A big part of that is not having a local presence - which you can get away with web-based apps (unless you take local advertising dollars - unless said dollars are paid directly to you overseas).
Suppose I provided a purely web-based service (news, search, something that involves nothing more than packets over the internet). I take payment in advance by some method which does not rely on infrastructure outside of my own country. Maybe I deposit checks, or maybe I use US credit cards (for a US company), or I take cash mailed in envelopes - whatever. My business is completely supported by my local government (it is legal, no politicians want to take extra-legal steps to shut me down, etc). Let's also assume that as the CEO/owner I never leave my own country.
If I operate this way, then there is nothing anybody can do about my business operating in their country, except try to block access or persecute their own citizens who are my customers. If my search page returns nazi images on wikipedia or whatever, the Germans can't do a thing about it. They can of course try me in absentia and find me guilty, but they have no power to punish me.
Now, they can do things like order local banks not to honor checks made out to me, or local credit card companies to deny payments to me. If they have the technical means they can try to firewall me. However, if one of their citizens opens a bank account in a foreign bank and uses it to pay me, there is not much they can do about it (except punish my customers).
In China's case, they have the great firewall, and punishing their own people is something that doesn't really give them concerns. So, in this case they can do something about it - but only inside their own borders. They can't touch Google itself at all, unless they convince the US government to play ball.
Indeed. This idea works only if everyone is idealistic as me.
Hey, how about this idea. We can all promise to buy products made in countries that have sane environmental laws and which do not exploit labor. Maybe we'll all agree that if we do have to buy something from such a country we'll pay some kind of a fine into a fund used to help compliant businesses. Since we can't trust that everybody will play ball maybe we can pay some guys to oversee enforcement.
We could formalize this agreement into something we can call a "social contract." Maybe the oversight body can be something we call a "government." Then a majority of people could agree that this stuff is a good idea and then we're all accountable to follow it.:)
Seriously, though, it is in the interest of every democratic nation to establish tariffs on goods from countries that do not have reasonable safety or environmental controls. While people in the US and EU love to focus on their differences regarding how many ppm of whatever can safely go in the air, the fact is that nobody in any of these nations really wants to see another Love Canal. Setting environmental and safety policies to protect our workers is just dumb if we don't ensure that foreign companies aren't able to take away all their jobs.
Note - I'm not advocating protectionism. These tariffs should not be applied to work simply because it happened in a different country. However, countries that have conditions that we would not tolerate in our own countries should not be able to use these conditions as a source of competitive advantage.
Well, I'm sorry, but if a company wants to operate in a country, it should abide by its laws, otherwise it's a criminal organization.
A company that doesn't abide by a law is a criminal organization by definition.
However, in a country where the laws are evil, it is the moral duty of a citizen to be a criminal. Obviously there is a continuity between being a citizen of Utopia and a citizen of some genocidal militaristic totalitarianism. I'm not suggesting that it is purely black and white.
I do value these things (and I do live in a democratic country) but I do not have the wisdom to say that it is better than all other forms of government, and neither do you unless you've lived in them.
Ok, is democracy the best of any other form of government that could conceivably exist - who can say?
Is democracy a morally superior form of government when compared to a totalitarian oligarchy? I think that is a no-brainer. The only legitimacy the Chinese government has is its ability to suppress revolt efficiently. That is not a moral basis of government. Frankly, much of how they treat dissent would be immoral even if it were approved by a genuine majority vote. Even a democratic government does not have the right to suppress basic freedoms by those who have not committed something that would be universally accepted as a crime.
Stop thinking so binary. Just because one is "evil" doesn't mean the other is "good". There are a lot more options than the ones you mention.
Sure, but that doesn't change the fact that assisting a regime with things like tracking down peaceful protesters so that they can be locked away and likely tortured is evil. There are lots of ethical dilemmas out there where I think people of good conscience can disagree, but that doesn't mean that there is no such thing as good or evil.
It probably has something to do with the fact that the freeware software doesn't have to:
1. Have tie-ins for 47 different kinds of DRM. 2. Have 17 different places to tie-in ad and placement revenue. 3. Incorporate with the company's latest media store concept (while breaking compatibility with the last one). 4. Make sure that the company's proprietary codec works better than any of the others. 5. Incorporate Bob's idea. Everybody knows that it is a dumb idea, but Bob's uncle is the executive VP of sales, so...
In today's world, W. Mark Felt would have had an anonymous identity and leaked good information to Firedoglake or Daily Kos.
Yes, but in today's world, lots of people have lots of anonymous identities and leak lots of bad information to lots of blogs.
That's how we know that Obama isn't a US Citizen, and that the CIA blew up the WTC on 9/11.
If you want news that isn't just gossip, you actually need to have somebody who actually has a personal reputation say "yeah, I spoke to the guy on the inside and they seem legit." It would be nice then if courts didn't jail that person (which is another thing that is killing genuine investigative journalism).
Sure, if the news you're looking for is a photo of the latest pre-release Apple product or whatever your model is fine. If you want actual investigative journalism, however, it doesn't work all that well. Sure, it will work in isolated cases.
To the extent that something like a blog actually does this stuff they're really just a newspaper under a different name. And most likely blogs that do serious fact-checking and protect a reputation are going to be expensive to operate, which means that they're in the same boat as the papers.
I think that independent and professional news gathering are a valuable service that needs to be preserved. We probably don't need world-class news organizations in every major city, but we do need some. Local news is also very important - maybe we need local news companies that don't feel compelled to compete with the Wall Street Journal and instead they can focus on local news.
The other benefit is that it could encourage more competition from private ISPs. Right now, ISPs are competing on raw pipe.
And I like it that way. What you go on to describe sounds like the cell phone nightmare in the US. I DON'T NEED MORE OF THAT!!!!!
Look, keep the ISP as a basic pipe.
What you're essentially doing is mandating that anybody who buys internet access also buy news - it isn't like the ISP isn't going to pass that cost along. So, why not just cut out the middleman. Every US citizen has to list news subscription receipts totaling $100 on their tax forms or they have to pay $100 in extra taxes. Now everybody can buy their bandwidth from whoever they want, and they can buy their news from whoever they want. Maybe just give a tax credit of up to $100 for subscription receipts - it is the same thing but people don't get penalized as directly for not claiming the credit.
Note that I'm not really a proponent of this - I'd rather leave news buying up to individuals and not force it.
But, if you absolutely have to have mandatory purchase of news, at least let people choose the best provider of each. The reason we have so little ISP choice in the US is due to the sprawling US population - most people only have two ISP choices, and many have only one. What if you're a NYC hippie who has moved to Texas - do you want to have to pay an extra $15 per month for your internet connection to one of the two ISPs who both only offer FOX News for free?
Anytime you move you're going to lose some of your top-notch staff - that's just the way it is.
In my field I like to think that I'm very competitive, but I'd have to think long and hard before applying for a job at a place like Google because I DON'T want to live in a super-expensive traffic-filled area. Sure, I don't want to live in the boondocks either, but a nice suburb 30 miles from some decent-sized city is just fine by me.
My current employer already has a nice high-rise in the middle of a major city, and I'm sure I could get myself transferred there if I really wanted to. But, why would I do that? I'd have less spending money and I'd get to ride a crowded train every day as opposed to an almost traffic-free 15 minute commute by car - unless of course I wanted to live in a decent-sized house and then I'd have 40 minutes of polluting logjam car commute followed by 20 minutes on the crowded train.
These sorts of things are fairly personal, and you'll find people interested in living in either environment. However, it does take time to build an organization after a move. Highly compensating people for making the move will obviously help to alleviate that.
Your list of things that don't have to be in Manhattan is absurd. Have you ever worked in a company that tried to disperse its basic functions that way? I have, and it's just not that easy. The loss of communication between key people hurts. A lot.
He's not suggesting that they disperse their basic functions - only that they move them. It isn't like they'd move HR to Oklahoma, IT to Pittsburgh, and Advertising to Nebraska.
No, they'd find some cheap place to buy a ton of land and a bunch of buildings - which has good infrastructure (in particular an airport to get reporters all over the world cheap), and then move everything but the actual local reporters to that location.
Now everything is still concentrated, but in a different city. Sure, your HR and IT departments aren't near your reporters covering arts, culture, local politics, etc. However, how often does the IT department personally service an individual reporter (besides fixing their laptop, which would they would surely have people onsite for).
Also - nobody is suggesting that they not have any physical presence in NYC. We're just talking about having a floor or two of office space (lots of reporters and on-site support staff and a few editors to oversee), rather than a building (even if half of it is leased out - I'm pretty sure real-estate isn't their core business).
You talk about how IT is easier by being in NYC. Sure, maybe you have a little more bandwidth competition and all that, but when you're buying in quantity bandwidth can be obtained anywhere fairly cheap. Just have two different companies run fiber optics to your facility (which takes less time than building said facility anyway), and now you have more potential bandwidth than anybody needs anyway.
And nobody is suggesting that this be in the middle of the New Mexico desert. Put it someplace that is just a bit more moderate in cost of living (which would be just about anywhere). Lots of big companies have moved stuff like IT out to more remote locations.
I doubt it would ever happen - I'm sure the senior execs like looking out the window over Manhattan, and have all their local social connections. Not that any of this really benefits the company much, but most companies are governed out of self-interest on the part of the executives - not shareholder interest.
All that said - I agree that their problems are far more fundamental than real-estate. Cutting these costs is just good business sense, but it won't make or break them. Their real problem is that in the networked world it is hard to get people to pay for original news gathering when you can get press releases for free. You also don't need nearly as many reporters/etc in the world where everybody reads only three newspapers.
I'm not one of those people who pretends that bloggers and cell phone cameras can really do news. However, the internet is pretty disruptive to the business of selling information in general, and news is very hard hit. The problem is that we still need people to do this work (maybe not as many, but we can't afford to lose all of it) - so how do we at least make sure a critical mass of journalism still happens?
I defy you to show me any law that would bar me from showing a photo of any unreleased product?
I'm not saying there is one. However, putting this check-box on the form would cover you from liability for "inducing" whatever it is that Apple thinks is illegal.
If you happen to get yourself a photo and are convinced that there are no laws against sharing it, then check the box and post away.:)
Then, when Apple or whoever complains you ask them for specifics regarding the laws that were supposedly violated, and figure out what you want to do about it. If you take it down after a day of consulting with lawyers (all of whom can testify that they were vigorously investigating the legal issues and consulting with the opposing counsel during that time) they probably wouldn't have a case, and by then everybody on the planet would have already seen it anyway.
Hey - I think it is all bogus too, but lots of people lose lots of money in the US over bogus cases, so playing the legal game is just being smart.
Yup, if they're smart they'd have just put a checkbox on the submission form:
"By checking this box you declare that you are not barred by law from sharing this photo."
If they later get complaints to the contrary they can of course take the photo back down (after taking the proper time to investigate the complaint and ensure that it is legitimate). After all, how could they tell that the photo was posted illegally?
Yes, but most of the value of gold is in the fact that people like to stockpile it for whatever reason. In a major economic collapse (which is what the GP seemed to be concerned about) people aren't going to be worrying about manufacturing leads for microchips - they're going to be worried about dinner or not dying from an infected wound.
My recollection is that the US never occupied that embassy, because of all the bugs. They didn't believe they could be certain that they would have gotten them all.
Sure in the future they might try to call the debt
This seems to be a common misunderstanding. Holders of treasury bonds cannot "call the debt."
When China buys US debt, they buy treasury bonds (or one of the half-dozen other names the same basic instrument sells under). A treasury bond is a promise to pay a stated sum of money on a given date.
So, today I might buy a $100 treasury bond with a maturity of 2040. In 2040 I can turn in that bond for $100 in US dollars (cash or whatever) from the US government. In 2039 it can't be turned in for a dime. Now, in 2039 you could almost certainly sell it to somebody else for very close to $100. The way China makes money is that the $100 bond might have only cost them $20-30 or whatever to buy today. Bonds may also pay interest as well.
The only thing China can do is stop buying new bonds and cash in their existing ones as they mature. The US never promised to give them money before the maturity date, so they are under no obligation to do so.
Agreed. I think that many of the stock market bubble problems we have are one of demographics. Lots of people want to work for 30 years and then live for 30 years off of what they saved up (work from 25-55, retire from 55-85). Fundamentally that just doesn't work - especially with a declining population size.
When all those boomers retire they're going to want to eat out, and that means that they'll have to trade dollars for dinners, and the resulting demand will drive up prices until their waitress is making $60k/yr selling them $100 burgers. Then they'll run through their savings in 10 years and be no better off than somebody who didn't save a dime for retirement and just planned to work until they die.
Obviously that is a stretched example, but the principle is right - all those people with money saved up will create a huge supply of cash and a shortage of people willing to actually perform services and supply goods in exchange for that cast. That means inflation which makes all that cash lose its value very quickly.
Of course, all those near-retirement people were putting tons of money into the stock market. The US economy is only so large, and when people invest more money than can actually be used to produce goods and services (because when they invest their money they don't spend it), the market bubbles. Then when the supply of people saving dries up the market starts to crash. When they start pulling out their money to live off of it en masse then they'll find that nobody wants to buy all that stock, and prices will drop to values that are more in line with the assets and earnings of the underlying companies.
Don't get me wrong - a moderate amount of saving is a good thing. Everybody should have some kind of buffer in their bank account. However, the entire country can't live off of savings. Imagine if EVERYBODY in the US saved up $20k in the bank - easily enough to live at a modest standard for several months. Then imagine that everybody actually tried to take a few months off of work AT THE SAME TIME. Those savings would be worthless as any place you could spend it would be close. Now imagine that maybe 5% of the country stayed at work - they could charge a fortune for their services. That's what will happen when the US population starts to fall with the retirement of the boomers, and many other nations face similar issues...
This is a circular argument. Supply of basic consumer goods in the US is at this point nearly entirely based upon imports
Yes and no. The US produces quite a few basic consumer goods - food in particular. A plastic toy supply shortage will not cripple the US. Granted, the US does depend on imports for a number of fairly critical practical things. But...
The world's economy is at these days pretty much a gigantic Ponzi scheme whereby "value" of currencies and goods is in its entirety based on make-believe wishful thinking. US currency has "value" only because enough people globally wish to pretend that it is so.
Arguably, then the US is in the best place of all. For the last decade we've been receiving useful and practical basic goods in exchange for pieces of paper that you believe are worthless. Is it any surprise that US companies don't want to bother making these goods if others are willing to do so just for pieces of paper?
As long as supplies of these goods were not cut off overnight, the US could make them on its own. Right now manufacturing in the US tends to not be as cheap as it is elsewhere, but it isn't like the US couldn't build enough cars or whatever for its own needs. Oil is probably the most critical imported resource, but the problems of oil aren't so much that the US depends on foreign supplies so much as that the entire world depends on a resource that will be limited everywhere at some point. If anything the relatively untapped US local oil reserves will put the US in a good strategic position when everybody else is running out.
As far as all the stuff about controlled versus natural currencies and that - every system has its pros and cons. A well-managed paper currency has a lot of advantages over something like gold in that you can actually regulate the supply of money in accordance with its demand to keep prices stable. Virtually all currencies tend to be artificial - at least since they stopped paying people in salt. It isn't like a lump of gold has any practical use. If there is ever a nuclear winter the guy who will be able to barter isn't the guy with all the gold bricks in his basement, but rather the guy with a lot full of functional cars/fuel (that he can defend) or the guy who knows how to perform basic surgeries. Anything other than a truly practical item or skill is just a currency of convenience, and there is nothing wrong with that either.
ReiserFS is in mainline, and is maintained by the kernel developers.
So is OS/2 HPFS. On the one hand that shows that ReiserFS will probably supported almost forever. On the other hand, I'm not sure I'd be rolling it out for new deployments or applications unless you're in a very tight niche.
Embargos aren't really the solution to problems like worker safety or healthcare - but tarrifs certainly are fair game.
If France wants to say - "workers should have good health care, so any product made by a company whose workers don't have x standard of health care will have a tariff" - then I'm fine with that. You'll probably find that almost anything the US actually exports probably is made by people with healthcare comparable to most Europeans, however.
These kinds of tariffs are important because otherwise a country that wants to keep its workers safe (or whatever) puts its companies at disadvantage against other nations that do not. It is also perfectly fair for countries with similar goals to unite (EU, etc) on these kinds of policies.
Despite a lot of the EU-USA bickering during much of the decade, the fact is that when you're dealing with countries like China the US and EU have a lot more in common than apart - ditto for non-EU countries that have decent standards. We shouldn't allow our multinationals to just move all the jobs to countries that have zero safety/environmental standards - and tariffs are a good way to do that. I'm hopeful that Obama may help to heal some of the rifts in this area.
And I say all of this as a fairly libertarian-leaning conservative that isn't all that big fan of most national healthcare proposals (although I think that eventually the concept will be inevitable when genetic testing makes voluntary insurance unsustainable). I'm just for nations competing on a level playing field and not having one big race to the bottom for workers.
I'm not sure censorship counts as "gross violations of basic human rights". It's not good, certainly, but not in the same league as arbitrary imprisonment, torture or executions (things the US is not exactly innocent of).
Uh, what happens in China if you try to bypass censorship? That would be arbitrary imprisonment, torture, or executions. I certainly don't excuse the US for doing this (it is completely inexcusable), but the fact that some people commit horrible acts doesn't give anybody else a pass for doing the same things. The US has turned most of those policies around and most people agree that it is at least moving in the right direction now.
If you disagree, why don't you try running a fiber line into China and set up an ISP that doesn't go through the great firewall and see what happens to you? Why don't you try posting something critical of the government on a blog (while living there)? Why don't you try to organize a protest?
Then come back and tell me (maybe in 30 years) about how censorship isn't all that big a deal in the big scheme of things.
While I'm sure China isn't the only country doing this, when you think about it this is a very scary proposition.
Just think - China decides that being able to take over the CNN front page at a future point in time might be useful to them (just a random example - it could be any site, and it could be some other country).
Teams work around the clock probing the CNN servers. They monitor tons of network traffic so they can passively identify every server that people actually make connections to (even for the most obscure things like a rare banner ad or the data feed for some weather applet or whatever). If ANY of those servers have a vulnerability they can get in.
Each lead is sent to a team that specializes in exploiting it. Hmm, looks like they're using some load balancer on their webservers - based on traffic patterns it might be this one. Let's give it to the guy who has taken apart two of them and knows the firmware inside and out. Looks like their weather uses some obscure XML type - let's get a guy who knows all about it to see if maybe the parser lets in some obscure field in the spec that the underlying app server might choke on.
Then you get in. The guy who manages to get a little access on a single box doesn't have to try to figure out the whole network on his own. Instead a team that specializes in DMZ mapping takes over and figures out what their datacenter looks like. Whole new teams work on additional exploits.
Once they find some good places to hide trojans then another team takes over. That load balancer firmware expert knows exactly how to create a hidden partition in the flash on one of the NICs installed in it which somehow gets triggered by some interrupt to run some code - maybe triggered by a specially crafted packet hitting it from the net. Specialists could sneak code into all kinds of places where nobody would ever spot it - probably in more than one place so a system upgrade wouldn't break their access.
Big companies have all kinds of proprietary software that isn't all that secure. The thing is that most teenage/college hackers don't ever see this software and as a result don't hack it. They might write a virus that targets excel, but they don't have one that targets some $3M payroll management system.
Once everything is in place it goes to the monitoring team which makes sure the trojans/etc stay in place with some stealthy pings from time to time. They can stay on top of thousands of hacks and bring in help when something goes wrong - just think of them like you think of your server monitoring team at work...
Don't under-estimate the capability of a well-run professional team - especially a fairly new one.
Granted, in 20 years it will start to resemble the IT at many fortune 500s. Hmm, the exploit script doesn't work - too bad we didn't pay the guy who wrote it enough and he's gone. What, the monitoring team isn't doing its job right - oh, but the guy who heads it up is the boss's cousin - well, maybe we won't ever need those exploits to remain in place...
Hmm - looks like the anti-ship ballistic missle is a credible threat after all. There is a counter to it, however - keep the Chinese from knowing where the carriers are with enough accuracy to target them.
That could be done with deception, or by shooting down survailence satellites.
Look, China fought the combined USA-UN forces to a standstill in North Korea two generations ago.
The US did not have the will to fight a strategic war with China. McArthur was gung ho to take them on. The decision to not do so was political, and probably a wise one considering the stakes.
The only thing Korea and Vietnam really teach about war is that you can't fight a war of attrition without taking out the strategic sources of resupply. In both of those wars those strategic targets were in other nations, and attacking them would have tremendously increased the scope of the war.
If the US actually got into a real war with China then it would attack strategic targets in China, which would greatly diminish its ability to make war. In general China lacks a conventional capability to strike at similar targets in the US.
China's relatively smaller ICBM force is still sufficient to annihilate civilisation
I don't have the figures, but I think that most people estimate China's ICBMs as being less than 50 or so. There is no question that this can do a lot of damage, but it won't come close to annihilating civilization. Even so, nobody risks nuclear war, so it is a serious deterrent.
China's new anti-ship ballistic MIRV deployment has neutralised any force projection capability by the US Navy near China for at least ten years
Uh, only if you allow for the use of nuclear warheads. I don't believe that any ICBM technology is capable of destroying ships with conventional warheads. Short range ballistic weapons are probably within the ability of anti-air defenses (they're not coming in at hypersonic speeds). In order to hit a ship with a conventional warhead and evade defenses you need a hypersonic warhead that can detect a ship and maneuver to hit it directly. How do you steer a hypersonic warhead with such accuracy? If it comes in any slower it will be shot down.
In Korea the Soviets clearly had the technology to destroy US carriers with nuclear arms, however they did not do so. The stakes of the war (a strip of land in the middle of asia) wasn't worth getting into a nuclear conflict (plus, at the time the US was ahead in strategic arms and power projection).
The same applies now. Nobody is going to fight a nuclear war over some computer hackers. Nobody is going to fight a conventional war over that stuff either. If the US and China did get into a big scuff chances are it would be fought over relatively minor economic targets (Taiwan, or whatever), and neither side is going to escalate to that level. In such a war the Chinese are going to be at a disadvantage - they are well behind the US in conventional technology and their nuclear deterrent is useless as anything except a spoiler. As long as the US made it clear that it wasn't considering regime change or invading chances are it wouldn't be used.
If for some reason the Chinese really did attack a carrier group with nuclear weapons, just think of the international reaction. They'd tick off just about every major power on the planet - including the former Soviets they have a very long border with.
In any case, I don't see any actual wars starting over this stuff. There is far to much to loose, and really nothing to gain. If the US doesn't want the Chinese buying up debt, then they should stop selling it to them. If the US doesn't like the value of their currency, then start passing tariffs. It isn't like the WTO is going to do anything - just make the reason environmental standards and global warming and you'll have support from just about everybody on the planet. It isn't like the Europeans like the idea of companies just outsourcing all their work to places where they can pollute freely.
In an economic war I think that China has at least as much to lose as the US.
If the Chinese sold THAT much of our debt at a huge discount, the US government would do well to just buy it back up. If you did some tax hikes and spending cuts to raise revenue the US could make out quite well. After all - the Chinese gave the US $x years ago, and then today the US is free of obligation by giving them $x/10. Even if we paid them back $x we'd still make out on time-value-of-money.
The only thing that it hurts is the ability to issue new debt at low rates - at least until the Chinese run out of bonds to sell.
Slashdot Mirror
And environmental policies protect everyone, not just the workers.
Agreed - all the more reason to tariff goods from nations that don't have sensible controls. Otherwise globalism is just one big race for the bottom.
What I advocate is really nothing more than holding other nations to the same standards that we hold ourselves.
A big part of that is not having a local presence - which you can get away with web-based apps (unless you take local advertising dollars - unless said dollars are paid directly to you overseas).
Suppose I provided a purely web-based service (news, search, something that involves nothing more than packets over the internet). I take payment in advance by some method which does not rely on infrastructure outside of my own country. Maybe I deposit checks, or maybe I use US credit cards (for a US company), or I take cash mailed in envelopes - whatever. My business is completely supported by my local government (it is legal, no politicians want to take extra-legal steps to shut me down, etc). Let's also assume that as the CEO/owner I never leave my own country.
If I operate this way, then there is nothing anybody can do about my business operating in their country, except try to block access or persecute their own citizens who are my customers. If my search page returns nazi images on wikipedia or whatever, the Germans can't do a thing about it. They can of course try me in absentia and find me guilty, but they have no power to punish me.
Now, they can do things like order local banks not to honor checks made out to me, or local credit card companies to deny payments to me. If they have the technical means they can try to firewall me. However, if one of their citizens opens a bank account in a foreign bank and uses it to pay me, there is not much they can do about it (except punish my customers).
In China's case, they have the great firewall, and punishing their own people is something that doesn't really give them concerns. So, in this case they can do something about it - but only inside their own borders. They can't touch Google itself at all, unless they convince the US government to play ball.
Indeed. This idea works only if everyone is idealistic as me.
Hey, how about this idea. We can all promise to buy products made in countries that have sane environmental laws and which do not exploit labor. Maybe we'll all agree that if we do have to buy something from such a country we'll pay some kind of a fine into a fund used to help compliant businesses. Since we can't trust that everybody will play ball maybe we can pay some guys to oversee enforcement.
We could formalize this agreement into something we can call a "social contract." Maybe the oversight body can be something we call a "government." Then a majority of people could agree that this stuff is a good idea and then we're all accountable to follow it. :)
Seriously, though, it is in the interest of every democratic nation to establish tariffs on goods from countries that do not have reasonable safety or environmental controls. While people in the US and EU love to focus on their differences regarding how many ppm of whatever can safely go in the air, the fact is that nobody in any of these nations really wants to see another Love Canal. Setting environmental and safety policies to protect our workers is just dumb if we don't ensure that foreign companies aren't able to take away all their jobs.
Note - I'm not advocating protectionism. These tariffs should not be applied to work simply because it happened in a different country. However, countries that have conditions that we would not tolerate in our own countries should not be able to use these conditions as a source of competitive advantage.
Well, I'm sorry, but if a company wants to operate in a country, it should abide by its laws, otherwise it's a criminal organization.
A company that doesn't abide by a law is a criminal organization by definition.
However, in a country where the laws are evil, it is the moral duty of a citizen to be a criminal. Obviously there is a continuity between being a citizen of Utopia and a citizen of some genocidal militaristic totalitarianism. I'm not suggesting that it is purely black and white.
I do value these things (and I do live in a democratic country) but I do not have the wisdom to say that it is better than all other forms of government, and neither do you unless you've lived in them.
Ok, is democracy the best of any other form of government that could conceivably exist - who can say?
Is democracy a morally superior form of government when compared to a totalitarian oligarchy? I think that is a no-brainer. The only legitimacy the Chinese government has is its ability to suppress revolt efficiently. That is not a moral basis of government. Frankly, much of how they treat dissent would be immoral even if it were approved by a genuine majority vote. Even a democratic government does not have the right to suppress basic freedoms by those who have not committed something that would be universally accepted as a crime.
Stop thinking so binary. Just because one is "evil" doesn't mean the other is "good". There are a lot more options than the ones you mention.
Sure, but that doesn't change the fact that assisting a regime with things like tracking down peaceful protesters so that they can be locked away and likely tortured is evil. There are lots of ethical dilemmas out there where I think people of good conscience can disagree, but that doesn't mean that there is no such thing as good or evil.
Why do I suddenly picture some guy biking through zombieland or whatever with a shotgun and a semi-automatic slung across his back?
It probably has something to do with the fact that the freeware software doesn't have to:
1. Have tie-ins for 47 different kinds of DRM.
2. Have 17 different places to tie-in ad and placement revenue.
3. Incorporate with the company's latest media store concept (while breaking compatibility with the last one).
4. Make sure that the company's proprietary codec works better than any of the others.
5. Incorporate Bob's idea. Everybody knows that it is a dumb idea, but Bob's uncle is the executive VP of sales, so...
In today's world, W. Mark Felt would have had an anonymous identity and leaked good information to Firedoglake or Daily Kos.
Yes, but in today's world, lots of people have lots of anonymous identities and leak lots of bad information to lots of blogs.
That's how we know that Obama isn't a US Citizen, and that the CIA blew up the WTC on 9/11.
If you want news that isn't just gossip, you actually need to have somebody who actually has a personal reputation say "yeah, I spoke to the guy on the inside and they seem legit." It would be nice then if courts didn't jail that person (which is another thing that is killing genuine investigative journalism).
Sure, if the news you're looking for is a photo of the latest pre-release Apple product or whatever your model is fine. If you want actual investigative journalism, however, it doesn't work all that well. Sure, it will work in isolated cases.
To the extent that something like a blog actually does this stuff they're really just a newspaper under a different name. And most likely blogs that do serious fact-checking and protect a reputation are going to be expensive to operate, which means that they're in the same boat as the papers.
I think that independent and professional news gathering are a valuable service that needs to be preserved. We probably don't need world-class news organizations in every major city, but we do need some. Local news is also very important - maybe we need local news companies that don't feel compelled to compete with the Wall Street Journal and instead they can focus on local news.
The other benefit is that it could encourage more competition from private ISPs. Right now, ISPs are competing on raw pipe.
And I like it that way. What you go on to describe sounds like the cell phone nightmare in the US. I DON'T NEED MORE OF THAT!!!!!
Look, keep the ISP as a basic pipe.
What you're essentially doing is mandating that anybody who buys internet access also buy news - it isn't like the ISP isn't going to pass that cost along. So, why not just cut out the middleman. Every US citizen has to list news subscription receipts totaling $100 on their tax forms or they have to pay $100 in extra taxes. Now everybody can buy their bandwidth from whoever they want, and they can buy their news from whoever they want. Maybe just give a tax credit of up to $100 for subscription receipts - it is the same thing but people don't get penalized as directly for not claiming the credit.
Note that I'm not really a proponent of this - I'd rather leave news buying up to individuals and not force it.
But, if you absolutely have to have mandatory purchase of news, at least let people choose the best provider of each. The reason we have so little ISP choice in the US is due to the sprawling US population - most people only have two ISP choices, and many have only one. What if you're a NYC hippie who has moved to Texas - do you want to have to pay an extra $15 per month for your internet connection to one of the two ISPs who both only offer FOX News for free?
Anytime you move you're going to lose some of your top-notch staff - that's just the way it is.
In my field I like to think that I'm very competitive, but I'd have to think long and hard before applying for a job at a place like Google because I DON'T want to live in a super-expensive traffic-filled area. Sure, I don't want to live in the boondocks either, but a nice suburb 30 miles from some decent-sized city is just fine by me.
My current employer already has a nice high-rise in the middle of a major city, and I'm sure I could get myself transferred there if I really wanted to. But, why would I do that? I'd have less spending money and I'd get to ride a crowded train every day as opposed to an almost traffic-free 15 minute commute by car - unless of course I wanted to live in a decent-sized house and then I'd have 40 minutes of polluting logjam car commute followed by 20 minutes on the crowded train.
These sorts of things are fairly personal, and you'll find people interested in living in either environment. However, it does take time to build an organization after a move. Highly compensating people for making the move will obviously help to alleviate that.
Your list of things that don't have to be in Manhattan is absurd. Have you ever worked in a company that tried to disperse its basic functions that way? I have, and it's just not that easy. The loss of communication between key people hurts. A lot.
He's not suggesting that they disperse their basic functions - only that they move them. It isn't like they'd move HR to Oklahoma, IT to Pittsburgh, and Advertising to Nebraska.
No, they'd find some cheap place to buy a ton of land and a bunch of buildings - which has good infrastructure (in particular an airport to get reporters all over the world cheap), and then move everything but the actual local reporters to that location.
Now everything is still concentrated, but in a different city. Sure, your HR and IT departments aren't near your reporters covering arts, culture, local politics, etc. However, how often does the IT department personally service an individual reporter (besides fixing their laptop, which would they would surely have people onsite for).
Also - nobody is suggesting that they not have any physical presence in NYC. We're just talking about having a floor or two of office space (lots of reporters and on-site support staff and a few editors to oversee), rather than a building (even if half of it is leased out - I'm pretty sure real-estate isn't their core business).
You talk about how IT is easier by being in NYC. Sure, maybe you have a little more bandwidth competition and all that, but when you're buying in quantity bandwidth can be obtained anywhere fairly cheap. Just have two different companies run fiber optics to your facility (which takes less time than building said facility anyway), and now you have more potential bandwidth than anybody needs anyway.
And nobody is suggesting that this be in the middle of the New Mexico desert. Put it someplace that is just a bit more moderate in cost of living (which would be just about anywhere). Lots of big companies have moved stuff like IT out to more remote locations.
I doubt it would ever happen - I'm sure the senior execs like looking out the window over Manhattan, and have all their local social connections. Not that any of this really benefits the company much, but most companies are governed out of self-interest on the part of the executives - not shareholder interest.
All that said - I agree that their problems are far more fundamental than real-estate. Cutting these costs is just good business sense, but it won't make or break them. Their real problem is that in the networked world it is hard to get people to pay for original news gathering when you can get press releases for free. You also don't need nearly as many reporters/etc in the world where everybody reads only three newspapers.
I'm not one of those people who pretends that bloggers and cell phone cameras can really do news. However, the internet is pretty disruptive to the business of selling information in general, and news is very hard hit. The problem is that we still need people to do this work (maybe not as many, but we can't afford to lose all of it) - so how do we at least make sure a critical mass of journalism still happens?
I defy you to show me any law that would bar me from showing a photo of any unreleased product?
I'm not saying there is one. However, putting this check-box on the form would cover you from liability for "inducing" whatever it is that Apple thinks is illegal.
If you happen to get yourself a photo and are convinced that there are no laws against sharing it, then check the box and post away. :)
Then, when Apple or whoever complains you ask them for specifics regarding the laws that were supposedly violated, and figure out what you want to do about it. If you take it down after a day of consulting with lawyers (all of whom can testify that they were vigorously investigating the legal issues and consulting with the opposing counsel during that time) they probably wouldn't have a case, and by then everybody on the planet would have already seen it anyway.
Hey - I think it is all bogus too, but lots of people lose lots of money in the US over bogus cases, so playing the legal game is just being smart.
Yup, if they're smart they'd have just put a checkbox on the submission form:
"By checking this box you declare that you are not barred by law from sharing this photo."
If they later get complaints to the contrary they can of course take the photo back down (after taking the proper time to investigate the complaint and ensure that it is legitimate). After all, how could they tell that the photo was posted illegally?
Yes, but most of the value of gold is in the fact that people like to stockpile it for whatever reason. In a major economic collapse (which is what the GP seemed to be concerned about) people aren't going to be worrying about manufacturing leads for microchips - they're going to be worried about dinner or not dying from an infected wound.
My recollection is that the US never occupied that embassy, because of all the bugs. They didn't believe they could be certain that they would have gotten them all.
Sure in the future they might try to call the debt
This seems to be a common misunderstanding. Holders of treasury bonds cannot "call the debt."
When China buys US debt, they buy treasury bonds (or one of the half-dozen other names the same basic instrument sells under). A treasury bond is a promise to pay a stated sum of money on a given date.
So, today I might buy a $100 treasury bond with a maturity of 2040. In 2040 I can turn in that bond for $100 in US dollars (cash or whatever) from the US government. In 2039 it can't be turned in for a dime. Now, in 2039 you could almost certainly sell it to somebody else for very close to $100. The way China makes money is that the $100 bond might have only cost them $20-30 or whatever to buy today. Bonds may also pay interest as well.
The only thing China can do is stop buying new bonds and cash in their existing ones as they mature. The US never promised to give them money before the maturity date, so they are under no obligation to do so.
Agreed. I think that many of the stock market bubble problems we have are one of demographics. Lots of people want to work for 30 years and then live for 30 years off of what they saved up (work from 25-55, retire from 55-85). Fundamentally that just doesn't work - especially with a declining population size.
When all those boomers retire they're going to want to eat out, and that means that they'll have to trade dollars for dinners, and the resulting demand will drive up prices until their waitress is making $60k/yr selling them $100 burgers. Then they'll run through their savings in 10 years and be no better off than somebody who didn't save a dime for retirement and just planned to work until they die.
Obviously that is a stretched example, but the principle is right - all those people with money saved up will create a huge supply of cash and a shortage of people willing to actually perform services and supply goods in exchange for that cast. That means inflation which makes all that cash lose its value very quickly.
Of course, all those near-retirement people were putting tons of money into the stock market. The US economy is only so large, and when people invest more money than can actually be used to produce goods and services (because when they invest their money they don't spend it), the market bubbles. Then when the supply of people saving dries up the market starts to crash. When they start pulling out their money to live off of it en masse then they'll find that nobody wants to buy all that stock, and prices will drop to values that are more in line with the assets and earnings of the underlying companies.
Don't get me wrong - a moderate amount of saving is a good thing. Everybody should have some kind of buffer in their bank account. However, the entire country can't live off of savings. Imagine if EVERYBODY in the US saved up $20k in the bank - easily enough to live at a modest standard for several months. Then imagine that everybody actually tried to take a few months off of work AT THE SAME TIME. Those savings would be worthless as any place you could spend it would be close. Now imagine that maybe 5% of the country stayed at work - they could charge a fortune for their services. That's what will happen when the US population starts to fall with the retirement of the boomers, and many other nations face similar issues...
This is a circular argument. Supply of basic consumer goods in the US is at this point nearly entirely based upon imports
Yes and no. The US produces quite a few basic consumer goods - food in particular. A plastic toy supply shortage will not cripple the US. Granted, the US does depend on imports for a number of fairly critical practical things. But...
The world's economy is at these days pretty much a gigantic Ponzi scheme whereby "value" of currencies and goods is in its entirety based on make-believe wishful thinking. US currency has "value" only because enough people globally wish to pretend that it is so.
Arguably, then the US is in the best place of all. For the last decade we've been receiving useful and practical basic goods in exchange for pieces of paper that you believe are worthless. Is it any surprise that US companies don't want to bother making these goods if others are willing to do so just for pieces of paper?
As long as supplies of these goods were not cut off overnight, the US could make them on its own. Right now manufacturing in the US tends to not be as cheap as it is elsewhere, but it isn't like the US couldn't build enough cars or whatever for its own needs. Oil is probably the most critical imported resource, but the problems of oil aren't so much that the US depends on foreign supplies so much as that the entire world depends on a resource that will be limited everywhere at some point. If anything the relatively untapped US local oil reserves will put the US in a good strategic position when everybody else is running out.
As far as all the stuff about controlled versus natural currencies and that - every system has its pros and cons. A well-managed paper currency has a lot of advantages over something like gold in that you can actually regulate the supply of money in accordance with its demand to keep prices stable. Virtually all currencies tend to be artificial - at least since they stopped paying people in salt. It isn't like a lump of gold has any practical use. If there is ever a nuclear winter the guy who will be able to barter isn't the guy with all the gold bricks in his basement, but rather the guy with a lot full of functional cars/fuel (that he can defend) or the guy who knows how to perform basic surgeries. Anything other than a truly practical item or skill is just a currency of convenience, and there is nothing wrong with that either.
ReiserFS is in mainline, and is maintained by the kernel developers.
So is OS/2 HPFS. On the one hand that shows that ReiserFS will probably supported almost forever. On the other hand, I'm not sure I'd be rolling it out for new deployments or applications unless you're in a very tight niche.
The manner in which the law is enforced tends to be arbitrary.
They don't just put you in a court and charge you with protesting. You simply disappear.
There really isn't due process of law - regardless of what the laws are.
Embargos aren't really the solution to problems like worker safety or healthcare - but tarrifs certainly are fair game.
If France wants to say - "workers should have good health care, so any product made by a company whose workers don't have x standard of health care will have a tariff" - then I'm fine with that. You'll probably find that almost anything the US actually exports probably is made by people with healthcare comparable to most Europeans, however.
These kinds of tariffs are important because otherwise a country that wants to keep its workers safe (or whatever) puts its companies at disadvantage against other nations that do not. It is also perfectly fair for countries with similar goals to unite (EU, etc) on these kinds of policies.
Despite a lot of the EU-USA bickering during much of the decade, the fact is that when you're dealing with countries like China the US and EU have a lot more in common than apart - ditto for non-EU countries that have decent standards. We shouldn't allow our multinationals to just move all the jobs to countries that have zero safety/environmental standards - and tariffs are a good way to do that. I'm hopeful that Obama may help to heal some of the rifts in this area.
And I say all of this as a fairly libertarian-leaning conservative that isn't all that big fan of most national healthcare proposals (although I think that eventually the concept will be inevitable when genetic testing makes voluntary insurance unsustainable). I'm just for nations competing on a level playing field and not having one big race to the bottom for workers.
I'm not sure censorship counts as "gross violations of basic human rights". It's not good, certainly, but not in the same league as arbitrary imprisonment, torture or executions (things the US is not exactly innocent of).
Uh, what happens in China if you try to bypass censorship? That would be arbitrary imprisonment, torture, or executions. I certainly don't excuse the US for doing this (it is completely inexcusable), but the fact that some people commit horrible acts doesn't give anybody else a pass for doing the same things. The US has turned most of those policies around and most people agree that it is at least moving in the right direction now.
If you disagree, why don't you try running a fiber line into China and set up an ISP that doesn't go through the great firewall and see what happens to you? Why don't you try posting something critical of the government on a blog (while living there)? Why don't you try to organize a protest?
Then come back and tell me (maybe in 30 years) about how censorship isn't all that big a deal in the big scheme of things.
While I'm sure China isn't the only country doing this, when you think about it this is a very scary proposition.
Just think - China decides that being able to take over the CNN front page at a future point in time might be useful to them (just a random example - it could be any site, and it could be some other country).
Teams work around the clock probing the CNN servers. They monitor tons of network traffic so they can passively identify every server that people actually make connections to (even for the most obscure things like a rare banner ad or the data feed for some weather applet or whatever). If ANY of those servers have a vulnerability they can get in.
Each lead is sent to a team that specializes in exploiting it. Hmm, looks like they're using some load balancer on their webservers - based on traffic patterns it might be this one. Let's give it to the guy who has taken apart two of them and knows the firmware inside and out. Looks like their weather uses some obscure XML type - let's get a guy who knows all about it to see if maybe the parser lets in some obscure field in the spec that the underlying app server might choke on.
Then you get in. The guy who manages to get a little access on a single box doesn't have to try to figure out the whole network on his own. Instead a team that specializes in DMZ mapping takes over and figures out what their datacenter looks like. Whole new teams work on additional exploits.
Once they find some good places to hide trojans then another team takes over. That load balancer firmware expert knows exactly how to create a hidden partition in the flash on one of the NICs installed in it which somehow gets triggered by some interrupt to run some code - maybe triggered by a specially crafted packet hitting it from the net. Specialists could sneak code into all kinds of places where nobody would ever spot it - probably in more than one place so a system upgrade wouldn't break their access.
Big companies have all kinds of proprietary software that isn't all that secure. The thing is that most teenage/college hackers don't ever see this software and as a result don't hack it. They might write a virus that targets excel, but they don't have one that targets some $3M payroll management system.
Once everything is in place it goes to the monitoring team which makes sure the trojans/etc stay in place with some stealthy pings from time to time. They can stay on top of thousands of hacks and bring in help when something goes wrong - just think of them like you think of your server monitoring team at work...
Don't under-estimate the capability of a well-run professional team - especially a fairly new one.
Granted, in 20 years it will start to resemble the IT at many fortune 500s. Hmm, the exploit script doesn't work - too bad we didn't pay the guy who wrote it enough and he's gone. What, the monitoring team isn't doing its job right - oh, but the guy who heads it up is the boss's cousin - well, maybe we won't ever need those exploits to remain in place...
Hmm - looks like the anti-ship ballistic missle is a credible threat after all. There is a counter to it, however - keep the Chinese from knowing where the carriers are with enough accuracy to target them.
That could be done with deception, or by shooting down survailence satellites.
Look, China fought the combined USA-UN forces to a standstill in North Korea two generations ago.
The US did not have the will to fight a strategic war with China. McArthur was gung ho to take them on. The decision to not do so was political, and probably a wise one considering the stakes.
The only thing Korea and Vietnam really teach about war is that you can't fight a war of attrition without taking out the strategic sources of resupply. In both of those wars those strategic targets were in other nations, and attacking them would have tremendously increased the scope of the war.
If the US actually got into a real war with China then it would attack strategic targets in China, which would greatly diminish its ability to make war. In general China lacks a conventional capability to strike at similar targets in the US.
China's relatively smaller ICBM force is still sufficient to annihilate civilisation
I don't have the figures, but I think that most people estimate China's ICBMs as being less than 50 or so. There is no question that this can do a lot of damage, but it won't come close to annihilating civilization. Even so, nobody risks nuclear war, so it is a serious deterrent.
China's new anti-ship ballistic MIRV deployment has neutralised any force projection capability by the US Navy near China for at least ten years
Uh, only if you allow for the use of nuclear warheads. I don't believe that any ICBM technology is capable of destroying ships with conventional warheads. Short range ballistic weapons are probably within the ability of anti-air defenses (they're not coming in at hypersonic speeds). In order to hit a ship with a conventional warhead and evade defenses you need a hypersonic warhead that can detect a ship and maneuver to hit it directly. How do you steer a hypersonic warhead with such accuracy? If it comes in any slower it will be shot down.
In Korea the Soviets clearly had the technology to destroy US carriers with nuclear arms, however they did not do so. The stakes of the war (a strip of land in the middle of asia) wasn't worth getting into a nuclear conflict (plus, at the time the US was ahead in strategic arms and power projection).
The same applies now. Nobody is going to fight a nuclear war over some computer hackers. Nobody is going to fight a conventional war over that stuff either. If the US and China did get into a big scuff chances are it would be fought over relatively minor economic targets (Taiwan, or whatever), and neither side is going to escalate to that level. In such a war the Chinese are going to be at a disadvantage - they are well behind the US in conventional technology and their nuclear deterrent is useless as anything except a spoiler. As long as the US made it clear that it wasn't considering regime change or invading chances are it wouldn't be used.
If for some reason the Chinese really did attack a carrier group with nuclear weapons, just think of the international reaction. They'd tick off just about every major power on the planet - including the former Soviets they have a very long border with.
In any case, I don't see any actual wars starting over this stuff. There is far to much to loose, and really nothing to gain. If the US doesn't want the Chinese buying up debt, then they should stop selling it to them. If the US doesn't like the value of their currency, then start passing tariffs. It isn't like the WTO is going to do anything - just make the reason environmental standards and global warming and you'll have support from just about everybody on the planet. It isn't like the Europeans like the idea of companies just outsourcing all their work to places where they can pollute freely.
In an economic war I think that China has at least as much to lose as the US.
If the Chinese sold THAT much of our debt at a huge discount, the US government would do well to just buy it back up. If you did some tax hikes and spending cuts to raise revenue the US could make out quite well. After all - the Chinese gave the US $x years ago, and then today the US is free of obligation by giving them $x/10. Even if we paid them back $x we'd still make out on time-value-of-money.
The only thing that it hurts is the ability to issue new debt at low rates - at least until the Chinese run out of bonds to sell.