What Darwin missed is that mutual cooperation ensures survival of those fittest and without that cooperation not even they survive. Comeptition leads only to the fittest coming out on top. It's like a race through a tunnel. The fittest may be the fastest but it doesn't really matter if no one is able to finish.
And how long does one have to spend to go to college to learn buggy-whip manufacturing or car manufacturing for that matter? I had to go to college for four years to get a degree in comp sci. I just love the president going on about how the future is in biotech or such - you need what? 8 years of college at some pretty presitigious schools to get a job in the biotech field. Whose going to pay for it?
So what your saying is in two to three years when all these outshoring investments fail, we'll see another recession. Just great. What if the jobs don't come back before then...
Immigration qoutas are in fact necessary. Diversity in a limited form is a great thing for any culture but not when it leads to a loss of social cohesion. An excellent and the classical example, the roman empire, showed this: in the late empire there was a huge amounts of imigration into it (yeah, they were all barabarians, haha, funny). The result was a lot of diversity. It also resulted in an roman population full of people who didn't think of themselves as romans. Duringt he early republic and even early empire, when rome was threatened, everyone got out on the field and kicked back the invaders. They could ahve doen the same when the barabaians invaded. However, when the barbarians did invade, the average roman thought they were liberators - liberating them from an empire they never really felt they belonged to but had immigrated to anyway. The roman empire had ceased to see itself as one people - they stopped considering themselves romans and so the roman empire collapsed. The same would hold true for the US.
This isn't charity dude. Our bosses are taking food out of our mouths and putting it in yours. AQnd sure the us is the big benefitter of it - but what part of the us?
" the sooner we get through the series of bloody revolutions that split the US into a number of autocratic fiefdoms and the sooner we can just settle down and get used to subsistence farming on feudal plantations."
"Although IT jobs are currently undergoing what manufacturing went through in the 1990s, many more jobs will be created in the US as a result of the lower costs associated with outsourcing IT work. The jobs created at home will be higher paid too."
Yep and who has the money to get the education those jobs will require? I live in NE Pennsylvania, one of the hardest hit by the manufacturing decline, and I can tell you that the people that were layed off from those plants aren't the ones getting those higher paying jobs. You fire a 50 or even worse a 60 year old who has worked his whole life for your plant and what do expect him/her to do? The dream of most people here is to get on disability becuase the only other jobs around are McDonald's and truck driving paying not even half of what they used to make and even those don't need too many of the ppl here. Most people can barely stay above debt with the two jobs for each parent. Retirement here is a pipe dream. It isn't were too proud to work, its the fact that when your 55 years old and have no job cause your compnay went to mexico, the mantra of retraining becomes a joke. Health benefits are minimal around here. Insurance rates are ridiculous. No one has any hope of retiring. Most saw their retirement disappear with the appearance of pink slips. Most will be forced to either live off their children or end up in even worse conditions. Try to live at the age of 55 on the salary of a teenager.
Higher paying jobs are nice but who the hell will pay for the multiple years of college to get the education necessary? What happens when they get out and the very next year they learn that the industry died in the last five years and have to go back to college? What field anyway? By the time you find out which is the field to train for, train for it, and get out, the industry has already shifted again. Who is going to pay for it? Not to mention the fact our education system is in shambles all over america (in NYC, 50% didn't graduate high school). Those higher paying jobs will go to places with better education systems than ours. Not to mention the fact that we don't hold a monopoly on innovation. Innovation doesn't come from underpaid workers - it comes from people who not only have a vested interest in that innovation (ie they will be the ones making the money off their innovation, not their companies CEO) but also not too far removed from the work that that innovation comes from (ie. Managers).
"the local bottlers must license the secret formula for water from Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta, GA."
Who have a tax shelter in another country and don't consider themselves an american company but a multinational one that doesn't give a shit about american workers.
Exactly. If I am not mistaken in the last quater of job growth of what 150,000 jobs or so, 76,000 were service jobs (aka walmart, mcjobs, etc.) Unless your furture of great job growth means everyone working for a clown or as the deliverator, the job growth we have seen so far has been crap.
Then what about companies that demand ownership of everything you create while you work for them, regardless of whether you are creating it during your working hours or doing the thing at home by yourself with only your own resources, not the companies. Hard to make any type of justification argument for that...
The sacriest stuff was the ghosts in basements of the chathedral. Thief 2 rocked. The probelm with thief 1 was that they weren't sure a sneaker would work so they tried to make it a hybrid sneaker/fps. After theif's sucess, theif 2 was made as a total sneaker. And come on who can't loevt hose damn robots constantly repeating 'the words of karris, the words of karris" and "blessed are the welded."
It also should be noted that their was some minor social commentary in theif 2 were thief 1 was just a game. Specifically, the words of karris about how the nobility were foolish for thinking themslevs of worth due to the money in their coffers instead of the value of their spirits.
No offense, but doesn't it remind you of those shitty movies ppl used to make in highschool as english projects? Its like they got two guys to dress up and smack each other. So amatuer...
Essentially what the chinese are doing is legislating investement in their own software industry and pulling money out of ours by cutting the market off to us. In the short term this is bad for both - china will have to work with inferior products for awhile and we will lose out on the market. In the longterm it is still bad for us but rather good for them. With 70% of the software in china coming from their own industry - and remember china is an imature market that is already huge - their industry will have to catch up. Japan's isolationism didn't work becuase they cut themselves off from the innovation and markets from other countries and hence limited their own growth to a much smaller market. China on the other hand has a huge market and it is cutting us out of it - rather than self imposed isolationism we are being isolated. Now we will see china fall backward and have to do a lot of catching up but once they get the infastructure in place - say 10 years from now - and the industry in china grows to exceed the us by taking advantage unfairly of chinas huge market then we will start to see the intelligence of this move. Right now, china's firms get little investment and are a bit behind ours. Now, China is basically legislating investment in its own industry and hence indirectly funding innovation in its own economy. American software firms on the other hand will be cut out of the market and hence will drop in profitability and hence it will become harder for them to inovate. In ten years we will see a huge chinese software industry due to that investment and a market it will now have dominance in - and even if they can't get innovation the chinese seem rather happy to steal it. In ten years, america being cut out of that already huge and growing market will lose out. Essentially, China has decided that even though the market of the us and the rest of the world is huge, if it cuts its own market away the us will lose more by being cut off then the chinese will lose by keeping their market to themselves. Where japan cut itself off from the larger market and stayed with the smaller, china is cutting the larger market off from the smaller. China is the future when it comes to market growth and they have decided to keep that market to themselves.
There was recently an article here about Comparative advantage that you may find interesting.
Btw, Free trade only works in an environment where an equal playing field can be maintained. That is where free trade falls apart on the global level. It ignores a fundemental reality of markets: no one wants to be satisfied with a status where everyone is considered equal when they can instead get an advantage. In fact no country in the history of the world has ever EVER given up an advantageous deal for a 'let's level the playing field' one (until modern times of course - england for example in the late 1800's began to push the idea.) In effect that is the greatest weakness of pure capitalism - it works best when the playing field is level but no one wants the playing field to be level and will gladly make it so that they will come out ahead. In order to correct for that you need a non-captilistic driven body to correct the markets and level that playing field. Adam Smith believed people's own morality would work as the correcting mechanism but the history of the 1800 and 1900's proved him wrong - the market corrected ppl by destroying morality rather than morality being imposed on and thus correcting the markets. That's why lazzie faire doesn't work - the markets don't correct themselves (in fact the opposite is true - greed leads to greater greed) and in the absense of such corrections you just have disaster. So you have countries like China who have found that by pretending to play by the rules of free trade while in reality freely breaking those rules every chance they get, they end up with a significant advantage. They don't want the playing field to be level, they want to have an advantage. On an international level the correcting mechanism that attempts to keep the playing field level (the WTO) and attempts to effectively protect the market from itself dosn't work. Without such a correcting body we are only going to end up with trouble. We have sacrificed our advantage for a level playing field while china is, if anything, attempting even harder to get an even greater advantage. And since we are still playing by the rules to get this situation redressed, we are unquestionably going to lose becuase the chinese aren't (you can't beat a cheater) and the umpire is asleep (or paralyzed/useless). The state level (the micro level) on the other hands fucntions because we have such a correcting mechanism known as the federal government.
Put simply - it should be no suprise that china is attempting to take advantage of the situation in order to better its markets and just becuase that isn't a free trade let's-all-be-friends approach doesn't mean it is foolish. China wants to have its cake and eat it too and with a weak WTO that is rife with political infighting, it will most likely get it. What should be suprising is that we are allowing them to take that advantage which was formerly ours with really no fight at all. They aren't playing by the rules but like good little children we are and we are getting taken to school while the recess lady looks the other way... Trade is like a game of chess: the chinese are cheating every chance they get and we are failing for it like dupes.
Re:Just don't forget one thing!
on
Mind Over Machine
·
· Score: 5, Informative
No, its a refernce to the SCi-fi classic Forbidden Planet. A highly species known as the Krell develope a machine that allows manipulation without instrumentation - all they had to do was think about it and the machine would create whatever they thought about right there. But the Krell forgot one thing: the monsters of the subconcious mind. The Krell had become so highly advanced that they had forgotten that deep down buried in their minds, the primitive savage still existed - a savage that still wanted to kill and destroy and in building the machine the Krell had given those monsters nearly infinite power. As a result, the Krell were destroyed by their own minds.
Just don't forget one thing!
on
Mind Over Machine
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Analysis Toolpack? Fortune Cookies? Those are for noobs. Real Geeks use the magic 8-ball to diagnose their pc problems. Somehow this works just as good as any other windows diagnostic tool...
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What Darwin missed is that mutual cooperation ensures survival of those fittest and without that cooperation not even they survive. Comeptition leads only to the fittest coming out on top. It's like a race through a tunnel. The fittest may be the fastest but it doesn't really matter if no one is able to finish.
And more importantly: who is going to pay for the training?
And how long does one have to spend to go to college to learn buggy-whip manufacturing or car manufacturing for that matter? I had to go to college for four years to get a degree in comp sci. I just love the president going on about how the future is in biotech or such - you need what? 8 years of college at some pretty presitigious schools to get a job in the biotech field. Whose going to pay for it?
So what your saying is in two to three years when all these outshoring investments fail, we'll see another recession. Just great. What if the jobs don't come back before then...
Immigration qoutas are in fact necessary. Diversity in a limited form is a great thing for any culture but not when it leads to a loss of social cohesion. An excellent and the classical example, the roman empire, showed this: in the late empire there was a huge amounts of imigration into it (yeah, they were all barabarians, haha, funny). The result was a lot of diversity. It also resulted in an roman population full of people who didn't think of themselves as romans. Duringt he early republic and even early empire, when rome was threatened, everyone got out on the field and kicked back the invaders. They could ahve doen the same when the barabaians invaded. However, when the barbarians did invade, the average roman thought they were liberators - liberating them from an empire they never really felt they belonged to but had immigrated to anyway. The roman empire had ceased to see itself as one people - they stopped considering themselves romans and so the roman empire collapsed. The same would hold true for the US.
This isn't charity dude. Our bosses are taking food out of our mouths and putting it in yours. AQnd sure the us is the big benefitter of it - but what part of the us?
" the sooner we get through the series of bloody revolutions that split the US into a number of autocratic fiefdoms and the sooner we can just settle down and get used to subsistence farming on feudal plantations."
Welcome back, John Titor!
"I guess it's working well for the ivory tower folk."
To qoute Douglas Adams, "They're gonnna be the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes."
"Smart consumers and smart bosses never by on cost alone; what they buy on is value"
And that is why we are all wearing jeans made in China. Get real - walmart is a sucess BECAUSE ppl buy on cost rather than value.
There are only three things that America does better than anyone else:
1. Music
2. Movies
3. High speed pizza delivery
The future of america is the Deliverator.
"Although IT jobs are currently undergoing what manufacturing went through in the 1990s, many more jobs will be created in the US as a result of the lower costs associated with outsourcing IT work. The jobs created at home will be higher paid too."
Yep and who has the money to get the education those jobs will require? I live in NE Pennsylvania, one of the hardest hit by the manufacturing decline, and I can tell you that the people that were layed off from those plants aren't the ones getting those higher paying jobs. You fire a 50 or even worse a 60 year old who has worked his whole life for your plant and what do expect him/her to do? The dream of most people here is to get on disability becuase the only other jobs around are McDonald's and truck driving paying not even half of what they used to make and even those don't need too many of the ppl here. Most people can barely stay above debt with the two jobs for each parent. Retirement here is a pipe dream. It isn't were too proud to work, its the fact that when your 55 years old and have no job cause your compnay went to mexico, the mantra of retraining becomes a joke. Health benefits are minimal around here. Insurance rates are ridiculous. No one has any hope of retiring. Most saw their retirement disappear with the appearance of pink slips. Most will be forced to either live off their children or end up in even worse conditions. Try to live at the age of 55 on the salary of a teenager.
Higher paying jobs are nice but who the hell will pay for the multiple years of college to get the education necessary? What happens when they get out and the very next year they learn that the industry died in the last five years and have to go back to college? What field anyway? By the time you find out which is the field to train for, train for it, and get out, the industry has already shifted again. Who is going to pay for it? Not to mention the fact our education system is in shambles all over america (in NYC, 50% didn't graduate high school). Those higher paying jobs will go to places with better education systems than ours. Not to mention the fact that we don't hold a monopoly on innovation. Innovation doesn't come from underpaid workers - it comes from people who not only have a vested interest in that innovation (ie they will be the ones making the money off their innovation, not their companies CEO) but also not too far removed from the work that that innovation comes from (ie. Managers).
"the local bottlers must license the secret formula for water from Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta, GA."
Who have a tax shelter in another country and don't consider themselves an american company but a multinational one that doesn't give a shit about american workers.
Exactly. If I am not mistaken in the last quater of job growth of what 150,000 jobs or so, 76,000 were service jobs (aka walmart, mcjobs, etc.) Unless your furture of great job growth means everyone working for a clown or as the deliverator, the job growth we have seen so far has been crap.
When games were actually orginal and not just sequel after sequel after sequel.
Then what about companies that demand ownership of everything you create while you work for them, regardless of whether you are creating it during your working hours or doing the thing at home by yourself with only your own resources, not the companies. Hard to make any type of justification argument for that...
The sacriest stuff was the ghosts in basements of the chathedral. Thief 2 rocked. The probelm with thief 1 was that they weren't sure a sneaker would work so they tried to make it a hybrid sneaker/fps. After theif's sucess, theif 2 was made as a total sneaker. And come on who can't loevt hose damn robots constantly repeating 'the words of karris, the words of karris" and "blessed are the welded."
It also should be noted that their was some minor social commentary in theif 2 were thief 1 was just a game. Specifically, the words of karris about how the nobility were foolish for thinking themslevs of worth due to the money in their coffers instead of the value of their spirits.
No offense, but doesn't it remind you of those shitty movies ppl used to make in highschool as english projects? Its like they got two guys to dress up and smack each other. So amatuer...
It's greed and profit-motives that make the system work so well.
The only reason these policies ever get enacted is to protect greedy companies within the respective countries.
Mind explaining how greed makes the system work while also demainding things like protections to harm itself?
Adam Smith: here
Essentially what the chinese are doing is legislating investement in their own software industry and pulling money out of ours by cutting the market off to us. In the short term this is bad for both - china will have to work with inferior products for awhile and we will lose out on the market. In the longterm it is still bad for us but rather good for them. With 70% of the software in china coming from their own industry - and remember china is an imature market that is already huge - their industry will have to catch up. Japan's isolationism didn't work becuase they cut themselves off from the innovation and markets from other countries and hence limited their own growth to a much smaller market. China on the other hand has a huge market and it is cutting us out of it - rather than self imposed isolationism we are being isolated. Now we will see china fall backward and have to do a lot of catching up but once they get the infastructure in place - say 10 years from now - and the industry in china grows to exceed the us by taking advantage unfairly of chinas huge market then we will start to see the intelligence of this move. Right now, china's firms get little investment and are a bit behind ours. Now, China is basically legislating investment in its own industry and hence indirectly funding innovation in its own economy. American software firms on the other hand will be cut out of the market and hence will drop in profitability and hence it will become harder for them to inovate. In ten years we will see a huge chinese software industry due to that investment and a market it will now have dominance in - and even if they can't get innovation the chinese seem rather happy to steal it. In ten years, america being cut out of that already huge and growing market will lose out. Essentially, China has decided that even though the market of the us and the rest of the world is huge, if it cuts its own market away the us will lose more by being cut off then the chinese will lose by keeping their market to themselves. Where japan cut itself off from the larger market and stayed with the smaller, china is cutting the larger market off from the smaller. China is the future when it comes to market growth and they have decided to keep that market to themselves.
There was recently an article here about Comparative advantage that you may find interesting.
Btw, Free trade only works in an environment where an equal playing field can be maintained. That is where free trade falls apart on the global level. It ignores a fundemental reality of markets: no one wants to be satisfied with a status where everyone is considered equal when they can instead get an advantage. In fact no country in the history of the world has ever EVER given up an advantageous deal for a 'let's level the playing field' one (until modern times of course - england for example in the late 1800's began to push the idea.) In effect that is the greatest weakness of pure capitalism - it works best when the playing field is level but no one wants the playing field to be level and will gladly make it so that they will come out ahead. In order to correct for that you need a non-captilistic driven body to correct the markets and level that playing field. Adam Smith believed people's own morality would work as the correcting mechanism but the history of the 1800 and 1900's proved him wrong - the market corrected ppl by destroying morality rather than morality being imposed on and thus correcting the markets. That's why lazzie faire doesn't work - the markets don't correct themselves (in fact the opposite is true - greed leads to greater greed) and in the absense of such corrections you just have disaster. So you have countries like China who have found that by pretending to play by the rules of free trade while in reality freely breaking those rules every chance they get, they end up with a significant advantage. They don't want the playing field to be level, they want to have an advantage. On an international level the correcting mechanism that attempts to keep the playing field level (the WTO) and attempts to effectively protect the market from itself dosn't work. Without such a correcting body we are only going to end up with trouble. We have sacrificed our advantage for a level playing field while china is, if anything, attempting even harder to get an even greater advantage. And since we are still playing by the rules to get this situation redressed, we are unquestionably going to lose becuase the chinese aren't (you can't beat a cheater) and the umpire is asleep (or paralyzed/useless). The state level (the micro level) on the other hands fucntions because we have such a correcting mechanism known as the federal government.
Put simply - it should be no suprise that china is attempting to take advantage of the situation in order to better its markets and just becuase that isn't a free trade let's-all-be-friends approach doesn't mean it is foolish. China wants to have its cake and eat it too and with a weak WTO that is rife with political infighting, it will most likely get it. What should be suprising is that we are allowing them to take that advantage which was formerly ours with really no fight at all. They aren't playing by the rules but like good little children we are and we are getting taken to school while the recess lady looks the other way... Trade is like a game of chess: the chinese are cheating every chance they get and we are failing for it like dupes.
No, its a refernce to the SCi-fi classic Forbidden Planet. A highly species known as the Krell develope a machine that allows manipulation without instrumentation - all they had to do was think about it and the machine would create whatever they thought about right there. But the Krell forgot one thing: the monsters of the subconcious mind. The Krell had become so highly advanced that they had forgotten that deep down buried in their minds, the primitive savage still existed - a savage that still wanted to kill and destroy and in building the machine the Krell had given those monsters nearly infinite power. As a result, the Krell were destroyed by their own minds.
Monsters, John! Monsters... from the id!
The price of housing in Boulder, Colorado is going up cause of this...
A windows OS without security issues is like a pizza without the dough.
Analysis Toolpack? Fortune Cookies? Those are for noobs. Real Geeks use the magic 8-ball to diagnose their pc problems. Somehow this works just as good as any other windows diagnostic tool...