That doesn't mean it isn't simple, it means it isn't secure. They're different things. You could certainly point out that security is more important than simplicity, but that doesn't make an XP install complicated, and installing SP2 insn't complicated either. You could also argue that Windows is never secure (probably not true), but even if you're right that *still* doesn't make it complicated or hard to use - only insecure.
And yet, completely accurate. I'm sorry that my drawing attention to your misunderstanding upsets you, so I suggest that in the future, you do a better job of trying to understand. It will help you avoid cases like the current one, where only your gross, intentional, misunderstanding of what I wrote is causing you problems.
I refuse to engage in any sort of conversation with someone displaying this attitude. I'm not even going to read the rest of what you wrote. I'm sure plenty of people will argue with someone who's not willing to admit any possibility of error, but I am not one of them.
I'll substitute "unethical" and "ethical" for the more emotionally loaded "evil" and "good." Surely someone has mentioned to you that unethical and illegal behavior are not the same thing, and it's perfectly possible to commit an ethical illegal act. Probably even more prevalent is the reverse - acts that are legal but unethical. I'm not saying that what you describe is ethical, just that the fact it's illegal doesn't imply anything about whether it's ethical.
There is certainly value if someone is willing to pay for the labor, and apparently people are. Your point is right on, though - if you're doing it for fun, you should evaluate the return on your time by how much fun you had, not how much value you created. And of course if you're doing it for the money, you evaluate based on how much money you made.
Combine broader wiretapping with the executive's claimed authority to imprison anyone anywhere anytime without judicial review, and it starts to look more like a freedom of speech issue. Though as you and the other poster indicate, it's more due process/privacy.
One thing that's changed is that "the overall economy" pretty much used to mean "the US" plus maybe some trade with Europe. Now it's the whole world. All the same principles you mention still apply, just on a much larger (and poorer) playing field. Now I'm not saying that people outside the US don't deserve a higher standard of living. But what Wal-Mart is participating in is shipping a bunch of money to 1) their stockholders, which is their job and 2) the third world. Lots of other companies are doing this too. I'm not saying this is evil, I'm saying I'm concerned about it. I'm concerned because if you even out the standard of living between the US and all the countries like China and India that are attracting jobs, then my kids or grandkids (great grandkids?) might not ever be able to earn enough to do things like own a home or send their children to college. Manufacturing jobs are already just about gone. Relatively unskilled service jobs will never pay very well. Knowledge-based jobs (IT, etc) will presumably continue to be outsourced, putting downward pressure on wages as well as directly leading to fewer job openings here. Fields that cannot be outsourced such as health care will eventually see the market lower their wages as well as people unable to find good-paying jobs elsewhere will enter those fields.
This is not a lose-lose situation, since it benefits some terribly poor countries. But that doesn't mean it's something I'm not worried about.
Well, you mentioned the three Wal-Mart criticisms I'm least concerned about. Moving manufacturing overseas, and employee treatment are of much more concern to me than unions, environment, or organic food. There are instances of Wal-Mart wanting to drain wetlands to build a store, which I think is a bad idea, but that's a minority case and it could be they're no worse in that regard than most big corporations. Also, your claim that consumers are the cause of the problem is questionable at best. Yes, Wal-Mart would go out of business if no one shopped there, but it's more complicated than that. Either you don't know it's more complicated, or you know it is but purposely set up a strawman. I'm not sure which is worse. Describing organic foods as a cult kind of makes it sound like you don't know what you're talking about - ad hominem argument. I've read both Machiavelli and Orwell, so don't assume I'm ignorant.
It doesn't make sense because it doesn't take advantage of the collective bargaining power that employers and governments enjoy. This increases costs to the consumer in the form of higher prices, and also forces the suppliers to market to a larger group and deal with millions of individual customers rather than in large groups, which I can only think would increase their costs as well.
First of all, I don't appreciate your assumption that all disagreement must stem from my misunderstanding. It's arrogant, disingenuous, and doesn't further a good debate.
You said that "an open mind in the face of overwhelming fact is...reporting." I disagree with that. I think if there are overwhelming facts supporting a case, good reporting means saying just that, not keeping an open mind and giving equal time both to the overwhelming facts and to the fringe speculation. You seem to think that a reporter should not make up his mind even "in the face of overwhelming fact." Feel free to clarify.
P.S. just to illustrate my first point, I could have said "feel free to clarify your earlier misstatements."
I actually liked the format; what I found funny is that the next/previous page buttons would highlight and then actually work when my pointer was halfway up the text, inches away from the button. Did anyone else see that on Firefox?
The question is, which is worse for the lower class in America, the loss of jobs that Wal-Mart causes by pushing manufacturing overseas, or paying the higher prices they would pay if Wal-Mart didn't demand such low prices from their suppliers? I don't know for sure, and I suspect nobody else does either. But I would guess the loss of jobs is worse. Besides the difficulty of quantifying the problem, there's also the issue that job loss affects a few people very severely, while price cuts benefit a whole lot of people much more modestly. How do you balance those concerns? Anyway, I neither work nor shop at Wal-Mart, partly because it's my judgment that they do more harm than good, except to their stockholders.
No, it is reporting. Reporting is not the injection of your assessment of whther something is supported by overwhelming fact. That is editorializing, and you suggestion that it is the correct way to approach journalism is ludicrous.
Shouldn't honest reporting be about presenting facts? Shouldn't a journalist be asked to evaluate the quality of information they're getting and decide what's credible enough to report? Why is it good enough to simply repeat what both sides say (or just one side, or whatever) rather than trying to find out what's really going on?
OK, so your point is that working conditions in China now are better than they were here 100 years ago? If so I would hesitate to even call that a point. Are you saying that they are at acceptable levels, or that nothing should be done to improve them?
For the same reason, there are strict rules governing F1 competitions, the more even the playing field, the more competitive it is.
Actually it's not clear that's true. It seems that the strict and extensive rules of F1 have made it so that the companies that can afford to spend $100M to get a very small advantage (Ferrari) are the ones that win. I guess you could call that a more competitive field, but I wouldn't consider it so. The same is probably true of business. If you had the level of regulation of F1 in the business laws, it would reward companies like Wal-Mart that can spend a billion dollars to find the loophole. I'm not saying we should have no regulation, just the simplest regulation possible to prevent abuses.
The problem regarding healthcare is that Wal-Mart's approach is dysfunctional on a large scale. If we want to have taxpayers generally fund all health care, then the money has to come from somewhere, for example much higher taxation of corporate profits. If individuals are to pay for their own (which doesn't make much sense) then minimum wage has to be much, much higher for people to afford it. However, as a country we haven't picked either of those paths, we've decided to have employers pay most of the cost of health care. Wal-Mart makes every effort not to do so, which hurts 1) the employees who get no or inadequate health care (I'm not saying this is all of them but certainly many) and 2) everybody else, who ends up picking up the tab for those who turn to public health care. Again, if the systems were designed for that kind of behavior it would be fine, but that's not the case.
It seems to me that the criticisms of Wal-Mart on this page are reasonable and even supported with citations. On the other hand, the defenses of Wal-Mart are either vague; profane and semi-literate; or ad hominem; and in all cases not supported with citations. Interesting.
I don't buy things based on their names, but this reminds me of a letter I saw printed in a motorcycle mag. It was about the then-new Yamaha naked liter bike, marketed in Europe as the Fazer (which I think is what a similar bike was called years ago). The letter was from someone who had put a deposit on one with his local dealer, he was so excited about the product. When Yamaha announced they were naming it FZ-1 for the US marked, he cancelled his order. So yes, what a product is called affects its sales, even if only by a small amount (and maybe it's actually significant).
Sorry to hear of your situation, but first this is not a prosthetic device, and second not everyone has your insurance plan. So it isn't necessarily useless for everyone.
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That doesn't mean it isn't simple, it means it isn't secure. They're different things. You could certainly point out that security is more important than simplicity, but that doesn't make an XP install complicated, and installing SP2 insn't complicated either. You could also argue that Windows is never secure (probably not true), but even if you're right that *still* doesn't make it complicated or hard to use - only insecure.
Is that like a cross between legislate and refrigerate?
I'll substitute "unethical" and "ethical" for the more emotionally loaded "evil" and "good." Surely someone has mentioned to you that unethical and illegal behavior are not the same thing, and it's perfectly possible to commit an ethical illegal act. Probably even more prevalent is the reverse - acts that are legal but unethical. I'm not saying that what you describe is ethical, just that the fact it's illegal doesn't imply anything about whether it's ethical.
There is certainly value if someone is willing to pay for the labor, and apparently people are. Your point is right on, though - if you're doing it for fun, you should evaluate the return on your time by how much fun you had, not how much value you created. And of course if you're doing it for the money, you evaluate based on how much money you made.
Combine broader wiretapping with the executive's claimed authority to imprison anyone anywhere anytime without judicial review, and it starts to look more like a freedom of speech issue. Though as you and the other poster indicate, it's more due process/privacy.
And your point is...
*ducks*
This is not a lose-lose situation, since it benefits some terribly poor countries. But that doesn't mean it's something I'm not worried about.
Well, you mentioned the three Wal-Mart criticisms I'm least concerned about. Moving manufacturing overseas, and employee treatment are of much more concern to me than unions, environment, or organic food. There are instances of Wal-Mart wanting to drain wetlands to build a store, which I think is a bad idea, but that's a minority case and it could be they're no worse in that regard than most big corporations. Also, your claim that consumers are the cause of the problem is questionable at best. Yes, Wal-Mart would go out of business if no one shopped there, but it's more complicated than that. Either you don't know it's more complicated, or you know it is but purposely set up a strawman. I'm not sure which is worse. Describing organic foods as a cult kind of makes it sound like you don't know what you're talking about - ad hominem argument. I've read both Machiavelli and Orwell, so don't assume I'm ignorant.
It doesn't make sense because it doesn't take advantage of the collective bargaining power that employers and governments enjoy. This increases costs to the consumer in the form of higher prices, and also forces the suppliers to market to a larger group and deal with millions of individual customers rather than in large groups, which I can only think would increase their costs as well.
You said that "an open mind in the face of overwhelming fact is...reporting." I disagree with that. I think if there are overwhelming facts supporting a case, good reporting means saying just that, not keeping an open mind and giving equal time both to the overwhelming facts and to the fringe speculation. You seem to think that a reporter should not make up his mind even "in the face of overwhelming fact." Feel free to clarify.
P.S. just to illustrate my first point, I could have said "feel free to clarify your earlier misstatements."
I actually liked the format; what I found funny is that the next/previous page buttons would highlight and then actually work when my pointer was halfway up the text, inches away from the button. Did anyone else see that on Firefox?
The question is, which is worse for the lower class in America, the loss of jobs that Wal-Mart causes by pushing manufacturing overseas, or paying the higher prices they would pay if Wal-Mart didn't demand such low prices from their suppliers? I don't know for sure, and I suspect nobody else does either. But I would guess the loss of jobs is worse. Besides the difficulty of quantifying the problem, there's also the issue that job loss affects a few people very severely, while price cuts benefit a whole lot of people much more modestly. How do you balance those concerns? Anyway, I neither work nor shop at Wal-Mart, partly because it's my judgment that they do more harm than good, except to their stockholders.
OK, so your point is that working conditions in China now are better than they were here 100 years ago? If so I would hesitate to even call that a point. Are you saying that they are at acceptable levels, or that nothing should be done to improve them?
The problem regarding healthcare is that Wal-Mart's approach is dysfunctional on a large scale. If we want to have taxpayers generally fund all health care, then the money has to come from somewhere, for example much higher taxation of corporate profits. If individuals are to pay for their own (which doesn't make much sense) then minimum wage has to be much, much higher for people to afford it. However, as a country we haven't picked either of those paths, we've decided to have employers pay most of the cost of health care. Wal-Mart makes every effort not to do so, which hurts 1) the employees who get no or inadequate health care (I'm not saying this is all of them but certainly many) and 2) everybody else, who ends up picking up the tab for those who turn to public health care. Again, if the systems were designed for that kind of behavior it would be fine, but that's not the case.
It seems to me that the criticisms of Wal-Mart on this page are reasonable and even supported with citations. On the other hand, the defenses of Wal-Mart are either vague; profane and semi-literate; or ad hominem; and in all cases not supported with citations. Interesting.
I don't buy things based on their names, but this reminds me of a letter I saw printed in a motorcycle mag. It was about the then-new Yamaha naked liter bike, marketed in Europe as the Fazer (which I think is what a similar bike was called years ago). The letter was from someone who had put a deposit on one with his local dealer, he was so excited about the product. When Yamaha announced they were naming it FZ-1 for the US marked, he cancelled his order. So yes, what a product is called affects its sales, even if only by a small amount (and maybe it's actually significant).
Or worse: "Hey can I please play with your Wii?"
Assuming that such a phone does not exist, do you have a theory for why every manufacturer has missed out on this huge untapped market you describe?
You want one of them to win? ;-)
Sorry to hear of your situation, but first this is not a prosthetic device, and second not everyone has your insurance plan. So it isn't necessarily useless for everyone.