In practice, no economically optimized dictatorship has ever existed
Some people in South Korea and Taiwan may say that this concept is not quite correct. Recent work titled "The Political Economy of Growth: Democracy and Human Capital" (PDF) shows that democracy has no statistically significant direct effect on economic growth.
There are plenty of examples of dictatorships which were highly effective in achieving economic growth, and plenty of examples of democracies which are not effective in achieving economic growth. Of course, the converse of both is true as well.
Economic growth has much more to do with regulation per se, as opposed to the political source of the regulation.
DTV signals occupy the same bandwidth as analog broadcasts (6 MHz). The plus is that you can fit four standard definition sub-channels into that space, or a mixture of high definition and standard definition channels (with the HD looking better with fewer or zero standard def sub channels). Most importantly, DTV signals can be packed tighter together so the total number of channels required can be less. Not all adjacent analog channels can be used today.
The process of moving to DTV is accomplished with channel changes in order to pack the television spectrum tighter so that UHF channels 52-69 will become unoccupied by broadcast televison, and will be available for other uses.
Besides the ATSC standard having programming information delivered via a mechanism known as PSIP (Program and System Information Protocol) for on-screen programming guides on DTV tuner devices, the FCC recently mandated that all stations must have updated and accurate PSIP emmissions.
The deadline for all stations to have a DTV signal on the air has passed. Almost all US television stations have a DTV signal on air now, although not all have maximized their DTV signal power.
The difference is that McCarthyism affected people for their political viewpoints. Most current terror suspects were picked up on a battlefield, and most were a member of a terrorist or government-terrorist organization with blood on their hands. Moreover, these are not US citizens (with perhaps a few exceptions), and members of organizations which remain at war with the US.
A person in my family were made unemployed, driven to depression, and and committed suicide because McCarthyism, but he was only guilty of believing in a silly political belief, not actually killing people. He was not at war against the US.
1) 100 years ago: little indoor plumbing, widespread legal racial and religious discrimination
2) There was plenty of corporate lobbying and donations to government officials 100 years ago. The 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act was mainly the work of food producer Henry Heinz, for example.
1902 to 1912, often referred to as the muckraking decade, saw the publication of more than a thousand articles providing detailed accounts of the economic and political corruption caused by big business, especially the trusts.
3) Standard Oil never came close to cornering the market, by the time the antitrust case against it was filed in 1906, it had hundreds of competitors. Standard Oil oversaw a dramatic reduction in oil prices. It was convicted because of a general anti-business animus stoked by socialist intellectuals and journalists such as Henry Demarest Lloyd and Ida Tarbell and urged on by the company's higher-cost and higher-priced rivals. As a result the most efficient industrial organization of the time was crippled, weakening competition and pushing prices up.
AT&T was broken up into pseudo-monopoly ILECs, wow, thanks.
I can run Linux or OSX, don't need Microsoft. Who cares?
4) Western Union vs. Bell Telephone on telephone patents? 1878 Patent disputes between big corporations are old news. Of course, copyright extension is another matter.
Nothing is really all that new over the last 100 years...now go back 200 years, before the widespread legalization of joint-stock corporations...
Yes, I do. The average Indian IT worker does not have access to the same level of capital and thus infrastructure support that an American IT worker does.
That is part of the explanation, of course, the mismatch between Indian IT labor supply and demand is the other half (and probably dominant part) of the reason.
I really hate to say this, but look at democratic India from independence until the 1980's - democratically enforced socialism, low growth, little poverty reduction.
Or Bolivia, where the country is exploding because popular revolutionary forces are about to kill the goose that laid the golden egg by nationalizing foreign gas operations there.
I'm a big believer in freedom, yet I think a lot of Chinese are incredibly happy about the last 20 years of tremendous economic growth under their autocratic overlords.
No doubt the people will eventually become rich enough and the economy will become complex enough that the autocrats will have to go, but I have a feeling that is 20 years down the road at least.
The fact that India is getting more work than they can handle (for the moment) does not make me smile.
It should, because the richer they get, the richer we get. The global economy is not a zero sum game. Everyone benefits from global economic growth, because every free market transaction is an increase in wealth for both sides (or else they would not have engaged in the transaction).
I predict that US GDP and Indian GDP will both continue. Unless someone gets more socialist.
Their wages only seem so low because the money exchanges aren't linear.
No, the wages of Indian IT workers are low because of lower worker productivity and a large labor pool for a small labor demand because of low capital investment. But as capital investments are made in the sector in India and thus labor demand rises, so will their salaries, about 10% per year so far.
China has a slightly offset currency situation, but only about 15%, much less than the difference between average US and Indian IT salaries.
"Average Indian salaries in the [IT] field rose 12 percent last year, and they are expected to rise by about 15 percent across the industry again this year."
Fujitsu has been making cool tablet-style computers for a while. I have used a lot of the old Fujitsu Stylistic tablets for projects (~100 MHz machines, touch screen).
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Cheap products don't matter, what matters is that consumers can afford those products. Unemployed people can't.
Yet despite years of complaining about oursourcing to Japan, China, and now India, the US unemployment rate is still historically low. Hmmm...
In practice, no economically optimized dictatorship has ever existed
Some people in South Korea and Taiwan may say that this concept is not quite correct. Recent work titled "The Political Economy of Growth: Democracy and Human Capital" (PDF) shows that democracy has no statistically significant direct effect on economic growth.
There are plenty of examples of dictatorships which were highly effective in achieving economic growth, and plenty of examples of democracies which are not effective in achieving economic growth. Of course, the converse of both is true as well.
Economic growth has much more to do with regulation per se, as opposed to the political source of the regulation.
My favorite meta-blog site is Economics Roundtable which has links to blogs by many leading economists.
DTV signals will continue in VHF. It is only the "out of core" UHF channels 52-69 which will be abandoned by broadcast television for re-use.
DTV signals occupy the same bandwidth as analog broadcasts (6 MHz). The plus is that you can fit four standard definition sub-channels into that space, or a mixture of high definition and standard definition channels (with the HD looking better with fewer or zero standard def sub channels). Most importantly, DTV signals can be packed tighter together so the total number of channels required can be less. Not all adjacent analog channels can be used today.
The process of moving to DTV is accomplished with channel changes in order to pack the television spectrum tighter so that UHF channels 52-69 will become unoccupied by broadcast televison, and will be available for other uses.
Besides the ATSC standard having programming information delivered via a mechanism known as PSIP (Program and System Information Protocol) for on-screen programming guides on DTV tuner devices, the FCC recently mandated that all stations must have updated and accurate PSIP emmissions.
The deadline for all stations to have a DTV signal on the air has passed. Almost all US television stations have a DTV signal on air now, although not all have maximized their DTV signal power.
I sent my friends email from my Blackberry from the top of Pike's Peak (14,100 feet above sea level).
The US doesn't have the level of youth unemployment that Europe does, which significantly limits mass protest in the US ;)
The difference is that McCarthyism affected people for their political viewpoints. Most current terror suspects were picked up on a battlefield, and most were a member of a terrorist or government-terrorist organization with blood on their hands. Moreover, these are not US citizens (with perhaps a few exceptions), and members of organizations which remain at war with the US.
A person in my family were made unemployed, driven to depression, and and committed suicide because McCarthyism, but he was only guilty of believing in a silly political belief, not actually killing people. He was not at war against the US.
http://www.infusionblogs.com/blogs/gbrill/archive/ 2005/05/18/117.aspx
1) 100 years ago: little indoor plumbing, widespread legal racial and religious discrimination
2) There was plenty of corporate lobbying and donations to government officials 100 years ago. The 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act was mainly the work of food producer Henry Heinz, for example.
1902 to 1912, often referred to as the muckraking decade, saw the publication of more than a thousand articles providing detailed accounts of the economic and political corruption caused by big business, especially the trusts.
3) Standard Oil never came close to cornering the market, by the time the antitrust case against it was filed in 1906, it had hundreds of competitors. Standard Oil oversaw a dramatic reduction in oil prices. It was convicted because of a general anti-business animus stoked by socialist intellectuals and journalists such as Henry Demarest Lloyd and Ida Tarbell and urged on by the company's higher-cost and higher-priced rivals. As a result the most efficient industrial organization of the time was crippled, weakening competition and pushing prices up.
AT&T was broken up into pseudo-monopoly ILECs, wow, thanks.
I can run Linux or OSX, don't need Microsoft. Who cares?
4) Western Union vs. Bell Telephone on telephone patents? 1878 Patent disputes between big corporations are old news. Of course, copyright extension is another matter.
Nothing is really all that new over the last 100 years...now go back 200 years, before the widespread legalization of joint-stock corporations...
Yes, I do. The average Indian IT worker does not have access to the same level of capital and thus infrastructure support that an American IT worker does.
That is part of the explanation, of course, the mismatch between Indian IT labor supply and demand is the other half (and probably dominant part) of the reason.
I really hate to say this, but look at democratic India from independence until the 1980's - democratically enforced socialism, low growth, little poverty reduction.
Or Bolivia, where the country is exploding because popular revolutionary forces are about to kill the goose that laid the golden egg by nationalizing foreign gas operations there.
I'm a big believer in freedom, yet I think a lot of Chinese are incredibly happy about the last 20 years of tremendous economic growth under their autocratic overlords.
No doubt the people will eventually become rich enough and the economy will become complex enough that the autocrats will have to go, but I have a feeling that is 20 years down the road at least.
The fact that India is getting more work than they can handle (for the moment) does not make me smile.
It should, because the richer they get, the richer we get. The global economy is not a zero sum game. Everyone benefits from global economic growth, because every free market transaction is an increase in wealth for both sides (or else they would not have engaged in the transaction).
I predict that US GDP and Indian GDP will both continue. Unless someone gets more socialist.
Their wages only seem so low because the money exchanges aren't linear.
No, the wages of Indian IT workers are low because of lower worker productivity and a large labor pool for a small labor demand because of low capital investment. But as capital investments are made in the sector in India and thus labor demand rises, so will their salaries, about 10% per year so far.
China has a slightly offset currency situation, but only about 15%, much less than the difference between average US and Indian IT salaries.
We've been seeing Indian IT salary rises of about 10% per year for many years now. Most recently:
7 107,39225948,00.htm
http://www.asia.cnet.com/news/perspectives/0,3903
"Average Indian salaries in the [IT] field rose 12 percent last year, and they are expected to rise by about 15 percent across the industry again this year."
Fujitsu has been making cool tablet-style computers for a while. I have used a lot of the old Fujitsu Stylistic tablets for projects (~100 MHz machines, touch screen).
Would a living source of the methane impart a differential Carbon isotope ratio than non-living source?
the full cost gets passed on to consumers no matter what
Congratulations for passing economics 101. Now if only the rest of Slashdot could...
DNAhack.Com is the website for amateur genetic engineering. This would be great for that!
Think of Iraq as a honeypot for terrorists...
Recent research has shown that eggs can be artificially created from ovarian surface epithelial cells.
You know what? I think that the free market will provide the appropriate incentives to provide a supply of skills that are actually in demand.
The difference is that an embryo has no developed central nervous system or consciousness.