I'm not sure I put much stock in this method. I'll bet if you search for MS Access and any of those words, you'd find 10 to 1000 times the number of pages - because there are soooo many Access users stumbling for help out there. I'd suggest the same thing is true for MySQL, on a more limited scale. Very, very few of these users will ever acquire the depth knowledge you'd need to make a serious assessment of the relative merits of the databases.
Congrats, you really know your stuff. So rare here on/....
To me it's a very simple premise:
Human bodies have had hundreds of thousands of years to get used to eating foods without GMO, without strong pesticides, and without growth hormones. And it's sure not hard to imagine some research group, whatever their intentions or level of skill, overlooking something amidst the myriad complexity of the human body.
Perhaps in several thousand years our bodies will adapt to new foodstuffs, or perhaps a mistake was made and some GMO element will always be terminally bad for us. Either way, I'd rather not be a test case in that adaptation process, thanks.
I take issue with this point: The United States is the one making a very large donation to a poor company for almost no (if any) self-benifit, yet it is painted as the bad guy for not agreeing to mill the corn as well!
Let's look at the actual cost of this corn. The article quotes a ship arrive each day for 2 days with 10000 metric tons of corn, each costing $95. Let's say the US does this for a full year (which seems like the outside limit to me). This would cost $347 million, a trivial sum of money for this country.
I won't bother with the usual comparison to the US gov't national budget. Instead, let's compare that to the amount of money a private investment corporation, JP Morgan, was willing to put into Enron as of November last year: $1 billion. See this article. This after Enron revealed that it was in very poor financial shape as a result of extensive book-cooking for years. From this point of view, $350m is bargain basement.
What we gain: We will have fed 12 million starving people at a time when many peple in the world thinks the US is full of greedy bastards. Furthermore, we will have shown Europe, and other large trading partners that we are willing to go against the demands of our corporations sometimes, also at a time when many people inside and outside the US have doubts about the trustworthiness of those corporations.
As for your point that the Europeans are also involved here because they are placing restrictions on imported foodstuffs, that's a fair point. For African countries, the burden of meeting US and European food importation standard is a very heavy one. Europe is full of double-talk on this issue - if they wanted to help, they could indeed make some concessions here.
Of course we could do an end run around all of this by formally granting Zimbabwe permanent indemnity from IP claims by Monsanto (or at least until the average standard of living is something comparable to the 1st world). Hell, if Monsanto was really good faith about all this, it could grant the indemnity itself. Talk about a publicity steal for Monsanto - for the price of a tiny bit money they'd be hard pressed to collect anyway, they get to claim that their GE seeds "helped save 12 million Zimbabweans from starving".
Lets see: U.S. companies spend boatloads of cash engineering GE foods that can solve world hunger once and for all and the hungry slap their hands? Certainly sounds to me like beggars trying to be choosers.
I hope you're not suggesting we all owe Monsanto a big hug for being so kind as to develop patented versions of the food people used to be able to grow for free. I'm believe that they, like the rest of us would be happy to see world hunger solved, but I don't see them offering any way out of Zimbabwe's food-now, lawsuits-later dilemma.
At what point should some government (ours - US) be saying to them, yes you are encouraged to make money, but you have an obligation to the rest of humanity that is as or more important the making your stock valuations increase?
Read the rest of the article! In the US, GE corn is not separated from non-GE corn as it's collected for shipment and resale. To change this would require major changes in how corn is moved - not liley to happen before Zimbabwe needs some eats, if ever.
The fact that we're not willing to pay $25 a metric ton is much more damning. I would hardly put it past Mugabe to play politics just for some good press internationally and domestically, but the request to mill the corn first really is quite reasonable from a lot of points of view. And frankly all the US doesn't seem to have a particularly good reason not to the mill the corn - our answer seems to be a patronizing, "well it's our corn so shut up and do what we say" answer, viz: At a news conference in Johannesburg on Friday, Roger Winter, USAID's assistant administrator for humanitarian assistance, suggested that Zimbabwe had little choice if it wanted to feed its people. "We have no substitute for that maize. That maize is what's available," he said. and: When India balked over a humanitarian shipment of gene-altered food, one U.S. official was quoted as saying, "Beggars can't be chosers."
Take what positions you will about other US foreign policy actions, this just seems gratuitously obnoxious on our part, unless they really are trying to push Monsanto corn on everyone.
The point here is well taken - devices that try to cater to people's unwillingness to work to learn eventually become restrictive and annoying.
I'd say we're wrapping up the first round of "user-friendliness realignment". As computers, which up till a decade ago were largely for the use of people who knew what they wanted to do, and were willing to put in substantial effort to learn, turned into something that everyone needed to use, someone needed to redesing them towards accomplishing the task these new users want to do, without needing a year's worth of engineering training. To continue the car analogy, we eliminated the choke, made the car automatic, and set up Jiffy Lubes to change yout oil. For this it was necessary to think from the point of view of a email/IM/word processing user rather than a programmer and see what these people were trying to accomplish, and how to make it straightforward for them.
I believe there will be several more rounds of usability improvments, as people begin to shape their lives more around computers, and all of these will involve making it straightforward (!= trivial!!!) to do what people want to do.
five - your employer will, at some level, feel they've been strongarmed by you. This will adversely affect your long-term relationship with them regardless.
This is an excellent point. You can minimize this feeling by by clear and respectful with your supervisors as you begin to look for new work. If you work with them like you're both trying to solve the problem of getting a position that works well for you, that really helps keep their respect for you. In this case, your ending up at another company means that what's offered there meets your needs better, and tends to leave much less of a bad taste in people's mouth than springing the news that you'll be cleaning out your desk in exactly 14.0 days. Both companies are less likely to feel that they've been played off against each other, and then you're in the catbird seat. OK, a little rosy, but a little respectfulness goes a long way.
I disagree. There's no excuse for not knowing how to communicate with people of variety of levels. You may be a whiz in front of a [root@boxen root]$ but if you can't express these ideas to people who don't already know most of what you're talking about, you're taking a lot of chances on somebody recognizing your genius.
I do agree to really master the subject, you do have take the time to learn it through and through. A buffer overflow is a compact phrase representing of a particular concept. But you may well be called on to explain in lay terms what that idea means and why Project X should pay you to make sure there aren't any.
All of which is to say, make sure you take an English class or two before leaving college.
Instead, I think many of the folks in this administration are simply pro-rich people and corporations. I believe there are some very morally corrupt people hanging out at the White House. I still believe that G. W. Bush is a well-meaning dupe, however.
Regrettably I think you're right - Dick Cheney and company are basically cynical opportunists. There's a strand of feeling for this that they're capitalizing on - in my experience, many people are still kind of resentful about the "you have it better than most of the world", "corporations are greedy scum" rhetoric of the past several decades, like they're being called morally corrupt for wanting wealth. I hope we can come back to a more balanced view, where wanting wealth is perfectly fine thing to want, in tandem with duty to family, friends, neighbors, community, world.
with a few exceptions, the poorest of today have significant wealth in comparison to their predecessors.
Not to be picky, but where did the survey cover? I believe that health, bad is it is in places, is probably no worse than before, and vastly better in some places, so I'd buy better health. But I'm not sure I think that about starvation, unemployment, and violence. And whether it's absolute or relative poverty, if people feel a lack of dignity, they feel it, it's real.
The only thing they have to trade is labor. Ideally, market globalism should include as fundamental complete fluidity of labor. But the biggest bleeding-heart liberals, worrying over the world's impoverished, become notably less caring when it comes to the question of those poor people "taking away jobs".
Undoubtedly, freely moving capital and blocked labor will always favor the capitalist over the laborer. Bleeding-heart liberal or no, I just don't think it would work to emmigrate millions of Africans to the G8 countries. Besides, it wouldn't surprise me if we could automate most manual labor within 100 years. Which only makes the contrast even starker. Call me utopian, but imagine 3 billion intellects working in synchronicity....or 2 billions souls starving in front you.
So, I don't know. If simple market forces can't get the job done, then these regions need huge infusions of capital that is correctly distributed
And many of them need some way to recover from the cynicism about the rule of law that centuries of colonialism and corruption have left.
I think a key thing for those of us who want to see this infusion of capital happen to do is to stay on top of the WTO. The WTO offers a enormous opportunity to align interests here. Investors have a natural and stated interest in transparency, economic stability, and rule of law. Though they may say don't want to pay for it, they have a secondary interest in developing the infrastructure of these countries. And as much as they may crow about having all the money, investors need investment opportunities, and companies need labor. If there were really good people (like George Soros good) in there advocating for the fair and equitable application of the principles of the WTO, countries could do much better leveraging their resources for capital under terms favorable to them.
Imagine for example, a truly powerful Mercosur-EU alliance that told the US to go to hell when we ratified illegal subsidies for steel. Even Bush's blinders would hold that out.
It's that last bit that's the problem. Of course, that's always the problem when you're trying to build something that only can be grown.
Brilliant turn of phrase. I'll have to remember that one.
Wow - somebody disagreed with me civilly! I love it. And on/. to boot!
On the subject of usury, the word actually means the practice of charging interest on a loan. Depending on your interpretation, it may mean the charging of excessive interest, or the charging of interest period. And yes, there's a story in the Bible about usury.
You are right that I was reading it metaphorically as a mandate against exploitation. Good point to clarify. I do think exploitation is inhumane, and frankly it's a disgrace that humanity lets that kind of thing go on on the scales that we do.
The "humanity has come a long way" argument is essentially meaningless, sorry to say. All you're basically saying there is that you think everybody ought to behave according to your preferences, but in more high-minded terms.
If you're saying that my metaphor is overstated for a debate over the price of CDs, I can buy that criticism. I'm also open to the criticism that I phrase ideas about how I think humanity could live better as moral imperatives, and that is a patronizing way of approaching people. If this what you're saying, fairly said.
As for me wanting people to live according to my preferences - the answer is an unabashed yes (in the general sense, not in the absolute sense). High-minded or low-minded, sooner or later, everyone advocates for a way of doing things - if they're looking out for themselves, they at least advocate about the way to do the things that affect them. Take building roads - building them or not building them are both choices that affect my life. I'm interested in problems people have to cooperate to solve, so I advocate for myself and others at once.
I'm about people looking out for each other - and making that a priority over other things. Corral my language if it's obnoxious, but that's what I'm fer.
Rather, capitalism elevates rational self-interest as a fundamental principle.
Certainly this is a deep-running theme in economics. Of course you can make a pretty good case that it works because people believe it should work, try hard at being rational self-interested agents, largely succeed, and their efforts result in wealth. I don't like that these theories offer a very reductionist view of human nature - people are much, much more interesting than rational self-interested agents. It's fair to say that you can count on people being self-interested perhaps more than other qualities like altruism, need for a bond with others, intellectual and physical passions, etc., but those other qualities fill in what it means to be human.
Rational self-interest allows--requires--some level of enforcement of the rule of law such that less rational people are prevented from literally and metaphorically hitting other people over the head with a rock and stealing their sheep.
This is true. But you can also read it as a parable about the Northern European diaspora's craving for order - it's not okay to steal someone's sheep using a rock, but a lawsuit is A-OK. That's not intended to be cynical, just pointing out our quirks.
In this age of global fluidity, you can thread together a pretty convincing story that rational self-interest also requires some redistribution of wealth:
Whatever you think of their merit, we need to pay some money to works in Africa so that continent doesn't collapse in famine and disease and hose the rest of the world in the process.
Market economics is a good thing because it works. It creates wealth where there was no wealth before,
Good point. Another way of putting this is that it requires people to keep one eye on the bottom line - are we actually producing something of value?
and as a general rule everyone benefits from this.
That's not so clear. Market economics does very little about disparities in power. If you believe Marx's economic analysis (leaving aside the crap about "collective anarchy") - those with money make more money, and quickly accumulate power. Pretty convincing.
I'd hesitate to argue that more people are better off today than before - there's a lot of very poor and desperate people in this world today. Is it better or worse than before? I don't know if that question can be answered, or really if it should - the relevant one is how do we make most people OK off, without putting roadblocks in the way of generating wealth.
(Certainly that's true in contrast to mere wealth redistribution.)
A professor of mine once characterized a huge problem with the Soviet economy as the fact that politics always superceded economics. Things always got built where politics (mostly personalist Party politics) dictated. That seems like a pretty insightful way to look at it. But the reverse is true, too: the triumph of "rationally self-interested" economics over everything else means a breakdown of civic society - a course I hope the US and others reverse. The question is how to keep the freedom to express individual genius and drive but not reduce every interaction that involves money to one that can be commoditized.
Not because it makes sense to elevate simple selfishness to some grand moral principle. That way of thinking is that of the Market Cultists, and they're down the hall, in the padded room with the Objectivists.
Well hopefully most of the Objectivists can be safely sent off to write philosophical and scientific treatises to their objective hearts' delight, but right now we've got Market Cultists in the White House, and this bad news for a market that needs some coralling.
The stock market of today is used by many people as a wealth-generation tool. People think that the stock market is around to help people make money.
I think is an incredibly insightful comment, and I encourage you to follow up on it more.
For my part I see a couple deep problems here:
The market is meta-capitalism - that is, it's not making money through doing anything, it's more or less making money through a loan. Risky loans, as they involve to trying to put a dollar value on a very complex operation (a sizable business) involving personal and economic dynamics of negotations between entities. One don't have any problem with the captains of Solomon Bros, etc losing their silk shirts, but I don't think people really understand the risk - particularly not working-class 401k contributors who are led into bad loans by well-connected shysters (Enron), or people who invest in mutual funds who rely on shyster analysts.
Another problem is:
Making money for money's sake is fundamentally incompatible with another function of the economy, which is to deliver services to people
(I'd rather not use the word consumer, because I think it doesn't leave room for economic transactions that improve quality of life - e.g. working on your neighborhood' park cleanup effort, or working on another neighboorhood's park cleanup effort). Is there any way to reestablish the ethic of doing work for its own sake?
Another thing y'all may be able to fill in is a comment a friend made to me. He said:
The market is really driven by the big investment houses: Solomon Bros, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, etc. Index prices mostly react to the movements of huge amounts of money in these kinds of institutional transactions.
Do you think this is true? To me it reflects on a situation I think is unfortunate: the government is current afraid to assert its authority over big business because big business basically threatens to put a lot of people out of work (political death) if they don't get what they want.
You have some very good points about widespread piracy. They point to a need for balancing the privacy and rights of a consumer with those of producers and distributors. In other words, work together (yeah, cooperate, one of those dirty GNU/Commie words) to make a system that works for everyone.
I was gonna leave this "the market takes care of everything rant" alone, but it always seems to get coopted into a "we should kowtow to every whim of big business" rant
The price of CDs, like any other economic entity, is governed by market forces. They charge $16 for a CD because people will pay it. It is not morally wrong or illegal to charge whatever price the market will bear
CD's like any other entity are traded in an economic climate where decisions are shaped by the laws and norms of the country, as well as the power realities: Dell cannot say no to Microsoft when they demand that Dell not install alternate OSes - that's not "free" market economics at all, that's a power dynamic. Hence the constant debate over intellectual property law here - this law shapes the economy of information.
Here's another look at the question of cost of CDs: because recording companies have achieved massive control of the distribution channels for music, CDs cost $16, notwithstanding the low costs of production. The record companies' control over production relies on a series of laws regarding contracts and intellectual property which they helped shape by lobbying.
The "free" market is an abstraction, even to economists. The practical question is how to shape the elements that govern a market to avoid gratuitious restricting individuals' actions but still hold true to society's morality and goals.
In fact, some believe that it's morally wrong not to do so.
Whoa,whoa,whoa, let's slow down here a minute. It's morally wrong not to charge people as much as you possibly can for something? I'm not religious, but as I recall, that practice has been frowned upon since at least biblical times, being referred to in the bible as usury. Humanity has come a long way from the days when those who could took all they could from anyone they could take it from. To say that it's morally wrong not to charge someone as much as you can for something is pretty cynical.
Dogtown and Z boys does a great job capturing the sense of the moment and place that these guys grew up in. As an East-Coaster transplanted West, I came away with a new appreciation for the beach towns in southern California. And the soundtrack itself was worth going for.
But in many ways the movie felt frustratingly self-aggrandizing. If you notice that the interviewer is always saying "you guys" and "we" to the subjects, while they're discussing the badass things they invented when they were 13, you realize that Stacey Peralta shot a movie about how cool his childhood friends were. That's great as long as the personal perspective is evident - I think my childhood friends are some of most remarkable people I know. But when you present the "we invented modern skateboarding" mantra as an impartial conclusion, it just ends up sounding pretentious.
Still the movie is a great snapshot of what came to be a big part of American pop culture. Stacey Peralta clear has some chops as a filmmaker, and this one's worth a watch.
some free-licensing regimes are antithetical to the government's stated policy that moneymaking applications should develop from government-funded research
That particular piece of FUD was troubling to me, as it means that Microsoft thinks that the political climate is safe for them to say that publicly funded work should not be released to the public domain, but rather should be used to enrich a particular set of people (i.e., them).
It troubles me that people think they can make that claim in public, because it says to me that people are really buying this crap that in order to provide jobs for the middle class, you've got to mollify every little whim of the captains of industry. I don't think it's wise for government to alienate industry entirely, but it does need to make sure industry knows who's ultimately in charge. Time for some balance.
If your leaders encourage (whether through tacit support, rabble-rousing speeches, or even direct orders) you to target noncombatants, you're not part of an army. You're a murderer, thug, or an assassin.
This is exactly the problem - this issue is not cut and dried at all. It is intolerable that these so-called martyrs go attack civilians in the guise of being an army. On the other hand, there's ample precedent for taking up arms against your oppressor in ways outside the standard guys-in-camo definition, from Jewish uprisings in the Nazi ghettos to the American and French revolutions. And given that Israel has long used assasination and torture as tools of war, it's pretty hard to argue that this "war" has been kept inside those guys-in-green line.
If Yasser had set up a market system and concentreated more on the economic development of his people, rather than the extermination of the Jews, he might be worthy of respect.
This is an excellent point, Yasser Arafat does not seem at all effective in broadening the economic base of Palestine.
However, the same point goes goes doubly for us and trebly for Israel, who are, after all, paying for all this monkey business. You want to see an end to the bombers, you gotta put all those smart people to work at something, or they'll work on their own plots and machinations. Food for thought, given that our foreign aid is 0.1% of our GDP (even worse if that 0.1% includes military aid).
The example is a good one to discuss, but I'm not sure I agree with you that increased exposure caused those stereotypes to exist.
I think a good way to encapsulate what Friedman is on about is that someone who knows a little is much more dangerous than someone who knows nothing.
The Korean-African-American animosity is pretty well explained as a case of people not really understanding each other, but where those people now have the strain of sharing a neighborhood. And it's sad but true that you can live right across the street from someone and not know a thing about that person, and remain suspicious of them for an entire lifetime. "Exposure" as you define it doesn't fix this. The kind of exposure that involves getting to know people's point of view does.
That said, it's hard work getting along with your family, your girlfriend (boyfriend), your neighbors, and your countrymen. Just like it takes a lot of effort to understand why your friend gets upset when you make certain jokes, and still more to remember not do it so as not to offend (and likewise for your friend to put up with it when you do do it), it takes effort for anyone to tolerate anyone else. It seems ridiculous in retrospect to have expected that just because people could check out my bio page that they'd be able to get along with me any better.
And that's not even a little beachhead against this "technology will promote understanding" infomercial we've lived for the past 5 years. For all of its "rich multimedia content", a 30 min IM session conveys less than 4 minutes of face to face conversation. We seem to think that we can keep doing exactly what we do now, and click through to the story about our neighbors every so often, and we'll all just be subsumed by grace and tolerance. I'm no fortuneteller, but I'd call that pretty unlikely.
How conveniently simple and objective. C'mon, man, how many people on earth can deliver that lesson you just outlined? I can guess at some of YOUR biases having only read some 1000 characters that you wrote on the internet.
Students need to learn both the material on its own merits, but also that people have opinions and those opinions color their presentation of facts. So absolutely, the teacher should present a thoughtful, balanced approach to the ethical situation, and encourage the students to come to their own conclusions (ethics is, after all, about learning good judgement in subtle cases). But the teacher should also be up front about her own biases and not try obfuscate the fact that things make sense to her in certain way. This way, the students practice both evaluating a set of facts, and evaluating what facts were presented, to whom, and why the presenter might have chosen these facts among others. With work and luck, they will develop judgement.
I'm sure someone has noted by now that ZDNet is carrying this story. On ZDNet it was posted at 4PM. It seems quite possible to me that they picked it up because it was running on Slashdot - it's much more a geek story than an enterprise-techie one. The media getting their news from Slashdot? - a disturbing prospect, and totally circular. What shall we read, dear Liza?
For all his other brilliances, I don't think Bill Gates is particularly blessed with articulate speech. And he knows this, which is why you rarely see him speak without handling. And it's why it's a baaad idea for Microsoft to put him on the stand. He'll probably speak his mind, which is not something you do in court.
The funny thing about this speech is that it seems sincere. He really seems to think that the cost of Windows is trivial, and that complaints about its price are just bad press. Amazing. And then says a few sentences later that we should be moving towards lower cost computing. I just don't get how he puts it together.
Re:Long on Talk, Short on Substance
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On Hacktivism
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Well put. Ironic that while the article bashes in the press and pundits who dare attach e to words, the author spends many column-inches predicting e-democratization.
How often do most Internet users take take advantage of the fact that most major world newspapers are online, and a fish away from being comprehensible in their own language?
I certainly can't speak for any Chinese, but the case for truth and light coming shining through the Internet seems vastly overstated to me.
I think the reason is that putting the case for lux et libertas et machina is that you get to hack the firewall and call it progress, instead of cleaning up oozing wounds on people afflicted with AIDS.
I admire the concern for social problems and the desire to get the tech community (indisputably among the world's richest few percent) involved. Let's just remember: technology won't solve a problem unless the remainder of the infrastructure exists to do the task at hand. You could definitely build a massive shipping database in Equatorial Guinea, but that wouldn't get shipments anywhere any faster than the donkey walks.
But, I can see you and I have a basic disagreement here anyway. You do seem to believe that buying and selling is coercive.
I believe that like all other human activites buying and selling can be highly beneficial for both parties or tremendously exploitive, depending on the relationship between the buyer and the seller. I don't know you, but I'd guess that we agree about on this on some basic level, and probably not at more subtle levels. That is, usury is pretty clearly wrong, but we may disagree about the terms the WTO sets.
I confess that I may bring in the fact that buying and selling can be coercive when sometimes I ought not. It's pretty hard, however, to evaluate the fairness of US trade with have-not nations without noting that we've freqyently intervened with our military in order to set trade terms highly favorable to us. Hence the Congo example.
As for your points about the language of the original poster, your arguments are interesting and cogent. Nicely put.
I suppose you think that working is wage slavery, too.
Touche. How about a compromise where we both limit the invective?
You poor suffering peasant. I hate to fight flame with flame, but y'all are in the wrong industry to be complaining about government handouts, and I'm in too crappy a mood to listen to puerile nerds complain about how hard it is for them when they have to pay some taxes for the plush infrastructure that lets them run servers in the houses on dirt-cheap gummint electricity. (Of course if you pointed out that a self-righteous answer to an ignorant self-righteous rant is somehwere self-defeating, I'd be obliged to concede the wisdom of this, but a little reply-ranting feels good, as we well know here. On with the show).
It's time for some Q&A.Let's start with familiar/. lore.
Q. Who invented the Internet?
A. The US federal gummint (DARPA)
Q. On whose dime?
A. The US taxpayers'
Q. What industry occupies the largest portion of the US federal government's trillions of dollars in expenditures?
A. Defense. 35% in 2001. Welfare and other means-tested entitlments were 6%.
Q. What has the US Dept. of Defense been focusing on since the end of the Cold War?
A. Technology - computerized planes, satellites, drones, tanks, etc. Read any Afghanistan story in the
Washington Post or New York Times, or any other major newspaper, and you will hear nothing but raves about our high-tech military.
Q. And who does that money employ?
A. Engineers, technologists, programmers.
Q. What do they make on average?
A. A starting salary of $60K, if not more
Q. Wow, Eric, sounds like the geeks get the most welfare of all! Why do you think they complain so much?
A. (stumped)
And don't even dare to complain how hard it is to figure out what the government spends - it took me 6 seconds to find
the US budget.
Whew!
We didn't cut down all of our trees. There are huge forests in the US. I believe I read that there are more trees now than 30 years ago through careful management.
Be cautious - this is the Weyerhauser spin on trees. There may or may not be more than 30 years ago (which was a really low point of environmental stewardship for our country), but the trees which have been "carefully managed" are softwood - i.e., pulp trees. In places where trees have been replanted, the ecosystems are not the same as they were.
This treaty is a sham designed to hurt the US.
This is energy company spin. While your points about the transfer of economic power are interesting, putting the "they're just out to get us" angle back in there makes your reply a counter-screed to the parent screed. Second, if the US derives economic power from activities which put a burden on the rest of the world, then we gotta make restitution, even if that involves a transfer of power. You gotta pay to play.
If you don't like losing them, stop selling them to us.
The "just stop selling them" argument is a little simplistic. By the same rights, the US has no business fighting a war on drugs abroad - we should "just stop" buying them.
Even worse, it's totally cynical. You're suggesting that because we as the US have money, we're totally devoid of responsiblity for what happens when we throw it around, because after all, all those Congolese people "chose" to "sell" us their diamonds. Yes, there is an onus on Brazil to control it's own population and make sensible policy choices about their resources. But the onus is also on us to help them, because it's in our interests, as well as theirs to have less CO2 in the atmosphere.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure I put much stock in this method. I'll bet if you search for MS Access and any of those words, you'd find 10 to 1000 times the number of pages - because there are soooo many Access users stumbling for help out there. I'd suggest the same thing is true for MySQL, on a more limited scale. Very, very few of these users will ever acquire the depth knowledge you'd need to make a serious assessment of the relative merits of the databases.
Congrats, you really know your stuff. So rare here on /. ...
To me it's a very simple premise:
Human bodies have had hundreds of thousands of years to get used to eating foods without GMO, without strong pesticides, and without growth hormones. And it's sure not hard to imagine some research group, whatever their intentions or level of skill, overlooking something amidst the myriad complexity of the human body.
Perhaps in several thousand years our bodies will adapt to new foodstuffs, or perhaps a mistake was made and some GMO element will always be terminally bad for us. Either way, I'd rather not be a test case in that adaptation process, thanks.
Excellent post, way to put it in perspective.
However,
I take issue with this point:
The United States is the one making a very large donation to a poor company for almost no (if any) self-benifit, yet it is painted as the bad guy for not agreeing to mill the corn as well!
Let's look at the actual cost of this corn.
The article quotes a ship arrive each day for 2 days with 10000 metric tons of corn, each costing $95. Let's say the US does this for a full year (which seems like the outside limit to me). This would cost $347 million, a trivial sum of money for this country.
I won't bother with the usual comparison to the US gov't national budget. Instead, let's compare that to the amount of money a private investment corporation, JP Morgan, was willing to put into Enron as of November last year: $1 billion. See this article. This after Enron revealed that it was in very poor financial shape as a result of extensive book-cooking for years. From this point of view, $350m is bargain basement.
What we gain:
We will have fed 12 million starving people at a time when many peple in the world thinks the US is full of greedy bastards.
Furthermore, we will have shown Europe, and other large trading partners that we are willing to go against the demands of our corporations sometimes, also at a time when many people inside and outside the US have doubts about the trustworthiness of those corporations.
As for your point that the Europeans are also involved here because they are placing restrictions on imported foodstuffs, that's a fair point. For African countries, the burden of meeting US and European food importation standard is a very heavy one. Europe is full of double-talk on this issue - if they wanted to help, they could indeed make some concessions here.
Of course we could do an end run around all of this by formally granting Zimbabwe permanent indemnity from IP claims by Monsanto (or at least until the average standard of living is something comparable to the 1st world). Hell, if Monsanto was really good faith about all this, it could grant the indemnity itself. Talk about a publicity steal for Monsanto - for the price of a tiny bit money they'd be hard pressed to collect anyway, they get to claim that their GE seeds "helped save 12 million Zimbabweans from starving".
Lets see: U.S. companies spend boatloads of cash engineering GE foods that can solve world hunger once and for all and the hungry slap their hands? Certainly sounds to me like beggars trying to be choosers.
I hope you're not suggesting we all owe Monsanto a big hug for being so kind as to develop patented versions of the food people used to be able to grow for free. I'm believe that they, like the rest of us would be happy to see world hunger solved, but I don't see them offering any way out of Zimbabwe's food-now, lawsuits-later dilemma.
At what point should some government (ours - US) be saying to them, yes you are encouraged to make money, but you have an obligation to the rest of humanity that is as or more important the making your stock valuations increase?
The fact that we're not willing to pay $25 a metric ton is much more damning. I would hardly put it past Mugabe to play politics just for some good press internationally and domestically, but the request to mill the corn first really is quite reasonable from a lot of points of view. And frankly all the US doesn't seem to have a particularly good reason not to the mill the corn - our answer seems to be a patronizing, "well it's our corn so shut up and do what we say" answer, viz:
At a news conference in Johannesburg on Friday, Roger Winter, USAID's assistant administrator for humanitarian assistance, suggested that Zimbabwe had little choice if it wanted to feed its people. "We have no substitute for that maize. That maize is what's available," he said.
and:
When India balked over a humanitarian shipment of gene-altered food, one U.S. official was quoted as saying, "Beggars can't be chosers."
Take what positions you will about other US foreign policy actions, this just seems gratuitously obnoxious on our part, unless they really are trying to push Monsanto corn on everyone.
The point here is well taken - devices that try to cater to people's unwillingness to work to learn eventually become restrictive and annoying.
I'd say we're wrapping up the first round of "user-friendliness realignment". As computers, which up till a decade ago were largely for the use of people who knew what they wanted to do, and were willing to put in substantial effort to learn, turned into something that everyone needed to use, someone needed to redesing them towards accomplishing the task these new users want to do, without needing a year's worth of engineering training. To continue the car analogy, we eliminated the choke, made the car automatic, and set up Jiffy Lubes to change yout oil. For this it was necessary to think from the point of view of a email/IM/word processing user rather than a programmer and see what these people were trying to accomplish, and how to make it straightforward for them.
I believe there will be several more rounds of usability improvments, as people begin to shape their lives more around computers, and all of these will involve making it straightforward (!= trivial!!!) to do what people want to do.
This is an excellent point. You can minimize this feeling by by clear and respectful with your supervisors as you begin to look for new work. If you work with them like you're both trying to solve the problem of getting a position that works well for you, that really helps keep their respect for you. In this case, your ending up at another company means that what's offered there meets your needs better, and tends to leave much less of a bad taste in people's mouth than springing the news that you'll be cleaning out your desk in exactly 14.0 days. Both companies are less likely to feel that they've been played off against each other, and then you're in the catbird seat. OK, a little rosy, but a little respectfulness goes a long way.
I disagree.
There's no excuse for not knowing how to communicate with people of variety of levels. You may be a whiz in front of a
[root@boxen root]$
but if you can't express these ideas to people who don't already know most of what you're talking about, you're taking a lot of chances on somebody recognizing your genius.
I do agree to really master the subject, you do have take the time to learn it through and through. A buffer overflow is a compact phrase representing of a particular concept. But you may well be called on to explain in lay terms what that idea means and why Project X should pay you to make sure there aren't any.
All of which is to say, make sure you take an English class or two before leaving college.
Regrettably I think you're right - Dick Cheney and company are basically cynical opportunists. There's a strand of feeling for this that they're capitalizing on - in my experience, many people are still kind of resentful about the "you have it better than most of the world", "corporations are greedy scum" rhetoric of the past several decades, like they're being called morally corrupt for wanting wealth. I hope we can come back to a more balanced view, where wanting wealth is perfectly fine thing to want, in tandem with duty to family, friends, neighbors, community, world.
with a few exceptions, the poorest of today have significant wealth in comparison to their predecessors.
Not to be picky, but where did the survey cover? I believe that health, bad is it is in places, is probably no worse than before, and vastly better in some places, so I'd buy better health. But I'm not sure I think that about starvation, unemployment, and violence. And whether it's absolute or relative poverty, if people feel a lack of dignity, they feel it, it's real.
The only thing they have to trade is labor. Ideally, market globalism should include as fundamental complete fluidity of labor. But the biggest bleeding-heart liberals, worrying over the world's impoverished, become notably less caring when it comes to the question of those poor people "taking away jobs".
Undoubtedly, freely moving capital and blocked labor will always favor the capitalist over the laborer. Bleeding-heart liberal or no, I just don't think it would work to emmigrate millions of Africans to the G8 countries. Besides, it wouldn't surprise me if we could automate most manual labor within 100 years. Which only makes the contrast even starker. Call me utopian, but imagine 3 billion intellects working in synchronicity....or 2 billions souls starving in front you.
So, I don't know. If simple market forces can't get the job done, then these regions need huge infusions of capital that is correctly distributed
And many of them need some way to recover from the cynicism about the rule of law that centuries of colonialism and corruption have left.
I think a key thing for those of us who want to see this infusion of capital happen to do is to stay on top of the WTO. The WTO offers a enormous opportunity to align interests here. Investors have a natural and stated interest in transparency, economic stability, and rule of law. Though they may say don't want to pay for it, they have a secondary interest in developing the infrastructure of these countries. And as much as they may crow about having all the money, investors need investment opportunities, and companies need labor. If there were really good people (like George Soros good) in there advocating for the fair and equitable application of the principles of the WTO, countries could do much better leveraging their resources for capital under terms favorable to them.
Imagine for example, a truly powerful Mercosur-EU alliance that told the US to go to hell when we ratified illegal subsidies for steel. Even Bush's blinders would hold that out.
It's that last bit that's the problem. Of course, that's always the problem when you're trying to build something that only can be grown.
Brilliant turn of phrase. I'll have to remember that one.
On the subject of usury, the word actually means the practice of charging interest on a loan. Depending on your interpretation, it may mean the charging of excessive interest, or the charging of interest period. And yes, there's a story in the Bible about usury.
You are right that I was reading it metaphorically as a mandate against exploitation. Good point to clarify. I do think exploitation is inhumane, and frankly it's a disgrace that humanity lets that kind of thing go on on the scales that we do.
The "humanity has come a long way" argument is essentially meaningless, sorry to say. All you're basically saying there is that you think everybody ought to behave according to your preferences, but in more high-minded terms.
If you're saying that my metaphor is overstated for a debate over the price of CDs, I can buy that criticism. I'm also open to the criticism that I phrase ideas about how I think humanity could live better as moral imperatives, and that is a patronizing way of approaching people. If this what you're saying, fairly said.
As for me wanting people to live according to my preferences - the answer is an unabashed yes (in the general sense, not in the absolute sense). High-minded or low-minded, sooner or later, everyone advocates for a way of doing things - if they're looking out for themselves, they at least advocate about the way to do the things that affect them. Take building roads - building them or not building them are both choices that affect my life. I'm interested in problems people have to cooperate to solve, so I advocate for myself and others at once. I'm about people looking out for each other - and making that a priority over other things. Corral my language if it's obnoxious, but that's what I'm fer.
Rather, capitalism elevates rational self-interest as a fundamental principle.
Certainly this is a deep-running theme in economics. Of course you can make a pretty good case that it works because people believe it should work, try hard at being rational self-interested agents, largely succeed, and their efforts result in wealth. I don't like that these theories offer a very reductionist view of human nature - people are much, much more interesting than rational self-interested agents. It's fair to say that you can count on people being self-interested perhaps more than other qualities like altruism, need for a bond with others, intellectual and physical passions, etc., but those other qualities fill in what it means to be human.
Rational self-interest allows--requires--some level of enforcement of the rule of law such that less rational people are prevented from literally and metaphorically hitting other people over the head with a rock and stealing their sheep.
This is true. But you can also read it as a parable about the Northern European diaspora's craving for order - it's not okay to steal someone's sheep using a rock, but a lawsuit is A-OK. That's not intended to be cynical, just pointing out our quirks.
In this age of global fluidity, you can thread together a pretty convincing story that rational self-interest also requires some redistribution of wealth:
Whatever you think of their merit, we need to pay some money to works in Africa so that continent doesn't collapse in famine and disease and hose the rest of the world in the process.
Market economics is a good thing because it works. It creates wealth where there was no wealth before,
Good point. Another way of putting this is that it requires people to keep one eye on the bottom line - are we actually producing something of value?
and as a general rule everyone benefits from this. That's not so clear. Market economics does very little about disparities in power. If you believe Marx's economic analysis (leaving aside the crap about "collective anarchy") - those with money make more money, and quickly accumulate power. Pretty convincing.
I'd hesitate to argue that more people are better off today than before - there's a lot of very poor and desperate people in this world today. Is it better or worse than before? I don't know if that question can be answered, or really if it should - the relevant one is how do we make most people OK off, without putting roadblocks in the way of generating wealth.
(Certainly that's true in contrast to mere wealth redistribution.)
A professor of mine once characterized a huge problem with the Soviet economy as the fact that politics always superceded economics. Things always got built where politics (mostly personalist Party politics) dictated. That seems like a pretty insightful way to look at it. But the reverse is true, too: the triumph of "rationally self-interested" economics over everything else means a breakdown of civic society - a course I hope the US and others reverse. The question is how to keep the freedom to express individual genius and drive but not reduce every interaction that involves money to one that can be commoditized.
Not because it makes sense to elevate simple selfishness to some grand moral principle. That way of thinking is that of the Market Cultists, and they're down the hall, in the padded room with the Objectivists.
Well hopefully most of the Objectivists can be safely sent off to write philosophical and scientific treatises to their objective hearts' delight, but right now we've got Market Cultists in the White House, and this bad news for a market that needs some coralling.
I think is an incredibly insightful comment, and I encourage you to follow up on it more.
For my part I see a couple deep problems here:
The market is meta-capitalism - that is, it's not making money through doing anything, it's more or less making money through a loan. Risky loans, as they involve to trying to put a dollar value on a very complex operation (a sizable business) involving personal and economic dynamics of negotations between entities. One don't have any problem with the captains of Solomon Bros, etc losing their silk shirts, but I don't think people really understand the risk - particularly not working-class 401k contributors who are led into bad loans by well-connected shysters (Enron), or people who invest in mutual funds who rely on shyster analysts.
Another problem is:
Making money for money's sake is fundamentally incompatible with another function of the economy, which is to deliver services to people (I'd rather not use the word consumer, because I think it doesn't leave room for economic transactions that improve quality of life - e.g. working on your neighborhood' park cleanup effort, or working on another neighboorhood's park cleanup effort). Is there any way to reestablish the ethic of doing work for its own sake?
Another thing y'all may be able to fill in is a comment a friend made to me. He said:
The market is really driven by the big investment houses: Solomon Bros, JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, etc. Index prices mostly react to the movements of huge amounts of money in these kinds of institutional transactions. Do you think this is true?
To me it reflects on a situation I think is unfortunate: the government is current afraid to assert its authority over big business because big business basically threatens to put a lot of people out of work (political death) if they don't get what they want.
I was gonna leave this "the market takes care of everything rant" alone, but it always seems to get coopted into a "we should kowtow to every whim of big business" rant
The price of CDs, like any other economic entity, is governed by market forces. They charge $16 for a CD because people will pay it. It is not morally wrong or illegal to charge whatever price the market will bear
CD's like any other entity are traded in an economic climate where decisions are shaped by the laws and norms of the country, as well as the power realities: Dell cannot say no to Microsoft when they demand that Dell not install alternate OSes - that's not "free" market economics at all, that's a power dynamic. Hence the constant debate over intellectual property law here - this law shapes the economy of information.
Here's another look at the question of cost of CDs: because recording companies have achieved massive control of the distribution channels for music, CDs cost $16, notwithstanding the low costs of production. The record companies' control over production relies on a series of laws regarding contracts and intellectual property which they helped shape by lobbying.
The "free" market is an abstraction, even to economists. The practical question is how to shape the elements that govern a market to avoid gratuitious restricting individuals' actions but still hold true to society's morality and goals.
In fact, some believe that it's morally wrong not to do so.
Whoa,whoa,whoa, let's slow down here a minute. It's morally wrong not to charge people as much as you possibly can for something? I'm not religious, but as I recall, that practice has been frowned upon since at least biblical times, being referred to in the bible as usury. Humanity has come a long way from the days when those who could took all they could from anyone they could take it from. To say that it's morally wrong not to charge someone as much as you can for something is pretty cynical.
Dogtown and Z boys does a great job capturing the sense of the moment and place that these guys grew up in. As an East-Coaster transplanted West, I came away with a new appreciation for the beach towns in southern California. And the soundtrack itself was worth going for.
But in many ways the movie felt frustratingly self-aggrandizing. If you notice that the interviewer is always saying "you guys" and "we" to the subjects, while they're discussing the badass things they invented when they were 13, you realize that Stacey Peralta shot a movie about how cool his childhood friends were. That's great as long as the personal perspective is evident - I think my childhood friends are some of most remarkable people I know. But when you present the "we invented modern skateboarding" mantra as an impartial conclusion, it just ends up sounding pretentious.
Still the movie is a great snapshot of what came to be a big part of American pop culture. Stacey Peralta clear has some chops as a filmmaker, and this one's worth a watch.
That particular piece of FUD was troubling to me, as it means that Microsoft thinks that the political climate is safe for them to say that publicly funded work should not be released to the public domain, but rather should be used to enrich a particular set of people (i.e., them).
It troubles me that people think they can make that claim in public, because it says to me that people are really buying this crap that in order to provide jobs for the middle class, you've got to mollify every little whim of the captains of industry. I don't think it's wise for government to alienate industry entirely, but it does need to make sure industry knows who's ultimately in charge. Time for some balance.
Have more than 3 trained squirrels actually experienced this problem?
How many broken iMacs are we actually talking about?
This is exactly the problem - this issue is not cut and dried at all. It is intolerable that these so-called martyrs go attack civilians in the guise of being an army. On the other hand, there's ample precedent for taking up arms against your oppressor in ways outside the standard guys-in-camo definition, from Jewish uprisings in the Nazi ghettos to the American and French revolutions. And given that Israel has long used assasination and torture as tools of war, it's pretty hard to argue that this "war" has been kept inside those guys-in-green line.
If Yasser had set up a market system and concentreated more on the economic development of his people, rather than the extermination of the Jews, he might be worthy of respect.
This is an excellent point, Yasser Arafat does not seem at all effective in broadening the economic base of Palestine. However, the same point goes goes doubly for us and trebly for Israel, who are, after all, paying for all this monkey business. You want to see an end to the bombers, you gotta put all those smart people to work at something, or they'll work on their own plots and machinations. Food for thought, given that our foreign aid is 0.1% of our GDP (even worse if that 0.1% includes military aid).
I think a good way to encapsulate what Friedman is on about is that someone who knows a little is much more dangerous than someone who knows nothing.
The Korean-African-American animosity is pretty well explained as a case of people not really understanding each other, but where those people now have the strain of sharing a neighborhood. And it's sad but true that you can live right across the street from someone and not know a thing about that person, and remain suspicious of them for an entire lifetime. "Exposure" as you define it doesn't fix this. The kind of exposure that involves getting to know people's point of view does.
That said, it's hard work getting along with your family, your girlfriend (boyfriend), your neighbors, and your countrymen. Just like it takes a lot of effort to understand why your friend gets upset when you make certain jokes, and still more to remember not do it so as not to offend (and likewise for your friend to put up with it when you do do it), it takes effort for anyone to tolerate anyone else. It seems ridiculous in retrospect to have expected that just because people could check out my bio page that they'd be able to get along with me any better.
And that's not even a little beachhead against this "technology will promote understanding" infomercial we've lived for the past 5 years. For all of its "rich multimedia content", a 30 min IM session conveys less than 4 minutes of face to face conversation. We seem to think that we can keep doing exactly what we do now, and click through to the story about our neighbors every so often, and we'll all just be subsumed by grace and tolerance. I'm no fortuneteller, but I'd call that pretty unlikely.
How conveniently simple and objective. C'mon, man, how many people on earth can deliver that lesson you just outlined? I can guess at some of YOUR biases having only read some 1000 characters that you wrote on the internet.
Students need to learn both the material on its own merits, but also that people have opinions and those opinions color their presentation of facts. So absolutely, the teacher should present a thoughtful, balanced approach to the ethical situation, and encourage the students to come to their own conclusions (ethics is, after all, about learning good judgement in subtle cases). But the teacher should also be up front about her own biases and not try obfuscate the fact that things make sense to her in certain way. This way, the students practice both evaluating a set of facts, and evaluating what facts were presented, to whom, and why the presenter might have chosen these facts among others. With work and luck, they will develop judgement.
I'm sure someone has noted by now that ZDNet is carrying this story. On ZDNet it was posted at 4PM. It seems quite possible to me that they picked it up because it was running on Slashdot - it's much more a geek story than an enterprise-techie one. The media getting their news from Slashdot? - a disturbing prospect, and totally circular. What shall we read, dear Liza?
For all his other brilliances, I don't think Bill Gates is particularly blessed with articulate speech. And he knows this, which is why you rarely see him speak without handling. And it's why it's a baaad idea for Microsoft to put him on the stand. He'll probably speak his mind, which is not something you do in court.
The funny thing about this speech is that it seems sincere. He really seems to think that the cost of Windows is trivial, and that complaints about its price are just bad press. Amazing. And then says a few sentences later that we should be moving towards lower cost computing. I just don't get how he puts it together.
How often do most Internet users take take advantage of the fact that most major world newspapers are online, and a fish away from being comprehensible in their own language? I certainly can't speak for any Chinese, but the case for truth and light coming shining through the Internet seems vastly overstated to me. I think the reason is that putting the case for lux et libertas et machina is that you get to hack the firewall and call it progress, instead of cleaning up oozing wounds on people afflicted with AIDS.
I admire the concern for social problems and the desire to get the tech community (indisputably among the world's richest few percent) involved. Let's just remember: technology won't solve a problem unless the remainder of the infrastructure exists to do the task at hand. You could definitely build a massive shipping database in Equatorial Guinea, but that wouldn't get shipments anywhere any faster than the donkey walks.
But, I can see you and I have a basic disagreement here anyway. You do seem to believe that buying and selling is coercive.
I believe that like all other human activites buying and selling can be highly beneficial for both parties or tremendously exploitive, depending on the relationship between the buyer and the seller. I don't know you, but I'd guess that we agree about on this on some basic level, and probably not at more subtle levels. That is, usury is pretty clearly wrong, but we may disagree about the terms the WTO sets.
I confess that I may bring in the fact that buying and selling can be coercive when sometimes I ought not. It's pretty hard, however, to evaluate the fairness of US trade with have-not nations without noting that we've freqyently intervened with our military in order to set trade terms highly favorable to us. Hence the Congo example.
As for your points about the language of the original poster, your arguments are interesting and cogent. Nicely put.
I suppose you think that working is wage slavery, too.
Touche. How about a compromise where we both limit the invective?
It's time for some Q&A.Let's start with familiar /. lore.
Q. Who invented the Internet?
A. The US federal gummint (DARPA)
Q. On whose dime?
A. The US taxpayers'
Q. What industry occupies the largest portion of the US federal government's trillions of dollars in expenditures?
A. Defense. 35% in 2001. Welfare and other means-tested entitlments were 6%.
Q. What has the US Dept. of Defense been focusing on since the end of the Cold War? A. Technology - computerized planes, satellites, drones, tanks, etc. Read any Afghanistan story in the Washington Post or New York Times, or any other major newspaper, and you will hear nothing but raves about our high-tech military.
Q. And who does that money employ?
A. Engineers, technologists, programmers.
Q. What do they make on average?
A. A starting salary of $60K, if not more
Q. Wow, Eric, sounds like the geeks get the most welfare of all! Why do you think they complain so much?
A. (stumped)
And don't even dare to complain how hard it is to figure out what the government spends - it took me 6 seconds to find the US budget. Whew!
Be cautious - this is the Weyerhauser spin on trees. There may or may not be more than 30 years ago (which was a really low point of environmental stewardship for our country), but the trees which have been "carefully managed" are softwood - i.e., pulp trees. In places where trees have been replanted, the ecosystems are not the same as they were.
This treaty is a sham designed to hurt the US.
This is energy company spin. While your points about the transfer of economic power are interesting, putting the "they're just out to get us" angle back in there makes your reply a counter-screed to the parent screed. Second, if the US derives economic power from activities which put a burden on the rest of the world, then we gotta make restitution, even if that involves a transfer of power. You gotta pay to play.
If you don't like losing them, stop selling them to us.
The "just stop selling them" argument is a little simplistic. By the same rights, the US has no business fighting a war on drugs abroad - we should "just stop" buying them. Even worse, it's totally cynical. You're suggesting that because we as the US have money, we're totally devoid of responsiblity for what happens when we throw it around, because after all, all those Congolese people "chose" to "sell" us their diamonds. Yes, there is an onus on Brazil to control it's own population and make sensible policy choices about their resources. But the onus is also on us to help them, because it's in our interests, as well as theirs to have less CO2 in the atmosphere.