The first tiem I heard of Eugene Jarvis was in a book about classic video games with the qoute "The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games."
That is actually a falacy. The people that lived a hundred years ago would not understand a lot of the issues we are faced with simply becuase they were not issues. It was a matter of common sense. The classic examples are sexuality and violence. If you asked Horace (around 10 BC or so) or Ovid (around the same), they would not have understood the differences in sexuality that we now classify as being different. The same with violence. The average ancient greek did things on a daily basis taht would shock and horrify even the most hardened inner city gang member today. The ancients greeks had a festival were women had tgo throw a dead pig in a well and three days later climb down there and fish it back up. The ancients greeks when they went back to nature, really went back to nature. They would go out in the woods and literally rip apart small animals with their bare hands and eat them raw. In fact there is actually a greek word for the science of eating raw flesh and several manuscripts were supposedly written on the subject. The ancient greeks had a connection with nature and the animals we have long since lost. The same with people 100 years ago, they had conections and attitudes that we don't have. If we ahd grown up then we would have the same asttitudes but we wouldn't be like we are now - we wouldn't be us. So you are partly correct - if any person lived and grew in any era, they woudl grow to fit into that era. But if we were to take say an adult ancient greek out of the past and transport him here, no matter how much education or social interaction he had he would never ever fit in cause he is not the same as us.
As to the attitudes towards women, you are somewhat correct and somewhat wrong. men of the times often kept women out of politics, not becuase they thought women were inferior (though some if not many obviously did) but to a large extent becuase they wanted to protect women. Politics is a messy business and it wasn't something most men wanted women to dirty their hands with. It was one of the side effects of the victorian era - before it, women were as much a part of everyday siociety as men were. They worked at the home and in the fields, helped to support the family, etc. But as they were no longer needed becuase the husband could support the family alone, a lot of guys thought their wives should be above dirtying their hands with work. Women were thought to be above that. On the other hand, there was no reason to hold back women that did want to dirty their hands. If a woman wanted to vote, she should have been allowed to. Its the pedestal problem - once you put something on top of a pedestal it harms that things interaction with everything else. That was what happened with the victorian era - if women were above it then they were restricted from it as well. A similiar thing occured in France during the early middle ages with the Marovingians. They were set on such a high pedestal (of holiness this time) that they became useless to reality becuase they were so restricted in their interactions with it. In the end the price of freedom is that you have to get your hands dirty. Women eventually fought their way off the pedestal and are now a part of our culture in a real way again. Unfortunately some feminists are so sexist that they are trying to fight their way back up onto the pedestal.
If they banned video games cause of their violence they would have to ban television too. Afterall, those superheroes are all acting violent and beating the crap out of bad guys. The Justice League is just going to have to love Lex Luthor from now on...
Claiming that people are violent because they play video games is like claiming people like swinging on ropes cause they play pitfall. The worst a game can do is bring out the violence taht is already inside of you. And if a video game is enough to put the average person over the top on that count then our siociety is in very great trouble indeed.
There are three kinds of liars in the world: liars, damn lairs, and statistics. The problem with yours is you present it in a vacuum. There is more than just the number of people working. There is population growth - we are gaining ppl to the labor force faster than jobs. There is the standard of those jobs - 20 million Mcjobs aren't something to be proud of if in the meantime 10 million good paying high tech jobs 'fled'. these are only some of the factors. How many of those jobs are partitme/underemployed/contract work? As to total income tax going up you can't make any judgement about that either. If 1 million workers lose their $50,000 jobs and are forced to work for the clown (Ronald McDonald or Bush, take your pick) but one CEO gets a 10 million dollar raise, income tax values will most certianly go up. And of course what about changes to the income tax code/interpetation? See, statistics are real numbers but you have to place them in context in order for them to mean aything. However, no one can get the full context. You only get the context the author wants you to get which could support any conclusion the author wants - just by altering the context and giving only certain info while not mentioning either. Take the US during the Civil War - the economy had a boom so it should have been a great time for the economy and hence the people until you release it was good due to large war supplying demand being fueled by massive amounts of death.
An indian can work for indian wages and pay indian prices. I can't work for indian wages and pay american prices. Since cost seems to be the only thing that ppl compete on anymore, there is no way to comepte against an indian without moving to india to take advantage of the prices. Unfortunetaly india doesn't allow imigration like that so I'm stuck. Any suggestion, idiot?
Actaully that is what justifies 4 years of college. If it is no longer a given and becomes a gamble, fewer will risk it. Which means that the system is in effect dumbing itself down. What we need is free college - if you need a BS to get a job, then the govt shoudl apy for it. Otherwise we'll see a drop in the populouses education which isn't good for either democracy or the market. But that's what corp.'s want, right? Stupid consumers...
"Note that, if your income stays still, and you pay twice as much for everything, you just had a 50% pay cut."
Note that, if your income becoems nill cause your job went to india, and you would only have to pay half as much for everything, you've had a 100% pay cut and can't afford to take advantage of those prices.
Its like lemmings - the ones who haven't fallen into the sea are pushing to go over themselves. (Yes, I know the rumors taht lemmings don't jump into the sae, that Disney actually threw them into the sea in order to finish their video back in the 60's becuase they found much to their dismay taht if all the lemmings constanly jumped into the sea - there would be no more lemmings.)
None of your thoughts puts food on my plate. Dreamers starve to death. So do teachers. Have you seen the state of public education in the last decade? It is insanely bad.
This is how we get ourseves into a frenzy. In other words, we are using the internet in the same way the revolutionaries of the 1800's used the press. Of course we don't want a revolution (at least most of us don't) but we do want to be heard. The more we whip up the mob here and the more we get our message sent out, the more the govt will hear and react.
So you don't support free trade. Afterall, our ancestors suceeded were tariifs were the order of the day. Plus: a butcher can go work in a fcatory with little retraining. The same doesn't true for work that requires a college education. Plus, our ancestors came out on top laregly due to the GI bill. It wasn't till the 1940-1970's that we really saw a rise of the middle class in america as we know it (as opposed to the more limited english-type middle class that arrived with the industrial revolution and owned factories - and soon made the entry to middle classedom nearly impossible. As Elizibeth Gaskell once noted, the factory workers had come up through poverty but not the destitution that came to be inflicted on the wrokers later. As for Horatio Alger - it actually proved the so-called 'american dream' as just that, an illusion. Everyoen one of his characters runs into a point where they cannot get ahead and cannot save. It is at this point that an act of god - saving the faftory workers son or daughter usually - propels them to the stars.)
You want to be scared? Recent studies suggest that even if you factor in the depopulation of zerop birth rates in india/china and take a liberal view of technological growth it still turns out the the world cannot live at our middle class standard of living (ie. every one has a car, a house, a tv etc. - not two cars and not mansions but real world standards). China alone would make it impossible. As a result unless your going to live to see 2500 when the tech catchs up, our standard of living will disappear to ghetto levels for the rest of our lives and neve get substantially better, all in order to 'balance with the world'.
I'm one of those graduates and the only concilation I have is that the automatic "well, you were on top in the 90's so now you deserve to suffer, you shouldn't have been greedy" (even though i am just getting into the field and i did so almost purely out of interest) has turned into "its free trade and in the long run you'll be better for it" (assuming I don't starve to death in the interm - not even bankruptcy gets rid of student debts.) Hopefully, by the time I end up on the street as a burn out (which is getting more and more common - use a recent graduate till they suffer a collapse then get another one) there will be real sympathy... and a job offering as the deliverator.
Add Scranton and Wilkes Barrie, Pennslyvania to the list. We lost our economies manufcaturing base and have not and probably never will recover. Most people think its hopeless here and our leaving. A recent study has shown that we missed out on the biggest economic boom int eh countries histroy (the 90's). They talk about how we don't need the manufacturing jobs and we can do higher paying work. Trouble is the people fired from the manufacturing jobs aren't getting those higher paying jobs. Its easy to say retrain but how is a former factory worker going to pay for a college education?
That is becuase CEO's are now making massively larger salaries than they used to. Free trade might be good for the economy but as others have noted the only people who have the power to take advantage of that goodness are those that are already wealthy to begin with. Check here.
He gets free housing - the cardboard box kind. And the bank makes its money by investing it into forieng markets and multinational corporate stock so the lower housing costs never materialize here. You lose your job here, the ceo makes money, puts it in the bank, the bank puts it into forieng investments and stocks, which drive more outsourcing.
And when his staffer who reads it notes it doesn't include a campaign donation, he'll promptly throw it out and your congressmen and president won't even hear about it.
The indian economy is protectionist. The government has banned coke and a couple of other companies from selling their precisely for the reason that they don't want international companies destorying their industries through competition. So it works out this way - we pay the indians for software, services, etc. They use that money to buy goods from other indians (or china, taiwan just as we do - us stuff is too expensive). We send money out and we're lucky if 10% comes back. Laregly our economy is running on credit over there. That's why we had growth while everyone now still suffers. We're running on money we saved up from the last century (value of the dollar for example.) Currently though we are burning through that credit like crazy. Eventually we'll no longer be able to handle this trade imbalance and indian will get work and do business with another country while we rot.
And those who are so keen on forieng firms investing here - remember the theory of economic imperialism (you should, britian and the us have been using it for over a century). Our economy becoems based on forieng firms and forieng investment. Then one day the country of china gets mad at us and wants us to do something. We say no and they pull their investments destroying our economy. In 1900's we did it all the time, especially to the third world. Why do you think we have so much forieng aid? Prop up a dictator, make him dependent on your continued aid, then pull his strings. Now in the 2000's the third world is doing it to us. In addition the former allies of our imperialism, coke, pepsi, etc. have turned traitor and our now playing for our enemies.
yes, in protectionism the average goes down where as in free trade the average benefit goes up. But in protectionism, the average worker benefits while the super greedy CEO goes down a lot so as to create a lower average than free trade were the average worker goes down but the super greedy CEO makes so much cash that he/she makes up for the loss and comes out ahead.
Slashdot Mirror
Camelot?
The first tiem I heard of Eugene Jarvis was in a book about classic video games with the qoute "The only legitimate use of a computer is to play games."
I played Laser Blast for 8 hours once... but then my brother accidently hit the reset switch.
Personally, I blame it on El Nino.
"Dude, people are the same. Always."
That is actually a falacy. The people that lived a hundred years ago would not understand a lot of the issues we are faced with simply becuase they were not issues. It was a matter of common sense. The classic examples are sexuality and violence. If you asked Horace (around 10 BC or so) or Ovid (around the same), they would not have understood the differences in sexuality that we now classify as being different. The same with violence. The average ancient greek did things on a daily basis taht would shock and horrify even the most hardened inner city gang member today. The ancients greeks had a festival were women had tgo throw a dead pig in a well and three days later climb down there and fish it back up. The ancients greeks when they went back to nature, really went back to nature. They would go out in the woods and literally rip apart small animals with their bare hands and eat them raw. In fact there is actually a greek word for the science of eating raw flesh and several manuscripts were supposedly written on the subject. The ancient greeks had a connection with nature and the animals we have long since lost. The same with people 100 years ago, they had conections and attitudes that we don't have. If we ahd grown up then we would have the same asttitudes but we wouldn't be like we are now - we wouldn't be us. So you are partly correct - if any person lived and grew in any era, they woudl grow to fit into that era. But if we were to take say an adult ancient greek out of the past and transport him here, no matter how much education or social interaction he had he would never ever fit in cause he is not the same as us.
As to the attitudes towards women, you are somewhat correct and somewhat wrong. men of the times often kept women out of politics, not becuase they thought women were inferior (though some if not many obviously did) but to a large extent becuase they wanted to protect women. Politics is a messy business and it wasn't something most men wanted women to dirty their hands with. It was one of the side effects of the victorian era - before it, women were as much a part of everyday siociety as men were. They worked at the home and in the fields, helped to support the family, etc. But as they were no longer needed becuase the husband could support the family alone, a lot of guys thought their wives should be above dirtying their hands with work. Women were thought to be above that. On the other hand, there was no reason to hold back women that did want to dirty their hands. If a woman wanted to vote, she should have been allowed to. Its the pedestal problem - once you put something on top of a pedestal it harms that things interaction with everything else. That was what happened with the victorian era - if women were above it then they were restricted from it as well. A similiar thing occured in France during the early middle ages with the Marovingians. They were set on such a high pedestal (of holiness this time) that they became useless to reality becuase they were so restricted in their interactions with it. In the end the price of freedom is that you have to get your hands dirty. Women eventually fought their way off the pedestal and are now a part of our culture in a real way again. Unfortunately some feminists are so sexist that they are trying to fight their way back up onto the pedestal.
If they banned video games cause of their violence they would have to ban television too. Afterall, those superheroes are all acting violent and beating the crap out of bad guys. The Justice League is just going to have to love Lex Luthor from now on...
Claiming that people are violent because they play video games is like claiming people like swinging on ropes cause they play pitfall. The worst a game can do is bring out the violence taht is already inside of you. And if a video game is enough to put the average person over the top on that count then our siociety is in very great trouble indeed.
There are three kinds of liars in the world: liars, damn lairs, and statistics. The problem with yours is you present it in a vacuum. There is more than just the number of people working. There is population growth - we are gaining ppl to the labor force faster than jobs. There is the standard of those jobs - 20 million Mcjobs aren't something to be proud of if in the meantime 10 million good paying high tech jobs 'fled'. these are only some of the factors. How many of those jobs are partitme/underemployed/contract work? As to total income tax going up you can't make any judgement about that either. If 1 million workers lose their $50,000 jobs and are forced to work for the clown (Ronald McDonald or Bush, take your pick) but one CEO gets a 10 million dollar raise, income tax values will most certianly go up. And of course what about changes to the income tax code/interpetation? See, statistics are real numbers but you have to place them in context in order for them to mean aything. However, no one can get the full context. You only get the context the author wants you to get which could support any conclusion the author wants - just by altering the context and giving only certain info while not mentioning either. Take the US during the Civil War - the economy had a boom so it should have been a great time for the economy and hence the people until you release it was good due to large war supplying demand being fueled by massive amounts of death.
An indian can work for indian wages and pay indian prices. I can't work for indian wages and pay american prices. Since cost seems to be the only thing that ppl compete on anymore, there is no way to comepte against an indian without moving to india to take advantage of the prices. Unfortunetaly india doesn't allow imigration like that so I'm stuck. Any suggestion, idiot?
Actaully that is what justifies 4 years of college. If it is no longer a given and becomes a gamble, fewer will risk it. Which means that the system is in effect dumbing itself down. What we need is free college - if you need a BS to get a job, then the govt shoudl apy for it. Otherwise we'll see a drop in the populouses education which isn't good for either democracy or the market. But that's what corp.'s want, right? Stupid consumers...
"Note that, if your income stays still, and you pay twice as much for everything, you just had a 50% pay cut."
Note that, if your income becoems nill cause your job went to india, and you would only have to pay half as much for everything, you've had a 100% pay cut and can't afford to take advantage of those prices.
Its like lemmings - the ones who haven't fallen into the sea are pushing to go over themselves. (Yes, I know the rumors taht lemmings don't jump into the sae, that Disney actually threw them into the sea in order to finish their video back in the 60's becuase they found much to their dismay taht if all the lemmings constanly jumped into the sea - there would be no more lemmings.)
None of your thoughts puts food on my plate. Dreamers starve to death. So do teachers. Have you seen the state of public education in the last decade? It is insanely bad.
The son of a School Teacher.
This is how we get ourseves into a frenzy. In other words, we are using the internet in the same way the revolutionaries of the 1800's used the press. Of course we don't want a revolution (at least most of us don't) but we do want to be heard. The more we whip up the mob here and the more we get our message sent out, the more the govt will hear and react.
Tax cuts for the rich Money sent to India U.S. workers screwed
So you don't support free trade. Afterall, our ancestors suceeded were tariifs were the order of the day. Plus: a butcher can go work in a fcatory with little retraining. The same doesn't true for work that requires a college education. Plus, our ancestors came out on top laregly due to the GI bill. It wasn't till the 1940-1970's that we really saw a rise of the middle class in america as we know it (as opposed to the more limited english-type middle class that arrived with the industrial revolution and owned factories - and soon made the entry to middle classedom nearly impossible. As Elizibeth Gaskell once noted, the factory workers had come up through poverty but not the destitution that came to be inflicted on the wrokers later. As for Horatio Alger - it actually proved the so-called 'american dream' as just that, an illusion. Everyoen one of his characters runs into a point where they cannot get ahead and cannot save. It is at this point that an act of god - saving the faftory workers son or daughter usually - propels them to the stars.)
You want to be scared? Recent studies suggest that even if you factor in the depopulation of zerop birth rates in india/china and take a liberal view of technological growth it still turns out the the world cannot live at our middle class standard of living (ie. every one has a car, a house, a tv etc. - not two cars and not mansions but real world standards). China alone would make it impossible. As a result unless your going to live to see 2500 when the tech catchs up, our standard of living will disappear to ghetto levels for the rest of our lives and neve get substantially better, all in order to 'balance with the world'.
I'm one of those graduates and the only concilation I have is that the automatic "well, you were on top in the 90's so now you deserve to suffer, you shouldn't have been greedy" (even though i am just getting into the field and i did so almost purely out of interest) has turned into "its free trade and in the long run you'll be better for it" (assuming I don't starve to death in the interm - not even bankruptcy gets rid of student debts.) Hopefully, by the time I end up on the street as a burn out (which is getting more and more common - use a recent graduate till they suffer a collapse then get another one) there will be real sympathy... and a job offering as the deliverator.
It all comes down to the markets - they want us to work at Inidan pay levels whiel paying american prices. Suprise, suprise, we can't.
Add Scranton and Wilkes Barrie, Pennslyvania to the list. We lost our economies manufcaturing base and have not and probably never will recover. Most people think its hopeless here and our leaving. A recent study has shown that we missed out on the biggest economic boom int eh countries histroy (the 90's). They talk about how we don't need the manufacturing jobs and we can do higher paying work. Trouble is the people fired from the manufacturing jobs aren't getting those higher paying jobs. Its easy to say retrain but how is a former factory worker going to pay for a college education?
"INCLUDING average salary levels"
That is becuase CEO's are now making massively larger salaries than they used to. Free trade might be good for the economy but as others have noted the only people who have the power to take advantage of that goodness are those that are already wealthy to begin with. Check here.
He gets free housing - the cardboard box kind. And the bank makes its money by investing it into forieng markets and multinational corporate stock so the lower housing costs never materialize here. You lose your job here, the ceo makes money, puts it in the bank, the bank puts it into forieng investments and stocks, which drive more outsourcing.
"Write your congressman, write the president"
And when his staffer who reads it notes it doesn't include a campaign donation, he'll promptly throw it out and your congressmen and president won't even hear about it.
The indian economy is protectionist. The government has banned coke and a couple of other companies from selling their precisely for the reason that they don't want international companies destorying their industries through competition. So it works out this way - we pay the indians for software, services, etc. They use that money to buy goods from other indians (or china, taiwan just as we do - us stuff is too expensive). We send money out and we're lucky if 10% comes back. Laregly our economy is running on credit over there. That's why we had growth while everyone now still suffers. We're running on money we saved up from the last century (value of the dollar for example.) Currently though we are burning through that credit like crazy. Eventually we'll no longer be able to handle this trade imbalance and indian will get work and do business with another country while we rot.
And those who are so keen on forieng firms investing here - remember the theory of economic imperialism (you should, britian and the us have been using it for over a century). Our economy becoems based on forieng firms and forieng investment. Then one day the country of china gets mad at us and wants us to do something. We say no and they pull their investments destroying our economy. In 1900's we did it all the time, especially to the third world. Why do you think we have so much forieng aid? Prop up a dictator, make him dependent on your continued aid, then pull his strings. Now in the 2000's the third world is doing it to us. In addition the former allies of our imperialism, coke, pepsi, etc. have turned traitor and our now playing for our enemies.
"protectionism ends up leaving us all poorer"
yes, in protectionism the average goes down where as in free trade the average benefit goes up. But in protectionism, the average worker benefits while the super greedy CEO goes down a lot so as to create a lower average than free trade were the average worker goes down but the super greedy CEO makes so much cash that he/she makes up for the loss and comes out ahead.