The stone age was overtaken by the bronze age because of 1) a technological discovery, the ability to melt and alloy metal to create bronze, 2) specialization of labor allowed metalsmiths to become good at bronze working (instead of working on the farm all the time) and 3) expansion of trade routes allowed metals to flow from where they were found to where they were needed.
The broze age did not occur because some dictator saw to it. It just happened because of the free market and free trade...
I think the problem is spectrum congestion. The last few times I've been in Manhattan, I've often found 802.11b to be useless because of the large number of hotspots and users overlapping.
BPL is most of a risk to weak signal work in the HF bands. But things like SKYWARN are maninly VHF or UHF.
The emergency value of HF is even in question these days with the rapidly dropping cost of satellite communications. I can pick up an Iridium or Inmarsat phone and have a connection right away, no phone patch needed on the remote side. Small uplink dishes now fit into suitcases, providing enough bandwidth for hundreds of phone calls or even video, and will have even more gain with the new Ka-band satellites.
I let my ham license lapse when I stopped using it, replaced with cellphone and Internet.
Wow, you are right, Canada has a 6.8% unemployment rate. Not like France or Germany, but still a bit high.
I suggest that Canada de-regulate & de-socialize its medical industry, there is some excellent opportunity for additional employment through privatization.
Can one rule out that the reduction in death due to other causes (especially communicable diseases) leaves you with nothing left to die from except cancer and heart attacks?
The barriers to self-employment are being reduced all the time. The reason why firms exist are to remove the transaction costs involved in the organization of people to perform orchestrated tasks. Today, with the Internet, it is trivial to organize individuals to perform orchestrated tasks.
What is wrong with full employment? It implies significant economic inefficiencies which reduces economic growth the improvement in standards of living.
Full employment can only be achieved through "make work" jobs, which are difficult to take pride in. Then you have real dreamless sheep.
If you want to keep meaningful physical labor, feel free to go to a developing country, there is plenty there!
Oralux is a Knoppix live-CD to facilitate access to GNU/Linux for the visually impaired. The Oralux user interface is based on Emacspeak or Yasr, and has FLITE and EFM (Festival/MBROLA version).
Or is what you meant that you think forcing billions of other people to spend their money on it is a good idea?
If one believes that global warming is an externality which needs to be contained, the choices are building the sun shield, carbon taxes, or tradeable CO2/Methane emission limits. I believe that the sun shield might be the cheapest solution.
100 million barrels of oil per day times $50 per barrel (being conservative) times 365 days per year makes oil itself a $1.8 trillion / year industry. That doesn't even begin to add in the cost of oil refining, gasonline distribution, etc.
I think spending a few billion dollars to stave off global warming would pay for itself very rapidly.
This map of Chad shows that there is something water related there. It is just north of Koro-Toro, a ways south of Faya-Largeau (although there are similar features around that city according to the map).
I think the feature is a semi-permanent lake, one that may fill up in some seasons, and then possibly evaporate almost completely away (like the lake in Death Valley). Lake Chad was once huge (the Pale-Chadian Sea) and some of those semi-permanent lakes might be all that is left of the sea in the north. This link suggests a cause:
Lake Chad, located in the southwestern part of the basin at an altitude of 282 meters, surprisingly does not mark the basin's lowest point; instead, this is found in the Bodele and Djourab regions in the north-central and northeastern parts of the country, respectively. This oddity arises because the great stationary dunes (ergs) of the Kanem region create a dam, preventing lake waters from flowing to the basin's lowest point.
Djourab is in about the right place to be near these features.
If 90% of the working popuation hold poverty-level jobs, they aren't going to be doing a lot of discretionary buying.
The poor need food, housing, and some level of entertainment as much as any of us do. Infact one of the biggest growth industries of the future will be selling things to the global poor as economies in developing countries reform.
At the same time, I know people "in poverty" who buy big-screen tv's, surround sound units, and have new clothes and shoes (they are much less expensive than they used to be, because they are made overseas...)
Only 3% of US jobs are minimum wage, by the way.
Poverty in the US is mainly a single-parent family phenomenon. One-third of single-parent families are in poverty, compared with 5.6% of married-couple families. Poverty is also measured pre-tax, so key poverty fighters such as food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit are not included in the calculation of the statistics.
The majority of people not employed are stay at home mothers, students, and retirees. The statistics count people aged 16 and over. Age 16-19 labor force participation is only 47.4%. Age 65 and over is only 13.2%.
Women 25-34, for example, participate 75.1%, while men in that age range participate 92.4%.
Given the number of immigrants that come to the US legally and start successful, even if small, companies, I wouldn't go so far as to say that Americans have some sort of monopoly on the ability to make companies go.
Yes. the business innovation you see from the US comes from our legal system which allows ventures to launch, get funded, and to either succeed or fail. It isn't from DNA, it is from appropriate and low levels of regulation.
Starting and running a business in most other countries and complying with their labor laws and financing regulations is actually much harder.
See Doing Business guide to see how hard it is to start a business in other countries. For example, in Brazil, it takes 152 days to start a company, compared with 5 in the US.
Globally there is plenty of entrepreneurism, unfortunately, in many poor countries it has been stifled or forced into the illegal and less productive "informal sector" because of regulations, some of which are more stringent than ones in the developed world.
If a group of Indian programmers writes Word 2006 which is then presented as Microsoft's product, is it counted as part of America's GDP?
The cost of the product is, but the price paid to the Indians is taken away from GDP.
The US does have key skills in terms of business organization, marketing, distribution, sales, etc. These skills are just as important in business as writing code.
However, I think you will find that Microsoft still spends plenty of R&D money in the US, although it also spends money on it around the world as well.
The US government can't even obey its own *AFTA treaties. You expect the world governments to not try and cash in?
The "cash in" is of course temporary or illusory. The US does not benefit on the whole by putting up tariff barriers. Some particular jobs may be temporarilly saved, but the economy as a whole is damaged as US consumers are unable to realize the savings from foreign production, and while domestic industry is saved from the competitive pressures from foreign companies to become more innovative and productive.
The key example of this is recent steel tariffs, which damaged a lot of US companies who build value-added products from foreign steel. This damage was much greater than the value of US steel jobs temporarilly saved.
Then that's the world we need to return to if we're going to continue to have a middle class.
The concept of class is not well defined, and worthless.
I just want to increase my quality of life a little each year, and so far, with the exception of parts of the 1970's and parts of 2001, it is going fine for me. I don't care which "class" someone would like to say I am in.
But we're currently embroiled in a much larger conflict (the economic war combined with the war on terror)
I think that you are overly concerned about a couple of nuts with bombs, not to mention concerned about an economic regime which has a track record of bringing incredible increases in wealth to the US, as well as raising hundreds of millions of people in Asia out of absolute poverty (under $1 a day).
There is no emergency. The concept of emergency is most used to spread fear by priests or politicians to who seek power by hurting people or damaging the economy with regulations.
From 1974 to 1997 unemployment was higher than it is now. For example in 1982, the US has over 10% unemployment.
By historically, I mean in the period since women entered the workforce in large amounts. Unemployment before the 1970's is really a different world (with a much lower total labor force participation).
You are correct that unemployment was very low during WWII, and labor force participation was very high. It was not sustainable, and required federal debt to approach 125% of GDP.
What's going on is systematic disabling of the north american ability to manufacture and support goods and services.
Then why does the US GDP continue to grow, if we are less able to provide goods or services?
Eventually, nobody will be available to make the goods or support them, except those who undercut the prices so severely in the first place. They are then free to set the prices at whatever levels they want, since they have exclusive ability.
This whole predatory pricing thing has been proven to be incorrect time and time again.
First of all, by reducing prices, "predators" are provide incredible value benefits to the consumers, while losing potential profit. Certainly the US consumer is already seeing trillions of dollars of savings from imported products.
Secondly, when "they" try to turn around the prices, what barriers of entry will keep other competitors out of the game? How will "they" be able to conspire in order to do this? What about competitors in their own countries? What about competition from other countries (China, Vietnam, El Salvador, etc.)?
Given the fact that there are really no good examples of "predatory pricing" every working, I would not worry.
The free market shows incredible capability to react to supply and demand changes. As long as we keep our economy free of over-regulation, we will be OK.
You own examples (about Indians giving "lousy support") show that there is not an easy path for India and China and others to absorb a large part of US IT. They will certainly absorb a portion, but I suspect there will be plenty of US IT jobs for the forseeable future.
US labor force participation (the percent of population with a job) in 1960 was 59.4%, in 1970 was 60.4%, in 1980 was 63.8%, and is now at 66%. So it is fair to say that US labor force participation is also historically fairly high.
It is down from the all-time high of 67.1% in 2000, but the bubble burt, you know.
Causing unemployment in Europe and the U.S. to save a couple sheckles on the front end will ultimately result in less wealth and less growth in the long run.
I'd argue that current European labor laws are causing much higher unemployment (over 10%) in countries like France and Germany. Unemployment of young people in those countries is much higher as well. The regulations are also limited European GDP growth, currently at or below 1% in France and Germany.
Walmart (and other innovative retailers) have dramatically increased the productivity of US retail, which is a part of the reason why US GDP growth has been higher than Japan's.
Japan does a great job at productive manufacturing, but its retail sector has been regulated so that "mon and pop" stores survive, along with their low productivity, which has kept its economic growth in Japan, on the whole, low.
Slashdot Mirror
The stone age was overtaken by the bronze age because of 1) a technological discovery, the ability to melt and alloy metal to create bronze, 2) specialization of labor allowed metalsmiths to become good at bronze working (instead of working on the farm all the time) and 3) expansion of trade routes allowed metals to flow from where they were found to where they were needed.
The broze age did not occur because some dictator saw to it. It just happened because of the free market and free trade...
The enthalpy of formation of NaCL is 411.15 kJ/mol NaCl. Not insignificant.
NPR also distributes audio using MPEG 1, Layer II in their Content Depot.
I think the problem is spectrum congestion. The last few times I've been in Manhattan, I've often found 802.11b to be useless because of the large number of hotspots and users overlapping.
BPL is most of a risk to weak signal work in the HF bands. But things like SKYWARN are maninly VHF or UHF.
The emergency value of HF is even in question these days with the rapidly dropping cost of satellite communications. I can pick up an Iridium or Inmarsat phone and have a connection right away, no phone patch needed on the remote side. Small uplink dishes now fit into suitcases, providing enough bandwidth for hundreds of phone calls or even video, and will have even more gain with the new Ka-band satellites.
I let my ham license lapse when I stopped using it, replaced with cellphone and Internet.
Wow, you are right, Canada has a 6.8% unemployment rate. Not like France or Germany, but still a bit high.
I suggest that Canada de-regulate & de-socialize its medical industry, there is some excellent opportunity for additional employment through privatization.
Here in the US, almost everyone I know has a job.
Condoms which are a flat sheet of latex are also known as dental dams ;)
Topologically, condoms which are fully-functional should not have any holes. Condoms which are topologically equivalent to a torus are a problem.
Can one rule out that the reduction in death due to other causes (especially communicable diseases) leaves you with nothing left to die from except cancer and heart attacks?
The barriers to self-employment are being reduced all the time. The reason why firms exist are to remove the transaction costs involved in the organization of people to perform orchestrated tasks. Today, with the Internet, it is trivial to organize individuals to perform orchestrated tasks.
What is wrong with full employment? It implies significant economic inefficiencies which reduces economic growth the improvement in standards of living.
Full employment can only be achieved through "make work" jobs, which are difficult to take pride in. Then you have real dreamless sheep.
If you want to keep meaningful physical labor, feel free to go to a developing country, there is plenty there!
Oralux is a Knoppix live-CD to facilitate access to GNU/Linux for the visually impaired. The Oralux user interface is based on Emacspeak or Yasr, and has FLITE and EFM (Festival/MBROLA version).
The reactor structure which is bombarded by neutrons due to fusion becomes highly radioactive though...
Or is what you meant that you think forcing billions of other people to spend their money on it is a good idea?
If one believes that global warming is an externality which needs to be contained, the choices are building the sun shield, carbon taxes, or tradeable CO2/Methane emission limits. I believe that the sun shield might be the cheapest solution.
100 million barrels of oil per day times $50 per barrel (being conservative) times 365 days per year makes oil itself a $1.8 trillion / year industry. That doesn't even begin to add in the cost of oil refining, gasonline distribution, etc.
I think spending a few billion dollars to stave off global warming would pay for itself very rapidly.
This map of Chad shows that there is something water related there. It is just north of Koro-Toro, a ways south of Faya-Largeau (although there are similar features around that city according to the map).
I think the feature is a semi-permanent lake, one that may fill up in some seasons, and then possibly evaporate almost completely away (like the lake in Death Valley). Lake Chad was once huge (the Pale-Chadian Sea) and some of those semi-permanent lakes might be all that is left of the sea in the north. This link suggests a cause:
Lake Chad, located in the southwestern part of the basin at an altitude of 282 meters, surprisingly does not mark the basin's lowest point; instead, this is found in the Bodele and Djourab regions in the north-central and northeastern parts of the country, respectively. This oddity arises because the great stationary dunes (ergs) of the Kanem region create a dam, preventing lake waters from flowing to the basin's lowest point.
Djourab is in about the right place to be near these features.
If 90% of the working popuation hold poverty-level jobs, they aren't going to be doing a lot of discretionary buying.
The poor need food, housing, and some level of entertainment as much as any of us do. Infact one of the biggest growth industries of the future will be selling things to the global poor as economies in developing countries reform.
At the same time, I know people "in poverty" who buy big-screen tv's, surround sound units, and have new clothes and shoes (they are much less expensive than they used to be, because they are made overseas...)
Only 3% of US jobs are minimum wage, by the way.
Poverty in the US is mainly a single-parent family phenomenon. One-third of single-parent families are in poverty, compared with 5.6% of married-couple families. Poverty is also measured pre-tax, so key poverty fighters such as food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit are not included in the calculation of the statistics.
The majority of people not employed are stay at home mothers, students, and retirees. The statistics count people aged 16 and over. Age 16-19 labor force participation is only 47.4%. Age 65 and over is only 13.2%.
Women 25-34, for example, participate 75.1%, while men in that age range participate 92.4%.
Detailed statistics are here.
Given the number of immigrants that come to the US legally and start successful, even if small, companies, I wouldn't go so far as to say that Americans have some sort of monopoly on the ability to make companies go.
Yes. the business innovation you see from the US comes from our legal system which allows ventures to launch, get funded, and to either succeed or fail. It isn't from DNA, it is from appropriate and low levels of regulation.
Starting and running a business in most other countries and complying with their labor laws and financing regulations is actually much harder.
See Doing Business guide to see how hard it is to start a business in other countries. For example, in Brazil, it takes 152 days to start a company, compared with 5 in the US.
Globally there is plenty of entrepreneurism, unfortunately, in many poor countries it has been stifled or forced into the illegal and less productive "informal sector" because of regulations, some of which are more stringent than ones in the developed world.
If a group of Indian programmers writes Word 2006 which is then presented as Microsoft's product, is it counted as part of America's GDP?
The cost of the product is, but the price paid to the Indians is taken away from GDP.
The US does have key skills in terms of business organization, marketing, distribution, sales, etc. These skills are just as important in business as writing code.
However, I think you will find that Microsoft still spends plenty of R&D money in the US, although it also spends money on it around the world as well.
The US government can't even obey its own *AFTA treaties. You expect the world governments to not try and cash in?
The "cash in" is of course temporary or illusory. The US does not benefit on the whole by putting up tariff barriers. Some particular jobs may be temporarilly saved, but the economy as a whole is damaged as US consumers are unable to realize the savings from foreign production, and while domestic industry is saved from the competitive pressures from foreign companies to become more innovative and productive.
The key example of this is recent steel tariffs, which damaged a lot of US companies who build value-added products from foreign steel. This damage was much greater than the value of US steel jobs temporarilly saved.
By the way, I love buying cheap stuff at Target!
Then that's the world we need to return to if we're going to continue to have a middle class.
The concept of class is not well defined, and worthless.
I just want to increase my quality of life a little each year, and so far, with the exception of parts of the 1970's and parts of 2001, it is going fine for me. I don't care which "class" someone would like to say I am in.
But we're currently embroiled in a much larger conflict (the economic war combined with the war on terror)
I think that you are overly concerned about a couple of nuts with bombs, not to mention concerned about an economic regime which has a track record of bringing incredible increases in wealth to the US, as well as raising hundreds of millions of people in Asia out of absolute poverty (under $1 a day).
There is no emergency. The concept of emergency is most used to spread fear by priests or politicians to who seek power by hurting people or damaging the economy with regulations.
From 1974 to 1997 unemployment was higher than it is now. For example in 1982, the US has over 10% unemployment.
By historically, I mean in the period since women entered the workforce in large amounts. Unemployment before the 1970's is really a different world (with a much lower total labor force participation).
You are correct that unemployment was very low during WWII, and labor force participation was very high. It was not sustainable, and required federal debt to approach 125% of GDP.
What's going on is systematic disabling of the north american ability to manufacture and support goods and services.
Then why does the US GDP continue to grow, if we are less able to provide goods or services?
Eventually, nobody will be available to make the goods or support them, except those who undercut the prices so severely in the first place. They are then free to set the prices at whatever levels they want, since they have exclusive ability.
This whole predatory pricing thing has been proven to be incorrect time and time again.
First of all, by reducing prices, "predators" are provide incredible value benefits to the consumers, while losing potential profit. Certainly the US consumer is already seeing trillions of dollars of savings from imported products.
Secondly, when "they" try to turn around the prices, what barriers of entry will keep other competitors out of the game? How will "they" be able to conspire in order to do this? What about competitors in their own countries? What about competition from other countries (China, Vietnam, El Salvador, etc.)?
Given the fact that there are really no good examples of "predatory pricing" every working, I would not worry.
The free market shows incredible capability to react to supply and demand changes. As long as we keep our economy free of over-regulation, we will be OK.
You own examples (about Indians giving "lousy support") show that there is not an easy path for India and China and others to absorb a large part of US IT. They will certainly absorb a portion, but I suspect there will be plenty of US IT jobs for the forseeable future.
US labor force participation (the percent of population with a job) in 1960 was 59.4%, in 1970 was 60.4%, in 1980 was 63.8%, and is now at 66%. So it is fair to say that US labor force participation is also historically fairly high.
It is down from the all-time high of 67.1% in 2000, but the bubble burt, you know.
Causing unemployment in Europe and the U.S. to save a couple sheckles on the front end will ultimately result in less wealth and less growth in the long run.
I'd argue that current European labor laws are causing much higher unemployment (over 10%) in countries like France and Germany. Unemployment of young people in those countries is much higher as well. The regulations are also limited European GDP growth, currently at or below 1% in France and Germany.
Walmart (and other innovative retailers) have dramatically increased the productivity of US retail, which is a part of the reason why US GDP growth has been higher than Japan's.
Japan does a great job at productive manufacturing, but its retail sector has been regulated so that "mon and pop" stores survive, along with their low productivity, which has kept its economic growth in Japan, on the whole, low.