The ridiculous point is - nobody with any sense invests long-term any more. Which is the fundamental problem for stockholders and employees alike - long term health of the company is meaningless to the PHB's trying to ramp up profits to look good when their yearly "performance review" is due, and the quickest way to do that is to fire employees.
Sure, the company's in the shitter two years down the road, but by then the CEO's quit and taken his stock options to the bank.
Yeah. I got modded "offtopic" for pointing out that Israeli and US courts are subject to the same stupidity. Doubtless by some right-wing fucktard with delusions of humanity...
But that would make sense. And everyone knows that sense and logic are antithetical to courtrooms.
This is the same justice system where psychotic evanglical christian-types convince judges not to allow D&D books or other roleplaying books because it uses dice ("OMG GAMBLING"), because it's "Satanic", and because it "encourages gang behavior." To wit: "The Dungeon Master is tasked with giving directions to other players, which Muraski testified mimics the organization of a gang." - despite the fact that this is NOTHING LIKE D&D, the testimony of Dumbass Muraski was accepted as "expert testimony" in court.
And the same justice system where our dumbass, inept, clueless judges actually BUY those lines of argument.
Great idea! Let's hand over control of the UN to a collection of communists, monarchies, corrupt governments, and Islamic theocracies, which together make up the majority of UN members. What could possibly go wrong!
Already have done. Ever counted up the percentage of functioning democracies in the UN General Assembly as opposed to the number of Juntas, Tin-Pot Dictatorships, Communist Dictatorships, Banana Republics, and Psychopathic Theocracies?
No kidding. Not just that, but it's fucking terrible managing to find out which temproot/permroot function works best for your phone, and then keeping it applied through the OTA update nonsense.
They've improved the taste somewhat over the years.
On the other end, however, it still gives you constipation like you wouldn't believe. They should start packing an ex-lax into each one to balance it out...
Honestly, you sound like you're still angry at Bush and your making up your facts.
No, I'm presenting the facts that I run into. In our state (run by some of the dumbest Republicans on the planet) there are almost no controls on the abuses the insurance companies can get away with, thanks to a "waah deregulate deregulate deregulate" spree from these idiots a decade ago.
COBRA, for me, would be over $900/month. Unemployment benefits are capped at $1600/month. Think about that. It's a scam, pure and simple. Nobody unemployed could pay it.
They should go somewhere that doesn't screw it's residents
Funny thing about that: not everyone has the option to simply pick up and move. People are tied to their job. They are tied to family members - either as a caregiver, or helping to make ends meet, or because their spouse is also working, or because their spouse is in school (college undergrad or grad) and unable to leave the program, or because they're tied to a mortgage, or any of a large number of other reasons, usually a combination of several.
or they should stop voting for the democrats that banned nationwide insurance shopping.
Now who's making shit up? If the Republicans were actually interested in interstate health insurance shopping - which would, by the way, help fix our fucked up system only until the carriers started charging "adjusted" rates to match the in-state rates of each state - then they wouldn't have attached it to a bill with a dozen poison pills designed to ensure it never fucking passed because even half the Republican house delegation wouldn't vote for it.
Every contract I've seen specified 6 month exemption for preexisting conditions, and that's waived if there's no prior break in coverage.
You must live in a Democrat-run state. Here, it's 2 years. The Republicans during their last session tried to push it to 4. Oh, and the "no prior break in coverage"? Meaningless. You switch carriers for any reason, you're fucked, previously covered or not.
Yeah, that really sucks if you get laid off, but if you're job hopping it doesn't matter at all, and your new employer doesn't have to know you're about to clobber their group rate until after they've hired you.
Try living in a "right to work/at-will-employment" state created by the Republicans. The moment the assholes find out your PEC means the group rate goes up, you're right back out the door.
When Obamacare ends the whole concept of preexisting conditions, health insurance is doomed. Anyone with any math skills will dump their insurance immediately, pay out of pocket for general care, and then knock on Aetna's door when something serious happens - who will be forced to take them in. Insurance companies will bankrupt, and President Pelosi will step in to socialize all medical care. That's my tinfoil hat theory on our new health insurance "reform".
You know, if you'd said that 5 years ago, it might have meant something. Today? I have friends in Britain doing just fine. I have a friend in Canada who was diagnosed with breast cancer 4 years ago, she has NO problem getting care. I have friends in Germany who do just fine when they need to see a doctor.
The problem is not "socialized medicine", because those countries pay LESS of their GDP than we do on care, and they manage to cover their people just fine with LESS horror stories than we have under our psychopathic current system. If you think screaming "aaugh president pelosi will step in to socialize all medical care" as a boogeyman is going to get me to agree with you - sorry, but our current system is the equivalent of something designed by a Republican Golgothan shitting all over anyone who winds up with any sort of an unexpected medical problem. "Socialized medicine" won't be perfect, but it'll be a definite improvement, as well as very nice to eliminate all the fat assholes who are taking 30% right off the top of our current system and giving NO benefit to anyone in return.
Or consider that the "toilet seat" is actually an entire commode hooked into a waste-disposal system on an aircraft carrier or airplane, which isn't allowed to simply dump waste out everywhere.
I'm reminded of the episode of The West Wing where one of the WH staffers gets in the face of a navy officer about the "$60 ashtrays" used on naval ships... he smashes one on the desk to show her how it splits into three neat pieces, because the last thing you need in a firefight is sharp glass or ceramic shards from your ordinary model of ashtray flying around living compartments.
Shit that morons from the "waah why does it cost so much" department never fucking consider...
You must be in perfect health, aged 25-35, with no wife or kids then.
I spent a couple years having to try to find private coverage in my early 20s. Congenital heart defect, minor food allergies. The ONLY way that I was able to maintain coverage throughout that time was to take a token college course and maintain the student health insurance plan from my alma mater during that time: I was turned down by every coverage agency for "unspecified reasons" each time I tried to apply for private insurance. Whenever I apply for work, I have to watch the fine print for the (usually 2 years in my state) "time we won't cover preexisting conditions" bullshit where I have to cover ANY expense that they claim "could be related" to a preexisting condition.
You ever looked at the list of how many conditions they can ascribe to a congenital heart defect? High cholesterol, low cholesterol, low blood pressure, high blood pressure, ocular illness, anything to do with joint degradation, anything to do with immune function... pretty much everything in your fucking body they can deny based on "oh that's related to the heart condition." The "individual illnesses that could be related" list is LONGER THAN THE FUCKING CONTRACTS.
This is the problem with the health insurance industry in general. If you are in perfect health, and are willing to take an insanely fucking high deductible, then they're happy to sign you up. If you have ANYTHING that they could say "preexisting condition" to, either they won't take you at all, or there's some fucking insane wait period along with even higher deductibles and premiums that are worse than my relatively modest mortgage payment.
So, since 80% of the US has some form of "preexisting condition", they're ALL tied to their fucking job. Praying they can't get fired, since the only other option is COBRA, which - at 110% of "what the employer paid" while you're being given a maximum of $400/week in unemployment - is a fucking unaffordable joke come up with by heartless Republicans to fuck over the poor at a time when they are most vulnerable.
Now add a staffer with a congenital heart defect to your "group", and watch the rates skyrocket.
Or someone whose kid is autistic, or develops a serious long-term illness (happened to a friend of mine: she was fired from her job because her KID had leukemia and it made the "group insurance plan" too expensive).
Republicans say "well maybe they shouldn't have let their kid get leukemia", then deride people like her as "leeches" for winding up on Medicaid. Fuck those greedy, heartless sons of bitches.
The moment you do this, you lose the right to claim insurance benefits and other benefits of working at the job. You have to pay it all yourself. You also forfeit the ability to take any paid leave/sick time, the ability to participate in contribution-matching towards retirement funds, and a host of other benefits (though granted, with the Republicans in charge, those benefits are getting cut by greedy legislators every day).
Individual insurance is a BITCH to get. Something like 20% of all claims are rejected, with another 40% "quietly rejected" by the agent who tells you "I'll just shred this so there's no record, because other companies can use our rejection as a reason to reject your application."
On top of that, if you have ANY health condition whatsoever, good luck finding insurance to cover it without an incredibly long wait period or incredibly high monthly costs and deductibles.
Got a heart condition? Family history of any form of neurological disorder, even Alzheimer's? How about a grandparent or two who's a diabetic? Hell, even a family history of asthma can hurt you if you're trying to get your kid insured.
Oh, and good luck EVER finding dental insurance that isn't from an employer.
There's a reason most people don't go the way you suggest - if you ever get hurt or sick, it's fucking suicide.
Statistical mechanics works because when molecules interact they do so in probabilistic ways that you can easily work out
No. Statistical mechanics works because when you average the interactions of the millions of molecules, the result is predictable. Many of the interactions do NOT happen exactly as one might predict, but some act "unpredictably" in one direction, and some "unpredictably" in another.
Humans don't operate like that. Human interactions are, shockingly, more complex than a molecule bumping into another.
That's irrelevant. Individual humans behave unpredictably. People, en masse, behave in ways that are actually highly predictable because the unpredictable actions of one person are balanced by the "unpredictable" action of another person doing something relatively opposite.
My prediction: this rather insightful comment gets modded down to oblivion because of the "bury brigades" trolling Slashdot lately from the Tea Party astroturf movement.
Cutting corners gets caught pretty quickly and usually backfires.
Unless you're flooding the market at high enough rates that you crowd out the better products. Which is part of what happens here.
Selling at a loss is an expensive and risky proposition.
Not if you're a gorilla-sized entity trying to choke off smaller competitors, or we wouldn't have predatory pricing laws in most of the world.
Theft of intellectual property can be handled by the courts
Not when you are dealing in international trade with a country that refuses to enforce and abide by treaties. Which is precisely the problem with China: they give lip service to "international treaties", then steal the designs and patented tech for their own plants, and when complaints are lodged, the response is a combination of "well what are you going to do with it" and "tough luck foreigner, only Chinese have rights here!"
Currency manipulation if a ficticious boogeyman. It doesn't work for the same reason that perpetual motion machines don't work.
I'm just clarifying that the only reason we allow it is the US is a profoundly racist country.
And I'm just clarifying that you are fucking full of shit. Y'know?
The other option is explode prices upward, because the capital cost of setting up a competitor is very high and takes a long time, and our government will not help our manufacturers in fact it will stand in the way whenever possible, and finally if we built a plant to sell cheap panels the Chinese govt would merely repeat the same trick, hand cash to their manufacturers to undercut the prices of our new plant, and put our new plant out of business, at which time they can charge whatever they want again.
Which is in essence what the complaint is about. The Chinese government is not playing by the same rules the rest of the world is playing by. The entire problem of the "non-protectionist" bullcrap arguments is that they assume that all countries are playing by the same rules - e.g. that all nations involved in trade have relatively equivalent standards for worker protection, environmental protection, and product safety. Meanwhile, the Chinese communist government creates nothing of real value, produces vast quantities of unsafe, dangerous knockoff crap from stolen designs, and treats 90% of their population as slave classes. One great example: a "landmark study" on enforced "vegan" nutrient-poor diets was recently done in China by a US-based "useful idiot" academic. Why do it in China? The Chinese government has laws preventing their slave classes from moving between villages and absolutely no Human Subjects regulations.
The USA problem is we think we are human beings and Chinese are not human beings they are just the yellow hordes or whatever subhuman description you'd like.
No, actually, the problem is that most people don't even know what goes into MAKING most of the products they use today. For instance, food. It has nothing to do with racism, it has nothing to do with hate, it's just a simple fact that most people don't consider anything beyond the point where they saw product X on the store shelves.
You want to talk economics? Fine, let's talk economics. But kindly get your head out of your ass and stop assuming that everything in the world is a product of "racism."
Incidentally: nobody in the USA refers to "the USA problem." It'd be "America's problem." My guess is, you're probably from some communist dipshit country where you get force-fed a diet of "USA bad, evil whiteys racist, they want to take over the world and depose your Glorious Leader" bullshit.
- Rampant theft of intellectual property - we're not just talking Napster-grade "file sharing" here, we are talking about rampant spying and thievery of patented products and designs. As the last article I link shows, it's not just the US getting burned by the Chinese - this is a major point of concern in the EU as well.
Are you getting some form of a clue now?
Re:Change cannot be stopped
on
The Case For Piracy
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The secondary problem with "strong copyright" is that copyright has become disconnected from the lifetime of the medium on which the performance/art/work is rendered.
Copyright is what now, 95 years for "work for hire" and life-of-author-plus-70 for independent? Compare that to the sales lifetime (or even TWICE the sales lifetime) of a standard video game console - a "decade lifetime" is pushing it. Atari 2600's and original NES units are considered antiques. Good luck even FINDING a working Vectrex.
Hell, even for non-gaming - a while back Slashdot had a story about a guy who built a homebrew Cray-1 replica. His biggest problem? FINDING SOFTWARE TO TEST IT WITH. Nobody kept the discs around, and the few discs that are even findable today have succumbed to bit-rot.
From that article: After searching the internet exhaustively, I contacted the Computer History Musuem and they didn’t have any either. They also informed me that apparently SGI destroyed Cray’s old software archives before spinning them off again in the late 90s. I filed a couple of FOIA requests with scary government agencies that also came up dry. I wound up e-mailing back and forth with a bunch of former Cray employees and also came up *mostly* dry. My current best hope is a guy I was able to track down that happened to own an 80 MB ‘disk pack’ from a Cray-1 Maintenance Control Unit (the Cray-1 was so complicated, it required a dedicated mini-computer just to boot it!), although it still remains to be seen if I’ll actually get a chance to try to recover it.
Under current "copyright", his asking for software copies is technically a violation of copyright.
"Copyright" has ceased to be what it originally was. The promise of copyright is that the protected creation is protected for a limited time, WHENCE IT SHALL ENTER THE PUBLIC DOMAIN AND BE AVAILABLE. Increasingly, copyright has instead become a fucking scam to promote forced obsolescence and premature death-of-product and prevent even historians from preserving the work for posterity.
Funny. Nobody in the world has ever fucking heard of the other BBX before. A cursory Google search comes up with a NYSE stock listing (BBX = BankAtlantic Bancorp, Inc), BroadBandXpress (bbxpress.net), "BBX Inc" bodybuilding scam artists, "BBX Technologies" (http://www.bbxtechnologies.com), and on the SECOND page, one of the shittiest written Wikipedia entries I've ever had the misfortune to lay eyes on (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBx).
Trademark trolls, Patent trolls... trolls is trolls.
Slashdot Mirror
The ridiculous point is - nobody with any sense invests long-term any more. Which is the fundamental problem for stockholders and employees alike - long term health of the company is meaningless to the PHB's trying to ramp up profits to look good when their yearly "performance review" is due, and the quickest way to do that is to fire employees.
Sure, the company's in the shitter two years down the road, but by then the CEO's quit and taken his stock options to the bank.
Yeah. I got modded "offtopic" for pointing out that Israeli and US courts are subject to the same stupidity. Doubtless by some right-wing fucktard with delusions of humanity...
But that would make sense. And everyone knows that sense and logic are antithetical to courtrooms.
This is the same justice system where psychotic evanglical christian-types convince judges not to allow D&D books or other roleplaying books because it uses dice ("OMG GAMBLING"), because it's "Satanic", and because it "encourages gang behavior." To wit: "The Dungeon Master is tasked with giving directions to other players, which Muraski testified mimics the organization of a gang." - despite the fact that this is NOTHING LIKE D&D, the testimony of Dumbass Muraski was accepted as "expert testimony" in court.
And the same justice system where our dumbass, inept, clueless judges actually BUY those lines of argument.
Great idea! Let's hand over control of the UN to a collection of communists, monarchies, corrupt governments, and Islamic theocracies, which together make up the majority of UN members. What could possibly go wrong!
Already have done. Ever counted up the percentage of functioning democracies in the UN General Assembly as opposed to the number of Juntas, Tin-Pot Dictatorships, Communist Dictatorships, Banana Republics, and Psychopathic Theocracies?
And you thought government was by the people, for the people?
Only if you define "the people" as the top 1% who run the corporations.
The paranoid would say that this is a plan by the HDD manufacturers to get people to switch over to SSD's instead.
Of course, SSD's can't handle nearly the capacity-for-cost right now, which could present a problem.
When, oh when will we finally get holographic storage with petabytes per 1-inch cube? ;) Or perhaps Isolinear Chips?
No kidding. Not just that, but it's fucking terrible managing to find out which temproot/permroot function works best for your phone, and then keeping it applied through the OTA update nonsense.
They airdrop them into third-world areas as a "humanitarian" gesture. Only then they call them an "HDR" ("Humanitarian Daily Ration.")
Wrapped in yellow plastic dangerously similar to the yellow plastic around unexploded cluster bomb munitions, approximately the same size/shape too.
Just to confuse the fuck out of the poor people who don't know if they're about to get a meal or their hand blown off...
They've improved the taste somewhat over the years.
On the other end, however, it still gives you constipation like you wouldn't believe. They should start packing an ex-lax into each one to balance it out...
Honestly, you sound like you're still angry at Bush and your making up your facts.
No, I'm presenting the facts that I run into. In our state (run by some of the dumbest Republicans on the planet) there are almost no controls on the abuses the insurance companies can get away with, thanks to a "waah deregulate deregulate deregulate" spree from these idiots a decade ago.
COBRA, for me, would be over $900/month. Unemployment benefits are capped at $1600/month. Think about that. It's a scam, pure and simple. Nobody unemployed could pay it.
They should go somewhere that doesn't screw it's residents
Funny thing about that: not everyone has the option to simply pick up and move. People are tied to their job. They are tied to family members - either as a caregiver, or helping to make ends meet, or because their spouse is also working, or because their spouse is in school (college undergrad or grad) and unable to leave the program, or because they're tied to a mortgage, or any of a large number of other reasons, usually a combination of several.
or they should stop voting for the democrats that banned nationwide insurance shopping.
Now who's making shit up? If the Republicans were actually interested in interstate health insurance shopping - which would, by the way, help fix our fucked up system only until the carriers started charging "adjusted" rates to match the in-state rates of each state - then they wouldn't have attached it to a bill with a dozen poison pills designed to ensure it never fucking passed because even half the Republican house delegation wouldn't vote for it.
Every contract I've seen specified 6 month exemption for preexisting conditions, and that's waived if there's no prior break in coverage.
You must live in a Democrat-run state. Here, it's 2 years. The Republicans during their last session tried to push it to 4. Oh, and the "no prior break in coverage"? Meaningless. You switch carriers for any reason, you're fucked, previously covered or not.
Yeah, that really sucks if you get laid off, but if you're job hopping it doesn't matter at all, and your new employer doesn't have to know you're about to clobber their group rate until after they've hired you.
Try living in a "right to work/at-will-employment" state created by the Republicans. The moment the assholes find out your PEC means the group rate goes up, you're right back out the door.
When Obamacare ends the whole concept of preexisting conditions, health insurance is doomed. Anyone with any math skills will dump their insurance immediately, pay out of pocket for general care, and then knock on Aetna's door when something serious happens - who will be forced to take them in. Insurance companies will bankrupt, and President Pelosi will step in to socialize all medical care. That's my tinfoil hat theory on our new health insurance "reform".
You know, if you'd said that 5 years ago, it might have meant something. Today? I have friends in Britain doing just fine. I have a friend in Canada who was diagnosed with breast cancer 4 years ago, she has NO problem getting care. I have friends in Germany who do just fine when they need to see a doctor.
The problem is not "socialized medicine", because those countries pay LESS of their GDP than we do on care, and they manage to cover their people just fine with LESS horror stories than we have under our psychopathic current system. If you think screaming "aaugh president pelosi will step in to socialize all medical care" as a boogeyman is going to get me to agree with you - sorry, but our current system is the equivalent of something designed by a Republican Golgothan shitting all over anyone who winds up with any sort of an unexpected medical problem. "Socialized medicine" won't be perfect, but it'll be a definite improvement, as well as very nice to eliminate all the fat assholes who are taking 30% right off the top of our current system and giving NO benefit to anyone in return.
Or consider that the "toilet seat" is actually an entire commode hooked into a waste-disposal system on an aircraft carrier or airplane, which isn't allowed to simply dump waste out everywhere.
I'm reminded of the episode of The West Wing where one of the WH staffers gets in the face of a navy officer about the "$60 ashtrays" used on naval ships... he smashes one on the desk to show her how it splits into three neat pieces, because the last thing you need in a firefight is sharp glass or ceramic shards from your ordinary model of ashtray flying around living compartments.
Shit that morons from the "waah why does it cost so much" department never fucking consider...
You must be in perfect health, aged 25-35, with no wife or kids then.
I spent a couple years having to try to find private coverage in my early 20s. Congenital heart defect, minor food allergies. The ONLY way that I was able to maintain coverage throughout that time was to take a token college course and maintain the student health insurance plan from my alma mater during that time: I was turned down by every coverage agency for "unspecified reasons" each time I tried to apply for private insurance. Whenever I apply for work, I have to watch the fine print for the (usually 2 years in my state) "time we won't cover preexisting conditions" bullshit where I have to cover ANY expense that they claim "could be related" to a preexisting condition.
You ever looked at the list of how many conditions they can ascribe to a congenital heart defect? High cholesterol, low cholesterol, low blood pressure, high blood pressure, ocular illness, anything to do with joint degradation, anything to do with immune function... pretty much everything in your fucking body they can deny based on "oh that's related to the heart condition." The "individual illnesses that could be related" list is LONGER THAN THE FUCKING CONTRACTS.
This is the problem with the health insurance industry in general. If you are in perfect health, and are willing to take an insanely fucking high deductible, then they're happy to sign you up. If you have ANYTHING that they could say "preexisting condition" to, either they won't take you at all, or there's some fucking insane wait period along with even higher deductibles and premiums that are worse than my relatively modest mortgage payment.
So, since 80% of the US has some form of "preexisting condition", they're ALL tied to their fucking job. Praying they can't get fired, since the only other option is COBRA, which - at 110% of "what the employer paid" while you're being given a maximum of $400/week in unemployment - is a fucking unaffordable joke come up with by heartless Republicans to fuck over the poor at a time when they are most vulnerable.
No shit.
Now add a staffer with a congenital heart defect to your "group", and watch the rates skyrocket.
Or someone whose kid is autistic, or develops a serious long-term illness (happened to a friend of mine: she was fired from her job because her KID had leukemia and it made the "group insurance plan" too expensive).
Republicans say "well maybe they shouldn't have let their kid get leukemia", then deride people like her as "leeches" for winding up on Medicaid. Fuck those greedy, heartless sons of bitches.
The moment you do this, you lose the right to claim insurance benefits and other benefits of working at the job. You have to pay it all yourself. You also forfeit the ability to take any paid leave/sick time, the ability to participate in contribution-matching towards retirement funds, and a host of other benefits (though granted, with the Republicans in charge, those benefits are getting cut by greedy legislators every day).
Individual insurance is a BITCH to get. Something like 20% of all claims are rejected, with another 40% "quietly rejected" by the agent who tells you "I'll just shred this so there's no record, because other companies can use our rejection as a reason to reject your application."
On top of that, if you have ANY health condition whatsoever, good luck finding insurance to cover it without an incredibly long wait period or incredibly high monthly costs and deductibles.
Got a heart condition? Family history of any form of neurological disorder, even Alzheimer's? How about a grandparent or two who's a diabetic? Hell, even a family history of asthma can hurt you if you're trying to get your kid insured.
Oh, and good luck EVER finding dental insurance that isn't from an employer.
There's a reason most people don't go the way you suggest - if you ever get hurt or sick, it's fucking suicide.
Statistical mechanics works because when molecules interact they do so in probabilistic ways that you can easily work out
No. Statistical mechanics works because when you average the interactions of the millions of molecules, the result is predictable. Many of the interactions do NOT happen exactly as one might predict, but some act "unpredictably" in one direction, and some "unpredictably" in another.
In the same way, we do not need to know which individual person did something stupid on the freeway to determine that once there is critical density of traffic, someone tapping their brakes at one point will cause a cascade effect that leads to a full-stop situation for the freeway a few miles back.
Humans don't operate like that. Human interactions are, shockingly, more complex than a molecule bumping into another.
That's irrelevant. Individual humans behave unpredictably. People, en masse, behave in ways that are actually highly predictable because the unpredictable actions of one person are balanced by the "unpredictable" action of another person doing something relatively opposite.
That isn't really a great loss to society either. If anything it's an improvement...
My prediction: this rather insightful comment gets modded down to oblivion because of the "bury brigades" trolling Slashdot lately from the Tea Party astroturf movement.
Let's see if I'm right...
You're a moron aren't you?
Cutting corners gets caught pretty quickly and usually backfires.
Unless you're flooding the market at high enough rates that you crowd out the better products. Which is part of what happens here.
Selling at a loss is an expensive and risky proposition.
Not if you're a gorilla-sized entity trying to choke off smaller competitors, or we wouldn't have predatory pricing laws in most of the world.
Theft of intellectual property can be handled by the courts
Not when you are dealing in international trade with a country that refuses to enforce and abide by treaties. Which is precisely the problem with China: they give lip service to "international treaties", then steal the designs and patented tech for their own plants, and when complaints are lodged, the response is a combination of "well what are you going to do with it" and "tough luck foreigner, only Chinese have rights here!"
Currency manipulation if a ficticious boogeyman. It doesn't work for the same reason that perpetual motion machines don't work.
And you just proved you're a fool. Go do some reading and come back when you have the slightest clue what you're talking about.
$30B in china goes to buy a lot more slaves and build bigger factories than the equivalent sum in the US.
FTFY.
Well stated. Wish I had the modpoints, I'd give you one.
I'm just clarifying that the only reason we allow it is the US is a profoundly racist country.
And I'm just clarifying that you are fucking full of shit. Y'know?
The other option is explode prices upward, because the capital cost of setting up a competitor is very high and takes a long time, and our government will not help our manufacturers in fact it will stand in the way whenever possible, and finally if we built a plant to sell cheap panels the Chinese govt would merely repeat the same trick, hand cash to their manufacturers to undercut the prices of our new plant, and put our new plant out of business, at which time they can charge whatever they want again.
Which is in essence what the complaint is about. The Chinese government is not playing by the same rules the rest of the world is playing by. The entire problem of the "non-protectionist" bullcrap arguments is that they assume that all countries are playing by the same rules - e.g. that all nations involved in trade have relatively equivalent standards for worker protection, environmental protection, and product safety. Meanwhile, the Chinese communist government creates nothing of real value, produces vast quantities of unsafe, dangerous knockoff crap from stolen designs, and treats 90% of their population as slave classes. One great example: a "landmark study" on enforced "vegan" nutrient-poor diets was recently done in China by a US-based "useful idiot" academic. Why do it in China? The Chinese government has laws preventing their slave classes from moving between villages and absolutely no Human Subjects regulations.
The USA problem is we think we are human beings and Chinese are not human beings they are just the yellow hordes or whatever subhuman description you'd like.
No, actually, the problem is that most people don't even know what goes into MAKING most of the products they use today. For instance, food. It has nothing to do with racism, it has nothing to do with hate, it's just a simple fact that most people don't consider anything beyond the point where they saw product X on the store shelves.
You want to talk economics? Fine, let's talk economics. But kindly get your head out of your ass and stop assuming that everything in the world is a product of "racism."
Incidentally: nobody in the USA refers to "the USA problem." It'd be "America's problem." My guess is, you're probably from some communist dipshit country where you get force-fed a diet of "USA bad, evil whiteys racist, they want to take over the world and depose your Glorious Leader" bullshit.
Cheating:
- Governmental currency manipulation which is pretty much a certainty.
- "Product Dumping", e.g. selling a product at below production cost (either by simply eating the loss or cutting corners and dumping an inferior, unsafe product) so as to drive competitors out of the market and then price-gouge once you're the only supplier (already seen in some markets where China did, in fact, run US companies out of business)
- Rampant theft of intellectual property - we're not just talking Napster-grade "file sharing" here, we are talking about rampant spying and thievery of patented products and designs. As the last article I link shows, it's not just the US getting burned by the Chinese - this is a major point of concern in the EU as well.
Are you getting some form of a clue now?
The secondary problem with "strong copyright" is that copyright has become disconnected from the lifetime of the medium on which the performance/art/work is rendered.
Copyright is what now, 95 years for "work for hire" and life-of-author-plus-70 for independent? Compare that to the sales lifetime (or even TWICE the sales lifetime) of a standard video game console - a "decade lifetime" is pushing it. Atari 2600's and original NES units are considered antiques. Good luck even FINDING a working Vectrex.
Hell, even for non-gaming - a while back Slashdot had a story about a guy who built a homebrew Cray-1 replica. His biggest problem? FINDING SOFTWARE TO TEST IT WITH. Nobody kept the discs around, and the few discs that are even findable today have succumbed to bit-rot.
From that article:
After searching the internet exhaustively, I contacted the Computer History Musuem and they didn’t have any either. They also informed me that apparently SGI destroyed Cray’s old software archives before spinning them off again in the late 90s. I filed a couple of FOIA requests with scary government agencies that also came up dry. I wound up e-mailing back and forth with a bunch of former Cray employees and also came up *mostly* dry. My current best hope is a guy I was able to track down that happened to own an 80 MB ‘disk pack’ from a Cray-1 Maintenance Control Unit (the Cray-1 was so complicated, it required a dedicated mini-computer just to boot it!), although it still remains to be seen if I’ll actually get a chance to try to recover it.
Under current "copyright", his asking for software copies is technically a violation of copyright.
"Copyright" has ceased to be what it originally was. The promise of copyright is that the protected creation is protected for a limited time, WHENCE IT SHALL ENTER THE PUBLIC DOMAIN AND BE AVAILABLE. Increasingly, copyright has instead become a fucking scam to promote forced obsolescence and premature death-of-product and prevent even historians from preserving the work for posterity.
Funny. Nobody in the world has ever fucking heard of the other BBX before. A cursory Google search comes up with a NYSE stock listing (BBX = BankAtlantic Bancorp, Inc), BroadBandXpress (bbxpress.net), "BBX Inc" bodybuilding scam artists, "BBX Technologies" (http://www.bbxtechnologies.com), and on the SECOND page, one of the shittiest written Wikipedia entries I've ever had the misfortune to lay eyes on (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBx).
Trademark trolls, Patent trolls... trolls is trolls.