While outsourcing has hit the tech sector in a moderate fashion,
BZZT! Completely incorrect. I am a tech worker and have been since 1985. The industry now is awash in the FUD caused by outsourcing and offshoring. It is 100% pervasive. Tech workers live in fear as a standard issue now, and not just from rumors but pervasive practice of outsourcing, outsourcing, outsourcing. This is hardly "moderate"!
You get even more foolish here:
The answer to outsourcing is better eduction for American workers, tax breaks to enterprises that choose to locate factories in the U.S. and American free-trade partners (Canada, Mexico), investment in research & development (not necessarily by the government but by large lending institutions, and the general organs of the economy).
1. FACT: A "better education" just places you into a population of workers whose tasks are even more outsourcable and offshorable than before. Therefore, education is a LIABILITY, not an asset, since it incurs an enormous debt to buy less of a job future.
2. FACT: Corporations are swimming in unprecedented levels of tax breaks, grants, loan guarantees and outright bribes... yet the outflow of capital and jobs is at record rates. Therefore, tax breaks don't work at all.
3. FACT: American corporations want nothing to do with R&D anymore since it doesn't payoff in the next fiscal quarter as far as the MBAs are (solely) concerned. You're against protectionism, so what are you going to do, pass a law mandating R&D in America?
Everyone benefits when the whole world has jobs.
Oh, I agree, as long as you actually expand the franchise of the middle class. But that's NOT what's happening. What's actually happening is that the First World is losing sustainable jobs to the Third World, so they are losing their middle class. These jobs are creating a small uber-consuming class that is literally consuming itself in an orgy of spending. The rest of the offshoring is capturing dispossessed rurals and placing them into wage slavery in faux urbanized environments.
When you actually have evidence that a SUSTAINABLE middle class in the world is expanding, I'll be happy to hear your further comments. But America's and Europe 's middle classes are being cashed out to increase the wealth of the elite few, and they are leveraging the unsustainable American-type of lifestyle in Third World areas to tempt people into wage slavery. The scumbag capitalists are going through waves of movement from even the higher-priced areas they created, to lower ones in other Third World zones, to continue the gravy train of Hypercapitalism -- a.k.a. looting capitalism, or slash-and-burn capitalism.
Really, come back when you have some real arguments, pal.
The people in charge would have had to be incredibly stupid if the Iraq war was all about oil - they won't be getting much oil out of Iraq for a very long time.
So? As long as the "right people" (i.e. WASPs and Israelis) controlled those oil reserves, then they would get what they wanted one way or another.
People like to harp on the general observation that "the price of gas didn't fall so the Iraq War wasn't about oil", but it was never about price. The invasion was never about making it cheaper for consumers. It was all about controlling a significant fraction of the world's oil reserves so that a new extranational elite could take the next step into being trillionaires from parceling out such a commodity barrel by barrel, then gallon by gallon, then ounce by ounce.
This is probably one reason why a murderous asshole like Pat Robertson wants Chavez killed. Chavez is sharing the wealth of oil in ways that DON'T make Robertson's class of WASP and Israeli elites even wealthier.
It's the same thing when Wall Street condemns a company like Costco for actually paying their workers well. It's all about class war, and you can just bet that EVERYONE who posts on Slashdot are on the losing side of that war.
If you'll recall, the Bush Administration called it Operation Iraqi Liberation at first... before someone noticed that too much truth was implied by that name, so they quickly changed it to Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Bzzt! Sorry, chum, but there are varying levels of, oh, I dunno, IMMENSE LEGAL REQUIREMENTS for individuals arriving in other countries. Many countries have REAL immigration laws -- unlike America (the land of cheap, often illegal, immigrant labor) -- which means they are highly restrictive and have small quotas.
The OP is right. Workers are NOT free to select a pool of global employers. Capital encounters about 100 times less friction when selecting a pool of global employees.
Time to turn off Rush Limbaugh and fucking THINK for a change, sport. Try it. After a while, you might even like having informed opinions of your own, not just those cooked-up in the Republican Echo Chamber first.
Wow, yeah, the Libertarians. What a laugh. Corporations (and thus, the wealthy) will exempt themselves from many sales taxes anyway.
The exemption processes have already been planned and are currently in force. Companies now "exchange" things instead of buying and selling. The most famous example is in buying an entire company. You -- the worker bee, or "sap" -- would think that THAT EVENT would trigger a sales tax, since it's, well, a SALE... but no, the Libertarian-leaning executives, lawyers and accountants have re-defined it in their board rooms while you spent your time working yourself to death. So instead of a SALE, what actually happens is that the neo-buyer"gains control of company operations" while the neo-seller"gains control of financial assets". See? No "sale" occurred at all! What actually happened instead was a "new" form of transaction that -- what a coincidence! -- is defined so that it's not subject to tax.
I think I'll stop by the gas station and give the attendent "control of some dollar bills" while in exchange he gives me "control of some gallons of gas". We can then eliminate paying that silly gas tax since, after all, it wasn't actually a SALE.
Americans are going to fucking have to face the fact that taxes are the cost of running a civilization. If we progressively refuse to tax wealth, and then watch sustainable jobs either go overseas or get filled locally with cheap foreign labor, we'll have no civilization worth speaking of since there will be NO TAX BASE to fucking support it!
When you sign an employment contract you are agreeing to provide a service: your labour. To claim you own that contract is such an stupid idea that I don't see how it took hold of people minds at all.
It's amazing how people like you use the term "contract" and then assume that only one side owns it. That's not a contract, stupid. A real contract is owned by both signatories -- that's what MAKES IT A CONTRACT.
Furthermore, contracts are made in societies that have laws governing how they are made. These laws tend to give the weaker signatory rights, even some that the contract cannot legally remove.
I know your best buddy Rush Limbaugh wouldn't agree with any of this... but he IS a big fat Republican propagandist, so we shouldn't be surprised. So I know how that stupid idea got into YOUR mind. Isn't it about time you owned up to it?
(In case you missed it, buddy, you JUST GOT OWNED.)
I'm sooooo tired of hearing the dupes and rubes of the middle class pretending that the corporations don't own them body and soul, even when they stop employing them. Adapting isn't working, since the core problem of "capital supremacy" remains. Moving isn't working, for the same reason.
Capital is essentially frictionless now, and that's only because we have CHOSEN to not place social restraints on it. We've allowed labor to be decoupled from the wealth it produces. There's no natural law that says this should be so. So when the fuck are people going to wake up and return to regulating their corporations again?
The FACT that the most eminently outsourcable jobs on the basis of costs (i.e. executives) are not outsourced only illustrates what this all is: CLASS WARFARE. And the elites are winning by an enormous margin.
Me: You need to stop worshipping money and start... You: You need to start offering real arguments.
I already did, but since money is your religion you refuse to deal with blasphemy. Time to talk to your priest (i.e. stockbroker), eh? All this logical thinking must be making you uncomfortable.
Me: Monetizing a population and privatizing all property are surefire ways of creating poverty where none existed before You: Wrong.
How insightful! Deny it all you like, but the history of Africa and the Western-dominated financial institutions only support what I said. You only respond with a one-liner (in this case, one-word) answer since you are trying to avoid looking at the vast body of evidence.
Like I said, you're ignorant -- probably willfully so -- and you need to educate yourself on the action of capital on world populations. I already talked about the death of the commons in Africa; google it and stop looking like a naysaying moron. I already talked about the IMF... so instead of googling it, try a few of the DOZENS OF BOOKS that document how the IMF ruins native economies (by monetizing, then globalizing them).
Me: It is highly immoral and completely vicious. You: It is based on the rights of the individual. Right to own property being the chief one of them. Besides being moral, the alternative -- communal ownership does not work.
Firstly, when did I say we should do away with the concept of private property? You've been listening to Rush Limbaugh a bit too much, Mr. Knee-Jerk Reaction.
Secondly, you have private property in societies with "commons". Why do you think the "commons" even had a name? It's named since its DIFFERENT than the private property under control of the owners. Both community and privacy exist, and are not mutually exclusive.
Thirdly, communal ownership DID work -- despite the "tragedy of the commons", which was no worse that the "eternal vigilance" required by representative democracy -- but the West has thrown all that out in an immoral orgy of privatizing profits. About the only thing now that's "public" is the ownership of corporate costs and debts... an immoral privilege which corporations obtained by corrupting (i.e. owning) governments.
You sound like the "Fuck Communism" type. So what have you been doing to fight Corporate Communism? You sound like the type for whom "Socialism" is one of your dirty words, so what are you doing about corporations socializing their costs upon the public?
Me: And the more you support it, the more you support those evil behaviors. You: Yeah, sure. Evil behaviors. One needs only to compare [...]
That's the usual fallacy performed by capitalist zombies like yourself. You compare regimes under overt killers (capitalist autocracies) with regimes run by covert ones (capitalist republics). For most of the 20th Century, the republics have externalized their violence by attacking the tyrannies. As the autocracies become subdued (note: by the same forces that the capitalist republics are being destroyed with at a slower pace), these republics have to continue their violent practices since -- as I've explained before -- their systems depend on it.
Buddy, you're getting so "owned" yourself in this argument string that I'm starting to wonder if you're actually a posting troll.
At any rate, your particular mental disease is that you are so excited about becoming a millionaire -- which you're extremely likely to never be, which is even more sad -- that you'll excuse everything that happens at the lower levels that makes such a system function. I don't even have to descend into a metaphor of "putting boiled babies' blood in your gas tank"... since the raping of Iraq is fundamentally clear about how such a metaphor is essentially and
You're continuing to miss the point. If you're American (as I am) then you've already been ravaged (although not as severely as capital ravages a resource-rich area like Iraq). The ravaging involves (1) coming in, (2) increasing the standard of living into unsustainable levels, then (3) pulling out to leave it all to crash.
You may joke about "ravage me please", but millions of Americans with bills they cannot pay after their jobs fled, are not amused.
Unrestrained capitalism is thoroughly evil and must be stopped. Of course, since we're participants, WE must stop doing whatever we do that supports the extremity of such a system. Our insatiable demands are part of the problem.
So what do you suggest instead? Communism and a government managed economy? Hmm, that doesn't work. Socialism and government owned companies? That doesn't work either without Capitalism, most socialist countries are privatizing their state-owned companies.
It sure is funny hearing the usual Hypercapitalist twit indulge in the "damn that centralized economy" slogan, while corporations are attaining grants, loan guarantees, and tax breaks by the 10s of billions from the government.
If you are against a centralized or planned economy, I'm sure you've protested mightily against all the tax abatements and state-budget line items that shovel billions of tax money into the maws of private entities. Ever hear of "corporate welfare"?
Capitalism, although it has its evils, is probably the best economic system right now, until some new social or technological development makes a better economy possible.
WRONG. We HAD a better system, called "Socialist Capitalism" or whatever you are comfortable calling it. We applied populist controls to the use of capital. A person could use his capital to try to make himself a profit, but if he polluted, committed fraud, or abused workers, we slapped him down like the bitch he was.
The best system has fled, and we are now embroiled in tyranny under a new name, and it's just getting started. Corporations are going to become far more obviously the owners of government mechanisms before people stop worshipping wealth and wake up to their own wage slavery.
Ideology only works in a perfect world, mate. And this ain't a perfect world...
Ideology is much of what's driving this sickness of Hypercapitalism. People continue to believe that corporations will help them when it's clearly obvious that their economic liberty is being progressively destroyed. The freedom to get into outrageous debt isn't liberty by any sane definition.
Capitalism may, indeed, foster inequality, but it does not create poverty
You need to stop worshipping money and start understanding the IMF and the World Bank, as well as what the "death of the commons" in Africa really did to people. Heck, why let you try to claim the Third World is not applicable to my argument? Try studying the history of Appalachia in the United States, primarily the 20th Century. The introduction of property taxes alone drove hordes of Appalachians out of their homes, and either out of the region or into apartments (where they became subordinate to landlords, you follow?).
Monetizing a population and privatizing all property are surefire ways of creating poverty where none existed before. THIS is how Capitalism (note: without socialist controls) actually manufactures the poor.
So... sorry, buddy, your favorite economic system sucks. It is highly immoral and completely vicious. And the more you support it, the more you support those evil behaviors.
You said: "Chinese peasants are streaming into the cities to find work at wages that you and I find appallingly low, and they're doing so because it's better than staying at home on the farm. Nobody's putting a gun to their heads to make them do factory work."
Gun? Sure there is. The "gun" is the government support of concentrating wealth into cities and under capitalists, instead of putting this wealth into socialist systems that benefit the commoner ONLY.
We have the same system of coercion in America. You get an enormous tax break for buying an SUV, but only a piddling one for buying a car with vaster fuel efficiency. You can get 100% abatement on your local property taxes if you're a corporation, but the small shop down the street gets hit each year for them. The examples are so numerous that it's pointless to continue.
So, you're wrong. Designing and then manipulating impoverished populations is the very definition of modern capitalism (also called other things: Hypercapitalism, looting capitalism, crony capitalism, etc.). It's tyranny under another name. It's the nice and calm way of killing people and stealing their property.
Once we have a system where you as an individual can legally pay no taxes at all for 4 out of the last 5 years (as Enron did before it collapsed), then I will agree with your sentiments. Until then, you're just worshipping wealth by ignoring how it is ravaging the poor and middle class. This subversion of government by money must stop before domestic war results.
while capitalism isn't perfect it's the best system we have.
WRONG. We HAD a better system, called "Socialist Capitalism" or whatever you are comfortable calling it. We applied populist controls to the use of capital. A person could use his capital to try to make himself a profit, but if he polluted, committed fraud, or abused workers, we slapped him down like the bitch he was.
But those populist controls are being cut at an increasing pace, leaving capital free to ravage the world... which it is exactly doing. As soon as capital ravages one spot sufficiently, it abandons it and attacks another spot.
There is no sane viewpoint in which this is "best". It's only a calm way of killing people and stealing their stuff. It's only a notch above despotic murder.
In a global economy, there will always be someone able/willing to do it for less money. Eventually those who were the go-to people are undercut. And then the undercutters are undercut. And it so on, and so forth. Eventually a global economic equilibrium is reached, where the price is the same everwhere.
So when you call up your landlord and hand him this line of reasoning to explain why you don't have the rent after being laid off by another offshoring round, what will he say?...
A. "That's OK. I can wait 3 to 8 years for prices to stabilize before I can recover my rent from you."
B. "Hit the road, jackass. You're evicted."
I think you've drunk too much of the Kool-Aid {tm} of the globalist "long term gains" myth. People don't eat and pay their bills in the long term. They eat 3 times a day. Bills are generally due each month. Etc.
I know everyone has their own tech support nightmare stories but my point with this one is why even have a tier one or general support line at all? More often then not, it is 100% completely useless and gets you nothing. I guess the status quo keeps them there but they could save even more money getting rid of them entirely.
Tier 1 serves two purposes now.
Firstly, having thoroughly and intentionally deskilled it, it became the lowest-hanging fruit for cost cutting. Hence, massive outsourcing and offshoring gutted Tier 1 support. Execs could look like heroes for their acumen at "saving money".
Secondly -- and mostly -- corporations stopped seeing customer support as valid. Since Tier 1 is the first contact, it made sense then to try to use that level of support as a "demotivator" for customers to actually seek any support whatsoever.
So, fella, please re-think your call for eliminating Tier 1 support. You're only following their plan to stop supporting their products for you. You are only allowing their vicious selfishness to authorize the removal of their responsibility.
As a metaphor, if politicians hired thugs to beat you up if you tried to vote, why would you start calling for the end of voting? STOP THE ABUSE.
The textbook is falling prey to a massive culture of distraction. IM, web, games, television, cellphones... the ubiquitous pull becomes even worse when the last thing a student wants to do is read a boring math text.
I can support this. I've sampled texts over the past several years once I noticed "the change", and am increasingly horrified.
The "change" is that these texts are like the worst webpages you could imagine. There are sidebars and textboxes literally everywhere on the pages, mixed with a wide variety of fonts, colors and of course largely irrelevent pictures. Each page is a blizzard of distraction.
Why do we expect children to concentrate when this type of thing is becoming the normal and primary source of school information?
I've thought this through and concluded it's not just be being an old fogey (I'm 38). Sequential texts carrying out a long thought process have largely been deleted from the K-9 school experience. Of course, this is right in line with the agenda of the "corporate consumer culture", so I should not be surprised.
Side effects? LUDDITE! We should not care about the side effects (like in Viagra's case, death and blindness) when we are having our Gee Whiz moment with a sexy (purrrrr!) new drug!
Just take the damned drug and be the test subject for the drug industry. We test Microsoft's software for them, don't we? So it's only natural that we're becoming drug testers for Big Pharma.
Considering that a Presidential order has the force of law, and in fact the Executive Office is the enforcement branch of the US government, I'd have to say your argument is poor.
At any rate, anyone who stops you from expressing yourself in public -- and I mean "stops you when you have every right to do so from a property standpoint" -- crosses the 1st Amendment. This is long precedented with endless court cases affirming your PERSONAL right to not be stopped. So a President CAN cross that amendment too, when he undertakes to stop someone from expressing.
Republican or otherwise, the USA President has no right whatsoever to stop Internet expressions. PERIOD. If the Executive Branch has any influence over the formation of TLDs, it can only be along the lines of current formations rules... and I hardly see porn sites being knocked out.
To sum up: Obviously, Bush is just rattling his Hyper-Conservative saber once again, since he still thinks he's anointed by God and can do no wrong. Someone's got to get that guy some Viagra so he can work off his frustrations on Laura Bush, and not the American public.
OP: There is a large swath of people who believe their interpretation of the Bible trumps the law.
You: We have a name for these folks: traitors.
Me: Why worry or hurl inaccurate labels? We have a far more accurate name for these people when the act on their Bible trumping: CRIMINALS. If you use the Bible to justify breaking secular law, the secular authorities are duty bound to prosecute you for it.
Really, it's not even personal. For example, we have people time and time again chaining themselves to military-base fences or blocking access to abortion clinics, and the police eventually show up and haul them away for trespassing and the like. More often than not, a judge and/or jury finds these people of violating the law, and then they are sentenced to jail.
Practically every person sympathizes with some of these protestors and the like, because some aspect of the protest or illegal act lines up with their personal philosophy. But it's still illegal, and in doing illegal things, one tends to pay the price.
Let's let the legal system address these trumpers. I'm far from a fan of that system, but we should let it function if there's to be any structure whatsoever to our society.
You may wish to point out at each opportunity how too much trumpin' is not particularly honorable, and perhaps the people involved should press for changes in the law, even the US Constitution itself. I know I'm particularly frustrated in trying to point out to people that the 2nd Amendment can't just be ignored, and that for true gun bans in America the Constitution must be amended to remove the 2nd Amendment. When people want to use mob rule and also pointedly ignore the amendment process, THEN we can rationally expect a civil war it drawing near.
Despite the fact that there is no way to meter air, capitalism manages to survive perfectly well despite the fact that we don't have to pay to breathe.
That's the other COST buried in the system: Public subsidies to clean the air that the Capitalists used as their toilet -- since the air was free to dump into. So this Capitalism is doing pretty well for itself, but NOT for the general public who has to carry the hidden costs of pollution.
So, YOU relax, fella. Once again, the facts of public-costs-while-private-profits demonstrate that you're WRONG.
If energy is free, they'll sell you the solar panels [...]
And I well note that solar panels are STILL commonly unavailable for powering your home, while the market suppliers are falling all over each other to provide you with piped energy sources that they can meter and hence can increase the price on in any period of (largely planned) scarcity. Solar equipment that DOES exist, is terribly expensive, since those same Capitalist scum did NOT make the investments in such technology to expand (hence cheapen) the supply.
YOU'RE OWNED! Go back to whatever Conservative thinktank that spawned you... because, Buddy, you're not even good at repeating the propaganda lines.
The Capitalist class will never allow their capital base to transform into a distributed and disconnected energy system, since any fool can take a solar panel and stick it out into the sun, with no meter there to tick-tick-tick (counting corporate profits).
The only way our Hypercapitalism will ever allow itself to invest in distributed energy systems is to have government control that enforces their entirely artificial command of profits. To wit: you will need to RENT solar panels, or be LICNESED (hence, taxed each year) to have them. Then the scumbag Capitalists will release "their" (in reality, OUR) billions to make solar power happen.
It's been said best in the past: You can't put a meter on the sun and wind. THAT is why the West labors under oil, coal and nuclear energy sources -- because those can be metered out and profited from. People with pipelines and trucking companies want everything to flow through them... so they can take a percentage in perpetuity.
Firstly, if you're going to propagandize, at least be good at it. You aren't.
Secondly, my point is entirely true. An amateur band can come up with the cash to produce 100s to 1000s of professional-looking packaged CDs. As I said before, technology has vastly lowered the bar for professional production. Any fool can look around and see that this is generally true. Those who don't agree are merely lying or engaging in that more subtle form of lying: willful ignorance.
Thirdly, small productions can approach other small infringing productions as equals. You may recall that there is something laying around called "law" and "court". There is always redress possible through the legal system. (Note: this does not apply to file-sharers. Each sharer is far too small to effectively use law enforcement upon. HENCE... file sharers are instead social change and there's nothing anyone can do about them that doesn't involve destroying basic personal liberty.)
Fourthly, digital duplication has been the most beneficial technology to affect music since the (bakelite?) record disc. No sane man can arrive at the conclusion that digitech is somehow "disrupting" music. As with all technology that vastly enables small producers, said tech has various clients of effect that have positive and negative sides for each client.
Sure, if you're an innately unfair person who advocates double standards, I'm sure that digitech DOES look disruptive now. After all, digitech should have stayed in the backrooms where the digital priesthood could monopolize it, hence rationing out the production to a subject population of consumers who would be forced to only accept or deny.
But digitech's vast capacity is available to anyone who can scrape together up to $2000 for the equipment to not only produce many digital copies of one's own work, but to also copy the works of others. The freedom to do one is the freedom to do the other.
So, tough titty for the likes of you. Corporations were pretty happy with digitech for all the efficiency it offered them, and also for the quality of production they could attain, but once it reached the common man those same corporations started to cry foul. But the genie's out of the bottle. It's about equal rights. If a corporation has to right to take a person's song and effectively steal it, then burn it onto 1000s of pieces of media and sell it, then a small operation in a person's garage also has the same right. And -- oh yeah -- it's not by accident that the same person's garage can produce 1000s of absolutely legal copies of their own work for distribution to the same retail outlets that the corporations have monopolized access to for years.
It's no coincidence that corporations are complaining about the tech's piracy capabilities at this time. They are complaining since their monopoly is in dire danger of collapsing due to the pervasive efficiency and empowerment made possible by digitech. The public availability of a powerful production method is at stake. The copyright issue is just a smokescreen.
We already have a legal system, and anyone can bring suit against infringement, so piracy is actually no public issue whatsoever. If you weren't such a corporate bitch, you'd see this.
Where the hell do you think this money is coming from?
My head has long told me that this is an unsupported conclusion of the pro-corporate forces that are trying to control that slippery product called "music". There is no proof whatsoever that touring is only possible due to the promotions of the record companies.
Firstly, it's completely obvious and true that touring itself is its own promotion mechanism. "Touring" of course encompasses everything from bar-room gigs, to concert starters, to main-event concerts.
And secondly, it's far more likely that touring itself was the cause of the rise of the record companies. As one of the obvious nitwits who have been lulled by that perversity called Western civilization, you engage in wilfull ignorance that bands existed before the Robber Barons (i.e. record companies) did.
Of course, this supports the "amateur" nature of sustainable music production, and from other posts you are definitely against that.
At any rate, your "OWNED" score is rising so rapidly now that epileptics are imperiled by viewing the flipping of the digits. You should stop before your mouth emits more stupidity (i.e. corporate propaganda). One thing that you should learn about talking on the Internet is that your lies and myths can be countered by someone knowledgable in about 1.2 seconds.
In other words, with a few exceptions, you want musicians to stop being professionals and become amateurs.
Well, nice way to try to control the debate, but once again you've failed to propagandize.
It is false that musicians are only contrained to be amateurs or professionals. With the web and small production houses (that can crank out CDs like a major player), the NEW stereotypical amateur band can achieve a professional-level of exposure.
You might want to look around every so often, as record-company execs apparently don't. You'd notice that things have changed. Take writing for instance. I used to write stuff by hand, and then I was able to own a typewriter, and now I can be my own production house (even being able to afford large scale printing that can produce thousands of copies of my work). Things have changed and technology is making a VAST middle ground between amateur and professional.
Of course, that would obliterate your point and your bias AGAINST artists and FOR the oppressive corporations who are trying to own them, so I'm sure you won't even respond to my post. You are, after all, completely OWNED.
Slashdot Mirror
While outsourcing has hit the tech sector in a moderate fashion,
... yet the outflow of capital and jobs is at record rates. Therefore, tax breaks don't work at all.
BZZT! Completely incorrect. I am a tech worker and have been since 1985. The industry now is awash in the FUD caused by outsourcing and offshoring. It is 100% pervasive. Tech workers live in fear as a standard issue now, and not just from rumors but pervasive practice of outsourcing, outsourcing, outsourcing. This is hardly "moderate"!
You get even more foolish here:
The answer to outsourcing is better eduction for American workers, tax breaks to enterprises that choose to locate factories in the U.S. and American free-trade partners (Canada, Mexico), investment in research & development (not necessarily by the government but by large lending institutions, and the general organs of the economy).
1. FACT: A "better education" just places you into a population of workers whose tasks are even more outsourcable and offshorable than before. Therefore, education is a LIABILITY, not an asset, since it incurs an enormous debt to buy less of a job future.
2. FACT: Corporations are swimming in unprecedented levels of tax breaks, grants, loan guarantees and outright bribes
3. FACT: American corporations want nothing to do with R&D anymore since it doesn't payoff in the next fiscal quarter as far as the MBAs are (solely) concerned. You're against protectionism, so what are you going to do, pass a law mandating R&D in America?
Everyone benefits when the whole world has jobs.
Oh, I agree, as long as you actually expand the franchise of the middle class. But that's NOT what's happening. What's actually happening is that the First World is losing sustainable jobs to the Third World, so they are losing their middle class. These jobs are creating a small uber-consuming class that is literally consuming itself in an orgy of spending. The rest of the offshoring is capturing dispossessed rurals and placing them into wage slavery in faux urbanized environments.
When you actually have evidence that a SUSTAINABLE middle class in the world is expanding, I'll be happy to hear your further comments. But America's and Europe 's middle classes are being cashed out to increase the wealth of the elite few, and they are leveraging the unsustainable American-type of lifestyle in Third World areas to tempt people into wage slavery. The scumbag capitalists are going through waves of movement from even the higher-priced areas they created, to lower ones in other Third World zones, to continue the gravy train of Hypercapitalism -- a.k.a. looting capitalism, or slash-and-burn capitalism.
Really, come back when you have some real arguments, pal.
The people in charge would have had to be incredibly stupid if the Iraq war was all about oil - they won't be getting much oil out of Iraq for a very long time.
So? As long as the "right people" (i.e. WASPs and Israelis) controlled those oil reserves, then they would get what they wanted one way or another.
People like to harp on the general observation that "the price of gas didn't fall so the Iraq War wasn't about oil", but it was never about price. The invasion was never about making it cheaper for consumers. It was all about controlling a significant fraction of the world's oil reserves so that a new extranational elite could take the next step into being trillionaires from parceling out such a commodity barrel by barrel, then gallon by gallon, then ounce by ounce.
This is probably one reason why a murderous asshole like Pat Robertson wants Chavez killed. Chavez is sharing the wealth of oil in ways that DON'T make Robertson's class of WASP and Israeli elites even wealthier.
It's the same thing when Wall Street condemns a company like Costco for actually paying their workers well. It's all about class war, and you can just bet that EVERYONE who posts on Slashdot are on the losing side of that war.
If you'll recall, the Bush Administration called it Operation Iraqi Liberation at first ... before someone noticed that too much truth was implied by that name, so they quickly changed it to Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Bzzt! Sorry, chum, but there are varying levels of, oh, I dunno, IMMENSE LEGAL REQUIREMENTS for individuals arriving in other countries. Many countries have REAL immigration laws -- unlike America (the land of cheap, often illegal, immigrant labor) -- which means they are highly restrictive and have small quotas.
The OP is right. Workers are NOT free to select a pool of global employers. Capital encounters about 100 times less friction when selecting a pool of global employees.
Time to turn off Rush Limbaugh and fucking THINK for a change, sport. Try it. After a while, you might even like having informed opinions of your own, not just those cooked-up in the Republican Echo Chamber first.
Wow, yeah, the Libertarians. What a laugh. Corporations (and thus, the wealthy) will exempt themselves from many sales taxes anyway.
... but no, the Libertarian-leaning executives, lawyers and accountants have re-defined it in their board rooms while you spent your time working yourself to death. So instead of a SALE, what actually happens is that the neo-buyer "gains control of company operations" while the neo-seller "gains control of financial assets". See? No "sale" occurred at all! What actually happened instead was a "new" form of transaction that -- what a coincidence! -- is defined so that it's not subject to tax.
The exemption processes have already been planned and are currently in force. Companies now "exchange" things instead of buying and selling. The most famous example is in buying an entire company. You -- the worker bee, or "sap" -- would think that THAT EVENT would trigger a sales tax, since it's, well, a SALE
I think I'll stop by the gas station and give the attendent "control of some dollar bills" while in exchange he gives me "control of some gallons of gas". We can then eliminate paying that silly gas tax since, after all, it wasn't actually a SALE.
Americans are going to fucking have to face the fact that taxes are the cost of running a civilization. If we progressively refuse to tax wealth, and then watch sustainable jobs either go overseas or get filled locally with cheap foreign labor, we'll have no civilization worth speaking of since there will be NO TAX BASE to fucking support it!
When you sign an employment contract you are agreeing to provide a service: your labour. To claim you own that contract is such an stupid idea that I don't see how it took hold of people minds at all.
... but he IS a big fat Republican propagandist, so we shouldn't be surprised. So I know how that stupid idea got into YOUR mind. Isn't it about time you owned up to it?
It's amazing how people like you use the term "contract" and then assume that only one side owns it. That's not a contract, stupid. A real contract is owned by both signatories -- that's what MAKES IT A CONTRACT.
Furthermore, contracts are made in societies that have laws governing how they are made. These laws tend to give the weaker signatory rights, even some that the contract cannot legally remove.
I know your best buddy Rush Limbaugh wouldn't agree with any of this
(In case you missed it, buddy, you JUST GOT OWNED.)
Somebody mod you up to Karma: Infinity.
I'm sooooo tired of hearing the dupes and rubes of the middle class pretending that the corporations don't own them body and soul, even when they stop employing them. Adapting isn't working, since the core problem of "capital supremacy" remains. Moving isn't working, for the same reason.
Capital is essentially frictionless now, and that's only because we have CHOSEN to not place social restraints on it. We've allowed labor to be decoupled from the wealth it produces. There's no natural law that says this should be so. So when the fuck are people going to wake up and return to regulating their corporations again?
The FACT that the most eminently outsourcable jobs on the basis of costs (i.e. executives) are not outsourced only illustrates what this all is: CLASS WARFARE. And the elites are winning by an enormous margin.
Me: You need to stop worshipping money and start ...
... so instead of googling it, try a few of the DOZENS OF BOOKS that document how the IMF ruins native economies (by monetizing, then globalizing them).
... an immoral privilege which corporations obtained by corrupting (i.e. owning) governments.
... since the raping of Iraq is fundamentally clear about how such a metaphor is essentially and
You: You need to start offering real arguments.
I already did, but since money is your religion you refuse to deal with blasphemy. Time to talk to your priest (i.e. stockbroker), eh? All this logical thinking must be making you uncomfortable.
Me: Monetizing a population and privatizing all property are surefire ways of creating poverty where none existed before
You: Wrong.
How insightful! Deny it all you like, but the history of Africa and the Western-dominated financial institutions only support what I said. You only respond with a one-liner (in this case, one-word) answer since you are trying to avoid looking at the vast body of evidence.
Like I said, you're ignorant -- probably willfully so -- and you need to educate yourself on the action of capital on world populations. I already talked about the death of the commons in Africa; google it and stop looking like a naysaying moron. I already talked about the IMF
Me: It is highly immoral and completely vicious.
You: It is based on the rights of the individual. Right to own property being the chief one of them. Besides being moral, the alternative -- communal ownership does not work.
Firstly, when did I say we should do away with the concept of private property? You've been listening to Rush Limbaugh a bit too much, Mr. Knee-Jerk Reaction.
Secondly, you have private property in societies with "commons". Why do you think the "commons" even had a name? It's named since its DIFFERENT than the private property under control of the owners. Both community and privacy exist, and are not mutually exclusive.
Thirdly, communal ownership DID work -- despite the "tragedy of the commons", which was no worse that the "eternal vigilance" required by representative democracy -- but the West has thrown all that out in an immoral orgy of privatizing profits. About the only thing now that's "public" is the ownership of corporate costs and debts
You sound like the "Fuck Communism" type. So what have you been doing to fight Corporate Communism? You sound like the type for whom "Socialism" is one of your dirty words, so what are you doing about corporations socializing their costs upon the public?
Me: And the more you support it, the more you support those evil behaviors.
You: Yeah, sure. Evil behaviors. One needs only to compare [...]
That's the usual fallacy performed by capitalist zombies like yourself. You compare regimes under overt killers (capitalist autocracies) with regimes run by covert ones (capitalist republics). For most of the 20th Century, the republics have externalized their violence by attacking the tyrannies. As the autocracies become subdued (note: by the same forces that the capitalist republics are being destroyed with at a slower pace), these republics have to continue their violent practices since -- as I've explained before -- their systems depend on it.
Buddy, you're getting so "owned" yourself in this argument string that I'm starting to wonder if you're actually a posting troll.
At any rate, your particular mental disease is that you are so excited about becoming a millionaire -- which you're extremely likely to never be, which is even more sad -- that you'll excuse everything that happens at the lower levels that makes such a system function. I don't even have to descend into a metaphor of "putting boiled babies' blood in your gas tank"
You're continuing to miss the point. If you're American (as I am) then you've already been ravaged (although not as severely as capital ravages a resource-rich area like Iraq). The ravaging involves (1) coming in, (2) increasing the standard of living into unsustainable levels, then (3) pulling out to leave it all to crash.
You may joke about "ravage me please", but millions of Americans with bills they cannot pay after their jobs fled, are not amused.
Unrestrained capitalism is thoroughly evil and must be stopped. Of course, since we're participants, WE must stop doing whatever we do that supports the extremity of such a system. Our insatiable demands are part of the problem.
Corinthian? Like the leather? Then you should be thicker skinned.
{chirp chirp}
Thanks, folks, I'll be here all week.
So what do you suggest instead? Communism and a government managed economy? Hmm, that doesn't work. Socialism and government owned companies? That doesn't work either without Capitalism, most socialist countries are privatizing their state-owned companies.
It sure is funny hearing the usual Hypercapitalist twit indulge in the "damn that centralized economy" slogan, while corporations are attaining grants, loan guarantees, and tax breaks by the 10s of billions from the government.
If you are against a centralized or planned economy, I'm sure you've protested mightily against all the tax abatements and state-budget line items that shovel billions of tax money into the maws of private entities. Ever hear of "corporate welfare"?
Capitalism, although it has its evils, is probably the best economic system right now, until some new social or technological development makes a better economy possible.
WRONG. We HAD a better system, called "Socialist Capitalism" or whatever you are comfortable calling it. We applied populist controls to the use of capital. A person could use his capital to try to make himself a profit, but if he polluted, committed fraud, or abused workers, we slapped him down like the bitch he was.
The best system has fled, and we are now embroiled in tyranny under a new name, and it's just getting started. Corporations are going to become far more obviously the owners of government mechanisms before people stop worshipping wealth and wake up to their own wage slavery.
Ideology only works in a perfect world, mate. And this ain't a perfect world...
Ideology is much of what's driving this sickness of Hypercapitalism. People continue to believe that corporations will help them when it's clearly obvious that their economic liberty is being progressively destroyed. The freedom to get into outrageous debt isn't liberty by any sane definition.
Capitalism may, indeed, foster inequality, but it does not create poverty
... sorry, buddy, your favorite economic system sucks. It is highly immoral and completely vicious. And the more you support it, the more you support those evil behaviors.
You need to stop worshipping money and start understanding the IMF and the World Bank, as well as what the "death of the commons" in Africa really did to people. Heck, why let you try to claim the Third World is not applicable to my argument? Try studying the history of Appalachia in the United States, primarily the 20th Century. The introduction of property taxes alone drove hordes of Appalachians out of their homes, and either out of the region or into apartments (where they became subordinate to landlords, you follow?).
Monetizing a population and privatizing all property are surefire ways of creating poverty where none existed before. THIS is how Capitalism (note: without socialist controls) actually manufactures the poor.
So
You said: "Chinese peasants are streaming into the cities to find work at wages that you and I find appallingly low, and they're doing so because it's better than staying at home on the farm. Nobody's putting a gun to their heads to make them do factory work."
Gun? Sure there is. The "gun" is the government support of concentrating wealth into cities and under capitalists, instead of putting this wealth into socialist systems that benefit the commoner ONLY.
We have the same system of coercion in America. You get an enormous tax break for buying an SUV, but only a piddling one for buying a car with vaster fuel efficiency. You can get 100% abatement on your local property taxes if you're a corporation, but the small shop down the street gets hit each year for them. The examples are so numerous that it's pointless to continue.
So, you're wrong. Designing and then manipulating impoverished populations is the very definition of modern capitalism (also called other things: Hypercapitalism, looting capitalism, crony capitalism, etc.). It's tyranny under another name. It's the nice and calm way of killing people and stealing their property.
Once we have a system where you as an individual can legally pay no taxes at all for 4 out of the last 5 years (as Enron did before it collapsed), then I will agree with your sentiments. Until then, you're just worshipping wealth by ignoring how it is ravaging the poor and middle class. This subversion of government by money must stop before domestic war results.
while capitalism isn't perfect it's the best system we have.
... which it is exactly doing. As soon as capital ravages one spot sufficiently, it abandons it and attacks another spot.
WRONG. We HAD a better system, called "Socialist Capitalism" or whatever you are comfortable calling it. We applied populist controls to the use of capital. A person could use his capital to try to make himself a profit, but if he polluted, committed fraud, or abused workers, we slapped him down like the bitch he was.
But those populist controls are being cut at an increasing pace, leaving capital free to ravage the world
There is no sane viewpoint in which this is "best". It's only a calm way of killing people and stealing their stuff. It's only a notch above despotic murder.
In a global economy, there will always be someone able/willing to do it for less money. Eventually those who were the go-to people are undercut. And then the undercutters are undercut. And it so on, and so forth. Eventually a global economic equilibrium is reached, where the price is the same everwhere.
...
So when you call up your landlord and hand him this line of reasoning to explain why you don't have the rent after being laid off by another offshoring round, what will he say?
A. "That's OK. I can wait 3 to 8 years for prices to stabilize before I can recover my rent from you."
B. "Hit the road, jackass. You're evicted."
I think you've drunk too much of the Kool-Aid {tm} of the globalist "long term gains" myth. People don't eat and pay their bills in the long term. They eat 3 times a day. Bills are generally due each month. Etc.
I know everyone has their own tech support nightmare stories but my point with this one is why even have a tier one or general support line at all? More often then not, it is 100% completely useless and gets you nothing. I guess the status quo keeps them there but they could save even more money getting rid of them entirely.
Tier 1 serves two purposes now.
Firstly, having thoroughly and intentionally deskilled it, it became the lowest-hanging fruit for cost cutting. Hence, massive outsourcing and offshoring gutted Tier 1 support. Execs could look like heroes for their acumen at "saving money".
Secondly -- and mostly -- corporations stopped seeing customer support as valid. Since Tier 1 is the first contact, it made sense then to try to use that level of support as a "demotivator" for customers to actually seek any support whatsoever.
So, fella, please re-think your call for eliminating Tier 1 support. You're only following their plan to stop supporting their products for you. You are only allowing their vicious selfishness to authorize the removal of their responsibility.
As a metaphor, if politicians hired thugs to beat you up if you tried to vote, why would you start calling for the end of voting? STOP THE ABUSE.
The textbook is falling prey to a massive culture of distraction. IM, web, games, television, cellphones... the ubiquitous pull becomes even worse when the last thing a student wants to do is read a boring math text.
I can support this. I've sampled texts over the past several years once I noticed "the change", and am increasingly horrified.
The "change" is that these texts are like the worst webpages you could imagine. There are sidebars and textboxes literally everywhere on the pages, mixed with a wide variety of fonts, colors and of course largely irrelevent pictures. Each page is a blizzard of distraction.
Why do we expect children to concentrate when this type of thing is becoming the normal and primary source of school information?
I've thought this through and concluded it's not just be being an old fogey (I'm 38). Sequential texts carrying out a long thought process have largely been deleted from the K-9 school experience. Of course, this is right in line with the agenda of the "corporate consumer culture", so I should not be surprised.
Side effects? LUDDITE! We should not care about the side effects (like in Viagra's case, death and blindness) when we are having our Gee Whiz moment with a sexy (purrrrr!) new drug!
Just take the damned drug and be the test subject for the drug industry. We test Microsoft's software for them, don't we? So it's only natural that we're becoming drug testers for Big Pharma.
Considering that a Presidential order has the force of law, and in fact the Executive Office is the enforcement branch of the US government, I'd have to say your argument is poor.
... and I hardly see porn sites being knocked out.
At any rate, anyone who stops you from expressing yourself in public -- and I mean "stops you when you have every right to do so from a property standpoint" -- crosses the 1st Amendment. This is long precedented with endless court cases affirming your PERSONAL right to not be stopped. So a President CAN cross that amendment too, when he undertakes to stop someone from expressing.
Republican or otherwise, the USA President has no right whatsoever to stop Internet expressions. PERIOD. If the Executive Branch has any influence over the formation of TLDs, it can only be along the lines of current formations rules
To sum up: Obviously, Bush is just rattling his Hyper-Conservative saber once again, since he still thinks he's anointed by God and can do no wrong. Someone's got to get that guy some Viagra so he can work off his frustrations on Laura Bush, and not the American public.
OP: There is a large swath of people who believe their interpretation of the Bible trumps the law.
You: We have a name for these folks: traitors.
Me: Why worry or hurl inaccurate labels? We have a far more accurate name for these people when the act on their Bible trumping: CRIMINALS. If you use the Bible to justify breaking secular law, the secular authorities are duty bound to prosecute you for it.
Really, it's not even personal. For example, we have people time and time again chaining themselves to military-base fences or blocking access to abortion clinics, and the police eventually show up and haul them away for trespassing and the like. More often than not, a judge and/or jury finds these people of violating the law, and then they are sentenced to jail.
Practically every person sympathizes with some of these protestors and the like, because some aspect of the protest or illegal act lines up with their personal philosophy. But it's still illegal, and in doing illegal things, one tends to pay the price.
Let's let the legal system address these trumpers. I'm far from a fan of that system, but we should let it function if there's to be any structure whatsoever to our society.
You may wish to point out at each opportunity how too much trumpin' is not particularly honorable, and perhaps the people involved should press for changes in the law, even the US Constitution itself. I know I'm particularly frustrated in trying to point out to people that the 2nd Amendment can't just be ignored, and that for true gun bans in America the Constitution must be amended to remove the 2nd Amendment. When people want to use mob rule and also pointedly ignore the amendment process, THEN we can rationally expect a civil war it drawing near.
Despite the fact that there is no way to meter air, capitalism manages to survive perfectly well despite the fact that we don't have to pay to breathe.
... because, Buddy, you're not even good at repeating the propaganda lines.
That's the other COST buried in the system: Public subsidies to clean the air that the Capitalists used as their toilet -- since the air was free to dump into. So this Capitalism is doing pretty well for itself, but NOT for the general public who has to carry the hidden costs of pollution.
So, YOU relax, fella. Once again, the facts of public-costs-while-private-profits demonstrate that you're WRONG.
If energy is free, they'll sell you the solar panels [...]
And I well note that solar panels are STILL commonly unavailable for powering your home, while the market suppliers are falling all over each other to provide you with piped energy sources that they can meter and hence can increase the price on in any period of (largely planned) scarcity. Solar equipment that DOES exist, is terribly expensive, since those same Capitalist scum did NOT make the investments in such technology to expand (hence cheapen) the supply.
YOU'RE OWNED! Go back to whatever Conservative thinktank that spawned you
The Capitalist class will never allow their capital base to transform into a distributed and disconnected energy system, since any fool can take a solar panel and stick it out into the sun, with no meter there to tick-tick-tick (counting corporate profits).
... so they can take a percentage in perpetuity.
The only way our Hypercapitalism will ever allow itself to invest in distributed energy systems is to have government control that enforces their entirely artificial command of profits. To wit: you will need to RENT solar panels, or be LICNESED (hence, taxed each year) to have them. Then the scumbag Capitalists will release "their" (in reality, OUR) billions to make solar power happen.
It's been said best in the past: You can't put a meter on the sun and wind. THAT is why the West labors under oil, coal and nuclear energy sources -- because those can be metered out and profited from. People with pipelines and trucking companies want everything to flow through them
And THAT sums it up.
Firstly, if you're going to propagandize, at least be good at it. You aren't.
... file sharers are instead social change and there's nothing anyone can do about them that doesn't involve destroying basic personal liberty.)
Secondly, my point is entirely true. An amateur band can come up with the cash to produce 100s to 1000s of professional-looking packaged CDs. As I said before, technology has vastly lowered the bar for professional production. Any fool can look around and see that this is generally true. Those who don't agree are merely lying or engaging in that more subtle form of lying: willful ignorance.
Thirdly, small productions can approach other small infringing productions as equals. You may recall that there is something laying around called "law" and "court". There is always redress possible through the legal system. (Note: this does not apply to file-sharers. Each sharer is far too small to effectively use law enforcement upon. HENCE
Fourthly, digital duplication has been the most beneficial technology to affect music since the (bakelite?) record disc. No sane man can arrive at the conclusion that digitech is somehow "disrupting" music. As with all technology that vastly enables small producers, said tech has various clients of effect that have positive and negative sides for each client.
Sure, if you're an innately unfair person who advocates double standards, I'm sure that digitech DOES look disruptive now. After all, digitech should have stayed in the backrooms where the digital priesthood could monopolize it, hence rationing out the production to a subject population of consumers who would be forced to only accept or deny.
But digitech's vast capacity is available to anyone who can scrape together up to $2000 for the equipment to not only produce many digital copies of one's own work, but to also copy the works of others. The freedom to do one is the freedom to do the other.
So, tough titty for the likes of you. Corporations were pretty happy with digitech for all the efficiency it offered them, and also for the quality of production they could attain, but once it reached the common man those same corporations started to cry foul. But the genie's out of the bottle. It's about equal rights. If a corporation has to right to take a person's song and effectively steal it, then burn it onto 1000s of pieces of media and sell it, then a small operation in a person's garage also has the same right. And -- oh yeah -- it's not by accident that the same person's garage can produce 1000s of absolutely legal copies of their own work for distribution to the same retail outlets that the corporations have monopolized access to for years.
It's no coincidence that corporations are complaining about the tech's piracy capabilities at this time. They are complaining since their monopoly is in dire danger of collapsing due to the pervasive efficiency and empowerment made possible by digitech. The public availability of a powerful production method is at stake. The copyright issue is just a smokescreen.
We already have a legal system, and anyone can bring suit against infringement, so piracy is actually no public issue whatsoever. If you weren't such a corporate bitch, you'd see this.
Where the hell do you think this money is coming from?
My head has long told me that this is an unsupported conclusion of the pro-corporate forces that are trying to control that slippery product called "music". There is no proof whatsoever that touring is only possible due to the promotions of the record companies.
Firstly, it's completely obvious and true that touring itself is its own promotion mechanism. "Touring" of course encompasses everything from bar-room gigs, to concert starters, to main-event concerts.
And secondly, it's far more likely that touring itself was the cause of the rise of the record companies. As one of the obvious nitwits who have been lulled by that perversity called Western civilization, you engage in wilfull ignorance that bands existed before the Robber Barons (i.e. record companies) did.
Of course, this supports the "amateur" nature of sustainable music production, and from other posts you are definitely against that.
At any rate, your "OWNED" score is rising so rapidly now that epileptics are imperiled by viewing the flipping of the digits. You should stop before your mouth emits more stupidity (i.e. corporate propaganda). One thing that you should learn about talking on the Internet is that your lies and myths can be countered by someone knowledgable in about 1.2 seconds.
In other words, with a few exceptions, you want musicians to stop being professionals and become amateurs.
Well, nice way to try to control the debate, but once again you've failed to propagandize.
It is false that musicians are only contrained to be amateurs or professionals. With the web and small production houses (that can crank out CDs like a major player), the NEW stereotypical amateur band can achieve a professional-level of exposure.
You might want to look around every so often, as record-company execs apparently don't. You'd notice that things have changed. Take writing for instance. I used to write stuff by hand, and then I was able to own a typewriter, and now I can be my own production house (even being able to afford large scale printing that can produce thousands of copies of my work). Things have changed and technology is making a VAST middle ground between amateur and professional.
Of course, that would obliterate your point and your bias AGAINST artists and FOR the oppressive corporations who are trying to own them, so I'm sure you won't even respond to my post. You are, after all, completely OWNED.