I sound "xenophobic" by simply pointing out that immigration should be controlled to the extent that citizenship should enjoy the benefits of its definition? I beg to differ.
I repeat: Immigration is healthy. So is outsourcing, offshoring, nearshoring, and moving capital in general. But when citizens are imperiled, then it all should be curtailed... regulated, if you want to bandy terms. It's not a matter of people being suddenly unable to afford $250K homes, since they otherwise could always find $125K homes. The problem is instead well exampled in my area (Toledo OH)... where homelessness from joblessness is a very real threat. I lost my own home, and it wasn't even that expensive ($600 rental).
Bringing people in just to save some thousands on their wages is just another attack by the Capitalist class on the Rest Of Us. It should be curtailed.
The last I heard, Congress made some vague efforts to retrun the H1B program to its prior levels. There are plenty of un- and under-employed IT workers in America... hundreds of thousands at least. The H1B program should be terminated for the interim, not ratcheted back to some mid-1990s level.
Just because they're of a different ethnicity than you, or they speak a different language, you think we should forbid them from coming here to work?
Their ethnicity and language don't concern me as much as the fact that THEY ARE NOT AMERICAN CITIZENS. As a citizen, I expect to receive preferential treatment from my government and my corporations, by definition. Otherwise... WHAT THE FUCK'S THE POINT OF CITIZENSHIP?
Immigration is healthy. So is a glass of wine per day. But chugging a couple of liters per day isn't healthy -- it's instead damaging. Similarly, immigration of all kinds is out of control. I also don't expect a heavily Capitalist Congress to do anything about it, since as part of the owner class, they are the prime beneficiaries of wage reductions.
You gotta be fair. Windows XP is exactly the OS we needed... in 1995. Well, putting that aside... and putting further aside how WinXP is forcing people to upgrade from PentiumIIs... Windows XP is good enough for the job. But you have to remove MSIE. MSIE is a massive security hole considering how easily it allows users to compromise their systems.
Actually, I suspect he'll wake up one day, to find that President Jeb Bush has signed into law the 2010 Secure Software Act, which effectively outlaws running Linux in America and its territories (primarily, Ameriraq, Ameriran and Syriamerica). So "past glory" will become a moot point.
Considering Ballmer and the rest of his executive team probably consider public source code to be a massive source of vulnerability, then such a statement can make perfect sense. All Ballmer has to do is get into a room with the average Forbes-reading CIO, and point out that Linux is being maintained by a bunch of anarchic tattooed hippie terrorists... and his mindset will click into the CIO's worldview much like serotonin does to a neuroreceptor. If a corporation doesn't control Linux, then by definition it is a BIG RISK.
That's all bullshit, of course, but Corporate America eats more mythology before breakfast that you'll eat all week.
Thanks. For the 3rd year running, my area (Toledo OH -- never come here, BTW) will set a record for filed bankruptcies. The harrowing stats you may have heard probably involve people who are in bankruptcy or are seeking "credit counselor" help... those miserable folks are the ones who commonly carry over $15K revolving cc debt. The avg debt for those who seek help, is probably well over $20K.
I well recall many entrepreneur-worshipping articles in the 1990s that illustrated all the folks who maxed out their debt capacity to make their small businesses work. Credit became part of the culture.
With government spending being what is, and with the increased efforts to tax things to "make up for the recession", it's the government debt that proves equally harrowing, if not more. Local governments still think that home property taxes are a blank check. I have hopes that forced frugality upon the general population will lead to a civic movement to reduce government expenses in a similar manner.
Of course, people will die from all this. It's regrettable, but we seem to have chosen worker deaths over solider deaths, for this low-level American revolution.
One aspect to this problem is that no one wants a doctor for themselves that is even just "average". Everyone wants a "good" doctor. But any educational system produces a range of people.
Hence, We The People have only helped create an environment where deceit is normal (medical review boards will continue to shield their members).
Honest and dutiful peer review by things like medical and police review boards, can only happen when you hear people say "I received a summons for jury duty, and I can't wait!". Self-interested "peer review" mechanisms will always fail us ("us" = the people the boards try to defend against). We would have to re-connect to these mechanisms (putting a stop to exclusive peer review) and make citizen involvement a widely pursued duty.
In the old days, you worked hard, and you got ahead. IMHO, that's no longer true, for the most part.
Although I agree in an important sense, I must ask what you think is "getting ahead"? Do you mean the American God-given red-blooded right to get so deeply in debt that you'll die owning money on your home, car, education and credit cards?
Americans used to live all their lives without health insurance, pensions and supermarkets... while still living in a modern era with homes, streets, automobiles, phones, police and fire departments, etc. We are returning to those times (I call it "entering the 21st Century by forcing labor into the 19th Century using the capital gains of the 20th Century"). In accord, since Americans refuse to exert Socialist controls over Capital, then Americans either have to submit to the terrors of economic slavery, or they will have to reduce their standard of living.
One way of expressing "reduction" in this new (old) environment, is to save money instead of spending it all the time. Part of saving money is that you must be frugal, too. The end result of this viewpoint is that you can still "get ahead"... as long as you avoid buying into the overconsumption lifestyle of McMansions, SUVs, private schooling, plastic consumer goods, and all the other trappings of unsustainable lifestyle. Over the course of your life, you can pay for things with cash that you accumulate diligently, and avoid the ruinous costs of credit. You are guaranteed to die firmly in the middle class, and will either leave enough for your children, or will have helped them through tough times without government welfare.
And (oh yeah)... American frugality will decimate the ranks of the millionaires to make room for a vast middle class -- which is exactly the opposite of what is happening now, in which millions of middle class are being dropped into the poor zone just to mint another 50 millionaires each year.
Do you see your efforts towards African regional self-sufficiency crossing the interests of the International Monetary Fund, as well as all other such mechanisms for keeping the "Third World" subservient to the Western-governed financial machine?
All you have to do is send a letter from an attorney and paypal backs down pretty quickly.
Any business that reverts to moral behavior only under threat, is not a business anyone should use. Of course, we should be able to use "the market" itself to control such things, since the use of lawyers in standard transactions adds a cost that many people will reject in time. The question is: will they?
Then take all of your money out of the stock market. Don't participate in the system that's killing you. Eventually, if enough people abandon it, its lethal qualities will wither, and law- and regulatory-enforcement will recover their power.
I keep advising people to do this who have similar complaints, but I continue to meet heavy resistance.
A cogent observation. I feel strongly that we have more than enough law to apply to situations where people hurt other people. But we get failures of cultural will, hence leading to stuff like you pointed out. We also get other things like the concept of "hate crime" (since for some reason, the laws against murder, assault, stalking and vandalism weren't enough). Of course, in short, we're doomed.
If managers would just admit things like "we're destroying the company with fatal levels of cost cutting", then I'd have nothing to criticize. But their dishonesty or ignorance are the real problems here.
Furthermore, managers are paid to manage. Hence, I can only hold them responsible for the consequences of (1) cutting too many corners and (2) issuing stupid policies. They should have known. After all, don't they want to be considered to be the "management class" of Humanity? If so, they'll have to earn it.
Sunday mornings were spent in worship, exercising their hard earned rights; Sunday afternoon were spent at the local firing range, practicing in order to defend those rights.
There's a potential sig in there, struggling to be born.
Mr Stephenson makes it painfully obvious that there are people in the world who are a lot brighter and/or erudite that I am. There's something in people like Neal that give me hope for Humanity's progression, but at the same time, I feel a bit chagrined in personal comparison to his command of thought and language.
Is this envy? Cynical realism? Or is this simply as far as a proud man can go in feeling inferior?
Wellll... there are a host of assumptions in what you said, and many of them have merit -- except for blatantly murdering homosexuals... have you no shame? -- but the brass tacks issue of anti-gay-marriage is not out of respect. The legislators and pundits haven't said "we oughta give those homosexuals a break from the shackles of marriage". They have instead said "letting homosexuals marry is degrading to our OWN marriages".
When you are involved with something, and someone says your presence is degrading it, then they are holding you in contempt. So: Dude, get a clue.
Personally, as far as actual marriage goes, I do agree with you that the institution is very shackling. I feel very strongly against letting Church and State have explicit authority over my relationship with a woman. But having the government recognize a union or marriage, allows specific legal rights... like the right to inherit, the right to euthanize, the right to legal authority over your children, etc. These are very important Human rights, and those are what the homosexuals are after (other than some of the radicals trying to "stick it" in the face of the "hets", but I digress).
An eighteen-year-old convicted of a single drug offense can never vote no matter how exemplary her subsequent life.
Not to be flippant, but that exemplary life should then be lived in some other state than Florida.
I asked a friend of mine who is homosexual, what he'll do if Ohio does pass its anti-gay-marriage amendment (1 of 11 states proposing such during this election). He replied that he'll eventually move since the amendment simply illustrates how anti-progressive Ohio is. In effect, Ohio holds him in contempt... so why stay?
The differences between states exist so that we can vote with our feet and dollars, and not just with levers, pencils and touchscreens. The bad old lifestyles in Florida simply mean the state wants to sink into the hell of its own rancor. If Floridans want to learn about forming a society of classes of citizens, then they should find out the hard way... as if they didn't have enough carjackings and drive-by shootings.
I wish I could believe that, but I don't. What's a "bank"? The answer is a lot more complicated and untrustworthy than you'd think. Would you issue a TLD to "Worldwide Immunity Bank, Gmbh" which was chartered in the Cayman Islands?
If the TLD were run by a certifying authority like a banking-financial consortium, I'd be more trusting of it. But only slightly more trusting, if you know what I mean.
Slashdot Mirror
I sound "xenophobic" by simply pointing out that immigration should be controlled to the extent that citizenship should enjoy the benefits of its definition? I beg to differ.
... regulated, if you want to bandy terms. It's not a matter of people being suddenly unable to afford $250K homes, since they otherwise could always find $125K homes. The problem is instead well exampled in my area (Toledo OH) ... where homelessness from joblessness is a very real threat. I lost my own home, and it wasn't even that expensive ($600 rental).
... hundreds of thousands at least. The H1B program should be terminated for the interim, not ratcheted back to some mid-1990s level.
I repeat: Immigration is healthy. So is outsourcing, offshoring, nearshoring, and moving capital in general. But when citizens are imperiled, then it all should be curtailed
Bringing people in just to save some thousands on their wages is just another attack by the Capitalist class on the Rest Of Us. It should be curtailed.
The last I heard, Congress made some vague efforts to retrun the H1B program to its prior levels. There are plenty of un- and under-employed IT workers in America
Just because they're of a different ethnicity than you, or they speak a different language, you think we should forbid them from coming here to work?
... WHAT THE FUCK'S THE POINT OF CITIZENSHIP?
Their ethnicity and language don't concern me as much as the fact that THEY ARE NOT AMERICAN CITIZENS. As a citizen, I expect to receive preferential treatment from my government and my corporations, by definition. Otherwise
Immigration is healthy. So is a glass of wine per day. But chugging a couple of liters per day isn't healthy -- it's instead damaging. Similarly, immigration of all kinds is out of control. I also don't expect a heavily Capitalist Congress to do anything about it, since as part of the owner class, they are the prime beneficiaries of wage reductions.
You gotta be fair. Windows XP is exactly the OS we needed ... in 1995. Well, putting that aside ... and putting further aside how WinXP is forcing people to upgrade from PentiumIIs ... Windows XP is good enough for the job. But you have to remove MSIE. MSIE is a massive security hole considering how easily it allows users to compromise their systems.
Actually, I suspect he'll wake up one day, to find that President Jeb Bush has signed into law the 2010 Secure Software Act, which effectively outlaws running Linux in America and its territories (primarily, Ameriraq, Ameriran and Syriamerica). So "past glory" will become a moot point.
Considering Ballmer and the rest of his executive team probably consider public source code to be a massive source of vulnerability, then such a statement can make perfect sense. All Ballmer has to do is get into a room with the average Forbes-reading CIO, and point out that Linux is being maintained by a bunch of anarchic tattooed hippie terrorists ... and his mindset will click into the CIO's worldview much like serotonin does to a neuroreceptor. If a corporation doesn't control Linux, then by definition it is a BIG RISK.
That's all bullshit, of course, but Corporate America eats more mythology before breakfast that you'll eat all week.
Thanks. For the 3rd year running, my area (Toledo OH -- never come here, BTW) will set a record for filed bankruptcies. The harrowing stats you may have heard probably involve people who are in bankruptcy or are seeking "credit counselor" help ... those miserable folks are the ones who commonly carry over $15K revolving cc debt. The avg debt for those who seek help, is probably well over $20K.
I well recall many entrepreneur-worshipping articles in the 1990s that illustrated all the folks who maxed out their debt capacity to make their small businesses work. Credit became part of the culture.
With government spending being what is, and with the increased efforts to tax things to "make up for the recession", it's the government debt that proves equally harrowing, if not more. Local governments still think that home property taxes are a blank check. I have hopes that forced frugality upon the general population will lead to a civic movement to reduce government expenses in a similar manner.
Of course, people will die from all this. It's regrettable, but we seem to have chosen worker deaths over solider deaths, for this low-level American revolution.
One aspect to this problem is that no one wants a doctor for themselves that is even just "average". Everyone wants a "good" doctor. But any educational system produces a range of people.
Hence, We The People have only helped create an environment where deceit is normal (medical review boards will continue to shield their members).
Honest and dutiful peer review by things like medical and police review boards, can only happen when you hear people say "I received a summons for jury duty, and I can't wait!". Self-interested "peer review" mechanisms will always fail us ("us" = the people the boards try to defend against). We would have to re-connect to these mechanisms (putting a stop to exclusive peer review) and make citizen involvement a widely pursued duty.
In the old days, you worked hard, and you got ahead. IMHO, that's no longer true, for the most part.
... while still living in a modern era with homes, streets, automobiles, phones, police and fire departments, etc. We are returning to those times (I call it "entering the 21st Century by forcing labor into the 19th Century using the capital gains of the 20th Century"). In accord, since Americans refuse to exert Socialist controls over Capital, then Americans either have to submit to the terrors of economic slavery, or they will have to reduce their standard of living.
... as long as you avoid buying into the overconsumption lifestyle of McMansions, SUVs, private schooling, plastic consumer goods, and all the other trappings of unsustainable lifestyle. Over the course of your life, you can pay for things with cash that you accumulate diligently, and avoid the ruinous costs of credit. You are guaranteed to die firmly in the middle class, and will either leave enough for your children, or will have helped them through tough times without government welfare.
... American frugality will decimate the ranks of the millionaires to make room for a vast middle class -- which is exactly the opposite of what is happening now, in which millions of middle class are being dropped into the poor zone just to mint another 50 millionaires each year.
Although I agree in an important sense, I must ask what you think is "getting ahead"? Do you mean the American God-given red-blooded right to get so deeply in debt that you'll die owning money on your home, car, education and credit cards?
Americans used to live all their lives without health insurance, pensions and supermarkets
One way of expressing "reduction" in this new (old) environment, is to save money instead of spending it all the time. Part of saving money is that you must be frugal, too. The end result of this viewpoint is that you can still "get ahead"
And (oh yeah)
Damn straight! Mission accomplished!! Stay the course!!! Bring it on!!!!
{pant, pant} Just practicing to vote Republican this year.
Do you see your efforts towards African regional self-sufficiency crossing the interests of the International Monetary Fund, as well as all other such mechanisms for keeping the "Third World" subservient to the Western-governed financial machine?
All you have to do is send a letter from an attorney and paypal backs down pretty quickly.
Any business that reverts to moral behavior only under threat, is not a business anyone should use. Of course, we should be able to use "the market" itself to control such things, since the use of lawyers in standard transactions adds a cost that many people will reject in time. The question is: will they?
Then take all of your money out of the stock market. Don't participate in the system that's killing you. Eventually, if enough people abandon it, its lethal qualities will wither, and law- and regulatory-enforcement will recover their power.
I keep advising people to do this who have similar complaints, but I continue to meet heavy resistance.
I agree. People will be outlawing the use of the word "picnic" next. Fucking Liberals.
A cogent observation. I feel strongly that we have more than enough law to apply to situations where people hurt other people. But we get failures of cultural will, hence leading to stuff like you pointed out. We also get other things like the concept of "hate crime" (since for some reason, the laws against murder, assault, stalking and vandalism weren't enough). Of course, in short, we're doomed.
What's that saying?:
... choose any two."
... and it's TRUE.
"GOOD, QUICK, CHEAP
If managers would just admit things like "we're destroying the company with fatal levels of cost cutting", then I'd have nothing to criticize. But their dishonesty or ignorance are the real problems here.
Furthermore, managers are paid to manage. Hence, I can only hold them responsible for the consequences of (1) cutting too many corners and (2) issuing stupid policies. They should have known. After all, don't they want to be considered to be the "management class" of Humanity? If so, they'll have to earn it.
- Manager issues a stupid order.
- Subordinates obey order out of fear.
- Manager gains confidence that stupidity is a valid method.
- Stupidity gains an increasing foothold until a catastrophe occurs.
OR- Manager cuts another corner or cost.
- Nothing immediately bad happens as a result.
- Manager gains confidence that cutting is a valid method.
- The cuttings increase until a catastrophe occurs.
Managers are among the most moronic of the "educated" Western class"Colonel Sonoda, you don't exactly have a hobby that you can brag about in public, do you?"
Sunday mornings were spent in worship, exercising their hard earned rights; Sunday afternoon were spent at the local firing range, practicing in order to defend those rights.
There's a potential sig in there, struggling to be born.
I'm going to ditto this a step further:
Mr Stephenson makes it painfully obvious that there are people in the world who are a lot brighter and/or erudite that I am. There's something in people like Neal that give me hope for Humanity's progression, but at the same time, I feel a bit chagrined in personal comparison to his command of thought and language.
Is this envy? Cynical realism? Or is this simply as far as a proud man can go in feeling inferior?
Wellll ... there are a host of assumptions in what you said, and many of them have merit -- except for blatantly murdering homosexuals ... have you no shame? -- but the brass tacks issue of anti-gay-marriage is not out of respect. The legislators and pundits haven't said "we oughta give those homosexuals a break from the shackles of marriage". They have instead said "letting homosexuals marry is degrading to our OWN marriages".
... like the right to inherit, the right to euthanize, the right to legal authority over your children, etc. These are very important Human rights, and those are what the homosexuals are after (other than some of the radicals trying to "stick it" in the face of the "hets", but I digress).
When you are involved with something, and someone says your presence is degrading it, then they are holding you in contempt. So: Dude, get a clue.
Personally, as far as actual marriage goes, I do agree with you that the institution is very shackling. I feel very strongly against letting Church and State have explicit authority over my relationship with a woman. But having the government recognize a union or marriage, allows specific legal rights
An eighteen-year-old convicted of a single drug offense can never vote no matter how exemplary her subsequent life.
... so why stay?
... as if they didn't have enough carjackings and drive-by shootings.
Not to be flippant, but that exemplary life should then be lived in some other state than Florida.
I asked a friend of mine who is homosexual, what he'll do if Ohio does pass its anti-gay-marriage amendment (1 of 11 states proposing such during this election). He replied that he'll eventually move since the amendment simply illustrates how anti-progressive Ohio is. In effect, Ohio holds him in contempt
The differences between states exist so that we can vote with our feet and dollars, and not just with levers, pencils and touchscreens. The bad old lifestyles in Florida simply mean the state wants to sink into the hell of its own rancor. If Floridans want to learn about forming a society of classes of citizens, then they should find out the hard way
I wish I could believe that, but I don't. What's a "bank"? The answer is a lot more complicated and untrustworthy than you'd think. Would you issue a TLD to "Worldwide Immunity Bank, Gmbh" which was chartered in the Cayman Islands?
If the TLD were run by a certifying authority like a banking-financial consortium, I'd be more trusting of it. But only slightly more trusting, if you know what I mean.
Say what you want about America, our propaganda system is the best in the world.
Now, if we could only export that enough to make up for the $45B monthly trade deficit, we'd be golden.
I have yet to hear from anyone who plays a lot of video/computer games that the games serve a mental exercise function.