True enough- though it was Pope Pius XII who said that where religious truth and scientific truth do not coincide, religion must bend. I have a feeling that had the embryonic stem cell research panned out, all religions would consider it ethical in 600-1000 years or so. But if we can use what we learn from embyronic stem cell research to achieve ADULT stem cell solutions- I think that's both a scientific and religious solution.
The USA is not Marxist. It does not deny religion. We have more selfish, brain dead morons per capita than any other nation on the planet.
It may not be Marxist, but it is PROTESTANT- and while that's not a total denial of religion, it's a denial of religious control over morals. The whole concept of the separation of church and state is to destroy the power of religion in politics, and the use of religion as a motivator of large groups of people. Mono-religious cultures have shared values, while Marxist and free-religion cultures do not. Marx and Jefferson were not very far apart on the Deistic idea that religion is the opiate of the masses. What they failed to see was the flip side- that without a strong state religion, there aren't any shared values either, and no reason to put another person's benefit above your own.
If they can get the nanotech right, however, resources for the basics will be plentiful- where resources for luxuries will be what is rare. After all- there's enough biomatter in a cubic mile of sewage to feed a family of four for a decade- it's just in the wrong form.
Another thing that might hold this back though is self replication- to truly cause a serious economic change, the desktop fabricator has to (with proper resources) be able to create itself.
Ok, I admit that many code monkeys have an education---in fact, many have a far better education than most. (ie: hire a BS degree in US or a masters degree in India?). That you can't do anything about (they went to school, got an education, etc.).
Yep- and thanks to India's rather socialist approach (to keeping costs down for the individual student) they got their BS or their Masters for about 1/10th the cost of mine. That gives them a SERIOUS competitive advantage.
The thing that you do control is your imagination, creativity, etc. Many people lack that. If you have the ability/skills to turn your ideas into reality, you can be successful.
Only as long as they don't steal them from you...my experience so far has been "Get hired, get paid a salary to come up with good ideas, project matures, get fired just before benefits kick in", seems to be the general model even *before* outsourcing. I've yet to be rewarded for any of my ideas- and I don't have the resources to pantent, say, the fireproof turkey deep fryer by myself (just a non-software idea I had after getting a brochure in the door from the local fire department on how incredibly bad turkey deepfryers are).
As for companies, many are looking for precisely the research kind. Have you looked at job offers from Google? (or Microsoft Research?). Pretty much _every_ major company is still very much hiering---but they're not looking for vb coders, they're looking people who can do the currently-impossible. Show your ability to do incredible things, and I'm sure you'll have no problem in getting a job at one of these places.
Tried that for 26 months- nearly lost my house trying that one. Most of them have moved to Hydrabad or Bangalore for that kind of research (very little research for Microsoft is still being done here in the United States). After all, why should they pay me $40,000/year for that kind of research, when they can get 10 Indians willing to work for $4000/year?
I can't blame them at all.
Your speech recognition example is pretty bad; pretty much all HMM methods require training (or they don't perform well). (and all current speech recognition is based on Hidden Markov Models). Your experience might've been good 'cause your voice may be `common', but if you speak a bit too fast or a bit too slow (or there are multiple speakers in the noisy room), those things won't be able to handle it. I bet that anyone who develops a speech recognition system that can totally eliminate the need for a keyboard (ie: the computer doesn't come with a keyboard/mouse---it comes with a microphone) will be rich beyond their dreams....just because someone `has a product that does that' doesn't mean you can't make a better product. I think Microsoft proved that.
Actually, the link I previded does that- but it might be the hardware it's matched with being just as important, given your assessment. I wondered why my PocketPC couldn't understand me unless I spoke into the top of it (though it didn't require training, for some reason- seems to understand just fine without the training) and that isn't exactly conductive to using it for GPS navigation in the car. No keyboard though at all- though there is an add on one available, and four other types of handwriting recog available on the platform.
And while Segway's _wheeled_ platform is impressive, it has little to do with jointed platforms (which are very much in their infancy right now).
The HT is only one platform they make- their other one was originally designed as a wheelchair that could grow legs and walk up stairs...Same idea though, using a gyroscope and accelerometers with a fast processor to decide where to put the feet next. Now a BIPEDAL one- well that will just take faster processors.
Damn- should have clicked on the Parent Link- or else I would have had a better conversation.
Here's an answer that makes sense from the previous conversation: The real problem with rampant individualism is that it's an everything-goes sort of marketplace; you don't just get good, selfless people willing to pull together to make the world a better place, you ALSO get selfish, brain dead morons who only exist so that they can earn large sums of money off of other people's work. Communism, or even socialism, cannot co-exist with such people- they are parasites that will eventually make the system too topheavy to survive.
That's why Marx denying religion was a bad idea- in doing so he also denied the single most effective way of getting a large population to share a single values system ever devised.
Individualism means that you follow your own path regardless of what others think.
Selfishness is only doing things that benefit you, and not others.
Being an individual does not preclude one from being generous or making the world a better place. Selfishness does.
Unfortuneately, while individual human beings are sometimes capable of doing good this way, the large majority seems to be utterly incapable of making the world a better place. To them- individualism IS doing what benefits you, and not what benefits others- as one man put it in a competency hearing on the subject "Why should do that which does NOT please or benefit me?".
As for being a true hive-mind communist- no, that doesn't work either. Where I'm not at all sure that human beings can actually be independant thinkers, they aren't a hive mind species either.
Neither Marx nor Capitalism is either Natural or Created by God. The only economic system that is natural is tribal bartering- and that is anything but "free trade".
As for your other topic- I can't name any Marxist/Communist/Socialist countries AT ALL- because the true form of that economic theory has never been tried.
It's a selfish waste of time and resources that could be better spent on making this a better world. Same problem that I have with C-level executives, stock brokers, and other people that expect to earn money off of my time.
Considering the argument at hand, it would be the ethical alternative.
It's actually both- because when it comes to science, the real measure is WHAT WORKS not WHAT ADVANCES A GIVEN POLITICAL TOPIC. Adult stem cells have been proven to work for therapeutic cloning. Embryonic stem cells have not (and theoretically, cannot).
I'm not- but I can be prevented from doing this because of the money- I've got a wife and baby to feed, as well as a house mortgage. I can't work at whatever-low-wage-country-of-the-week's wages are- and as long as the banks and venture capitalists want me to repay my mortgage, it's rather unfair of those same banks and venture capitalists to tell my boss that he can only pay for Indian standard of living- since they're the same idiots that are making my standard of living so expensive to begin with.
There are things a _good_ coder (ie: a software engineer) should be able to do that average code monkeys cannot: like being able to build a complex system (something way above the level of a `vb db app').
True enough- but NONE of them pay, because business doesn't really need anything more complex than a vb db app.
If you want some challenges, build a system that can recognize human speech well (no matter who's the speaker---and without training). I'm sure that will sell really well.
The Honda robot may walk, but have you seen it walk? It walks slower than a slug. Build a system that can keep its balance while running, and I'm sure that will sell.
Didn't the guy who created the Segway already create a mobile gyroscopic robot platform? I thought IRobot was already selling it to the military.
Microsoft computer can `talk'... build something that actually sounds like a human (places emphasis in right places, etc.,) and I'm sure that will sell.
Have you heard MSAgent lately? I considered it so good that I just went ahead and licensed it for my talking e-mail application.
There are also a ton of things I can think of in database and information retrieval domains that haven't been done yet (but would change the world if someone managed to do it).
And those will be done by the code-monkeys in Microsoft's new reseach center in Hydrabad, or Oracle's new research center in Bangalore. Nobody's going to bother to pay $5/hr for that kind of work.
ie: these are things that an average code monkey that gets outsourced cannot do---but a person with good education might be able to take a good stab at these problems.
What makes you think the code monkeys don't have an education? Better yet, what makes you think any company is going to be willing to pay American wages for this kind of research?
True enough- but the point is you can't take a magazine written by economists and believe ANYTHING it has to say anymore. Take it all with a grain of salt, because that's all the advice is worth.
In fact, getting better skills is just a trap- it means that you'll be far more valuable as an employee than as a manager. Only the skilless can become managers.
Huh? Advocating free trade leads to us "giving up our manufacturing and all of us getting degrees in high tech?"
Of course it does- why else would we give up our cushy $15/hr factory jobs and let them ship those jobs overseas?
Huh? I'm sure you have an interesting point to make here. Please make it.
If we had been alowed to know two small facts about this whole globalization scheme, this disaster would have been forseeable to many in the computer industry, particularily those working on Networking. Those two items were: India subsidizing the high tech education through it's several IIT campuses nationwide of several hundred thousand computer programmers, coupled with guest worker visas that didn't have adequate protections on them. That's what truly burst the bubble.
Garbage. The Economist has always argued for measures which it believes will lead to a better distribution of wealth.
As long as that better distribution of wealth is it being hoarded by a small minority, you mean.
I'm not familiar with your personal jargon. If you mean that Bush and Kerry are both in favour of free trade, then maybe you'd care to explain Kerry's call for protectionist measures to prevent outsourcing, and Bush's tarriffs on steel imports.
Token public issues to placate certain interest groups does not make for a unified protectionist policy. Now if either one had say, gotten behind the Grimes Labor Equalization Surcharge or better yet, the mileage tax on shipping, then I'd say you would have had a point.
Proven by whom?
By the people these policies have hurt and the number of suicides that it has caused.
The Economist has spelled out many times how free trade has been a relative success for developing and developed nations.
Yeah- massive unemployment and farmers suiciding over dumping of cheap subsidized products. Sure- that's success...if by success you mean the oligarchy gets richer and the people get poorer.
When I say 'relative,' I mean compared to any alternative system that has ever been devised. The system endorsed by your namesake was hardly a roaring success for all concerned.
And which word of the three do you take to be my namesake? Marx, hacking marx, or the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything?
Still- Dorthy Day's version of Marxism would probably have had better results than globalism has- by isolating local economies and simplifying the whole problem of resource distribution to a local matter instead of a global one.
I must have read Groucho as opposed to the real thing: Marx's theory of value is if anything, too moral. Marx criticizes 1800's religion because it told people that suffering on this earth would be repaid 10 times over in heaven. When you consider the society that Marx saw, England during the industrial revolution, it's really hard not to consider that kind of religious thought evil and manipulative.
True enough- but what he failed to understand was religion's inherant power of a shared value system among large groups of people.
Marx saw, just like we can see in today's US in a smaller scale, how religious beliefs can be twisted to make people act in a way that goes against their, and most people's, best interest. Marx belived that morality and religion are not synonymous. In many cases, religious beliefs can be completely immoral. Thus, he favored a society where morality was rational, as opposed of just be dictated by a book.
And in doing so- he threw out the baby with the bathwater and lost SHARED morality.
If you don't belive that morality can exist without religion, you should get out of the house more.
Oh, it can exist alright, but only as rampant individualism, not as a shared philosophy. For that, you not only need religion- you need a well defined hierarchy, and a final arbiter (examples include the Supreme Court and the Pope).
I trained to be a software ENGINEER- that includes coding far better than what any given code monkey can do. But since the code monkeys are doing it, my talents went to waste for over two years as I scrambled to find some way to make a living.
Science is about theory- ENGINEERING is about application of that theory. I'd much rather be doing the application of the theory than inventing the theory- but that's all been ripped away now.
Plus, if you haven't noticed- Honda has a computer that walks, and Microsoft has a computer that talks. It won't be long now.
Actually, I don't seem to remember that paper ever advocating any such thing. Nevertheless, a great many people fell for that one. A great many people still cling to it.
Advocating free trade leads to this automatically.
And to say that they "lied" implies that they knew different but told us this anyway.
They should have known different- the end result of 50 years of subsidized education in one of the two most populous countries on earth is obvious in hindsight- and that information was never shown in foresight.
Perhaps you can tell us what they hoped to gain from this grand deception.
Cheap labor and the destruction of the middle class- a maserful stroke from those who believe that society should only have two classes.
Or perhaps you'll just admit that you had an aversion to their endorsement of John Kerry.
Kerry, Bush, makes no difference, they're both free traitors.
Economists, and the Economist newspaper, seldom have a problem admitting mistakes.
Really? Then explain why they still support the WTO, when free trade has proven to be disasterous to both developing and developed nations.
And he had at least 4 MAJOR things wrong with his theories as well (these four things are the primary reason why I call myself marxist HACKER, not just a marxist):
1. Denial of religion. For without moral values, sharing ceases to be a virtue.
2. Lack of proper data gathering. Without knowing the wants and needs of the population, over production and under production is inevitable.
3. Lack of patience- the technology wasn't ready for what he was proposing at the time- agricultural science was just begining to prove itself, and 98% of the population was still required to work on the farms for the society to eat. A far cry from today when our main economic problem is a surplus of labor.
4. Centralization- this is the worst mistake he made, and it's a mistake that is being duplicated today in corporatism and centralized stock markets under so-called "capitalistic" countries.
The errors of Adam Smith are similar:
1. Denial of religion- by embracing one of the seven deadly sins, Adam Smith denied morality as a motivator for human beings.
2. Lack of proper data gathering- while the Invisible Hand of the Market is very good at determining WANTS it's very bad at determining NEEDS- particularily of people who are unemployed or underemployed and thus denied entry into the market, and for those who are too stupid to buy what they NEED and only buy what they WANT.
3. Lack of patience- Capitalism wants efficiency immediately, and will run you right over and pound you into the ground if you get in the way.
4. Centralization- by not putting any checks and balances on greed, mergers of corporations mean that in the end there can be only one mega-corporation- one board to rule them all, one board to find them, one board to bind them all and in the darkness profit from them.
My final solution for both is similar- $1/mile/shipping container tax. This encourages stuff to be produced as close to the end consumer as possible- thus bringing back jobs where comparative advantage would have taken them away. You still have the problem of jobs disappearing to technical obsolescence- but for the most part, those jobs are replaced with new jobs working on the new equipment.
Oddly enough- from my point of view, the fourth was the least dumb answer of the bunch- of course, the real problem with it is when the Robots start building other Robots- which will come *before* they're in general usage anyway.
One thing amazed me is still being done by human beings- toilets. I would have thought that would have been automated years ago- but apparently the clay they're made out of contains imperfections that can be sanded out once identified- and this is one more job that will have to wait for robotic vision to actually succeed at automating it.
1. I've gotten trolled- we've trolled each other. Because of that, I've strayed from the basic idea of distributionism- that all that is required for central planning to build a group of localized communist and capitalist utopias is a tax on shipping to prevent large corporations and greedy individuals from grabing more market share than they deserve.
You claimed: "People are inherently lazy and greedy.", and I used an extreme example to take you to task for it, and the discussion went downhill from there. I do not support eugenics or euthanasia- what I support most of all is a lack of free trade, done with an extreme tax on shipping. All else from there is under local control- because foreign control is destroyed at that point if their goods can't reach our markets at a competitive rate.
I see. So most people aren't necessary to survive.
Yep- because they're simply not required. This doesn't mean that we kill them- this means that we shunt them off and don't let them participate in the free market.
Ahh, I see. A few global elites know better than most people.
No- a few LOCAL elites know better than most people- and there should be barriers between the elites.
Nevermind the fact that virtually every study of the market (the "bazaar") has proven the market to be more-effective, accurate, and efficient than centralized systems (the "cathedral").
Yes- and my system is more bazaar-like than your central-power-all-in-the-stock-market system.
Wrong again on the facts. Try about 90-100% (it's been above 80% since 1984, so where your 66% figure comes from is beyond me) -- in spite of our being in an increasingly-automated society.
Try using The real numbers instead of the ones the White House wants the DOL to release.
Also, even if the 66% figure you claim (without sources) were correct, we have an unemployment rate of 5.5% to render irrelevant that labor-utilization figure.
Well, there's your source- and exactly why that 5.5% is a completely invented number (hint- if you're out of work long enough, they reclassify you as not being IN the labor force- and the unemployment rate is only the number of people in the labor force- the number of jobs. There's a whole group of people left out, and that's why the Labor Utilization Rate is more usefull).
By eliminating technology in order to reduce society back to an agrarian age? This is the opposite of progress.
No- by using technology to eliminate the need for human labor, thus moving us into a new age where WORK is entirely UNNECCESSARY.
Take off the tinfoil hat and go to college sometime. They are about mind-control to a certain degree (trying to force upon impressionable young college students the leftist ideals of socialism and "equality" and "diversity"), but they won't stop you from thinking outside-the-box. I gave a speech promoting free-markets a little over a week ago, and my leftist prof. didn't stand up and tell me I was wrong.
Try promoting the Robotic Nation next time and see where it gets you.
I take by "the market" you mean "the stock market" -- because to say "the market" is really far too-vague...
No, I mean the free market- the ability to buy and sell and choose what you buy. The only way you gain entry into that is if you're a part of the 66% (and falling) who are allowed to work.
So you mean to say that 30% of the public can't go down the street to their local financial advisor and start investing in the stock market? Baloney.
30% of the public doesn't have the money to do that. Heck, 50% of the public at the height of the dotcom boom didn't have the money to do that.
Financial advisors and companies seeking investment want only 1 thing: money.
Only if you're willing to be paid far less per year than you spent getting the degree. Or for that matter- far less than you need to continue learning to keep up with the technology.
Aren't these the same people who tried to tell us that "comparative advantage" meant we should give up our manufacturing and all get degrees in high tech? Why should we believe ANYTHING they have to say after they've lied to us for so long?
Economics is a religion- and a failed mythology at that. Economists need to learn to examine and reconfigure their basic axioms before ANYBODY should ever listen to them again.
Ok, so you get your ideas from sci-fi authors. That's why you're so wooly-headed.
2nd reply- I want to know who YOU get your ideas from. After all, most scientists start out as science fiction writers- that's where new theories come from. Some of them end up in fields of study that consist entirely of fiction- like economics.
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True enough- though it was Pope Pius XII who said that where religious truth and scientific truth do not coincide, religion must bend. I have a feeling that had the embryonic stem cell research panned out, all religions would consider it ethical in 600-1000 years or so. But if we can use what we learn from embyronic stem cell research to achieve ADULT stem cell solutions- I think that's both a scientific and religious solution.
The USA is not Marxist. It does not deny religion. We have more selfish, brain dead morons per capita than any other nation on the planet.
It may not be Marxist, but it is PROTESTANT- and while that's not a total denial of religion, it's a denial of religious control over morals. The whole concept of the separation of church and state is to destroy the power of religion in politics, and the use of religion as a motivator of large groups of people. Mono-religious cultures have shared values, while Marxist and free-religion cultures do not. Marx and Jefferson were not very far apart on the Deistic idea that religion is the opiate of the masses. What they failed to see was the flip side- that without a strong state religion, there aren't any shared values either, and no reason to put another person's benefit above your own.
If they can get the nanotech right, however, resources for the basics will be plentiful- where resources for luxuries will be what is rare. After all- there's enough biomatter in a cubic mile of sewage to feed a family of four for a decade- it's just in the wrong form.
Another thing that might hold this back though is self replication- to truly cause a serious economic change, the desktop fabricator has to (with proper resources) be able to create itself.
Ok, I admit that many code monkeys have an education---in fact, many have a far better education than most. (ie: hire a BS degree in US or a masters degree in India?). That you can't do anything about (they went to school, got an education, etc.).
...just because someone `has a product that does that' doesn't mean you can't make a better product. I think Microsoft proved that.
Yep- and thanks to India's rather socialist approach (to keeping costs down for the individual student) they got their BS or their Masters for about 1/10th the cost of mine. That gives them a SERIOUS competitive advantage.
The thing that you do control is your imagination, creativity, etc. Many people lack that. If you have the ability/skills to turn your ideas into reality, you can be successful.
Only as long as they don't steal them from you...my experience so far has been "Get hired, get paid a salary to come up with good ideas, project matures, get fired just before benefits kick in", seems to be the general model even *before* outsourcing. I've yet to be rewarded for any of my ideas- and I don't have the resources to pantent, say, the fireproof turkey deep fryer by myself (just a non-software idea I had after getting a brochure in the door from the local fire department on how incredibly bad turkey deepfryers are).
As for companies, many are looking for precisely the research kind. Have you looked at job offers from Google? (or Microsoft Research?). Pretty much _every_ major company is still very much hiering---but they're not looking for vb coders, they're looking people who can do the currently-impossible. Show your ability to do incredible things, and I'm sure you'll have no problem in getting a job at one of these places.
Tried that for 26 months- nearly lost my house trying that one. Most of them have moved to Hydrabad or Bangalore for that kind of research (very little research for Microsoft is still being done here in the United States). After all, why should they pay me $40,000/year for that kind of research, when they can get 10 Indians willing to work for $4000/year?
I can't blame them at all.
Your speech recognition example is pretty bad; pretty much all HMM methods require training (or they don't perform well). (and all current speech recognition is based on Hidden Markov Models). Your experience might've been good 'cause your voice may be `common', but if you speak a bit too fast or a bit too slow (or there are multiple speakers in the noisy room), those things won't be able to handle it. I bet that anyone who develops a speech recognition system that can totally eliminate the need for a keyboard (ie: the computer doesn't come with a keyboard/mouse---it comes with a microphone) will be rich beyond their dreams.
Actually, the link I previded does that- but it might be the hardware it's matched with being just as important, given your assessment. I wondered why my PocketPC couldn't understand me unless I spoke into the top of it (though it didn't require training, for some reason- seems to understand just fine without the training) and that isn't exactly conductive to using it for GPS navigation in the car. No keyboard though at all- though there is an add on one available, and four other types of handwriting recog available on the platform.
And while Segway's _wheeled_ platform is impressive, it has little to do with jointed platforms (which are very much in their infancy right now).
The HT is only one platform they make- their other one was originally designed as a wheelchair that could grow legs and walk up stairs...Same idea though, using a gyroscope and accelerometers with a fast processor to decide where to put the feet next. Now a BIPEDAL one- well that will just take faster processors.
Damn- should have clicked on the Parent Link- or else I would have had a better conversation.
Here's an answer that makes sense from the previous conversation: The real problem with rampant individualism is that it's an everything-goes sort of marketplace; you don't just get good, selfless people willing to pull together to make the world a better place, you ALSO get selfish, brain dead morons who only exist so that they can earn large sums of money off of other people's work. Communism, or even socialism, cannot co-exist with such people- they are parasites that will eventually make the system too topheavy to survive.
That's why Marx denying religion was a bad idea- in doing so he also denied the single most effective way of getting a large population to share a single values system ever devised.
Individualism means that you follow your own path regardless of what others think.
Selfishness is only doing things that benefit you, and not others.
Being an individual does not preclude one from being generous or making the world a better place. Selfishness does.
Unfortuneately, while individual human beings are sometimes capable of doing good this way, the large majority seems to be utterly incapable of making the world a better place. To them- individualism IS doing what benefits you, and not what benefits others- as one man put it in a competency hearing on the subject "Why should do that which does NOT please or benefit me?".
As for being a true hive-mind communist- no, that doesn't work either. Where I'm not at all sure that human beings can actually be independant thinkers, they aren't a hive mind species either.
Neither Marx nor Capitalism is either Natural or Created by God. The only economic system that is natural is tribal bartering- and that is anything but "free trade".
As for your other topic- I can't name any Marxist/Communist/Socialist countries AT ALL- because the true form of that economic theory has never been tried.
what do you have against rampant individualism?
It's a selfish waste of time and resources that could be better spent on making this a better world. Same problem that I have with C-level executives, stock brokers, and other people that expect to earn money off of my time.
Considering the argument at hand, it would be the ethical alternative.
It's actually both- because when it comes to science, the real measure is WHAT WORKS not WHAT ADVANCES A GIVEN POLITICAL TOPIC. Adult stem cells have been proven to work for therapeutic cloning. Embryonic stem cells have not (and theoretically, cannot).
I'm not- but I can be prevented from doing this because of the money- I've got a wife and baby to feed, as well as a house mortgage. I can't work at whatever-low-wage-country-of-the-week's wages are- and as long as the banks and venture capitalists want me to repay my mortgage, it's rather unfair of those same banks and venture capitalists to tell my boss that he can only pay for Indian standard of living- since they're the same idiots that are making my standard of living so expensive to begin with.
There are things a _good_ coder (ie: a software engineer) should be able to do that average code monkeys cannot: like being able to build a complex system (something way above the level of a `vb db app').
True enough- but NONE of them pay, because business doesn't really need anything more complex than a vb db app.
If you want some challenges, build a system that can recognize human speech well (no matter who's the speaker---and without training). I'm sure that will sell really well.
Already is for $39.99 a shrink-wraped package. If you're still working on this- you're wasting your time.
The Honda robot may walk, but have you seen it walk? It walks slower than a slug. Build a system that can keep its balance while running, and I'm sure that will sell.
Didn't the guy who created the Segway already create a mobile gyroscopic robot platform? I thought IRobot was already selling it to the military.
Microsoft computer can `talk'... build something that actually sounds like a human (places emphasis in right places, etc.,) and I'm sure that will sell.
Have you heard MSAgent lately? I considered it so good that I just went ahead and licensed it for my talking e-mail application.
There are also a ton of things I can think of in database and information retrieval domains that haven't been done yet (but would change the world if someone managed to do it).
And those will be done by the code-monkeys in Microsoft's new reseach center in Hydrabad, or Oracle's new research center in Bangalore. Nobody's going to bother to pay $5/hr for that kind of work.
ie: these are things that an average code monkey that gets outsourced cannot do---but a person with good education might be able to take a good stab at these problems.
What makes you think the code monkeys don't have an education? Better yet, what makes you think any company is going to be willing to pay American wages for this kind of research?
True enough- but the point is you can't take a magazine written by economists and believe ANYTHING it has to say anymore. Take it all with a grain of salt, because that's all the advice is worth.
In fact, getting better skills is just a trap- it means that you'll be far more valuable as an employee than as a manager. Only the skilless can become managers.
Huh? Advocating free trade leads to us "giving up our manufacturing and all of us getting degrees in high tech?"
Of course it does- why else would we give up our cushy $15/hr factory jobs and let them ship those jobs overseas?
Huh? I'm sure you have an interesting point to make here. Please make it.
If we had been alowed to know two small facts about this whole globalization scheme, this disaster would have been forseeable to many in the computer industry, particularily those working on Networking. Those two items were: India subsidizing the high tech education through it's several IIT campuses nationwide of several hundred thousand computer programmers, coupled with guest worker visas that didn't have adequate protections on them. That's what truly burst the bubble.
Garbage. The Economist has always argued for measures which it believes will lead to a better distribution of wealth.
As long as that better distribution of wealth is it being hoarded by a small minority, you mean.
I'm not familiar with your personal jargon. If you mean that Bush and Kerry are both in favour of free trade, then maybe you'd care to explain Kerry's call for protectionist measures to prevent outsourcing, and Bush's tarriffs on steel imports.
Token public issues to placate certain interest groups does not make for a unified protectionist policy. Now if either one had say, gotten behind the Grimes Labor Equalization Surcharge or better yet, the mileage tax on shipping, then I'd say you would have had a point.
Proven by whom?
By the people these policies have hurt and the number of suicides that it has caused.
The Economist has spelled out many times how free trade has been a relative success for developing and developed nations.
Yeah- massive unemployment and farmers suiciding over dumping of cheap subsidized products. Sure- that's success...if by success you mean the oligarchy gets richer and the people get poorer.
When I say 'relative,' I mean compared to any alternative system that has ever been devised. The system endorsed by your namesake was hardly a roaring success for all concerned.
And which word of the three do you take to be my namesake? Marx, hacking marx, or the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything?
Still- Dorthy Day's version of Marxism would probably have had better results than globalism has- by isolating local economies and simplifying the whole problem of resource distribution to a local matter instead of a global one.
I must have read Groucho as opposed to the real thing: Marx's theory of value is if anything, too moral. Marx criticizes 1800's religion because it told people that suffering on this earth would be repaid 10 times over in heaven. When you consider the society that Marx saw, England during the industrial revolution, it's really hard not to consider that kind of religious thought evil and manipulative.
True enough- but what he failed to understand was religion's inherant power of a shared value system among large groups of people.
Marx saw, just like we can see in today's US in a smaller scale, how religious beliefs can be twisted to make people act in a way that goes against their, and most people's, best interest. Marx belived that morality and religion are not synonymous. In many cases, religious beliefs can be completely immoral. Thus, he favored a society where morality was rational, as opposed of just be dictated by a book.
And in doing so- he threw out the baby with the bathwater and lost SHARED morality.
If you don't belive that morality can exist without religion, you should get out of the house more.
Oh, it can exist alright, but only as rampant individualism, not as a shared philosophy. For that, you not only need religion- you need a well defined hierarchy, and a final arbiter (examples include the Supreme Court and the Pope).
I trained to be a software ENGINEER- that includes coding far better than what any given code monkey can do. But since the code monkeys are doing it, my talents went to waste for over two years as I scrambled to find some way to make a living.
Science is about theory- ENGINEERING is about application of that theory. I'd much rather be doing the application of the theory than inventing the theory- but that's all been ripped away now.
Plus, if you haven't noticed- Honda has a computer that walks, and Microsoft has a computer that talks. It won't be long now.
Actually, I don't seem to remember that paper ever advocating any such thing. Nevertheless, a great many people fell for that one. A great many people still cling to it.
Advocating free trade leads to this automatically.
And to say that they "lied" implies that they knew different but told us this anyway.
They should have known different- the end result of 50 years of subsidized education in one of the two most populous countries on earth is obvious in hindsight- and that information was never shown in foresight.
Perhaps you can tell us what they hoped to gain from this grand deception.
Cheap labor and the destruction of the middle class- a maserful stroke from those who believe that society should only have two classes.
Or perhaps you'll just admit that you had an aversion to their endorsement of John Kerry.
Kerry, Bush, makes no difference, they're both free traitors.
Economists, and the Economist newspaper, seldom have a problem admitting mistakes.
Really? Then explain why they still support the WTO, when free trade has proven to be disasterous to both developing and developed nations.
And he had at least 4 MAJOR things wrong with his theories as well (these four things are the primary reason why I call myself marxist HACKER, not just a marxist):
1. Denial of religion. For without moral values, sharing ceases to be a virtue.
2. Lack of proper data gathering. Without knowing the wants and needs of the population, over production and under production is inevitable.
3. Lack of patience- the technology wasn't ready for what he was proposing at the time- agricultural science was just begining to prove itself, and 98% of the population was still required to work on the farms for the society to eat. A far cry from today when our main economic problem is a surplus of labor.
4. Centralization- this is the worst mistake he made, and it's a mistake that is being duplicated today in corporatism and centralized stock markets under so-called "capitalistic" countries.
The errors of Adam Smith are similar:
1. Denial of religion- by embracing one of the seven deadly sins, Adam Smith denied morality as a motivator for human beings.
2. Lack of proper data gathering- while the Invisible Hand of the Market is very good at determining WANTS it's very bad at determining NEEDS- particularily of people who are unemployed or underemployed and thus denied entry into the market, and for those who are too stupid to buy what they NEED and only buy what they WANT.
3. Lack of patience- Capitalism wants efficiency immediately, and will run you right over and pound you into the ground if you get in the way.
4. Centralization- by not putting any checks and balances on greed, mergers of corporations mean that in the end there can be only one mega-corporation- one board to rule them all, one board to find them, one board to bind them all and in the darkness profit from them.
My final solution for both is similar- $1/mile/shipping container tax. This encourages stuff to be produced as close to the end consumer as possible- thus bringing back jobs where comparative advantage would have taken them away. You still have the problem of jobs disappearing to technical obsolescence- but for the most part, those jobs are replaced with new jobs working on the new equipment.
Je Suis Marxiste, Tendance Groucho (Not worth actually looking up the french spelling for a joke).
Oddly enough- from my point of view, the fourth was the least dumb answer of the bunch- of course, the real problem with it is when the Robots start building other Robots- which will come *before* they're in general usage anyway.
One thing amazed me is still being done by human beings- toilets. I would have thought that would have been automated years ago- but apparently the clay they're made out of contains imperfections that can be sanded out once identified- and this is one more job that will have to wait for robotic vision to actually succeed at automating it.
#1, once again, the biggest thing you're missing:
1. I've gotten trolled- we've trolled each other. Because of that, I've strayed from the basic idea of distributionism- that all that is required for central planning to build a group of localized communist and capitalist utopias is a tax on shipping to prevent large corporations and greedy individuals from grabing more market share than they deserve.
You claimed: "People are inherently lazy and greedy.", and I used an extreme example to take you to task for it, and the discussion went downhill from there. I do not support eugenics or euthanasia- what I support most of all is a lack of free trade, done with an extreme tax on shipping. All else from there is under local control- because foreign control is destroyed at that point if their goods can't reach our markets at a competitive rate.
I see. So most people aren't necessary to survive.
Yep- because they're simply not required. This doesn't mean that we kill them- this means that we shunt them off and don't let them participate in the free market.
Ahh, I see. A few global elites know better than most people.
No- a few LOCAL elites know better than most people- and there should be barriers between the elites.
Nevermind the fact that virtually every study of the market (the "bazaar") has proven the market to be more-effective, accurate, and efficient than centralized systems (the "cathedral").
Yes- and my system is more bazaar-like than your central-power-all-in-the-stock-market system.
Wrong again on the facts. Try about 90-100% (it's been above 80% since 1984, so where your 66% figure comes from is beyond me) -- in spite of our being in an increasingly-automated society.
Try using The real numbers instead of the ones the White House wants the DOL to release.
Also, even if the 66% figure you claim (without sources) were correct, we have an unemployment rate of 5.5% to render irrelevant that labor-utilization figure.
Well, there's your source- and exactly why that 5.5% is a completely invented number (hint- if you're out of work long enough, they reclassify you as not being IN the labor force- and the unemployment rate is only the number of people in the labor force- the number of jobs. There's a whole group of people left out, and that's why the Labor Utilization Rate is more usefull).
By eliminating technology in order to reduce society back to an agrarian age? This is the opposite of progress.
No- by using technology to eliminate the need for human labor, thus moving us into a new age where WORK is entirely UNNECCESSARY.
Take off the tinfoil hat and go to college sometime. They are about mind-control to a certain degree (trying to force upon impressionable young college students the leftist ideals of socialism and "equality" and "diversity"), but they won't stop you from thinking outside-the-box. I gave a speech promoting free-markets a little over a week ago, and my leftist prof. didn't stand up and tell me I was wrong.
Try promoting the Robotic Nation next time and see where it gets you.
I take by "the market" you mean "the stock market" -- because to say "the market" is really far too-vague...
No, I mean the free market- the ability to buy and sell and choose what you buy. The only way you gain entry into that is if you're a part of the 66% (and falling) who are allowed to work.
So you mean to say that 30% of the public can't go down the street to their local financial advisor and start investing in the stock market? Baloney.
30% of the public doesn't have the money to do that. Heck, 50% of the public at the height of the dotcom boom didn't have the money to do that.
Financial advisors and companies seeking investment want only 1 thing: money.
And 30% of the population doesn't ha
Only if you're willing to be paid far less per year than you spent getting the degree. Or for that matter- far less than you need to continue learning to keep up with the technology.
And what new industry would that be? And why won't it go away too?
Aren't these the same people who tried to tell us that "comparative advantage" meant we should give up our manufacturing and all get degrees in high tech? Why should we believe ANYTHING they have to say after they've lied to us for so long?
Economics is a religion- and a failed mythology at that. Economists need to learn to examine and reconfigure their basic axioms before ANYBODY should ever listen to them again.
Ok, so you get your ideas from sci-fi authors. That's why you're so wooly-headed.
2nd reply- I want to know who YOU get your ideas from. After all, most scientists start out as science fiction writers- that's where new theories come from. Some of them end up in fields of study that consist entirely of fiction- like economics.