in that book took place 100 years ago. These were the very early years of industrialization, before enough wealth was generated for people to begin escaping their poverty (today's economy, for example, is thousands of times bigger for only three times as many people!). Also note the portion in the book about how a philanthopist helped them out. As wealth grows there are more opportunities for charity, and people who are really unable to get by can go stay at the YMCA or at mission somewhere.
Stabilizing forces will appear in an economy without federally subsidized welfare, especially as the people and businesses in that economy become more diverse. For every asshole out there is someone who is not, and the reality of suffering does not pass unnoticed. As there are more people and more businesses, things can only bet better.
Also note in all this is a requirement for personal accountability. For example, companies like the meat packing plant from the book and even modern companies like Monsanto, Phillip Morris, Firestone, etc. should be held fully accountable for any damage they do to their communtities. It seems my statements about minimal government should have been clearer to show that they definitely did not mean no government.
I'll never understand apologists, such as yourself, who will lie in the gutter defending those who put them there.
It isn't so much that I am defending slave-drivers; instead, it is the idea that all things are temporary. When people are oppressed by fellow citizens rather than the government, then the wrong-doing is localized rather than nationalized and there is greater opportunity for the community to deal with it. It doesn't happen in a day, but over years things would get better, especially as population grows and more competing businesses start up.
Pure capitalism doesn't work.
There is no such thing as pure captialism. However, the goal is to maintain only the minimal amount of government necessary to prevent people from killing each other and to protect our nation's borders. This is really the only long-term hedge against tyranny, where a large and ultra-powerful government can be replaced only by a civil war that destroys an entire nation before renewing it. I argue that this minimalism in government is actually very pacifistic and benefits everyone, even those beyond the nation's borders.
The truth is it isn't a level playing field. India has no minimum wage, no labor laws, no standards.
So, why did the US politicians put in place a minimum wage and labor laws? Let's not put the cart before the horse, here. Slave labor doesn't last long in a maturing economy, anyway. Eventually, Indonesia will come around, as will India. Eventually, the playing field will be even, but benefiting far more people than just the US.
unfair advantage.
It isn't unfair--it is reality.
racism?
Racism is culturalism in disguise.
Free trade is not an old concept, it is a very new one.
The Libertarian party started in the early 1970s. I think their ideals go back much further.
Free trade has already devastated our manufacturing industry.
Labor unions did much more damage. Federally-mandated standards like the FDA, USDA, OSHA, IRS, etc. did much more damage.
How much destruction has to occur before you decide to take some type of measure to limit the damage?
An industry that is falling apart means the US has to renew itself. This means things we never even imagined will probably take the place of basic manufacturing and basic IT as mainstays of the US economy. Also, if the rest of the world was allowed to grow with us--not under us--then manufacturing probably would still be around for those of us that enjoy it, instead of fleeing our pent up fantasy of living making $30/hr. as a union screw-driver operator somewhere.
Good examples of parallel processing are the ones we know...
On a coarser level this also includes any multi-user UNIX system that is actually used by multiple users. While not allowing per-person scaling, it allows very significant institutional scaling.
Microsoft will just use their normal tactic and re-define the word "Engineer" to mean what they want.
If Microsoft "Engineers" designed a toilet, it would refuse to flush every second time, and, every fourth time, it would flush backwards!
But people will still buy it. Simply amazing.
The people who flew civilian passenger planes into civilian skyscrapers, killing over 3,000 innocent civilians instantly, that's who.
They were a side-effect of an unfortunate history--more like a symptom than the ailment itself.
we can't afford to export our jobs and livelihoods.
Why? Are we somehow fundametally better than other humans? Are people in India somehow less deserving of a chance at building wealth and success for themselves?
Face it, the USA needs to evolve with the world and not beside it. It's unfortunate the Green Party, if what you say is true, has choses a rather short-sighted stance on this issue.
For me, jobs going offshore exposes the fault in our economic system, and shows how in many ways it is very primitive.
How? All the offshore "scandal" shows is that a very specific segment of US labor is overpriced. In a few years that will no longer be true.
So, how is the truth an indication of a fault?
in our system, in order to be able to have stuff, you need money, and to get money you have to work.
Damn, it's so crazy it just might work!
But of course it doesn't work like that - I loose my job and have no money.
You're right, because you have to adapt.
Human beigns are still much too close to our animal roots for idealistic socialistic societies to function well. People are most motivated and successful in light of some threat of deficiency, whether it is food, housing, or status. Simple fact: humans have more in common with wolves and bull frogs than angels, and it will be a long time before that changes significantly. There is plenty of life left in free market systems--we will know when their usefulness wanes, because it will seem utterly obvious and natural to adopt an alternative system.
"look at those idiots working most of their lives when they've already most of the tools to live a life of luxury!"
Okay, first, I challenge you to devise a home building material that lasts forever, in spite of earthquakes, mudslides, changing coastlines, rifts forming in the Earth, volcanic eruptions, etc. Until we can live with no contact with natural challenges, we will not see your idealistic life of all play and no work. We even still have to grow our own food.
I think the society you envision will be here in the 24th century (food replicators and warp technology take much of the natural burdens off of our shoulders).
Until then, I hope you at least gather the motivation to go to the unemployment office!
Agreed, lassiz faire capitalism in the United States would utterly devastate the middle class.
How so? A sound and diverse economy only guarantees that the middle class will have more options available to them than ever before.
Either drop all import tariffs or enforce tariffs on exported jobs.
Then, drop the tarriffs, albeit slowly, so the markets have time to react. Eventually--given appropriate time--the lack of tarriffs will only bolster international trade making the USA better off for it.
Lets set up tariffs. They want to farm there work offshore, lets make it so expensive to do so that they will lose money outsourcing.
Is this a joke? Do you really want the USA to stagnate in its little corner of the world while everyone else just rolls their eyes and laughs at us while progressing far beyond us in every respect?
Free trade is the long-term normalizer of the world. It levels the playing field so THE TRUTH and the FREE MARKET runs business, not some politically contrived fantasy of keeping the jobs at home.
Your statement reeks of isolationism, culturalism, racism, and a whole bunch of other -isms that are simply inappropriate for members of a FREE COUNTRY to speak of lest they put them into practice.
Third world nations can't get their markets started by themselves because the first world nations don't want them to industrialize outside of their control, and the first world citizens get their careers continuously destroyed by their supposed leaders.
Taking the politics out of business would allow India to do whatever it pleases. The fact is that the "first world" is currently experiening a bout of corruption and interventionism that is very short-sighted. If the USA left things more to their inherent mechanisms, we would be seeing much more wealth being generated throughout the world as friendly governments reinforce eachother through open trade. If this had started decades ago in lieu of tarriffs and domestic subsidies, we would see a much more level playing field internationally--and much fewer rogue states.
Does it improve the quality of support? Arguably no.
Does it improve the quality and tightness of the product? Arguably no.
Does it strengthen the company from within? No.
Very short-sighted. Think these things over when you drive your car that needs maintaince only twice a year (as opposed to four times twenty years ago and almost daily 100 years ago). How about when you add that 512MB of RAM for under $100 to your PC? How about when you can fly across the US (3000 miles!) for only a few hundred dollars? How about when you can buy a quartz-driven wristwatch that loses less than a second a month? How about when you choose OpenOffice.org over Microsoft Office? How about when you can go out and buy almost limitless amounts of pure bacteria-free water? How about when you take an aspirin or Tylenol for a headache?
People that bitch about the way things are take for granted that freedom and a free market took away everything else people used to bitch about. People that bitch about losing jobs overseas don't see that the whole world is gaining ground, not losing it, and don't see that losses at home are very temporary.
Sit back and be a little patient. Things will be just fine (as long as the self-perpetuated "war on terrorism" doesn't do us in, first--who are the terrorists, anyway?).
Like who?
I'm not sure it matters. The greatest innovation occurs when people are left only to the limits of their own imagination. The early USA was mostly wilderness with the federal government only remotely intervening in peoples lives. That's when the big boom occurred taking people from two-room shacks to the skylines of cities. Recently, the absence of massive regulation took garage-made computers and made them into the gigahertz fault-tolerant-yet-affordable behemoths of today. Software, being even more complex in nature will take even longer to mature (right now I think it is in the early adolescent years), but it will become an industry that people aren't ashamed of...perhaps they will even be proud of it. Imagine how sad it would be if software were mandated to halt where it is today, when there is decades of innovation left (beyond Windows; beyond UNIX).
Some economists and historians have claimed that this was one of the major reasons the US became the world's biggest economic power. Of course, now this has mostly been cancelled by recent laws extending patent and copyright indefinitely, and allowing them for rather silly "inventions".
Thus, opening up an opportunity for the USA to re-discover its libertarian roots. Much of the calls for regulation, it seems, are for codifying the status quo causing ultimate stagnation. Tarriffs will not stop job migration, subsidies will not save failing industries, copyright extensions do not benefit artists, a rigid national medical system will not benefit patients, etc.
The only form of government that is not doomed to failure is one that is so small, transparent, and managable that there is no chance for it to fail. Businsesses come and go, but large governments fall only in war. Why let it come to that?
yes, i am a leftwing whiner
Do you fly in circles listening to yourself?
A restructuring of the concept of files, getting rid of "drive letters" and such. Everything from the ability to add and remove RAM without rebooting, to XML scripted modular custom installations.
Nice, that Microsoft is catching up to where UNIX was years ago.
BTW, it is extemely likely that the RAM removal neato-nifto feature requires hardware support (i.e., no $499 Dell will allow it...more like a $5,500 IBM, at least). It is absolutely amazing how Microsoft's marketing leads people to believe they have things when they really don't (sort of like flawless DOS support in Win 95).
I get blank stares from programmers that want the equivalent of visual basic to work in.
Hire better programmers. I hear there are quite a few to pick from, recently.
Sun doesn't seem to be interested in letting go of their platform any more than MS does.
.NET when the time is right. At least, Sun is open to the idea.
I don't hear Microsoft saying they will consider opensourcing
Also consider checking out websites like www.openoffice.org, and www.sunsource.net. Sun is a non-trivial member of the Open Source community.
In this interview with Scott McNealy, McNealy mentions he is a libertarian. As is ESR. We shouldn't underestimate Sun's attitude towards giving people the tools they need to excersize choice.
Does anyone else get the impression that M$ is getting other folk to code up, for free, their bait in a massive bait-and-switch operation?
Actually, I think they are trying to inflate the "moist towelette" industry. Imagine the cry of millions of developers whose hands are dirty after working with C#/.NET, and Microsoft steps right in with a sample pack and a big smile on their faces.
I'll be happy when common lisp become mainstream.
We'd need to kill of the proprietary CL vendors, first. From what I've seen, even after decades, Lisp still suffers from wide differences in implementation. I'd much rather see "Works best with Common Lisp (2005 ANSI standard edition)" than "Allegro CL version XYZ (everyone else is SOL)".
...we had used a closed-source component in a very central way (in a lot of places) in a very large project. On at least one occasion we ran into a bug in the component that was difficult to work around. Since we didn't have the source, we couldn't fix it ourselves.
Even more entertaining is when the vendor of that widely-embedded proprietary component goes belly-up.
If Microsoft pulled an Enron next week, imagine how many people would be cut off with no way forward but to either stagnate with an end-of-life development platform or reimplement everything in some other technology base.
I think the "Microsoft is the infallible rock" attitude that is so common among IT people is totally naive. Hell, all it takes is a magnitude 7 earthquake in western Washington to put a big damper on your "mission critical" project.