Revenge fulfills two basic instincts: survival (by ensuring the perceived threat no longer exists) and validation (by making one feel stronger than the revengee).
Frankly, I don't see why this 'study' was necessary.
Yes, yes. I can't add or subtract, I was calculating something else first and didn't think it was worth a correction (since anyone would realize the error). Point remains, though.
It's not a "rosy scenario", it's "stupid". In case you have never worked, the ratio is usually Managers Managees, by as much as 1:20-30 in some fields. In IT, a realistic ratio (for the level of management high enough to remain) would start from 1:8 or so.
Er, the article does not define those fields in any terms nor does it take into account other factors -for example, the fact that 'programming' jobs were lost and 'engineering' jobs gained falls prey to a basic logical flaw: correlation is not causality. By your (or her) interpretation, these jobs were created because the 'lesser' ones were lost, a claim which is patently absurd -the 'good' jobs rely on the 'bad' ones and there would have been the demand anyway. The actual stats were that 71000 'bad' jobs were lost and 11500 'good' ones gained.
A more logical assertion would be that without outsourcing, instead of having gained (again, dubitable) 11500 - 71000 = 40500 jobs, we would have gained 71000 + 11500 = 186000 jobs. (Yes, I'm aware that it's not that simple but my assertion is realistically more accurate.)
Dissecting the article a bit:
It may come as a surprise, but global sourcing in the 1990s, by reducing the price of IT hardware, yielded increased investment in IT and more jobs for U.S. workers with IT skills.
Nice spin. One has to have read Orwell's 'Dictionary' for this one. The fact, of course, is that IT jobs increased because there was more IT to go around. Her causality is (intentionally) skewed.
The value to the U.S. economy of cheaper outsourced software and IT services is that it reduces the price of customized software. Econometric estimates are that, to an even greater degree than IT hardware, demand for software and services increases more than one-for-one with reductions in price. Therefore, as prices fall, demand for services and software rises more than one-for-one, diffusing IT into the lagging sectors and deepening the use of IT in the leading sectors, thus increasing demand for workers with IT skills in all sectors.
This is what is known as an assertion. Realistically, there is nothing that indicates that these potential jobs, too, couldn't be outsourced -quite the contrary: the capitalist principle of maximising profit is a strong argument for outsourcing, one that she has not one of a comparable magnitude for.
Yes, it's the logical conclusion and would be the eventual result: the republican heaven where no-one works but lives off their company stock. Of course, at some point a wall will be hit and this will never be realized. Instead, a part of the nation will continue doing the high-level management jobs and the rest will work in the service sector (retail of all sorts) that has to be done locally.
It's all pretty sad, but hey, if you're one of the high-level managers, why would you care?
Indeed! It's task enough to keep all those other 'candidates' away from the debates. Idiots thinking 'democracy' means something where everyone can run for office and have their cause heard.
I've got it, it's working fine. The company that offers the service here starts from a fairly reasonable 1Mbps for $29.95 per month. DSL is obviously slower and I find that the average speed is much higher (a nearly constant 450kbps) than the local TimeWarner 1.5Mbps (real speed maxing around 400kbps) -and there's no six-o-clock slowdown.
I feel that your responses are strongly influenced by a tainted understanding of the word 'communism' as a result of years of soft propaganda; hopefully all the informative posts here have unprogrammed you somewhat:) Here's my share:
The distinction is artificial. If everyone "owns" everything, then no one person can own one thing in the sense that they bear sole responsibility for it and have the sole right to enjoy it.
There's a house. The deed is under the names of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. By your logic, neither of them really owns it.
The distinction is very real.
My premise of it being inhumane is based on the notion that communism attempts to do away with individual rights in favor of group rights,
Communism doesn't do away with individual rights by any means (you have your right to a happy life, your home, etc.) -but at the same time we could speculate on what these 'rights' are -do we indeed have any inherent right to 'own' anything? Why would we have such a right, because we're superior? Following that line of logic (not yours, I hope, this is hypothesizing) we would assert that then humans could own objects of nature, including inanimates, animals and even other -for example mentally retarded and thus inferior- humans. These are important considerations.
Communism does, yes, require a certain spirit of, well, communality (hence the name..) which by no means is beyond the reach of humanity. You personally don't seem to agree with such a society but I fail to see any basic faults with it.
and that [communism] makes basic assumption that people will not act for the common good.
No -indeed a requirement of communism is that people will act for common good. Above you will see good posts about socialism, though, and socialism will use force to extract this behaviour. More on this later.
I will state this as an opinion: I believe a system of group rights to be inherently unstable as it inevitably leads to different rights for different groups.
That's paradoxical. A system of group rights, in this context of communism, by definition requires that there be only one group and therefore there can be no different groups that may have such different rights. Now, it's absolutely possible that such factioning will happen, I'm not contradicting that, but then the definition of the system also changes: it's not communism anymore.
Correlating communism with totalitarianism is quite reasonable given the evidence in the real world. Ideals aside, everywhere communism has been attempted it has degenerated into some form of totalitarianism.
Ideals aside nothing -it's pointless to try to debate about some watered-down failures of a system. I'm going all-out ideal communism. The USSR and China were atrocities that had nothing to do with communism and bore only the slightest resemblance to socialism.
This may be a good time to introduce my particular philosophy regarding communism: it's an inevitability. I mean that in a much different way than Marx did, though. He and I both believe that it's just a matter of time but he incorrectly thought that it would be possible to impose communism upon a people (the revolution and the whole concept of socialism are manifestations of this miscognition). I personally view it in such a way that eventually there will be two forks in the road of humanity: the other will be the path of destruction and the end of the human race. The other will be a peaceful, communist society (possibly just one phase on the way to something more) as humans have evolved to such a stage that it is possible; in other words, communism, to me, is a natural phase of the evolution of the human race* and the only alternative is that the evolution will take us to a different direction (or as cy
At the heart of communism is the notion that no person owns anything, and this is fundamentally inhumane
No. At the heart of communism is the notion that every person owns everything. The distinction is very important.
I'm also not sure if it's 'inhumane' to not own: it's certainly 'inanimal' not to but I thought we were supposed to be above that.
Second, it forces a distinction between people who may choose how others live and people who will be told how they must live. It enforces a class structure on the subject society and is hence biased toward totalitarianism.
You assume that communism is always something that's forced upon a people, which is not correct. Communism does not prevent democracy, either.
As a default condition it strips away human dignity.
Logical fallacy. You present your (incorrect) conceptions as facts which form your premise and therefore your conclusions are incorrect.
People think communism is bad because it is bad.
Those who do not understand communism and think it's bad do so because they correlate communism with totalitarianism, which is an incorrect correlation.
Those who do understand communism and think it's bad do so because they want to be better/richer/more powerful than others, which is impossible in a communistic society.
Incorrect. Nothing in communism mandates anything be taken by force, Marx just saw a (possibly violent) revolution as the only way to achieve communism which to me has always seemed as his worst miscognition.
To expand the parent's point a little bit for the unitiated: socialism as an economic/governmental theory, originally, was conceived as a sort of a stepping-stone on the road to communism by Marx.
The whole premise for socialism lays in the concept of revolution -Marx (correctly) assumed that it would take some time for the non-revolutionary people to get used to the idea of communism.
In the socialistic phase an interim government is necessary to supervise the progress towards communism and as soon as true communism were achieved (correlate this to people having evolved enough to accept it) the socialist government would be disbanded and a communist one formed. The Soviet Union never got to communism (largely because the socialistic phase devolved to an oligarchy of the Party) -and they indeed acknowledged it: it was called the United Socialist Soviet Republics.
Parent:
Communism and socialism fail for the same reason however -- a failure to harness the greed and desire for power inherent in every human being that has ever lived (including those who claim to be free of those influences).
Thus far, the only economic system to take advantage of those traits is capitalism, and as a result, the yearly GDP growth of relatively-capitalist countries almost-invariably outpaces that of relatively-socialist countries. It is no coincidence...
Personally I consider greed the root of all evil and something to transcend -greed is a manifestation of the primal need to survive (or the 'survival instinct' if you will) which probably will be never abolished but it may well be able to be directed to more productive activity. The people who you somewhat derisively state to claim they're free of greed indeed probably are (minus the hypocrites): They're not free of said driving force but they have diverted that need so that it will be sated by -to simplify- deeds of philantrophy or similar.
This is a dangerous attitude. An uninformed voting population is even more dangerous than a non-voting population. Sure, the number of voters is high, but it degrades the importance of issues, as people who don't know what's going on will vote on notions which may or may not be based on reality. Think: "Wow, that kerry guy has really nice eyes! I should vote for him!".
As an outsider in the US political culture, I've observed it for a while. This may surprise you but it seems that most people who vote this year will vote for one of these reasons:
I've always voted republican
I've always voted democrat
'Values' (i.e. right-wing christian bigotry)
"Anyone but Bush"
Many of the more 'thoughtful' people won't vote at all in their cynicism, which is sad. Just vote for the Communist party if nothing else -if any minority party got more than 3% of the vote, the US would be changed forever.
It might be well worth noting that most European governments actually place much less power on the President; rather it's the Prime Minister who runs the show -and that person is selected by an equal distribution calculation the Parliamentary elections -even if a given party wins the majority of seats in the Parliament they may not be able to govern effectively without taking other parties in with them which lessens the one-winner effect.
How about you take the World's Smallest Political Quiz. It's by no means exhaustive -it's only of value to an US voter as most of the other Western countries have an entirely different political atmosphere- but a lot of my 'republican' and 'democrat' acquaintances have found themselves in a strange place with the test.
For the record, I'm a Left-liberal leaning towards Statist.
You are trying to oversimplify the voting process. Most voters evaluate a candidate on a plethora of policy points, there ususally is no single overriding issue to steer them toward one candidate over another.
Hehe. You made milk spill out of my nostrils at work. Made my Wednesday.
Nope. You may be an ubergeek like the rest of us but the norm won't take too well to an assigned password, nor will they remember their own very well if it's nonsensical.
This is an introduction to generating strong, easy-to-remember passwords. Users will find this method, if not exciting, at least unintrusive and will quickly develop their own style -for example, in the second week of training, the last tally was that two people were drawing smiley faces, four writing upside down or backwards, two doing geometrical shapes and the rest an array of animal or hobby shapes, hearts etc. Only one person had stuck with 'traditional' lettering.
Any password can be cracked with brute force so that point is moot; in addition, this would hopefully deter social engineering as the user would have to think about how to explain their password to the requester instead of just blurting it out (thereby hopefully stumbling on that vague "Never give away your password to anyone" recollection from orientation).
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I could say everyone was a newbie once but how about this: you will be old and stupid one day, too. Have fun while it lasts.
OK.. why does your brain 'automatically' come up with a solution? See post above for answer.
Revenge fulfills two basic instincts: survival (by ensuring the perceived threat no longer exists) and validation (by making one feel stronger than the revengee).
Frankly, I don't see why this 'study' was necessary.
Yes, yes. I can't add or subtract, I was calculating something else first and didn't think it was worth a correction (since anyone would realize the error). Point remains, though.
It's not a "rosy scenario", it's "stupid". In case you have never worked, the ratio is usually Managers Managees, by as much as 1:20-30 in some fields. In IT, a realistic ratio (for the level of management high enough to remain) would start from 1:8 or so.
A more logical assertion would be that without outsourcing, instead of having gained (again, dubitable) 11500 - 71000 = 40500 jobs, we would have gained 71000 + 11500 = 186000 jobs. (Yes, I'm aware that it's not that simple but my assertion is realistically more accurate.)
Dissecting the article a bit:
Nice spin. One has to have read Orwell's 'Dictionary' for this one. The fact, of course, is that IT jobs increased because there was more IT to go around. Her causality is (intentionally) skewed.
This is what is known as an assertion. Realistically, there is nothing that indicates that these potential jobs, too, couldn't be outsourced -quite the contrary: the capitalist principle of maximising profit is a strong argument for outsourcing, one that she has not one of a comparable magnitude for.
Hope that's enough of a rebuttal.
Right.
Yes, it's the logical conclusion and would be the eventual result: the republican heaven where no-one works but lives off their company stock. Of course, at some point a wall will be hit and this will never be realized. Instead, a part of the nation will continue doing the high-level management jobs and the rest will work in the service sector (retail of all sorts) that has to be done locally.
It's all pretty sad, but hey, if you're one of the high-level managers, why would you care?
Indeed! It's task enough to keep all those other 'candidates' away from the debates. Idiots thinking 'democracy' means something where everyone can run for office and have their cause heard.
I've got it, it's working fine. The company that offers the service here starts from a fairly reasonable 1Mbps for $29.95 per month. DSL is obviously slower and I find that the average speed is much higher (a nearly constant 450kbps) than the local TimeWarner 1.5Mbps (real speed maxing around 400kbps) -and there's no six-o-clock slowdown.
I'm sorry but I don't see how sleeping from 04:00 to 12:00 indicates insomnia?
There's a house. The deed is under the names of Mr. and Mrs. Smith. By your logic, neither of them really owns it.
The distinction is very real.
Communism doesn't do away with individual rights by any means (you have your right to a happy life, your home, etc.) -but at the same time we could speculate on what these 'rights' are -do we indeed have any inherent right to 'own' anything? Why would we have such a right, because we're superior? Following that line of logic (not yours, I hope, this is hypothesizing) we would assert that then humans could own objects of nature, including inanimates, animals and even other -for example mentally retarded and thus inferior- humans. These are important considerations.
Communism does, yes, require a certain spirit of, well, communality (hence the name..) which by no means is beyond the reach of humanity. You personally don't seem to agree with such a society but I fail to see any basic faults with it.
No -indeed a requirement of communism is that people will act for common good. Above you will see good posts about socialism, though, and socialism will use force to extract this behaviour. More on this later.
That's paradoxical. A system of group rights, in this context of communism, by definition requires that there be only one group and therefore there can be no different groups that may have such different rights. Now, it's absolutely possible that such factioning will happen, I'm not contradicting that, but then the definition of the system also changes: it's not communism anymore.
Ideals aside nothing -it's pointless to try to debate about some watered-down failures of a system. I'm going all-out ideal communism. The USSR and China were atrocities that had nothing to do with communism and bore only the slightest resemblance to socialism.
This may be a good time to introduce my particular philosophy regarding communism: it's an inevitability. I mean that in a much different way than Marx did, though. He and I both believe that it's just a matter of time but he incorrectly thought that it would be possible to impose communism upon a people (the revolution and the whole concept of socialism are manifestations of this miscognition). I personally view it in such a way that eventually there will be two forks in the road of humanity: the other will be the path of destruction and the end of the human race. The other will be a peaceful, communist society (possibly just one phase on the way to something more) as humans have evolved to such a stage that it is possible; in other words, communism, to me, is a natural phase of the evolution of the human race* and the only alternative is that the evolution will take us to a different direction (or as cy
No. At the heart of communism is the notion that every person owns everything. The distinction is very important.
I'm also not sure if it's 'inhumane' to not own: it's certainly 'inanimal' not to but I thought we were supposed to be above that.
Second, it forces a distinction between people who may choose how others live and people who will be told how they must live. It enforces a class structure on the subject society and is hence biased toward totalitarianism.
You assume that communism is always something that's forced upon a people, which is not correct. Communism does not prevent democracy, either.
Logical fallacy. You present your (incorrect) conceptions as facts which form your premise and therefore your conclusions are incorrect.
Those who do not understand communism and think it's bad do so because they correlate communism with totalitarianism, which is an incorrect correlation.
Those who do understand communism and think it's bad do so because they want to be better/richer/more powerful than others, which is impossible in a communistic society.
Incorrect. Nothing in communism mandates anything be taken by force, Marx just saw a (possibly violent) revolution as the only way to achieve communism which to me has always seemed as his worst miscognition.
There are no communist governments nor have there ever been.
The definition of communism is that the people own and operate all means of production. Open source fits that criterion to a degree.
The whole premise for socialism lays in the concept of revolution -Marx (correctly) assumed that it would take some time for the non-revolutionary people to get used to the idea of communism.
In the socialistic phase an interim government is necessary to supervise the progress towards communism and as soon as true communism were achieved (correlate this to people having evolved enough to accept it) the socialist government would be disbanded and a communist one formed. The Soviet Union never got to communism (largely because the socialistic phase devolved to an oligarchy of the Party) -and they indeed acknowledged it: it was called the United Socialist Soviet Republics.
Parent:
Personally I consider greed the root of all evil and something to transcend -greed is a manifestation of the primal need to survive (or the 'survival instinct' if you will) which probably will be never abolished but it may well be able to be directed to more productive activity. The people who you somewhat derisively state to claim they're free of greed indeed probably are (minus the hypocrites): They're not free of said driving force but they have diverted that need so that it will be sated by -to simplify- deeds of philantrophy or similar.
You're not a big fan of documentaries, are you? Ignorant fuck.
Liking a movie doesn't mean that one identifies with the characters of the movie. Happiness is a very, very good movie about very, very bad things.
As an outsider in the US political culture, I've observed it for a while. This may surprise you but it seems that most people who vote this year will vote for one of these reasons:
Many of the more 'thoughtful' people won't vote at all in their cynicism, which is sad. Just vote for the Communist party if nothing else -if any minority party got more than 3% of the vote, the US would be changed forever.
It might be well worth noting that most European governments actually place much less power on the President; rather it's the Prime Minister who runs the show -and that person is selected by an equal distribution calculation the Parliamentary elections -even if a given party wins the majority of seats in the Parliament they may not be able to govern effectively without taking other parties in with them which lessens the one-winner effect.
How about you take the World's Smallest Political Quiz. It's by no means exhaustive -it's only of value to an US voter as most of the other Western countries have an entirely different political atmosphere- but a lot of my 'republican' and 'democrat' acquaintances have found themselves in a strange place with the test.
For the record, I'm a Left-liberal leaning towards Statist.
Hehe. You made milk spill out of my nostrils at work. Made my Wednesday.
No-one would bother to invent anything if they were not properly compensated for it, they suggest. Yay for capitalism and free-market economy.
Please cite these sources of yours. Not much is self-evident but you in your zeal obviously don't care.
Nope. You may be an ubergeek like the rest of us but the norm won't take too well to an assigned password, nor will they remember their own very well if it's nonsensical.
This is an introduction to generating strong, easy-to-remember passwords. Users will find this method, if not exciting, at least unintrusive and will quickly develop their own style -for example, in the second week of training, the last tally was that two people were drawing smiley faces, four writing upside down or backwards, two doing geometrical shapes and the rest an array of animal or hobby shapes, hearts etc. Only one person had stuck with 'traditional' lettering.
Any password can be cracked with brute force so that point is moot; in addition, this would hopefully deter social engineering as the user would have to think about how to explain their password to the requester instead of just blurting it out (thereby hopefully stumbling on that vague "Never give away your password to anyone" recollection from orientation).
It /could/ be the, er, HTML too, eh?