First, you obviously know nothing of economics, neither classical nor "real world." So you're saying that a rise in production costs won't translate into a rise in the retail price? I can see that you are an economic genius.
The cost of labor in agricultural products is infinitesimal, at less than 3%, if that much Really? Where did you get that stat? From your ass? If it's such a small percentage why do they pay such shit wages and use so many illegal immigrants?
Next, there is no operational "free-market capitalism" - that is rank idiocy to suggest such a thing actually exists To quote you back at yourself it: doesn't matter what you think, what matters are the facts
the facts have shown that illegal immigration has had significant impacts on the lowering of wages Show me the facts.
Costs have indeed been cut when mechanization has taken place, so again you are sadly wrong Well, duh. The point was they have mechanised so much that labor is now a negligible part of their costs.
do you work at McKinsey No, I own Mckinsey. Where do you you work? Starbucks? The National Enquirer? Your bedroom?
"The wrong side" is being affiliated with such a trash and bous gang as the WTO. The only right side is to be outside of that group. That was also my point. The US set up GATT and WTO in order to sell it's stuff abroad. Now that other countries can produce stuff cheaper it wants out.
No, we have free-market capitalism when we want to sell stuff to other countries; we have mercantilist oligopoly capitalism when they want to sell things to us.
I meant "recent" in a historical perspective... ie 50 years or so
I couldn't believe it the other day, I heard that a major Houston rodeo was being 'blackmailed' by the Hispanic community down there...that if they didn't print everything and make announcements in Spanish, they were going to be boycotted
That really doesn't sound likely, if they had trouble understanding the rodeo why were they there in the first place? Boycotting something you don't go to anyway doesn't make sense.
I don't know where you heard that (right wing media playing on people's prejudices no doubt) but you might want to consider the propriety of that source in future. They threatened a boycott because the rodeo was hiring non-Tejanos to perform at a Tejano cultural event, no mention of anyone printing or speaking spanish.
Heh, that was actually my first thought as a counter example, but in fact it's the exception that proves the rule; The only physical labour the Spartans valued was military in its pratical application (amongst other things they also valued public speaking), the sole domestic use of which was to keep the Helots in check in order that they could do their manual labour for them.
Name me one society in history that has valued physically demanding jobs over sedentary work... Through most of history societies have used slavery or other forms of compulsion to make other people do the hard physical work they didn't want to.
I don't think recent illegal immigration is messing with wage levels here, this is the other edge of the double edged sword of free-market capitalism: If strawberry-picker wages rise then the price of strawberries will rise too. But then wal-mart won't sell as many strawberries, so they'll go and buy them from producers in other, cheaper, countries, eg mexico. This will drive the growers out of business, losing the Fed a whole bunch of taxes and earning them a barracking in congress. To keep the US growers in business then the government either looks the other way while the growers use illegal immigrants to get their cheap labour (the only way to keep it cheap enough is for the employees not to have any benefits, hence illegal immmigrants) or pays them a subsidy to keep the prices down. Obviously they're going to plump for the cheaper option where possible.
You can replace strawberry picking above with pretty much any industry in the country, be it animal, vegetable or mineral.
For example Fruit/veg picking is largely manual labour that can't cut its costs by mechanising, it relies on on low labour costs so the government looks the other way. Cotton growing is now largely mechanised and wouldn't benefit much from cheaper labour so instead they get huge subsidies to keep the price competitive.
This is also of course why the US is increasingly on the wrong side of the WTO. Free markets are great while you can sell your stuff cheaper than everyone else, but when they undercut you, it doesn't look so rosy; He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.
In fact, all the posts to the thread in the article were made after this article was posted should have been
In fact, all the posts to the thread in the article that mentioned auto update were made after this article was posted
In fact, all the posts to the thread in the article were made after this article was posted to slashdot and by posters with a post count of 1. They talk about SP1 on auto-update (which the original post didn't) yet that can't possibly be true because that's not the case. And oh look, echostormfury is one of the posters, could he perchance be related to the Echostorm who posted the story? I smell bullshit...
Who modded this Offtopic? The summary says "which began rolling out via Automatic Update", which is just wrong. Admittedly they might want to have caught this a touch earlier, but it's not public yet, nevermind auto updating people's machines. OSS FUD I say...
You have good points (going to a European country it is very noticeable that there aren't kids hanging around outside everywhere) but while it maybe fashionable at the moment to blame everything on Tony and New Labour (the really fashionable spell it NuLabour) you have to concede that, unless you want your kids brought up by the state, the parents are ultimately responsible for the behaviour of their children, and most of them belong well and truly to the Thatcher generation.
Theodore Dalrymple is the british equivalent of Rush Limbaugh, if you want to find out what england's really like I suggest you look a bit harder. Also I would pick and choose your news reports carefully, I mean from where I'm sitting, Canadalooksprettyawful, but I know it's not that bad.
What am I connecting? You've just named 3 of the 10 richest people in the world, is it unlikely that they know each other? As another poster pointed out bin Talal also invested heavily in Apple when they were down on their luck, does this make Microsoft ultimately responsible for bringing Apple back from the dead?
As yet another poster pointed out, the people behind this are not stupid enough to think they'll win the IBM court case, probably they know SCO have some precious piece of IP locked up somewhere and will settle out of court with IBM & Novell in order to use the IP in the future. However $100m is loose change to these people, so it looks to me like they aren't taking it that seriously. That's probably just enough to clear their outstanding legal costs. I also expect to see McBride being hurled through the door at SCO HQ before too long, to be replaced with someone competent (unless of course he IS the IP!).
Comment number one is a wild Microsoft troll modded 5 Insightful, it can only go one way from here...
SNCP is an enormous private equity group, $100M is loose change to these guys, it's probably less than they spend on the coffee and biscuits for their AGM. I can assure you with 99.99% certainty that microsoft have nothing to do with it. Nor are they implicated in the death of princess Di and so far are in the clear regarding the manufacturing of the AIDS virus.
There's never any need to convince the masses that something is a good idea; just convince the individual that it's not worth fighting. You're right in principle, but in practice the UK government is not doing that: £293 per person?! I think that will go a long way to convincing most people that it's worth fighting.
When these things get introduced in the UK I'll grumble like hell Maybe that's all you'll do, but if they introduce ID cards here I for one will be out on the streets, as will at least one leader of a major political party.
Indeed, but even Israel would be pushed to attack Iran right now. They have enough domestic problems anyway, but the reason they can bomb Syria and Lebanon with impunity is because a) they have a much stronger military and b) their enemy's presumption that the US will back them up. Neither of these are the case with Iran and geographically it's much more complicated. I suspect one of the reasons Iran continues to fund Hezbollah is to keep Israel busy in its own backyard.
As to nuclear weapons, even if they do have them (after all having everyone believe you have them is as good as actually having them), they would very soon lose all of their allies if they started posturing around them. In Israel's case they are strictly for self-defence only.
Iran wins because two of their major strategic objectives have been achieved Three actually: the Taliban in Afghanistan are also no longer a threat.
Historically speaking Iran, almost since the time of the Persian empire, has always had three hostile borders; The Russians to the North, Afghans to the East and whoever controlled the middle east to the west (Greeks, Romans, Turks, British, Arabs etc). In the space of 5 years two of these have been nullified and the Russians are currently friendly, plus they're sitting on the world's next fifty years of energy. It's little wonder they're so bullish.
Microsoft? This story is on posted on linux.com and being hyped on a OSDN site, where do microsoft come in? They must have a pretty deep mole to get this one planted...
Why would you expect that to work? That's just lazy programming. Using another few chars to assign what the function returns to another var isn't going to kill you, and the bytecode will come out the same.
I always wonder the same thing: for a country that never tires of telling us how great their democracy is, they don't seem too good at actually concentrating on the details of making it work.
The UK hand counts all its votes too, it's not a small country (~60m people) but we still get the results in 4-5 hours after the polls close. The reason always given is that the US is too big, but that's a very poor argument. If you have more voters you also have more counters. There is never a lack of volunteers at elections (or if there is your democracy has bigger problems than this).
I suspect the answer lies, as always, in lobbyists. I don't know but I suspect diebold et al make a good few contributions in the right places. Unfortunately they seem to be trying to muscle into the UK now, and the government, always happy to receive judicious contributions, is pushing it blindly. Luckily it seems that returning officers and judges are against it, so maybe they will be able to kill it from the ground up.
You're right: Influenza, AIDS, SARS, West Nile Virus, H5N1... sooner or later one of these beauties is going to come along and we're not going to be able to treat it. However, that sort of argument is never going to make anyone pay attention in a world where yet-to-be-invented technologies are invoked as a panacea for global warming.
You really don't have to look very deep into history to see that money is always the driver for expansion and colonisation. Fore example, Britain was exporting religious nuts to die in Virginia for decades until they finally found that by growing tobacco they could actually turn a profit and people chose to go there. Space exploitation will have to pay for itself, and handsomely, if it's to become a reality.
Enjoy it while it lasts, as soon as Google/TeleAtlas get wind of it they will be round for their commercial royalties. Don't laugh; I know of at least one government department that has had to block access to G Maps to prove to them that no one on site is using it and so avoid the royalty fee.
Slashdot Mirror
No, we have free-market capitalism when we want to sell stuff to other countries; we have mercantilist oligopoly capitalism when they want to sell things to us.
That really doesn't sound likely, if they had trouble understanding the rodeo why were they there in the first place? Boycotting something you don't go to anyway doesn't make sense.
So I looked it up:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/5573321.html
I don't know where you heard that (right wing media playing on people's prejudices no doubt) but you might want to consider the propriety of that source in future. They threatened a boycott because the rodeo was hiring non-Tejanos to perform at a Tejano cultural event, no mention of anyone printing or speaking spanish.
Heh, that was actually my first thought as a counter example, but in fact it's the exception that proves the rule; The only physical labour the Spartans valued was military in its pratical application (amongst other things they also valued public speaking), the sole domestic use of which was to keep the Helots in check in order that they could do their manual labour for them.
I don't think recent illegal immigration is messing with wage levels here, this is the other edge of the double edged sword of free-market capitalism: If strawberry-picker wages rise then the price of strawberries will rise too. But then wal-mart won't sell as many strawberries, so they'll go and buy them from producers in other, cheaper, countries, eg mexico. This will drive the growers out of business, losing the Fed a whole bunch of taxes and earning them a barracking in congress. To keep the US growers in business then the government either looks the other way while the growers use illegal immigrants to get their cheap labour (the only way to keep it cheap enough is for the employees not to have any benefits, hence illegal immmigrants) or pays them a subsidy to keep the prices down. Obviously they're going to plump for the cheaper option where possible.
You can replace strawberry picking above with pretty much any industry in the country, be it animal, vegetable or mineral.
For example Fruit/veg picking is largely manual labour that can't cut its costs by mechanising, it relies on on low labour costs so the government looks the other way. Cotton growing is now largely mechanised and wouldn't benefit much from cheaper labour so instead they get huge subsidies to keep the price competitive.
This is also of course why the US is increasingly on the wrong side of the WTO. Free markets are great while you can sell your stuff cheaper than everyone else, but when they undercut you, it doesn't look so rosy; He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.
ha, google FIRST, post second...
That's cool. I wonder if someone's done a dynamic "you are here" version?
In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
In fact, all the posts to the thread in the article were made after this article was posted to slashdot and by posters with a post count of 1. They talk about SP1 on auto-update (which the original post didn't) yet that can't possibly be true because that's not the case. And oh look, echostormfury is one of the posters, could he perchance be related to the Echostorm who posted the story? I smell bullshit...
Who modded this Offtopic? The summary says "which began rolling out via Automatic Update", which is just wrong. Admittedly they might want to have caught this a touch earlier, but it's not public yet, nevermind auto updating people's machines. OSS FUD I say...
You have good points (going to a European country it is very noticeable that there aren't kids hanging around outside everywhere) but while it maybe fashionable at the moment to blame everything on Tony and New Labour (the really fashionable spell it NuLabour) you have to concede that, unless you want your kids brought up by the state, the parents are ultimately responsible for the behaviour of their children, and most of them belong well and truly to the Thatcher generation.
Theodore Dalrymple is the british equivalent of Rush Limbaugh, if you want to find out what england's really like I suggest you look a bit harder. Also I would pick and choose your news reports carefully, I mean from where I'm sitting, Canada looks pretty awful, but I know it's not that bad.
What am I connecting? You've just named 3 of the 10 richest people in the world, is it unlikely that they know each other? As another poster pointed out bin Talal also invested heavily in Apple when they were down on their luck, does this make Microsoft ultimately responsible for bringing Apple back from the dead?
As yet another poster pointed out, the people behind this are not stupid enough to think they'll win the IBM court case, probably they know SCO have some precious piece of IP locked up somewhere and will settle out of court with IBM & Novell in order to use the IP in the future. However $100m is loose change to these people, so it looks to me like they aren't taking it that seriously. That's probably just enough to clear their outstanding legal costs. I also expect to see McBride being hurled through the door at SCO HQ before too long, to be replaced with someone competent (unless of course he IS the IP!).
Comment number one is a wild Microsoft troll modded 5 Insightful, it can only go one way from here...
SNCP is an enormous private equity group, $100M is loose change to these guys, it's probably less than they spend on the coffee and biscuits for their AGM. I can assure you with 99.99% certainty that microsoft have nothing to do with it. Nor are they implicated in the death of princess Di and so far are in the clear regarding the manufacturing of the AIDS virus.Indeed, but even Israel would be pushed to attack Iran right now. They have enough domestic problems anyway, but the reason they can bomb Syria and Lebanon with impunity is because a) they have a much stronger military and b) their enemy's presumption that the US will back them up. Neither of these are the case with Iran and geographically it's much more complicated. I suspect one of the reasons Iran continues to fund Hezbollah is to keep Israel busy in its own backyard.
As to nuclear weapons, even if they do have them (after all having everyone believe you have them is as good as actually having them), they would very soon lose all of their allies if they started posturing around them. In Israel's case they are strictly for self-defence only.
Microsoft? This story is on posted on linux.com and being hyped on a OSDN site, where do microsoft come in? They must have a pretty deep mole to get this one planted...
Why would you expect that to work? That's just lazy programming. Using another few chars to assign what the function returns to another var isn't going to kill you, and the bytecode will come out the same.
Well, he reads books and can spell, plus he doesn't want to be a part of something: these are the hallmarks of a Gen Xer....
The UK hand counts all its votes too, it's not a small country (~60m people) but we still get the results in 4-5 hours after the polls close. The reason always given is that the US is too big, but that's a very poor argument. If you have more voters you also have more counters. There is never a lack of volunteers at elections (or if there is your democracy has bigger problems than this).
I suspect the answer lies, as always, in lobbyists. I don't know but I suspect diebold et al make a good few contributions in the right places. Unfortunately they seem to be trying to muscle into the UK now, and the government, always happy to receive judicious contributions, is pushing it blindly. Luckily it seems that returning officers and judges are against it, so maybe they will be able to kill it from the ground up.
You're right: Influenza, AIDS, SARS, West Nile Virus, H5N1... sooner or later one of these beauties is going to come along and we're not going to be able to treat it. However, that sort of argument is never going to make anyone pay attention in a world where yet-to-be-invented technologies are invoked as a panacea for global warming.
You really don't have to look very deep into history to see that money is always the driver for expansion and colonisation. Fore example, Britain was exporting religious nuts to die in Virginia for decades until they finally found that by growing tobacco they could actually turn a profit and people chose to go there. Space exploitation will have to pay for itself, and handsomely, if it's to become a reality.
Enjoy it while it lasts, as soon as Google/TeleAtlas get wind of it they will be round for their commercial royalties. Don't laugh; I know of at least one government department that has had to block access to G Maps to prove to them that no one on site is using it and so avoid the royalty fee.
from TFA: The ancient remains [tusks] come from Alaska, but researchers also have a Siberian bison skull with the same pockmarks.