But this is true even with a closed source JVM--microsoft just writes a Java library using JNI that relies on Win32 libraries. Basically, do exactly what Apple did when making the Java interface to Cocoa. I can't take that Java Cocoa application and run it on Linux, can I? (Unless GNUStep is way the heck more advanced than I realized.) (Apple just did it because Java is such a ripoff of Objective C that there was no reason not to make the libraries work in Java as well.)
I never heard of that, but I suppose that saying a Semantic Web is in principle capable of more than the "Regular Web" probably violates something Turing said. It seems to me that XML is poorly designed to serve a marginally useful purpose. Why the hell does it have to look like HTML? Instead of all those starting and closing tags tripling the size of my documents, why not just use white space and parentheses or brackets so that it could have maintained some semblance of still being human readable?
I'm not buying into the magical benefits of XML at all. Just because a file is written in XML doesn't mean your computer magically knows what it means (if that's what the semantic web is, then yeah, that violates both Godel's Theorem and common sense.) Your computer still has to know what XML tag to expect where, and what the data actually means in every tag (they can throw vague, poorly understood words like "ontology" around all they want, at the end of the day a human programmer still has to look up the documentation to see what a given tag stands for.)
Perhaps using an XML parsing library is slightly easier than designing your own file format and documenting it properly (you have to document it either way...but XML makes the process more formal, in theory). Perhaps using an XML editor or viewer to edit XML files is slightly easier than using emacs to edit text files. I suspect the minimal efficiency gains from either of those have already been burned away by millions of people trying to read and sort through meaningless noise-philosophies by MBAs preaching the benefits of this New World Order of Ontological Semantic Standardization.
A little known statistic--100% of all humans alive before the invention of the telephone are now dead?. How can this be? The human race still lives, no? Yes, it does, but that doesn't mean that all individuals who are a part of it are still alive, or could not have lived longer without a given new piece of technology.
If it makes you feel better, go ahead and call me an asshole. Flip me the bird, rant and rave, have a ball. Just hang up and drive (or eat, or watch the movie).
Why should we? You said yourself that you're too cheap to carry a jammer if it costs more than a few hundred dollars--and I'm sure if the jammers started becoming widespread the FCC fines would cost more than that. That means we're winning, and you're the one getting pissed off. Your flipping me the bird, or more likely just getting really angry silently because you don't want to start trouble, meanwhile I don't even notice you--I'm yelling "HEY THERE!.....HOW ARE YOU DOING?....YEAH THAT'S GREAT WELL I CAN'T HEAR YOU WITH THIS MOVIE GOING ON SO I'LL HAVE TO GET BACK TO YOU....HANG ON, THIS GUY WITH A REALLY RED FACE LOOKS LIKE HE'S HAVING A HEART ATTACK, I'M GOING TO HAVE TO CALL EMERGENCY SERVICES." Then as you keel over and die from your incredible rage, I call EMS. Your life is saved, though your anger-fueled stroke has left you completely paralyzed. Meanwhile, the mayor offers me the key to the city for saving your life. But I refuse, saying "DON'T THANK ME, THANK WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS SERVICES!!!!" The entire town erupts in cheers, and the city council unanimously votes to give free cell phones to everyone and applies taxes of One Bajillion Percent to all jamming technology devices.
Wait a minute, I don't even carry a cell phone! Nevermind.
Geez, let me try that again. My previous post has so many mistakes--I really should learn to preview before submit.
Question: was the Ching dynasty's protectionism cultural, like pre-Meiji Japan or current North Korea, or purely economic, like America has practiced to some degree since the constitution was signed, without which we would never have had an industrial revolution here? From an economic point of view, America is definitely large enough to be able to live off the global grid. Yes, global trade has benefits to some. But you should expect to see violent agitation if those benefits are not spread to all very quickly. Are you ready to die for Belgian beer? Because are those muscular unemployed laborers are going to be willing to kill for their next meal.
There's a huge difference between protectionism and WPA or Ludditism--protectionism doesn't protect jobs that shouldn't exist, it just makes sure the jobs are done here at home rather than abroad. Build a dishwasher to save labor if you must--but build and operate it here at home.
I don't really know what to say to your Sims-realization--it seems irrefutable to me that people need to be DOING something to become happier--pleasure is a small component of happiness. I know quite a few unhappy people with gigantic TVs. If Will Wright has indeed better defined 21st century man, this may explain why birth rates in industrialized nations keep falling. (America included, as long as you don't count immigrants.) People are realizing that their existence is adding nothing to the world, therefore they have no desire to create more copies of themselves. Will Wright's 21st century man will be extinct by the 22nd or 23rd century--man is a creature that needs purpose.
Perhaps you've acquired Stockholm syndrome. Having a different set of goals in life than everyone else is hard. There is a saying about the five people nearest you--looking at them today is looking at your own future. Human beings are social animals--they travel in packs, they have brains that are designed to emulate the other brains they surround themselves with. Spend enough time with anyone who doesn't do anything other than consume, and soon you won't either. Or you'll go insane. I'm opting for the latter.
More likely, you've managed to adjust your creative desires into a form that fits into consumerism. Awesome. Good job. But realize that you are a rare sort or organism. I've met far too many people who simply deny that creativity is of any value at all. They go to work, they do what their told, they go home, they watch what they're shown, they eat what they're fed. Some of these people I have great respect for--they're older people, who were brought up in times of great want and tribulation, who believed that working hard was the only way to stop the Nazi's/Communist's or whatever other war they were fighting at this time. Wasting time with artsy crap was a national disgrace--just a waste of effort that could be used to make our country a stronger place. They achieved Maslow self-actualization, ironically, by consciously deadening their need for self-actualization. They sacrificed their souls, their uniqueness--whatever they had to make America a stronger military power. The decision to be made was Guns vs. Butter, not Guns and Butter vs. Fan Fiction.
Most Americans spend a lot more time working than playing--yet we have optomized society for the enjoyment of the playing time, with little or no regard for improving the fulfilment that people find in their time spent working. Even as you defend consumerism, you don't mention anything about how happy you are as you're working. Because work has become so centralized and organized, people now have little influence over their own working environment--the assymetry of information between multinational employers and individuals has become too great. Even in the Will Wright, utilitarian world view, this will lead to unhappiness. Perhaps you are happy at your job--but that places you in a very fortunate minority.
Question: was the Ching dynasty's protectionism cultural, like pre-Meiji Japan or current North Korea, or purely economic, like America has practiced to some degree since the constitution was signed, without which we would never have had an industrial revolution here. From an economic point of view, America is definitely large enough to be able to live off the global grid. Yes, global trade has benefits to some. But you should expect to see violent agitation if those benefits are not spread to all very quickly. Are you ready to die for Belgian beer? Because are those muscular unemployed laborers are going to be willing to kill for their next meal.
There's a huge difference between protectionism and WPA or Ludditism--protectionism doesn't protect jobs that shouldn't exist, it just makes sure the jobs are done here at home rather than abroad. Build a dishwasher to save labor if you must--but build and operate it here at home.
I don't really know what to say to your Sims-realization--it seems irrefutable to me that people need to be DOING something to become happier--pleasure is a small component of happiness are unconnected. I know quite a few unhappy people with gigantic tvs. If Will Wright has indeed better defined 21st century man, this may explain why birth rates in industrialized nations keep falling. (America included, as long as you don't count immigrants.) People are realizing that their existence is adding nothing to the world, therefore they have no desire to create more copies of themselves. Will Wright's 21st century man will be extinct by the 22nd or 23rd century--man is a creature that needs purpose. My perverted world view can only account for your realization in one of three possible ways:
Perhaps you've acquired Stockholm syndrome. Having a different set of goals in life than everyone else is hard. There is a saying about the five people nearest you--looking at them today is looking at your own future. Human beings are social animals--they travel in packs, they have brains that are designed to emulate the other brains they surround themselves with. Spend enough time with anyone who doesn't do anything other than consume, and soon you won't either. Or you'll go insane. I'm opting for the latter.
More likely, you've managed to adjust your creative desires into a form that fits into consumerism. Awesome. Good job. But realize that you are a rare sort or organism. I've met far too many people who simply deny that creativity is of any value at all. They go to work, they do what their told, they go home, they watch what they're shown, they eat what they're fed. Some of these people I have great respect for--they're older people, who were brought up in times of great want and tribulation, who believed that working hard was the only way to stop the Nazi's/Communist's or whatever other war they were fighting at this time. Wasting time with artsy crap was a national disgrace--just a waste of effort that could be used to make our country a stronger place. They achieved Maslow self-actualization, ironically, by consciously deadening their need for self-actualization. They sacrificed their souls, their uniqueness--whatever they had to make America a stronger military power.
Most Americans spend a lot more time working than playing--yet we have optomized society for the enjoyment of the playing time, with little or no regard for improving the fulfilment that people find in their time spent working. Even as you defend consumerism, you don't mention anything about how happy you are as you're working. Because work has become so centralized and organized, people now have little influence over their own working environment--the assymetry of information between multinational employers and individuals has become too great. Even in the Will Wright, utilitarian world view, this will lead to unhappiness. Perhaps you are happy at your job--but that places you in a very fortunate minority.
The Anderson story sounds interesting. Still, I don't view isolationi
The world doesn't need enough movies to keep a population of 250 million people employed, and I rather expect the value of movies and any other individual piece of content to decline in value as the number of producers of content increases (which will happen as the world's technology catches up with the West.) Content is not king, content is doomed. American society will fall apart if it can't remain somewhere near full employment--I don't advocate isolationism, but if it is the only alternative to unemployment then it must be accepted. There are some major differences between North Korea and a potential isolated U.S.--for one, the U.S. is still the largest economy in the world. So we restrict Americans to trading only with 250 million people instead of 6 billion. That's still a huge economy. America could also isolate itself economically without cutting off the flow of ideas or people--which I suspect is the cause of far more of North Korea's misery than the cutting off the flow of money. As long as we are still sharing ideas with the rest of the world, we won't fall extremely far behind. I'm not saying isolation is the way to go, but it is a perfectly viable alternative, one with reasonable employment for everyone. Globalists can't just shrug at the unemployed and say "sorry, the free market is invincible" because it is not. Democracy can beat capitalism, if it is forced to do so.
Working at Home Depot might be enjoyable in the short run, but I can't imagine many would want to do it as a career unless they had a spectacular lack of ambition. It is difficult for me to imagine anyone seeing work at the Home Depot as fulfilling the American Dream. I do not contend that the services offered by Home Depot are in any way inferior to that of the Mom & Pop, but someone working at a Home Depot has sacrificed a large amount of control and responsibility of their own life in exchange for the comfort of consumerism. I cannot see this leading to happiness.
A simulation is a formalization of a theory, not evidence in support of it. Yes, consumerism leads to happiness in the Sims, yes people define their Sim in terms of the products it consumes--but I think these are properties emerging from the assumptions in the software. Real human beings need to be creative. They need to exert their influence on the world surrounding them--to effect things beyond themselves. It seems our current society tends to maximize the choices of consumers, but add growing limitations to the choices of workers and creators. We can wear whatever clothes we want, watch whatever we want on television--so long as we work in the prepackaged boxes defined for us. The Sims satisfies Utilitarian-based welfare economics, but not Maslow's hierarchy of needs--as a person's needs are met, they always find more needs. A person wants nice food to eat, then nice clothes to wear, then nice people to like him or her, and then after that the needs become very vague and incomputable--a person needs to become a better person. An economy that begins and ends with the person will be a serious hinderance to people making this final step.
I do object seriously to the Reason article for arguing that consumerism and populism are one, when despite the confusion of some elitists, they are in fact orthogonal. My objection to consumerism is not that the products produced are inferior or trashy--in fact I suspect the opposite is the case--but that they deprive the people of the chance to create things for themselves. Consumerism is a combination of Elitism in production, and Populism in Consumption--when really I would prefer to either have Populism all the time or to have the two roles reversed.
This is a really important question, and I wish I knew the answer, but keep in mind that the toxins resulting from solar panels are fixed costs--you pay per solar panel, not per kilowatt hour acquired from the solar panel. Or so I'd imagine.
To be perfectly honest, China worries me a lot more than India. It IS frightening that its no longer possible to outpace developing countries with education, but rather than make me sympathize more with programmers, it causes me to sympathize even more with manufacturers who have been getting shafted by international economics for much longer. The sick part about globalisation is that American workers are told that they can't compete because they're too lazy, they're getting paid too much, and that it's completely their fault, when in reality it's not their fault at all. Asian banks proping up the dollar until recently simply forced manufacturing jobs out of the country.
Looking at China rather than India might make my fear more explicit--China buys US Treasury bonds, holding up the dollar. This causes Americans to buy Chinese goods more cheaply. In the short run, except for the poor bastards who lost their jobs, this is great for Americans and bad for Chinese people--foreign goods in America's stores became cheaper, foreign goods in China's stores became pricier.
Since we really weren't buying any capital goods from China (after all, what idiot would want to build a factory here?) the Asian consumer goods we purchase make us happy only temporarily. Now, the dollar is falling, China is stuck with lower valued dollars BUT still probably has more wealth overall than they would have if they had not supported the dollar's value. Essentially, they traded away their consumers' short term welfare for more national wealth and power.
My suspcion is that unemployment among Americans is not caused by American laziness (we work many more hours with fewer vacations than Europeans) or lack of intelligence (unless your going to try to pull a "The Bell Curve" and argue that more racially pure Europe will have a higher IQ than mixed America) but by worker-unfriendly fiscal and trade policies.
I don't think we should close the border, but anyone arguing for an open border needs to realize--a closed American economy is a perfectly realistic option. One way or another, employment must be maintained, or social services expanded to fill the gaps. It is not acceptable in a civilized society to allow huge masses of people to remain idle and without sufficient medical care--that is the recipe for a revolution.
Actually, there would be a lot of benefits to state-based protectionism. Currently, states must compete with each other when setting tax rates, otherwise businesses will move out and ship their products in from some other state. Maybe libertarians think this is the great free market in action, but what they don't realize is that this forces our federal government to collect the lion's share of revenue in this country--revenue collection needs to take place at a high enough level that corporations have difficultly evading it simply by moving. The inability of states to regulate interstate commerce has made American capitalism much more efficient, but at the cost of severely weakening American democracy--now most of the decisions effecting our economy take place at the federal level, far too removed from the people for them to participate in.
The fact is, almost all Americans are both Consumers and Workers. American law has started to favor Consumers over Workers every chance it gets, but at the end of the day Consumers and Workers are the same people. Huge corporations and mass production make life easy for consumers, but also takes the joy out of working. The mom and pop hardware store owners probably see their jobs as the fulfillment of the American dream--they were their own boss, they could take pride in providing a unique service to their friends and neighbors. Who the heck dreams of working at Home Depot? The central planners of the American economy see consuming products as the ultimate road to happiness, but anyone with common sense can see what a hollow happiness that would be.
Of course, local monopolies, nepotism, Good Ole' Boy clubs, and corrupt labor unions al
Yes, the two individuals involved are happy. That does not mean that all of America and Belgium feel likewise. The problem is that the money we send them comes back LATER--and if we let our labor force atropy for lack of employment in the meantime, we're going to have trouble paying it back.
Programs do not last forever--information needs change, security holes become apparent, what once fulfilled your needs can become worthless, though the actual bits do not change. In the meantime, the Indian programmer has been gaining experience that will make him or her more useful in future programming tasks, and he or she has helpful currency to use in future consumption.
I was exaggerating. I was tempted to say "CMM Level Bajillion", and in retrospect that might have made more sense. But I used to work for one of the places you mentioned (uh, I mean a friend of mine did, or something else equally vague enough to protect my pseudonym), and, to be perfectly honest, I think it's all crap, but I've said too much already for me to expand upon that...perhaps its just a case of "I refuse to be a part of any club that would have me as a member, but I don't put much stock in CMM Level 5 actually indicating good code is produced.
So yeah, I recall everyone swelling with pride when it was announced we were the first to be CMM Level 5, and whenever something was broken we'd always mention that ironically.
No, the world is helped by jobs in India. But the fact is, a lot of highly educated people in America, as well as a lot of other people, are sitting idle right now when they could be using their skills to make the world a better place. See? And pick up a newspaper--yeah, the Canadian economy is growing, America is shrinking. Sorry, that's what's happening--I'm not saying Canada is doing anything wrong, on the contrary I was suggesting that we should look to them as a model to follow.
Okay, you win the battle (although I now ask you, in all honesty--where can I get information about past tax rates? Google doesn't seem up to the task, because any tax rate change is preceded with a huge amount of debate.) but have you won the war? Do you deny that wage taxes make American workers less competitive? That subsidies, like health care for workers, would make them more competitive (just for the sake of argument--imagining that the money to pay for it magically fell from the sky).
Okay I was in school in the Clinton era, and lord knows I'll probably never participate in the pyramid scheme known as the stock market to actually know what the rate is, but now I remember where my false tax raising memories came from. Bob Novak.
So I'm watching capital gang or something, and this is like, 1999 or 2000, right in the middle of the stock market bubble. Bob is complaining that capital gains taxes need to be cut to drive the stock market. Someone not insane tries to explain to him "Bob, the market is skyrocketing!" "Well, maybe if we cut it things would be even better!" Right, that would have been awesome, Bob, an even larger Internet Bubble.
So perhaps the problem we are having now is that Clinton SHOULD have raised capital gains taxes, but failed to do so. I mean, hell, either way we would have made out--either more government revenue if I'm right and the bubble still would have happened, or the bubble would never have happened if you're right, and the economy would have followed a more gentle slope upwards to where we are now rather than a boom/bust cycle.
I'll bet your post would have been modded up if you'd provided a link to his precise tax plans. Or if all of your post but the first sentence wasn't dedicated to slamming the moderation system, or if you had mentioned the rest of my post rather than one narrow mistake (though at this point I'm just taking your word for it.)
Here's the thing--we buy DVD players and running shoes today. Next year, because of wear and tear or competition with newer, superior products, the things we gave them pieces of paper for are worthless.
Meanwhile, perhaps those green pieces of paper, while not as valuable as when you got them (see the dollar's fall) are still fairly valuable. The degrade more slowly than the products we exchange them for.
No, you're wrong. And you can't spell. The thing is, "America" is not just one, homogenous place of greed and evil. (Yes, I know this complicates your worldview, because now the country you love to hate isn't a monolithic evil empire, sorry). I am glad that globalisation is making the third world a better place. What makes me angry is that it is the POOREST Americans who to sacrifice to make this possible, and I'm asking for government policies to change this--it is the RICHEST Americans who should sacrifice to improve the rest of the world. Basically, I'm glad Indian programmers now have a chance to work their way out of poverty, I am angered that America's poor are forced to use emergency rooms as primary care providers.
Duh yourself, fuckhead. Bush cut capital gains, the economy tanked. Bush later gives out personal tax credits, stock market starts to rise. (Job market still sucks, but hey...) Once again, Keynes wins, supply-side loses--even with their poster child in charge.
You're missing the point. You're still trying to use the Slashdot definition of hacker/cracker. To the entire rest of the world, a hacker is what you would call a cracker. It's pointless to discuss some sort of difference between the terms.
No, YOU"RE missing the point. You stopped quoting me as soon as I got to the point--is that where you stopped reading? It's not just a matter of pickiness over words or wanting to look cool--it's stopping the media, the government, all organized authority from equating playful behavior with criminal behavior, in all walks of life.
The whole hacker/cracker thing is just old Linux veterans trying to feel cool and be called "hackers" without doing illegal things. The rest of the world isn't gonna buy it because RMS said so, sorry.
I dunno, most of the dictionary.com entries linked to above at least gave both definitions, sometimes insisting on a distinction. Language is power--giving up words is giving up everything.
A hacker isn't just someone who writes code--it implies a very disorganized, chaotic approach to writing code or dealing with any formal system or machine. Thus, some crackers are also hackers. Which is why the distinction must continue to be made--there is a viewpoint that all computer programming that is not done on the payroll of a CMM Level 5 Corporation or Government is somehow shady, immoral, and illegal. To accept that definition of hacker is to accept that any playfulness involving computers (except that occuring within authorized video games) is at best borderline criminal. To let "this stupid argument die" is to condemn Linux itself.
Languages are living things, and languages are powerful things. Languages can control people, languages can liberate people. Gay people understand that, hackers would be wise to understand it to.
Re:But isn't language defined by usage?
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Hackers Hall of Fame
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You're being self-contradictory. Your arguing for a "language defined by use" definition of hacker, then objecting to "language defined by use" definition of "learning channel". Sure, watching a show teaching you how to decorate your home is technically "learning" in the dictionary, however to call a channel dedicated to home decorating and reality television "The Learning Channel" is a serious misnomer--which is why they never say "Learning" in the advertising for the station, opting instead for "TLC. Life unscripted" or whatever.
Yeah, that unfair income distibution in Venezuela really makes their economy soar. What you're saying makes no sense--who the fuck is going to buy an American luxury car? If you're poor, you buy from China, if you're rich, you buy from Japan and Germany. Even if it did make sense, the reason we need there to be more jobs is to make the world a better place for the poor and middle class--if you're suggesting we restructure our economy so that the vast majority of people are working to make products for the rich, which appears to be Bush's plan, you and your sick plutocrat plans can go fuck yourselves.
And then you have the nerve to repeat this supply-side bullshit--look how much the stock market soared when Clinton raised taxes on capital gains! The taxes on capital gains have to be incredibly huge before they start to matter--people will invest if an investment makes money, they won't invest if it doesn't make money--taxes on the profit made will have little effect on this.
On the other hand, taxes on labor have a very direct and simple effect on jobs. Corporations have to pay more wage taxes for every additional employee they hire IF they choose to hire that worker in the United States. Wage taxes and the lack of a nationalized health care systems (an exponentially increasing cost our employers are also expected to pay for, unless workers do without) are incentives for factories to move to either completely undervalued countries (India) or more progressive countries like Canada, which currently has a fantastically booming economy.
Bottom line: there has been no economy in the history of the world that has been able to withstand long-term trade deficits. It's great to save money on Indian labor, but unless we can find something else for American workers to do, unless we can find something else to export, then it doesn't do either the world or America any long term good. If you save 58 cents by outsourcing to India, hey, great, that's 58 cents more for the American economy. If you just spend the whole dollar on American labor, that's a whole dollar spent in the American economy.
Lets not confuse space engineering with space science.
Indeed, lets not. We should focus on space engineering. Collecting facts about the Universe is nice (I guess...) but we're running out of resources on this planet so fast, that if we don't do start working now towards allowing human beings to live long-term in outer space (which neither ISS or HST or the Space Shuttle get us any closer to doing), or at least extracting resources from space or robotic construction on other planets--if we don't start working on something to give humanity a better chance of survival, then we won't even have the option of space science very soon. The distant stars and dark matter are still going to be there for 22nd century researchers to investigate--lets work to make sure there's still a 22nd century for our descendents to investigate in.
The space station and hubble are certainly cool, but they're just not what humanity needs right now.
Slashdot Mirror
But this is true even with a closed source JVM--microsoft just writes a Java library using JNI that relies on Win32 libraries. Basically, do exactly what Apple did when making the Java interface to Cocoa. I can't take that Java Cocoa application and run it on Linux, can I? (Unless GNUStep is way the heck more advanced than I realized.) (Apple just did it because Java is such a ripoff of Objective C that there was no reason not to make the libraries work in Java as well.)
I'm not buying into the magical benefits of XML at all. Just because a file is written in XML doesn't mean your computer magically knows what it means (if that's what the semantic web is, then yeah, that violates both Godel's Theorem and common sense.) Your computer still has to know what XML tag to expect where, and what the data actually means in every tag (they can throw vague, poorly understood words like "ontology" around all they want, at the end of the day a human programmer still has to look up the documentation to see what a given tag stands for.)
Perhaps using an XML parsing library is slightly easier than designing your own file format and documenting it properly (you have to document it either way...but XML makes the process more formal, in theory). Perhaps using an XML editor or viewer to edit XML files is slightly easier than using emacs to edit text files. I suspect the minimal efficiency gains from either of those have already been burned away by millions of people trying to read and sort through meaningless noise-philosophies by MBAs preaching the benefits of this New World Order of Ontological Semantic Standardization.
that's right AC, that's the ONLY logical silliness in my post!
A little known statistic--100% of all humans alive before the invention of the telephone are now dead?. How can this be? The human race still lives, no? Yes, it does, but that doesn't mean that all individuals who are a part of it are still alive, or could not have lived longer without a given new piece of technology.
Why should we? You said yourself that you're too cheap to carry a jammer if it costs more than a few hundred dollars--and I'm sure if the jammers started becoming widespread the FCC fines would cost more than that. That means we're winning, and you're the one getting pissed off. Your flipping me the bird, or more likely just getting really angry silently because you don't want to start trouble, meanwhile I don't even notice you--I'm yelling "HEY THERE! .....HOW ARE YOU DOING?....YEAH THAT'S GREAT WELL I CAN'T HEAR YOU WITH THIS MOVIE GOING ON SO I'LL HAVE TO GET BACK TO YOU....HANG ON, THIS GUY WITH A REALLY RED FACE LOOKS LIKE HE'S HAVING A HEART ATTACK, I'M GOING TO HAVE TO CALL EMERGENCY SERVICES." Then as you keel over and die from your incredible rage, I call EMS. Your life is saved, though your anger-fueled stroke has left you completely paralyzed. Meanwhile, the mayor offers me the key to the city for saving your life. But I refuse, saying "DON'T THANK ME, THANK WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS SERVICES!!!!" The entire town erupts in cheers, and the city council unanimously votes to give free cell phones to everyone and applies taxes of One Bajillion Percent to all jamming technology devices.
Wait a minute, I don't even carry a cell phone! Nevermind.
Question: was the Ching dynasty's protectionism cultural, like pre-Meiji Japan or current North Korea, or purely economic, like America has practiced to some degree since the constitution was signed, without which we would never have had an industrial revolution here? From an economic point of view, America is definitely large enough to be able to live off the global grid. Yes, global trade has benefits to some. But you should expect to see violent agitation if those benefits are not spread to all very quickly. Are you ready to die for Belgian beer? Because are those muscular unemployed laborers are going to be willing to kill for their next meal.
There's a huge difference between protectionism and WPA or Ludditism--protectionism doesn't protect jobs that shouldn't exist, it just makes sure the jobs are done here at home rather than abroad. Build a dishwasher to save labor if you must--but build and operate it here at home.
I don't really know what to say to your Sims-realization--it seems irrefutable to me that people need to be DOING something to become happier--pleasure is a small component of happiness. I know quite a few unhappy people with gigantic TVs. If Will Wright has indeed better defined 21st century man, this may explain why birth rates in industrialized nations keep falling. (America included, as long as you don't count immigrants.) People are realizing that their existence is adding nothing to the world, therefore they have no desire to create more copies of themselves. Will Wright's 21st century man will be extinct by the 22nd or 23rd century--man is a creature that needs purpose.
Perhaps you've acquired Stockholm syndrome. Having a different set of goals in life than everyone else is hard. There is a saying about the five people nearest you--looking at them today is looking at your own future. Human beings are social animals--they travel in packs, they have brains that are designed to emulate the other brains they surround themselves with. Spend enough time with anyone who doesn't do anything other than consume, and soon you won't either. Or you'll go insane. I'm opting for the latter.
More likely, you've managed to adjust your creative desires into a form that fits into consumerism. Awesome. Good job. But realize that you are a rare sort or organism. I've met far too many people who simply deny that creativity is of any value at all. They go to work, they do what their told, they go home, they watch what they're shown, they eat what they're fed. Some of these people I have great respect for--they're older people, who were brought up in times of great want and tribulation, who believed that working hard was the only way to stop the Nazi's/Communist's or whatever other war they were fighting at this time. Wasting time with artsy crap was a national disgrace--just a waste of effort that could be used to make our country a stronger place. They achieved Maslow self-actualization, ironically, by consciously deadening their need for self-actualization. They sacrificed their souls, their uniqueness--whatever they had to make America a stronger military power. The decision to be made was Guns vs. Butter, not Guns and Butter vs. Fan Fiction.
Most Americans spend a lot more time working than playing--yet we have optomized society for the enjoyment of the playing time, with little or no regard for improving the fulfilment that people find in their time spent working. Even as you defend consumerism, you don't mention anything about how happy you are as you're working. Because work has become so centralized and organized, people now have little influence over their own working environment--the assymetry of information between multinational employers and individuals has become too great. Even in the Will Wright, utilitarian world view, this will lead to unhappiness. Perhaps you are happy at your job--but that places you in a very fortunate minority.
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There's a huge difference between protectionism and WPA or Ludditism--protectionism doesn't protect jobs that shouldn't exist, it just makes sure the jobs are done here at home rather than abroad. Build a dishwasher to save labor if you must--but build and operate it here at home.
I don't really know what to say to your Sims-realization--it seems irrefutable to me that people need to be DOING something to become happier--pleasure is a small component of happiness are unconnected. I know quite a few unhappy people with gigantic tvs. If Will Wright has indeed better defined 21st century man, this may explain why birth rates in industrialized nations keep falling. (America included, as long as you don't count immigrants.) People are realizing that their existence is adding nothing to the world, therefore they have no desire to create more copies of themselves. Will Wright's 21st century man will be extinct by the 22nd or 23rd century--man is a creature that needs purpose. My perverted world view can only account for your realization in one of three possible ways:
Perhaps you've acquired Stockholm syndrome. Having a different set of goals in life than everyone else is hard. There is a saying about the five people nearest you--looking at them today is looking at your own future. Human beings are social animals--they travel in packs, they have brains that are designed to emulate the other brains they surround themselves with. Spend enough time with anyone who doesn't do anything other than consume, and soon you won't either. Or you'll go insane. I'm opting for the latter.
More likely, you've managed to adjust your creative desires into a form that fits into consumerism. Awesome. Good job. But realize that you are a rare sort or organism. I've met far too many people who simply deny that creativity is of any value at all. They go to work, they do what their told, they go home, they watch what they're shown, they eat what they're fed. Some of these people I have great respect for--they're older people, who were brought up in times of great want and tribulation, who believed that working hard was the only way to stop the Nazi's/Communist's or whatever other war they were fighting at this time. Wasting time with artsy crap was a national disgrace--just a waste of effort that could be used to make our country a stronger place. They achieved Maslow self-actualization, ironically, by consciously deadening their need for self-actualization. They sacrificed their souls, their uniqueness--whatever they had to make America a stronger military power.
Most Americans spend a lot more time working than playing--yet we have optomized society for the enjoyment of the playing time, with little or no regard for improving the fulfilment that people find in their time spent working. Even as you defend consumerism, you don't mention anything about how happy you are as you're working. Because work has become so centralized and organized, people now have little influence over their own working environment--the assymetry of information between multinational employers and individuals has become too great. Even in the Will Wright, utilitarian world view, this will lead to unhappiness. Perhaps you are happy at your job--but that places you in a very fortunate minority.
The Anderson story sounds interesting. Still, I don't view isolationi
Working at Home Depot might be enjoyable in the short run, but I can't imagine many would want to do it as a career unless they had a spectacular lack of ambition. It is difficult for me to imagine anyone seeing work at the Home Depot as fulfilling the American Dream. I do not contend that the services offered by Home Depot are in any way inferior to that of the Mom & Pop, but someone working at a Home Depot has sacrificed a large amount of control and responsibility of their own life in exchange for the comfort of consumerism. I cannot see this leading to happiness.
A simulation is a formalization of a theory, not evidence in support of it. Yes, consumerism leads to happiness in the Sims, yes people define their Sim in terms of the products it consumes--but I think these are properties emerging from the assumptions in the software. Real human beings need to be creative. They need to exert their influence on the world surrounding them--to effect things beyond themselves. It seems our current society tends to maximize the choices of consumers, but add growing limitations to the choices of workers and creators. We can wear whatever clothes we want, watch whatever we want on television--so long as we work in the prepackaged boxes defined for us. The Sims satisfies Utilitarian-based welfare economics, but not Maslow's hierarchy of needs--as a person's needs are met, they always find more needs. A person wants nice food to eat, then nice clothes to wear, then nice people to like him or her, and then after that the needs become very vague and incomputable--a person needs to become a better person. An economy that begins and ends with the person will be a serious hinderance to people making this final step.
I do object seriously to the Reason article for arguing that consumerism and populism are one, when despite the confusion of some elitists, they are in fact orthogonal. My objection to consumerism is not that the products produced are inferior or trashy--in fact I suspect the opposite is the case--but that they deprive the people of the chance to create things for themselves. Consumerism is a combination of Elitism in production, and Populism in Consumption--when really I would prefer to either have Populism all the time or to have the two roles reversed.
This is a really important question, and I wish I knew the answer, but keep in mind that the toxins resulting from solar panels are fixed costs--you pay per solar panel, not per kilowatt hour acquired from the solar panel. Or so I'd imagine.
Looking at China rather than India might make my fear more explicit--China buys US Treasury bonds, holding up the dollar. This causes Americans to buy Chinese goods more cheaply. In the short run, except for the poor bastards who lost their jobs, this is great for Americans and bad for Chinese people--foreign goods in America's stores became cheaper, foreign goods in China's stores became pricier.
Since we really weren't buying any capital goods from China (after all, what idiot would want to build a factory here?) the Asian consumer goods we purchase make us happy only temporarily. Now, the dollar is falling, China is stuck with lower valued dollars BUT still probably has more wealth overall than they would have if they had not supported the dollar's value. Essentially, they traded away their consumers' short term welfare for more national wealth and power.
My suspcion is that unemployment among Americans is not caused by American laziness (we work many more hours with fewer vacations than Europeans) or lack of intelligence (unless your going to try to pull a "The Bell Curve" and argue that more racially pure Europe will have a higher IQ than mixed America) but by worker-unfriendly fiscal and trade policies.
I don't think we should close the border, but anyone arguing for an open border needs to realize--a closed American economy is a perfectly realistic option. One way or another, employment must be maintained, or social services expanded to fill the gaps. It is not acceptable in a civilized society to allow huge masses of people to remain idle and without sufficient medical care--that is the recipe for a revolution.
Actually, there would be a lot of benefits to state-based protectionism. Currently, states must compete with each other when setting tax rates, otherwise businesses will move out and ship their products in from some other state. Maybe libertarians think this is the great free market in action, but what they don't realize is that this forces our federal government to collect the lion's share of revenue in this country--revenue collection needs to take place at a high enough level that corporations have difficultly evading it simply by moving. The inability of states to regulate interstate commerce has made American capitalism much more efficient, but at the cost of severely weakening American democracy--now most of the decisions effecting our economy take place at the federal level, far too removed from the people for them to participate in.
The fact is, almost all Americans are both Consumers and Workers. American law has started to favor Consumers over Workers every chance it gets, but at the end of the day Consumers and Workers are the same people. Huge corporations and mass production make life easy for consumers, but also takes the joy out of working. The mom and pop hardware store owners probably see their jobs as the fulfillment of the American dream--they were their own boss, they could take pride in providing a unique service to their friends and neighbors. Who the heck dreams of working at Home Depot? The central planners of the American economy see consuming products as the ultimate road to happiness, but anyone with common sense can see what a hollow happiness that would be.
Of course, local monopolies, nepotism, Good Ole' Boy clubs, and corrupt labor unions al
Programs do not last forever--information needs change, security holes become apparent, what once fulfilled your needs can become worthless, though the actual bits do not change. In the meantime, the Indian programmer has been gaining experience that will make him or her more useful in future programming tasks, and he or she has helpful currency to use in future consumption.
So yeah, I recall everyone swelling with pride when it was announced we were the first to be CMM Level 5, and whenever something was broken we'd always mention that ironically.
No, the world is helped by jobs in India. But the fact is, a lot of highly educated people in America, as well as a lot of other people, are sitting idle right now when they could be using their skills to make the world a better place. See? And pick up a newspaper--yeah, the Canadian economy is growing, America is shrinking. Sorry, that's what's happening--I'm not saying Canada is doing anything wrong, on the contrary I was suggesting that we should look to them as a model to follow.
Okay I was in school in the Clinton era, and lord knows I'll probably never participate in the pyramid scheme known as the stock market to actually know what the rate is, but now I remember where my false tax raising memories came from. Bob Novak.
So I'm watching capital gang or something, and this is like, 1999 or 2000, right in the middle of the stock market bubble. Bob is complaining that capital gains taxes need to be cut to drive the stock market. Someone not insane tries to explain to him "Bob, the market is skyrocketing!" "Well, maybe if we cut it things would be even better!" Right, that would have been awesome, Bob, an even larger Internet Bubble.
So perhaps the problem we are having now is that Clinton SHOULD have raised capital gains taxes, but failed to do so. I mean, hell, either way we would have made out--either more government revenue if I'm right and the bubble still would have happened, or the bubble would never have happened if you're right, and the economy would have followed a more gentle slope upwards to where we are now rather than a boom/bust cycle.
I'll bet your post would have been modded up if you'd provided a link to his precise tax plans. Or if all of your post but the first sentence wasn't dedicated to slamming the moderation system, or if you had mentioned the rest of my post rather than one narrow mistake (though at this point I'm just taking your word for it.)
Meanwhile, perhaps those green pieces of paper, while not as valuable as when you got them (see the dollar's fall) are still fairly valuable. The degrade more slowly than the products we exchange them for.
No, you're wrong. And you can't spell. The thing is, "America" is not just one, homogenous place of greed and evil. (Yes, I know this complicates your worldview, because now the country you love to hate isn't a monolithic evil empire, sorry). I am glad that globalisation is making the third world a better place. What makes me angry is that it is the POOREST Americans who to sacrifice to make this possible, and I'm asking for government policies to change this--it is the RICHEST Americans who should sacrifice to improve the rest of the world. Basically, I'm glad Indian programmers now have a chance to work their way out of poverty, I am angered that America's poor are forced to use emergency rooms as primary care providers.
Um, one of the other replies to me regarding Eastern Europe in the 80s would seem to contradict your post, maybe you should have it out with him.
Duh yourself, fuckhead. Bush cut capital gains, the economy tanked. Bush later gives out personal tax credits, stock market starts to rise. (Job market still sucks, but hey...) Once again, Keynes wins, supply-side loses--even with their poster child in charge.
No, YOU"RE missing the point. You stopped quoting me as soon as I got to the point--is that where you stopped reading? It's not just a matter of pickiness over words or wanting to look cool--it's stopping the media, the government, all organized authority from equating playful behavior with criminal behavior, in all walks of life.
The whole hacker/cracker thing is just old Linux veterans trying to feel cool and be called "hackers" without doing illegal things. The rest of the world isn't gonna buy it because RMS said so, sorry.
I dunno, most of the dictionary.com entries linked to above at least gave both definitions, sometimes insisting on a distinction. Language is power--giving up words is giving up everything.
Languages are living things, and languages are powerful things. Languages can control people, languages can liberate people. Gay people understand that, hackers would be wise to understand it to.
You're being self-contradictory. Your arguing for a "language defined by use" definition of hacker, then objecting to "language defined by use" definition of "learning channel". Sure, watching a show teaching you how to decorate your home is technically "learning" in the dictionary, however to call a channel dedicated to home decorating and reality television "The Learning Channel" is a serious misnomer--which is why they never say "Learning" in the advertising for the station, opting instead for "TLC. Life unscripted" or whatever.
And then you have the nerve to repeat this supply-side bullshit--look how much the stock market soared when Clinton raised taxes on capital gains! The taxes on capital gains have to be incredibly huge before they start to matter--people will invest if an investment makes money, they won't invest if it doesn't make money--taxes on the profit made will have little effect on this.
On the other hand, taxes on labor have a very direct and simple effect on jobs. Corporations have to pay more wage taxes for every additional employee they hire IF they choose to hire that worker in the United States. Wage taxes and the lack of a nationalized health care systems (an exponentially increasing cost our employers are also expected to pay for, unless workers do without) are incentives for factories to move to either completely undervalued countries (India) or more progressive countries like Canada, which currently has a fantastically booming economy.
Bottom line: there has been no economy in the history of the world that has been able to withstand long-term trade deficits. It's great to save money on Indian labor, but unless we can find something else for American workers to do, unless we can find something else to export, then it doesn't do either the world or America any long term good. If you save 58 cents by outsourcing to India, hey, great, that's 58 cents more for the American economy. If you just spend the whole dollar on American labor, that's a whole dollar spent in the American economy.
Really, isn't that what all human progress is based on?
But the oceans, Antarctica and numerous deserts across the world are surely all cheaper than space to colonize, no? Why are people not moving there?
Indeed, lets not. We should focus on space engineering. Collecting facts about the Universe is nice (I guess...) but we're running out of resources on this planet so fast, that if we don't do start working now towards allowing human beings to live long-term in outer space (which neither ISS or HST or the Space Shuttle get us any closer to doing), or at least extracting resources from space or robotic construction on other planets--if we don't start working on something to give humanity a better chance of survival, then we won't even have the option of space science very soon. The distant stars and dark matter are still going to be there for 22nd century researchers to investigate--lets work to make sure there's still a 22nd century for our descendents to investigate in.
The space station and hubble are certainly cool, but they're just not what humanity needs right now.