I guess I saw inside the wrong cabinet! Nice to know -- I've always had this "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" feeling about that system. Of course, many parallel supercomputers these days really are "just" racks of commodity CPUs. No shame in that. Anyway, TMC certainly knew how to make a good-looking box.
Me too. As an undergrad at UIUC in the early '90s, I worked as a comptuer operator in the ACB (slide 4 in the FA). They had some cool hardware: Two Crays, including the beautiful Cray 2 with the waterfall, two Connection Machines (a CM2 and a huge CM5), a Convex, a big SGI of some sort, and some ancillary systems. The CMs arrived when parallel supercomputing was just becoming popular. The CM5 was a work of art, but when you opened the side panels, it was actually just racks of Suns inside (if I remember right.) But it was a fun time to work there. Mosaic was released when I was there. When I worked night shifts I played a lot of Maelstrom, and I'd stand on the roof sometimes and watch thunderstorms rolling across the prairie.
I was really just pointing out an absurdity, probably not really worth the effort. But since you ask, and if it's true that this lawyer argued cases for Microsoft by making claims she did not agree with (i.e., believe to be true) -- and nobody actually claimed this, by the way: the (grand?)parent only said that a lawyer does not necessarily agree with the claims they present on behalf of the client -- this would make her a liar. Saying things you believe to be untrue is lying (duh.)
In my reply to another poster, though, I didn't think to differentiate between making moral/ethical claims you don't agree with vs. making a factual claim you don't agree with. Only the second one would make you a liar. As for the first, you may or may not be a scumbag, but you'd just be pointing out that the law, as it stands, implies such and such in relation to your client. Even if your client is BTK, you wouldn't be a liar by asserting his legal rights.
On the other hand, I have to wonder about the suitability of someone who has never served as a judge for a Supreme Court position. It's one thing to win or lose for your client, believing you'd done your best. It's another to make the final decision and live with that. Sounds like something you'd need some practice at. Or, if you're the kind of person who takes that sort of thing lightly, I'd have to wonder a second time at your suitability.
Not no, yes: If you argue a point of view that you believe is untrue, you are lying. That's what lying is.
You can draw the distinction (worthy of a lawyer, I might add) that directly representing the position of one's client ("My client says...", "My client wishes to point out that...") isn't actually lying, but more akin to what a journalist does when quoting a source who is obviously lying. But insofar as the lawyer actually constructs (thinks up) the argument for the client, which is often the case, and to the extent that the lawyer does not believe that what is being stated is true, the lawyer is a liar.
I'm not saying that there is not a value in what (some) lawyers do that outweighs the fact that they say things they believe are false. And there's still plenty of room here for simply not knowing whether a clients are telling the truth and giving them the benefit of the doubt.
But if you believe that what you are saying is untrue, job or no job, you are a liar. You might also claim that a soldier is not a murderer when he kills, but it would just be semantic games. Dress up the pig all you like, it still stinks.
Just because someone can argue a point for someone (remember that was her JOB to give MS's argument, not her own preference) it does not automatically mean they believe it to be correct.
Your (accurate) argument implies, if it applies, that our new Supreme Court nominee is a professional liar.
It was about ensuring that Stallman's work in establishing a free software community is never forgotten.
I don't think your cynicism is far off the mark, but maybe a little ungenerous. Stallman didn't put his own name on it, after all. A lot of people are involved in GNU and the FSF, and they've made invaluable contributions to the free software world. Stallman is doing his job trying to put the spotlight on them when he can. Is it shameless promotion? Yes. Should he be ashamed. No.
I've never met Stallman (have you?) and I'll admit that his persona, as portrayed in the press, comes across as somewaht annoying. But this is true for most most iconoclasts. But his bio certainly doesn't make his life sound like a "train wreck".
How about this: You post your bio here and let us compare your accomplishments with his and decide whose life is a train wreck. Who the fuck were you again?
It would also be better if you made the effort to try to point out the errors or inconsistencies in his "crybaby" positions instead of engaging in simple-minded ad hominem attacks.
Does anyone really care about his opinion anymore?
Yes. Has anyone ever cared about yours (except me?)
And I, I walked over to the, to the bench there, and there is, Group W's where they put you if you may not be moral enough to join the army after committing your special crime, and there was all kinds of mean nasty ugly looking people on the bench there. Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father rapers! Father rapers sitting right there on the bench next to me! And they was mean and nasty and ugly and horrible crime-type guys sitting on the bench next to me. And the meanest, ugliest, nastiest one, the meanest father raper of them all, was coming over to me and he was mean 'n' ugly 'n' nasty 'n' horrible and all kind of things and he sat down next to me and said, "Kid, whad'ya get?" I said, "I didn't get nothing, I had to pay $50 and pick up the garbage." He said, "What were you arrested for, kid?" And I said, "Littering." And they all moved away from me on the bench there, and the hairy eyeball and all kinds of mean nasty things, till I said, "And creating a nuisance." And they all came back, shook my hand, and we had a great time on the bench, talkin about crime, mother stabbing,
father raping, all kinds of groovy things that we was talking about on the bench. And everything was fine, we was smoking cigarettes and all kinds of
things, until the Sargeant came over...
Actually, I hate to say it, but America is one of the least charitable nations on this planet, unless you count loans (with or without interest) as "charity", which I don't. To be clear, I mean least chartiable per capita, and of the wealthy nations. While it's true that the US gives the most in foreign aid as a total figure, we give much less per person than the citizens of most of the other rich nations, even though we are near the top of the list in per person income. (Since we also pay relatively little in taxes, it makes you wonder what we're doing with all our money, and whether we're really spending it wisely -- but that's a different subject.)
I'm not sure if this link is viewable by non-subscribers but, in short, it shows that the US gives about 0.16% of GDP as foreign aid. France gives about 2.5 times as much, per capita, as the US (about 0.41%) and some European countries, like the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark are giving over 0.7% of their GDP -- almost 3.8 times as much as the US.
These are government figures that do not reflect private giving. Although I admit it is only anecdotal evidence, after having lived for six years in the Netherlands, I would bet good money of my own that private giving exceeds American figures by similar margins (if you don't count the money Americans give to their churches or similar close-to-home charities). People there are exposed to many more opportunities to give to charity there, and seem to do so.
Then again, the article in The Economist mentions the variety of opinion on what works and what doesn't in foreign aid, and it's clear that some poorly-directed aid goes to dictators and terrorists. Nevertheless, those who think America is a great giver (and especially those of the Christian persuasion) should consider the story of the widow's mite.
Good Christ, I spent 30 minutes refuting the other ludicrous article you linked to by this guy, and now there's this?
For starters: Were [the minimum wage] an anti-poverty weapon, we might save loads of foreign aid expenditures simply by advising legislators in the world's poorest countries, such as Haiti, Bangladesh and Ethiopia, to legislate higher minimum wages. This is just a silly sentence. To compare the society and economic structure of Haiti or Bangladesh with those of the United States, and to base a straw-man argument on such a comparison is just insulting to the reader. The fact is that US corporations generally earn huge profits, some of which could reasonable be paid to their workers as higher wages. This is what an argument for a decent minimum wage is about. The same cannot be said for impoverished countries like those the author mentions, so his comparision (and would-be point) is absurd.
And then: Currently, the teen unemployment rate is 16 percent for whites and 32 percent for blacks. In 1948, the unemployment rate for black teens (16-17) was lower (9.4 percent) than white teens (10.2 percent)... How might we explain that? Well, since he doesn't bother to link to the study he's using, it's hard to say. One possibility is that the set of numbers he's using don't exclude full-time students from the labor pool. In that case, the fact that a smaller percentage of black teenagers were "unemployed" in 1948 than now could be accounted for by the fact that more of them are full-time students now -- while in 1948 they had already been pressed into the labor force. Presenting statistics with so little context is dishonest and misleading.
And, of course: Plus, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 2.2 percent of working adults earn the minimum wage. Now, really, if you're going to present a statistic that is absurd beyond belief, you'd better cite your source. Or maybe he means precisely what he says: 2.2 percent of Americans earn the minimum wage: The other 97.8 percent earn either above or below it. Unless someone can point me to a source for this data, I'm going to have to consider this either a typo or an outright lie.
Furthermore, I have to agree with other posters that his focus on teenagers is pointless. It would be better to focus on the effect the minimum wage has had on working-class families, on adults who are supporting children, and on society as a whole -- not just on burger-flipping teens. I'm afraid that if he presented the big picture, it wouldn't help him make his point.
For all that, I do agree with him on one thing: One effect of minimum wages is that of discriminating against the employment of low-skilled workers. And this is why US manufacturing and service jobs are moving overseas -- and why the US has a huge trade deficit, for that matter. The problem is that we demand a minimum wage for US citizens, but allow the import of products produced by workers who have no such gurantees. This makes US workers too expensive to compete. We allow the free movement of goods and capital, but not people (not that many Americans would move to Bangladesh to work in low-paid garment sewing!) But this economic aberration will have to be solved eventually, and we're going to have to pay for what we've gotten out of it. When we can borrow no more money abroad and our products are too expensive for export, you'll see wages start dropping. Or, more likely, you'll see the minimum wage "essentially repealed" (as Williams says) by inflation.
The article you cite is absurd. The author claims that, because we pay for imported goods with capital equal to the value of those goods, there is no trade defecit. But before the article ends, the author is castigating "our profligate Congress" for selling debt to foreign entities. He has, at least, identified the source of the problem: We are paying for imports with borrowed money. So, while it may be possible to argue that there is no trade deficit per se, the argument relies on a simplistic and dishonst redefinition of "trade balance".
In reality, it works like this: The US government sells $1 billion in treasury bonds to the Chinese government. Now the US government has $1 billion in cash, which it spends on public projects, federal salaries, goods and services the government itself consumes to support its operations, and (famously) tax cuts. All this government spending puts cash in the pockets of American consumers, which they are encouraged to spend. These days, a good portion of this money, spent on goods, goes back to China in exchange for more imported goods (this is where the author's supposed trade balance comes into play: We're exchanging capital of equal value for the goods, right?) The problem is, the money we're spending was borrowed from the Chinese in the first place... and we STILL owe them interest and principal on those treasury bonds!
The author writes that "[t]he fact that foreigners are willing to exchange massive amounts of goods in exchange for slips of paper in the forms of currency, stocks and bonds should be a source of pride." That might be true if, again, the money was earned, not borrowed. It may be a source of pride that your good reputation allows you to borrow. But should you still be proud when you are in way over your head and borrowing more?
The author writes, "America, with its wealth, rule of law and the sanctity of contracts, inspires foreigners to hold large amounts of their wealth in U.S. obligations." That's true -- for now. But for it to continue to be true, the United States has to repay all of the money it has borrowed according to terms under which it borrowed it. Where are we going to get that money?
One possibility is that we'll default on our debt, which will mean seizure of American assets all over the world and a pratical ban on our access to international financial markets. Or we might choose to go the way some of our neighbors to the south: Devalue our currency by stimulating inflation (aka, print money.) This will allow us pay off our debts more easily, but will wipe out most Americans' savings, as well as the value of loans held by banks. Either of these will impoverish the entire nation.
Hopefully, we'll earn it by producing goods and services that the world wants to buy. But there are enormous hurdles. There is barely a hint in the national dialogue of preparations for the kinds of changes and even sacrifices that will have to be made.
One upside to having a lot of national debt held by foreign entities is that the whole world has a stake in our success. The bank you borrow from to buy your house makes more money if you keep a job and pay your mortgage than they do if you declare bankruptcy and they have to liquidate your assets. Perhaps no one in the world has a real interest in an American failure. On the other hand, we need the world more than the world needs us and, it bears repeating, foreigners aren't stupid.
My guess is that you're not reading the articles. Yes, there's an obnoxious gadget layout in every issue, but there are also long, thoughtful articles, good columns, smart letters -- and let's please not forget Infoporn! These items, which constitute the bulk of the magazine, are seldom about gadgets.
I'm a current (and longtime) subscriber, and what I find wrong with Wired is more akin to the unnerving foibles of a loved one that make you grind your teeth but grin and bear it. Two things come to mind.
First, their attempts to hip up their prose can wear pretty thin. If you have to mention the same object again and again in an article, it's good to introduce some variety by using synonyms. But at Wired, they go right for the hip slang: If they need to mention shoes, they'll have to say "togs" (and, for a year or so, almost every issue had to mention "Prada" specifically.) I wish I had a copy with me now, I'm sure I could easily find ten instances of cool, slangy substitutes for day-to-day words that would have sounded fine. It's just a bit much.
My second complaint is about their coverage of weapons and war and how they paint these topics with the same glib strokes as VoIP, robotics or ecommerce. I remember a letter they (admirably) printed once in which the writer mock-praised them, "Way to jump on the death-dealing bandwagon!" Yeah, murdering people is great, and the tools that let you do it more efficiently are totally wired. I've duly informed the editor of my views, as a subscriber, for what they're worth (which is to say, I don't just bitch about them on Slashdot.)
Still, I mostly love the magazine. The "Infoporn" layouts can be amazing. However, for a good review of technology, I prefer The Economist's "Technology Quarterly" issue. You get a good survey of recent trends and research with a thoughtful analysis of what impact these might have. Plus, The Economist covers weapons and war with all the sobriety they deserve.
The Netherlands have proved the productivity argument invalid. While cannabis is all but legal there (and readily available commercially) the country has one of the world's most productive economies. It turns out that some people like to smoke pot and some people don't. Its availibility doesn't seem make or break the deal. As with alcohol everywhere else, some people use, some people abuse, and some people abstain.
Hmmm, yeah, why isn't alcohol illegal then?
Don't underestimate the importance of a black market -- preferrably a planned one. Every economy has a black market, no matter how repressive the government. Taking this as a given, good social planners try to make it as harmless as possible. Throw 'em a bone, you know. If pot entered the mainstream, the players who make their money off it would be forced to choose between "real" jobs and some other black-market segment. Coke? Heroin? Slavery? Fissile material? (Not like dime-bag dealers would start pushing uranium, but they'd put pressure on the high end of the market and somebody would.)
For what it's worth, I've had exactly the opposite experience. I pay $45 (plus tax, I'm sure) for 1.5 Mbit Qwest DSL + ISP service. I never had any billing problem. The service was available precisely when Qwest said it would be, and I've never had an outage or noticable degradation of service quality. I had a few questions for their tech support people early on and found them well-informed, professional and responsive. I'm a fairly harsh judge on this sort of thing, as I've regularly dealt with networking providers as part of my work and I don't suffer tech-support fools happily, so this is saying a lot.
My only complaint is that Qwest offers MSN as their primary ISP and MSN is fairly evil. No POP/IMAP or SMTP is available (Hotmail only!), nor NNTP. They do provide McAffee antivirus (alas, I'm running Windows on my laptop), which is good. For the record, Qwest does offer their own ISP service, Qwest.net, with all the stuff MSN lacks, but it costs a bit more.
Can you not get cable broadband at your apartment? At mine, the broadband choice is between the phone company (Qwest), or the cable company (Comcast). Someone might want to correct me on this if I'm mistaken, but since the Federal government has refused to enforce the open-access regulations on the regional telcos, these may be the only two choices a lot of people have. By which I mean, it might not be a shady deal between your apartment complex and Qwest (which seems unlikely anyway, on the face of it) but just the state of the market at the moment. From a technical perspective, the only way you'd have more options would be if a) Qwest allowed other companies to do business on their copper, and why would they do that? or b) your landlord allows you to pay a competitor to pull new copper/cable/fiber/whatever onto their property to offer competing service, and why would they do that?
I thought about this decision, and the positions of the individual justices, a bit today and realized that the ruling also means that cities can seize property from corporations and, for example, turn it into private homes. The decision as to what will be most beneficial to the community is left to the local authorities. I think that looking at it from this perspective (vs. the "they're taking homes and giving them to corporations" perspective) puts the justices' positions in a different light.
And, just a note to the parent, the private interests getting screwed this time are human beings, not corporations. Their homes are going to be seized and demolished. The private interest in having a roof over your head is, in my opinion, of a different type than the private interest in making an extra buck.
The more extremely wealthy people there are, the worse off an economy is.
So, I didn't twist anything. What I wrote follows directly, logically, from what you wrote. It leads to an obviously false statement, but that just goes to show that that the premise (what you wrote) was incorrect. As you probably know, in logic, one counterexample is enough to prove a premise false. My counterexample is the economy of the United States. If you can make a logical argument, please do, but just saying "You are twisting what I said" doesn't prove anything.
Our economy would be better with fewer rich people, all other things being equal.
I'd be interested to hear you explain this. I can see only two ways to have less rich people:
1. Destory their wealth. This will result in less rich people, but will make the economy as a whole poorer. This doesn't sound like a good solution.
2. Redistribute their wealth. An interesting option, but fraught with potential problems. My "better economy" I assume you mean one which operates more efficiently and generates more wealth. If redistribution of wealth is to achieve this goal, the underlying assumption is that those who receive the redistributed wealth (which they didn't earn, incidentally) will make better use of it than those from whom it is taken. Poorer people are more likely to engage in consumption with their newfound wealth; while this does drive the economy, it doesn't develop it: The economy is developed through investment, and investment is an activity for people with excess wealth (the rich). Is there any reason to believe that people who didn't generate excess wealth in the first place are going to do so if you hand them a bunch of cash? It seems to me that the reverse is true: The people who managed to generate excess wealth in the first place are probably good at it, and will invest more intelligently. Of course, there's lots of grey area: On the one hand, you have potential business geniuses who don't have the capital to start something of their own, for which the economy is poorer; and, on the other hand, heir(esse)s who control vast wealth they didn't earn and who don't know what to do with it (although most of these have money managers who proxy for them and invest intelligently.)
So, I'd be curious to know which mechanism for "less rich people" you recommend, and how you think it would benefit the economy. It seems to me that the economies that have tried to prevent rich people (communist states and those with very high marginal tax rates) underperform those that allow them.
Go read some economics texts.
Well, I have. Would you like to quote something, or explain what you are thinking (if you understand something, you can explain it), or do you just want to take cheap shots?
If you think so, you must have the comprehension of a child.
There you go again...
I didn't say credit is the problem
Actually, if you re-read your post, you did. You also mentioned fees and interest, but you specifically said that "easy credit" is a problem. And I agree with you. But where we seem to differ is on how we view people's responsibility in relation to credit. In what you wrote, you seem to feel that people have no choice in the matter. For example, you write
most people could afford to buy a car outright if they hadn't gotten their LAST CAR on credit and cost them so much of their money.
Didn't they have the option to save up and buy their car outright? That's how I bought mine. People know what the deal is -- or do if they bother to read the fine print, which I know a lot of people are either too lazy or too much in denial to do -- and they accept it, fees and interest rate and all the rest. But then, a lot of people think that they're going to win the lottery, or "get lucky" on some business scheme, or that Jesus is going to come take them away,
Pretty much no matter what you buy you're going to be indirectly funding something you oppose.
Wouldn't it be nice if we had a line-item veto on how our personal tax payments are spent?
In my opinion the best thing you can do is just buy the least expensive product you can find, and then use what you save to help make the world a better place according to what you believe.
That's very interesting. It makes me think of the way some hoped nationalized industries would produce better results for people because they wouldn't be tied to a profit motive. Of course, political corruption and the lack of intelligence (ie "the invisible hand") that should have come from a functional market have generally ruined this promise. I never realized that the same effect could be produced by simply favoring the cheapest product. Assuming that quality is roughly equal and the low-price supplier hasn't come by its advantage via anti-social means (worker exploitation, inadequate environmental controls, etc.), this means throwing your business (and your economic vote) to the firm that is, clearly, operating in the least greedy way possible.
You might have meant just "buy less and give more", which also works, but it's interesting that this also applies to the macro-economic case.
The more extremely wealthy people there are, the worse off an economy is.
There are more extremely wealthy people in the US than anywhere else in the world. By your logic, our economy should be the worst in the world.
It's not that spending is too high, most people can afford all the things they are buying. The problem is the easy credit...
You just contridicted yourself. You admit that the easy credit is a problem, a problem because people are using it and using credit is, by definition, buying things you can't afford (ie, you haven't bought it, someone else has.)
The current problems in the USA have NOTHING to do with the tax system.
I never said they were but, sure, the tax system is part of the problem. If you think you can discuss economics without figuring taxation and government spending into the equation, you're fooling yourself. Are you actually saying that the US tax system is perfect? Because if it's not, well, it's part of the problem.
Having vast assets is extremely valuable.
Assets are worthless. Only tangible goods and services have value, because we are living creatures in a physical world. Assets are simply a promise of goods and services to be delivered in the future, and promises are worth nothing until they are fulfilled. This is what all finance & economics voodoo boils down to. You can't eat money. You should convince yourself of this fact.
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I guess I saw inside the wrong cabinet! Nice to know -- I've always had this "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" feeling about that system. Of course, many parallel supercomputers these days really are "just" racks of commodity CPUs. No shame in that. Anyway, TMC certainly knew how to make a good-looking box.
Me too. As an undergrad at UIUC in the early '90s, I worked as a comptuer operator in the ACB (slide 4 in the FA). They had some cool hardware: Two Crays, including the beautiful Cray 2 with the waterfall, two Connection Machines (a CM2 and a huge CM5), a Convex, a big SGI of some sort, and some ancillary systems. The CMs arrived when parallel supercomputing was just becoming popular. The CM5 was a work of art, but when you opened the side panels, it was actually just racks of Suns inside (if I remember right.) But it was a fun time to work there. Mosaic was released when I was there. When I worked night shifts I played a lot of Maelstrom, and I'd stand on the roof sometimes and watch thunderstorms rolling across the prairie.
Heh, better than I'd feared... I was going to say that REO can't (quite) match Air Supply's cheeze factor, but I suppose that maybe no one can.
I know a genuine Panaphonics when I see one. And look, here's Magnetbox and Sorny!
If I make a cheesy joke about the musical group Air Supply right about now, will you join me in a laugh?
I don't know, let's find out. You've got a joke, right?
analog content is the boogie man
Really? KC is implicated in all this?
Oh, you must mean bogeyman...
I was really just pointing out an absurdity, probably not really worth the effort. But since you ask, and if it's true that this lawyer argued cases for Microsoft by making claims she did not agree with (i.e., believe to be true) -- and nobody actually claimed this, by the way: the (grand?)parent only said that a lawyer does not necessarily agree with the claims they present on behalf of the client -- this would make her a liar. Saying things you believe to be untrue is lying (duh.)
In my reply to another poster, though, I didn't think to differentiate between making moral/ethical claims you don't agree with vs. making a factual claim you don't agree with. Only the second one would make you a liar. As for the first, you may or may not be a scumbag, but you'd just be pointing out that the law, as it stands, implies such and such in relation to your client. Even if your client is BTK, you wouldn't be a liar by asserting his legal rights.
On the other hand, I have to wonder about the suitability of someone who has never served as a judge for a Supreme Court position. It's one thing to win or lose for your client, believing you'd done your best. It's another to make the final decision and live with that. Sounds like something you'd need some practice at. Or, if you're the kind of person who takes that sort of thing lightly, I'd have to wonder a second time at your suitability.
Not no, yes: If you argue a point of view that you believe is untrue, you are lying. That's what lying is.
You can draw the distinction (worthy of a lawyer, I might add) that directly representing the position of one's client ("My client says...", "My client wishes to point out that...") isn't actually lying, but more akin to what a journalist does when quoting a source who is obviously lying. But insofar as the lawyer actually constructs (thinks up) the argument for the client, which is often the case, and to the extent that the lawyer does not believe that what is being stated is true, the lawyer is a liar.
I'm not saying that there is not a value in what (some) lawyers do that outweighs the fact that they say things they believe are false. And there's still plenty of room here for simply not knowing whether a clients are telling the truth and giving them the benefit of the doubt.
But if you believe that what you are saying is untrue, job or no job, you are a liar. You might also claim that a soldier is not a murderer when he kills, but it would just be semantic games. Dress up the pig all you like, it still stinks.
Just because someone can argue a point for someone (remember that was her JOB to give MS's argument, not her own preference) it does not automatically mean they believe it to be correct.
Your (accurate) argument implies, if it applies, that our new Supreme Court nominee is a professional liar.
It was about ensuring that Stallman's work in establishing a free software community is never forgotten.
I don't think your cynicism is far off the mark, but maybe a little ungenerous. Stallman didn't put his own name on it, after all. A lot of people are involved in GNU and the FSF, and they've made invaluable contributions to the free software world. Stallman is doing his job trying to put the spotlight on them when he can. Is it shameless promotion? Yes. Should he be ashamed. No.
I've never met Stallman (have you?) and I'll admit that his persona, as portrayed in the press, comes across as somewaht annoying. But this is true for most most iconoclasts. But his bio certainly doesn't make his life sound like a "train wreck".
How about this: You post your bio here and let us compare your accomplishments with his and decide whose life is a train wreck. Who the fuck were you again?
It would also be better if you made the effort to try to point out the errors or inconsistencies in his "crybaby" positions instead of engaging in simple-minded ad hominem attacks.
Does anyone really care about his opinion anymore?
Yes. Has anyone ever cared about yours (except me?)
And I, I walked over to the, to the bench there, and there is, Group W's where they put you if you may not be moral enough to join the army after committing your special crime, and there was all kinds of mean nasty ugly looking people on the bench there. Mother rapers. Father stabbers. Father rapers! Father rapers sitting right there on the bench next to me! And they was mean and nasty and ugly and horrible crime-type guys sitting on the bench next to me. And the meanest, ugliest, nastiest one, the meanest father raper of them all, was coming over to me and he was mean 'n' ugly 'n' nasty 'n' horrible and all kind of things and he sat down next to me and said, "Kid, whad'ya get?" I said, "I didn't get nothing, I had to pay $50 and pick up the garbage." He said, "What were you arrested for, kid?" And I said, "Littering." And they all moved away from me on the bench there, and the hairy eyeball and all kinds of mean nasty things, till I said, "And creating a nuisance." And they all came back, shook my hand, and we had a great time on the bench, talkin about crime, mother stabbing, father raping, all kinds of groovy things that we was talking about on the bench. And everything was fine, we was smoking cigarettes and all kinds of things, until the Sargeant came over...
Actually, I hate to say it, but America is one of the least charitable nations on this planet, unless you count loans (with or without interest) as "charity", which I don't. To be clear, I mean least chartiable per capita, and of the wealthy nations. While it's true that the US gives the most in foreign aid as a total figure, we give much less per person than the citizens of most of the other rich nations, even though we are near the top of the list in per person income. (Since we also pay relatively little in taxes, it makes you wonder what we're doing with all our money, and whether we're really spending it wisely -- but that's a different subject.)
I'm not sure if this link is viewable by non-subscribers but, in short, it shows that the US gives about 0.16% of GDP as foreign aid. France gives about 2.5 times as much, per capita, as the US (about 0.41%) and some European countries, like the Netherlands, Sweden and Denmark are giving over 0.7% of their GDP -- almost 3.8 times as much as the US.
These are government figures that do not reflect private giving. Although I admit it is only anecdotal evidence, after having lived for six years in the Netherlands, I would bet good money of my own that private giving exceeds American figures by similar margins (if you don't count the money Americans give to their churches or similar close-to-home charities). People there are exposed to many more opportunities to give to charity there, and seem to do so.
Then again, the article in The Economist mentions the variety of opinion on what works and what doesn't in foreign aid, and it's clear that some poorly-directed aid goes to dictators and terrorists. Nevertheless, those who think America is a great giver (and especially those of the Christian persuasion) should consider the story of the widow's mite.
Good Christ, I spent 30 minutes refuting the other ludicrous article you linked to by this guy, and now there's this?
For starters: Were [the minimum wage] an anti-poverty weapon, we might save loads of foreign aid expenditures simply by advising legislators in the world's poorest countries, such as Haiti, Bangladesh and Ethiopia, to legislate higher minimum wages. This is just a silly sentence. To compare the society and economic structure of Haiti or Bangladesh with those of the United States, and to base a straw-man argument on such a comparison is just insulting to the reader. The fact is that US corporations generally earn huge profits, some of which could reasonable be paid to their workers as higher wages. This is what an argument for a decent minimum wage is about. The same cannot be said for impoverished countries like those the author mentions, so his comparision (and would-be point) is absurd.
And then: Currently, the teen unemployment rate is 16 percent for whites and 32 percent for blacks. In 1948, the unemployment rate for black teens (16-17) was lower (9.4 percent) than white teens (10.2 percent)... How might we explain that? Well, since he doesn't bother to link to the study he's using, it's hard to say. One possibility is that the set of numbers he's using don't exclude full-time students from the labor pool. In that case, the fact that a smaller percentage of black teenagers were "unemployed" in 1948 than now could be accounted for by the fact that more of them are full-time students now -- while in 1948 they had already been pressed into the labor force. Presenting statistics with so little context is dishonest and misleading.
And, of course: Plus, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 2.2 percent of working adults earn the minimum wage. Now, really, if you're going to present a statistic that is absurd beyond belief, you'd better cite your source. Or maybe he means precisely what he says: 2.2 percent of Americans earn the minimum wage: The other 97.8 percent earn either above or below it. Unless someone can point me to a source for this data, I'm going to have to consider this either a typo or an outright lie.
Furthermore, I have to agree with other posters that his focus on teenagers is pointless. It would be better to focus on the effect the minimum wage has had on working-class families, on adults who are supporting children, and on society as a whole -- not just on burger-flipping teens. I'm afraid that if he presented the big picture, it wouldn't help him make his point.
For all that, I do agree with him on one thing: One effect of minimum wages is that of discriminating against the employment of low-skilled workers. And this is why US manufacturing and service jobs are moving overseas -- and why the US has a huge trade deficit, for that matter. The problem is that we demand a minimum wage for US citizens, but allow the import of products produced by workers who have no such gurantees. This makes US workers too expensive to compete. We allow the free movement of goods and capital, but not people (not that many Americans would move to Bangladesh to work in low-paid garment sewing!) But this economic aberration will have to be solved eventually, and we're going to have to pay for what we've gotten out of it. When we can borrow no more money abroad and our products are too expensive for export, you'll see wages start dropping. Or, more likely, you'll see the minimum wage "essentially repealed" (as Williams says) by inflation.
The article you cite is absurd. The author claims that, because we pay for imported goods with capital equal to the value of those goods, there is no trade defecit. But before the article ends, the author is castigating "our profligate Congress" for selling debt to foreign entities. He has, at least, identified the source of the problem: We are paying for imports with borrowed money. So, while it may be possible to argue that there is no trade deficit per se, the argument relies on a simplistic and dishonst redefinition of "trade balance".
... and we STILL owe them interest and principal on those treasury bonds!
In reality, it works like this: The US government sells $1 billion in treasury bonds to the Chinese government. Now the US government has $1 billion in cash, which it spends on public projects, federal salaries, goods and services the government itself consumes to support its operations, and (famously) tax cuts. All this government spending puts cash in the pockets of American consumers, which they are encouraged to spend. These days, a good portion of this money, spent on goods, goes back to China in exchange for more imported goods (this is where the author's supposed trade balance comes into play: We're exchanging capital of equal value for the goods, right?) The problem is, the money we're spending was borrowed from the Chinese in the first place
The author writes that "[t]he fact that foreigners are willing to exchange massive amounts of goods in exchange for slips of paper in the forms of currency, stocks and bonds should be a source of pride." That might be true if, again, the money was earned, not borrowed. It may be a source of pride that your good reputation allows you to borrow. But should you still be proud when you are in way over your head and borrowing more?
The author writes, "America, with its wealth, rule of law and the sanctity of contracts, inspires foreigners to hold large amounts of their wealth in U.S. obligations." That's true -- for now. But for it to continue to be true, the United States has to repay all of the money it has borrowed according to terms under which it borrowed it. Where are we going to get that money?
One possibility is that we'll default on our debt, which will mean seizure of American assets all over the world and a pratical ban on our access to international financial markets. Or we might choose to go the way some of our neighbors to the south: Devalue our currency by stimulating inflation (aka, print money.) This will allow us pay off our debts more easily, but will wipe out most Americans' savings, as well as the value of loans held by banks. Either of these will impoverish the entire nation.
Hopefully, we'll earn it by producing goods and services that the world wants to buy. But there are enormous hurdles. There is barely a hint in the national dialogue of preparations for the kinds of changes and even sacrifices that will have to be made.
One upside to having a lot of national debt held by foreign entities is that the whole world has a stake in our success. The bank you borrow from to buy your house makes more money if you keep a job and pay your mortgage than they do if you declare bankruptcy and they have to liquidate your assets. Perhaps no one in the world has a real interest in an American failure. On the other hand, we need the world more than the world needs us and, it bears repeating, foreigners aren't stupid.
My guess is that you're not reading the articles. Yes, there's an obnoxious gadget layout in every issue, but there are also long, thoughtful articles, good columns, smart letters -- and let's please not forget Infoporn! These items, which constitute the bulk of the magazine, are seldom about gadgets.
What exactly is wrong with the magazine?
I'm a current (and longtime) subscriber, and what I find wrong with Wired is more akin to the unnerving foibles of a loved one that make you grind your teeth but grin and bear it. Two things come to mind.
First, their attempts to hip up their prose can wear pretty thin. If you have to mention the same object again and again in an article, it's good to introduce some variety by using synonyms. But at Wired, they go right for the hip slang: If they need to mention shoes, they'll have to say "togs" (and, for a year or so, almost every issue had to mention "Prada" specifically.) I wish I had a copy with me now, I'm sure I could easily find ten instances of cool, slangy substitutes for day-to-day words that would have sounded fine. It's just a bit much.
My second complaint is about their coverage of weapons and war and how they paint these topics with the same glib strokes as VoIP, robotics or ecommerce. I remember a letter they (admirably) printed once in which the writer mock-praised them, "Way to jump on the death-dealing bandwagon!" Yeah, murdering people is great, and the tools that let you do it more efficiently are totally wired. I've duly informed the editor of my views, as a subscriber, for what they're worth (which is to say, I don't just bitch about them on Slashdot.)
Still, I mostly love the magazine. The "Infoporn" layouts can be amazing. However, for a good review of technology, I prefer The Economist's "Technology Quarterly" issue. You get a good survey of recent trends and research with a thoughtful analysis of what impact these might have. Plus, The Economist covers weapons and war with all the sobriety they deserve.
Not even actual japanese schoolgirls - yes, I asked them - could tell me where to get that stuff.
Shows how fast fads move. By the time Wired prints it, no self-respecting hipster would admit to ever having heard of it.
If you read O'Reilly's Make you'll see some familiar bylines. It's nice to see some of these writers applying themselves to something practical.
The Netherlands have proved the productivity argument invalid. While cannabis is all but legal there (and readily available commercially) the country has one of the world's most productive economies. It turns out that some people like to smoke pot and some people don't. Its availibility doesn't seem make or break the deal. As with alcohol everywhere else, some people use, some people abuse, and some people abstain.
Hmmm, yeah, why isn't alcohol illegal then?
Don't underestimate the importance of a black market -- preferrably a planned one. Every economy has a black market, no matter how repressive the government. Taking this as a given, good social planners try to make it as harmless as possible. Throw 'em a bone, you know. If pot entered the mainstream, the players who make their money off it would be forced to choose between "real" jobs and some other black-market segment. Coke? Heroin? Slavery? Fissile material? (Not like dime-bag dealers would start pushing uranium, but they'd put pressure on the high end of the market and somebody would.)
For what it's worth, I've had exactly the opposite experience. I pay $45 (plus tax, I'm sure) for 1.5 Mbit Qwest DSL + ISP service. I never had any billing problem. The service was available precisely when Qwest said it would be, and I've never had an outage or noticable degradation of service quality. I had a few questions for their tech support people early on and found them well-informed, professional and responsive. I'm a fairly harsh judge on this sort of thing, as I've regularly dealt with networking providers as part of my work and I don't suffer tech-support fools happily, so this is saying a lot.
My only complaint is that Qwest offers MSN as their primary ISP and MSN is fairly evil. No POP/IMAP or SMTP is available (Hotmail only!), nor NNTP. They do provide McAffee antivirus (alas, I'm running Windows on my laptop), which is good. For the record, Qwest does offer their own ISP service, Qwest.net, with all the stuff MSN lacks, but it costs a bit more.
Can you not get cable broadband at your apartment? At mine, the broadband choice is between the phone company (Qwest), or the cable company (Comcast). Someone might want to correct me on this if I'm mistaken, but since the Federal government has refused to enforce the open-access regulations on the regional telcos, these may be the only two choices a lot of people have. By which I mean, it might not be a shady deal between your apartment complex and Qwest (which seems unlikely anyway, on the face of it) but just the state of the market at the moment. From a technical perspective, the only way you'd have more options would be if a) Qwest allowed other companies to do business on their copper, and why would they do that? or b) your landlord allows you to pay a competitor to pull new copper/cable/fiber/whatever onto their property to offer competing service, and why would they do that?
I thought about this decision, and the positions of the individual justices, a bit today and realized that the ruling also means that cities can seize property from corporations and, for example, turn it into private homes. The decision as to what will be most beneficial to the community is left to the local authorities. I think that looking at it from this perspective (vs. the "they're taking homes and giving them to corporations" perspective) puts the justices' positions in a different light.
And, just a note to the parent, the private interests getting screwed this time are human beings, not corporations. Their homes are going to be seized and demolished. The private interest in having a roof over your head is, in my opinion, of a different type than the private interest in making an extra buck.
No, you're twisting everything I've said.
What you said was:
The more extremely wealthy people there are, the worse off an economy is.
So, I didn't twist anything. What I wrote follows directly, logically, from what you wrote. It leads to an obviously false statement, but that just goes to show that that the premise (what you wrote) was incorrect. As you probably know, in logic, one counterexample is enough to prove a premise false. My counterexample is the economy of the United States. If you can make a logical argument, please do, but just saying "You are twisting what I said" doesn't prove anything.
Our economy would be better with fewer rich people, all other things being equal.
I'd be interested to hear you explain this. I can see only two ways to have less rich people:
1. Destory their wealth. This will result in less rich people, but will make the economy as a whole poorer. This doesn't sound like a good solution.
2. Redistribute their wealth. An interesting option, but fraught with potential problems. My "better economy" I assume you mean one which operates more efficiently and generates more wealth. If redistribution of wealth is to achieve this goal, the underlying assumption is that those who receive the redistributed wealth (which they didn't earn, incidentally) will make better use of it than those from whom it is taken. Poorer people are more likely to engage in consumption with their newfound wealth; while this does drive the economy, it doesn't develop it: The economy is developed through investment, and investment is an activity for people with excess wealth (the rich). Is there any reason to believe that people who didn't generate excess wealth in the first place are going to do so if you hand them a bunch of cash? It seems to me that the reverse is true: The people who managed to generate excess wealth in the first place are probably good at it, and will invest more intelligently. Of course, there's lots of grey area: On the one hand, you have potential business geniuses who don't have the capital to start something of their own, for which the economy is poorer; and, on the other hand, heir(esse)s who control vast wealth they didn't earn and who don't know what to do with it (although most of these have money managers who proxy for them and invest intelligently.)
So, I'd be curious to know which mechanism for "less rich people" you recommend, and how you think it would benefit the economy. It seems to me that the economies that have tried to prevent rich people (communist states and those with very high marginal tax rates) underperform those that allow them.
Go read some economics texts.
Well, I have. Would you like to quote something, or explain what you are thinking (if you understand something, you can explain it), or do you just want to take cheap shots?
If you think so, you must have the comprehension of a child.
There you go again...
I didn't say credit is the problem
Actually, if you re-read your post, you did. You also mentioned fees and interest, but you specifically said that "easy credit" is a problem. And I agree with you. But where we seem to differ is on how we view people's responsibility in relation to credit. In what you wrote, you seem to feel that people have no choice in the matter. For example, you write
most people could afford to buy a car outright if they hadn't gotten their LAST CAR on credit and cost them so much of their money.
Didn't they have the option to save up and buy their car outright? That's how I bought mine. People know what the deal is -- or do if they bother to read the fine print, which I know a lot of people are either too lazy or too much in denial to do -- and they accept it, fees and interest rate and all the rest. But then, a lot of people think that they're going to win the lottery, or "get lucky" on some business scheme, or that Jesus is going to come take them away,
Pretty much no matter what you buy you're going to be indirectly funding something you oppose.
Wouldn't it be nice if we had a line-item veto on how our personal tax payments are spent?
In my opinion the best thing you can do is just buy the least expensive product you can find, and then use what you save to help make the world a better place according to what you believe.
That's very interesting. It makes me think of the way some hoped nationalized industries would produce better results for people because they wouldn't be tied to a profit motive. Of course, political corruption and the lack of intelligence (ie "the invisible hand") that should have come from a functional market have generally ruined this promise. I never realized that the same effect could be produced by simply favoring the cheapest product. Assuming that quality is roughly equal and the low-price supplier hasn't come by its advantage via anti-social means (worker exploitation, inadequate environmental controls, etc.), this means throwing your business (and your economic vote) to the firm that is, clearly, operating in the least greedy way possible.
You might have meant just "buy less and give more", which also works, but it's interesting that this also applies to the macro-economic case.
The more extremely wealthy people there are, the worse off an economy is.
There are more extremely wealthy people in the US than anywhere else in the world. By your logic, our economy should be the worst in the world.
It's not that spending is too high, most people can afford all the things they are buying. The problem is the easy credit...
You just contridicted yourself. You admit that the easy credit is a problem, a problem because people are using it and using credit is, by definition, buying things you can't afford (ie, you haven't bought it, someone else has.)
The current problems in the USA have NOTHING to do with the tax system.
I never said they were but, sure, the tax system is part of the problem. If you think you can discuss economics without figuring taxation and government spending into the equation, you're fooling yourself. Are you actually saying that the US tax system is perfect? Because if it's not, well, it's part of the problem.
Having vast assets is extremely valuable.
Assets are worthless. Only tangible goods and services have value, because we are living creatures in a physical world. Assets are simply a promise of goods and services to be delivered in the future, and promises are worth nothing until they are fulfilled. This is what all finance & economics voodoo boils down to. You can't eat money. You should convince yourself of this fact.