things have changed, more than you might think. while previously this kind of slave labour has boosted the economy in the long term, through tax, enabling better infrastructure, this is no longer true.
large corporations are often not paying _ANY_ tax on anything they do in a poor country. This means that nothing is being added to the country in question, it is merely being used. When it is all used, it will be discarded.
Since when are corporate taxes the only way to "contribute" to a country. When a company employs people it sends money in. That money gets recycled throughout the economy and it can also be used to educate children. The government can get its hands on a slice of it in a variety of ways.
It is the fundamental premise of this scenario that is wrong. Somehow in the west we inevitably make the assumption that all nations without a western-style workforce and labor system are "underdeveloped" and that subsistence must always give way to organized labor.
When we do not bring industrialized labor to people, they move to where the industrialized labor is. This is the pattern everywhere in the world. People want the fruits of modernization. First and foremost they want modern medicine. People do not like watching their children or siblings die. That's what happens often when you do not have access to modern healthcare. Therefore people want money to pay for healthcare. And let's not forget education. Those of us with access to Western high schools and universities have a wonderful gift that I believe should be shared with everybody, everywhere.
I believe that anywhere in the world you should have choice. If you want to live on a farm you should have that choice. My wife's father is a farmer and all of his kids had the choice to stay on the farm. None of them chose to. And of course a North American farmer's life is much, much better than a subsistence farmer's. So choice is much more important for them.
Dualism rearing it's ugly head. Life might not be fair, but it doesn't have to be cruel! Why not raise the bar completely, so no one has to work 20 hour shifts? If there was a world law that everyone ratified, then there would be NO PLACE to get 20 hours for 5 cents a day. Right? It wouldn't HARM anyone, and we'd all be happy to pay 50 cents more for a T-shirt.
Who would ratify a world law? Who would enforce it and how? I would have no problem with a globalized union movement. But that is a COMPLEMENT to a globalized trade movement.
Globalism is never a problem for anyone -- it allows competition to level the paying field for even the poorest nations as long as they have the people who want to work for it.
Sorry, I'm pro-globalization but I would never make a blanket statement like that. Every social change has winners and losers. The hope is that the winners outnumber the losers. I know people who have lost jobs due to globalization. I know OTHER people have got new jobs due to globalization. But the benefits are certainly not spread around equally.
Where globalism, capitalism, and "Big Business" get ugly is when the government (any government) intervenes in any way: whether its a subsidy, a tariff, an embargo, even a bailout (a la airlines). The minute a government steals from the citizens in order to help a business, the system falls apart.
Here we go with that absolutist statements again. So if the government bails out the airplanes, it won't just be a waste of taxpayer money but the whole system will "fall apart". The sky is falling. The sky is falling!
It's evident that totally free trade can "save the world." It's more evident that our country will never allow it. Sanctions against Iraq destroyed that country (NOT Saddam Hussein as the media and government portrays as the culprit).
It would be just wonderful if Iraq was an economic super power. Imagine Saddam Hussein with the manufacturing base of Japan behind him. Oh, we don't need to, we've already seen it. 1930s era Germany.
In order to have a peaceful society, we need to get government ENTIRELY out of free trade. Let businesses and people deal with whomever they want, bar none. I can understand if government may want to limit arms sales, but other than that, I can see no reason to ever limit or subsidies trade or business of any kind.
So it would be okay if American producers buy products from a foreign slave plantation? As long as somebody gets paid it is "free" trade, right?
Hell, even the Libertarians are falling for this one. A little hint for the Randoids: You get a bunch of governments together in a room to agree on a set of rules and regulations about the economy and I guarandamntee you that "free trade" isn't going to come out the other end.
So are you claiming that trade between Canada, the US and Mexico was MORE FREE before NAFTA?
Or that China will have more trade barriers AFTER it joins the WTO?
So their options are either (a) work 20 hour shifts, or (b) die. I'm glad to hear they have a choice in the matter.:^P
They don't have a choice in how hard they work. Poor people have to work harder than rich people to survive. The universe is not fair. We can't make it fair, no matter how much we would like to. The choice they have is working 20 hours for Nike or working 20 hours in a rice paddy. Or maybe working 15 hours as a prostitute. That they choose Nike demonstrates something important about their other options.
Ask yourself: If you were in the above situation, would you feel that you were being treated fairly? Be honest.
I don't think I would really think about it terms of fair or unfair. I would think about it in terms of: "Nike is paying 5 cents a day better than my alternative. I guess I'll go do that." They would think about it in terms of survival and making a better life for their kids and so should we.
It isn't really fair that baseball players get paid so much more than soccer players either. Or that Bill Gates is so much richer than Linus Torvalds. If I was born before the failed Soviet Union experiment I would probably be a lot more motivated to set up a system that was "fair" rather than one that was economically efficient.
That said, I'm all for creative solutions like fair trade coffee and better labelling on clothes. If I heard protesters demanding a kinder, gentler, more accountable globalization, I would be in their corner. But what I actually hear is bashing globalization per se.
Before, the person had one choice: be a rice farmer. Okay, they're a rice farmer. Not much web development in that part of the world, you see. Can't really work at Starbucks.
If they were a rice farmer before, they can go back to being a rice farmer. But guess what: most people prefer to live in a city because being a rice farmer is also back breaking work but you don't get as much money for it.
Now, the factory is built where the farmer's rice paddies used to be, and the farmer is moved, along with everybody else in the hamlet, to a dirty shanty-town.
I do not believe that is an accurate presentation of how things work. You can employ a thousand people in a factory the size of a farm. Therefore you don't build the factory until you hvae a thousand people available to work there. So for the one farmer pushed off his land (or, perhaps the one farmer who gets rich from selling his land) you have 999 people who CHOSE to leave the farm to come to the factory because they can make more money.
It is important to note that often the money was borrowed by long-since removed corrupt regimes. As an individual you are not responsible for your father's debt but as a country you must pay for the gambling losses of every psycho that has ever run the country. Therefore there is a case to be made for the cancelling of third-world debt in some cases. Countries like the US and Britain have similar problems historically theselves. [1], [2],
The vast majority of the workers are underpaid. I see this myself everyday here in Brazil.
You can choose where to look at. You can see the manager, well paid, living as a king. Or, you can look at the bulk of workers, the other 99%, with low wages. It's all a question of choice.
Would Brazil be better off if we shut down globalization and Americans were disallowed even from paying Brazilians LOW wages? People seem to forget that a low wage is better than NO wage and that people (even in Brazil) would not CHOOSE a particular job unless they felt it was better than their alternatives.
You clearly do not know what you are talking about. Ask anyone who has visited the free trade zones in China, or the sweatshop labor factories in Indonesia.
Apart from anything else, these people are forced to work ludicrously long hours for peanuts.
There is one word that is wrong in there and it is the central point you are missing. Those people are NOT forced. Even China, I believe has long since ceased slave labor. Those people work those ridiculously long hours because it is better work for more money than whatever their alternatives are. If we withdraw the option, then they have to go back to whatever even worse work they had before.
As a libertarian, you should realise that coercion cannot play a part in any civilised society, so why then do you think people are working 20 hour shifts ?
They are working 20 hour shifts because that is how much they need to work to make the amount of money they need to survive. If they were given the option of 8 hour shifts, they probably wouldn't make enough money to survive and they probably wouldn't survive. I don't think that's what your advocating.
Of course the reason these meetings are held in secret is that the G7 leaders (and others) are discussing and agreeing things that their voters would not agree with. So much for democracy.
Actually, the problem is that much of what they are discussing is things that their corporations would not agree with. When the American representative says to the Japanese representative, "Okay, we'll lower our tariffs on steel if you lower your tarrifs on computer chips" they hear screams of bloody murder from their steel and computer chip manufacturers. The beneficiaries of these policies are ordinary people, Joe Blow. But we can't be bothered to lobby on our own behalf. "Lower steel prices NOW!"
As Naomi Klein [nologo.org] said in her bestselling book on the subject, 'No Logo [amazon.com]' the problem with globalization is that corporations simply move to the country with the weakest labor protection laws.
The majority of the world has essentially no labor protection whatsoever. That's because they are too poor to be able to afford that protection. When companies move jobs to places where there is no labor protection, they are moving jobs to poor countries. That helps the poor people there. Preventing corporations from moving the jobs hurts those people.
Even in rich countries, organized labor is a sell out of the impoverished for the middle class. How many times have we heard labor fight against a company trying to hire part-timers. The part-timers tend to be immigrants working three or four jobs. The full-timers tend to be well-connected people with relatively hefty salaries.
If we are going to have globalization of business profit making, should we not also have globalization of ethical awareness too ?
Yes. We should. So let's globalize ethical awareness, not prevent the movement of jobs to the places where people need them most. It is pretty clear world-wide that once a particular society gets to a particular level of income they develop the same labor protections we have here. Why would you deny them the opportunity to work up to that point?
Speaking of TiVo, when is somebody going to make a convergence device that does TiVo-like stuff and MP3-like stuff. Once you've got all of the connectors and the hard drive it is really just a question of software.
Personally, I think Perl is the "Nike-language": Just Do It. When I want to code in C or C++ (I like C, I'm not too happy about C++) I always have to do all these things first.
What makes my threshhold go up is people who think that there are only three or four languages in the world. Perl is more productive than C or Java. Wow! And my Camry has better pickup than dump truck.
Is Perl more productive than Python? Lisp? Ruby? SmallTalk? Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. Those languages at least a better point of comparison.
It's a big world out there! C, Perl and Java are not your only choices.
Re:Bad side of globalization
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Globalization
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And it is the poor who are the footsoldiers, without whom the mullahs would just be wackos standing on a street corner annoying people.
You have no evidence to that effect. I'll point out again that there are lots of poor people in the world who don't blow things up. Mexico is pretty close to LA. You don't see Mexicans crossing the border with munitions strapped to them.
However, it the US had spent 1 billion in Afghanistan after the Soviet pullout, building levees, educating farmers, building infrastructure, there would be significantly less support for "fundamentalists" or other rabble rousers. IIRC, the Taliban didn't arise in Afghanistan, but came in from outside the country and filled a power vaccuum, left by warring tribal factions and a weak central government..
So your claim is that the US now has the responsibility to directly pay to alleviate ALL poverty EVERYWHERE in the world because if we don't, they may grow up to be terrorists. Does that seem right to you?
Americans should be shocked and appalled by the treatment palestinians have recieved, which even the UN has condemned, yet we're indifferent to.
I don't know anybody indifferent. There was an excellent article in Harper's magazine just before Sept 11. But what exactly do you expect the US to do? The Israelis believe that they have a God-given right to the land and they believe the Palestinians have no right to it. The Palestinians have an equally xenophobic view. US presidents have spent thousands of hours sitting down with the leaders of both parties. It isn't as if the US has come down on the side of Israel. Actually the US has always asked both sides for moderation and to use non-violence. I'm not saying that the US' hands are clean but neither are the Palestinians', the Lebanese, the Saudi's or anyone else.
Nasty shit happens in the world and did before so-called globalization and it will if we ban so-called globalization. So let's put blame where blame is due: on fundamentalism and xenophobia of all kinds!
Re:GLOBALIZATION IS ABOUT HAVE EXPLOITING HAVE-NOT
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Globalization
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We compete on the gloabl stage for work. We offer a business advantage over third world competitors in that we are stable and are run by the rule of law. And because we have this advantage over 3rd world, that is the only reason why we have work here at all. Otherwise we would have no work here because we CHARGE HIGH WAGES.
People, that is a GOOD THING! WE WANT HIGH WAGES!
High wages for Westerners. Screw the poor elsewhere! They want to work for us but don't let them! Let them starve instead. We want them to work for us to lower the price of our goods. But don't let them! Let's have our products be overpriced instead! The most important thing is to protect the wages of the middle class.
Even if a person were as short-sighted and narrow-minded as that, it would still be no argument against globalization. The economics of the situation are that when we send money abroad those people become consumers and they buy stuff we make like K-rad computer games and Intel processors. So they can escape poverty, we get cheaper basic goods and we get paid to do more interesting work than working in a t-shirt factory. What a ripoff, eh?
If you don't believe the economics, just look at recent history. Ross Perot claimed that NAFTA would send tons of American jobs to Mexico but until the recent slowdown there was virtually no unemployment in the US. We know that low-end jobs did move to Mexico. But we also know that new, high-paying jobs have been created in the tech sector in the last several years. That seems like a good trade to me!
Re:Bad side of globalization
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Globalization
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In my own humble, ininformed, and probably stupid view,
You make it pretty hard for a guy to flame you for being uninformed.
the reason Fundamentalists gain so much support is that Globalization is basically capitalism, whereas the societies where it fails are those where people are so dirt poor that they can't afford the products or services offered by cosmopolitan societies. People no better or worse for the fate of their placement of birth, limited access to opportunity and ability to be brainwashed by zealous ideologues.
This "poverty breeds fundamentalism" view is not supported by the facts. It is usually the middle class and upper middle class that leads the revolution for or against fundamentalism. Where are the fundamentalists from sub-saharan Africa? Why aren't poor Nigerians blowing up planes? Look at Bin Laden and the university-educated students. Do they cite poverty as an issue? The issues are much more subtle and poverty is only one issue, if even that.
Drop a bunch of money on these people, then drop a bunch of catalogs, for the cost of one B-1 bomber we could have full employment, they could have all kinds of toys and we'd have peace.
Sorry. It doesn't work that way. Our billion dollars would be turned into weapons and turned back towards us. Nation building isn't about dumping cash into a cauldron of discontent and factionalism.
Well, peace if that bully in Israel would stop the acts of war against the palestinians.
Yeah, the fault is all Israel's. The fact that many Palestinians are dedicated to the distruction of the Israeli state and the murder of all Jews isn't relevant. This issue is simple like the other one: just tell those evil Jews to stop beating up on the virtuous Palestinians.
Re:anthrax--careful, John
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Globalization
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The Army of God is on the suspect list. And it's completely homegrown American.
It sounds like a fundamentalist outfit. That's in line with the article's thesis.
Why is it that this guy writes a message with a blatantly incorrect premise (that Windows XP won't have a command prompt) is corrected by several people and yet his score is much higher than those of the corrections? Slashdot isn't just a place where misunderstandings are created and perpetuated. They are even rewarded!
But even technologically, it is an error to confuse a scripting language with a system like.NET or Java.
.NET and Java are not even in the same class. One is a language. The other is a marketing buzzword that covers a variety of technologies. Be more precise. What part of.NET are you talking about?
Yes, Rebol, Python, and Perl are much simpler to program than.NET or Java. Yes, they run a few important things somewhat faster. But.NET and Java are natively compiled, fast,
In general, Java is bytecompiled, just as most scripting languages are. Sometimes Java can be JIT-ted to native code. Sometimes scripting languages can be JIT-ted to native code.
general-purpose programming environments with static type checking and large libraries (written in Java itself in the case of Java)
Java's library is not larger than CPAN and certainly is not larger than Jython's. The scripting languages originated the idea of large standard libraries. Python is known as the "batteries included" language. Java and C# (.NET is not a language) are relative johnny-come-latelies.
and that just makes them much more useful for large-real world problems. You see, another misconception is that the easier you make programming in a language, the more useful it is in real-world applications.
It isn't just about ease. Dynamically typed programming languages allow you to radically decrease your line count and all else being equal that reduces your original development cost and your maintenance costs. We could argue whether "all else is equal" but I think rather that I'll point you to some evidence that significant systems can be created in dynamically typed programming languages. Python case study, Using Lisp to Beat your Competition,
Smalltalk in the Large
I'm not the original poster, but I expect he/she would actually agree with you... he/she would say that trademarks, patents, and copyrights aren't "property" either. This is not the usual position but it is a defensible one.
Well it comes down to your definition of property. I think that property is an abstraction to begin with. And anyhow, isn't a corporation an abstraction? Do you dispute that a corporation can be property?
The alleged similarities between domain names and trademarks, IMHO, serve more to confuse the issues than clarify them. You can register the same trademark as someone else, as long as the two don't compete directly.
The issue isn't competition. I cannot open Coca Cola drycleaning. The issue is likelihood of confusion. Nevertheless, I didn't mean to claim that domain names and trademarks are in all senses the same. I claimed only that they are both abstractions and both property according to international law.
--- Intellectual "property" is to property as fool's gold is to gold.
I am personally glad to live in a world where I can buy Breyer's ice cream and be reasonably certain that it was made by the Breyer's corporation.
The key misunderstanding in all such issues is that people view domain names as a form of property. This is patently untrue. It is impossible to form a logical perspective on this case if you regard something as abstract as a domain name as if it was a subject to ownership.
How is a domain name more "abstract" than a trademark, a patent or a musical copyright? I think the entire basis of your post is flawed and the conclusions it comes to are flawed also.
If the law of supply and demand is to operate properly in the net, they have a duty to break their contract in favour of the highest bidder.
What is "operating properly"? Perhaps the Internet community has a legitimate interest in longevity of domain names because there is a clear relationship between longevity of domain names and the survival of meaningful hyperlinks. Furthermore, domain names and trademarks have many commonalities and there is quite an established body of law and practice around the defense of trademarks.
Moderators! The parent post makes basic errors of fact that are corrected in many of the replies. Please moderate accordingly! For intsance, user-level applications do not have to be rewritten to move from FAT to NTFS or to support zip disks. Porting between versions of Windows is less effort than porting between versions of Unix.
Re:Because upgrading IE often hoses your machine.
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AFAIK, IE is integrated into the kernel and replaces the file manager.
There is a difference between being integrated into the operating system (which is loosely defined as the stuff that comes on the OS install CD) and integrated into the kernel. I do not believe that IE is integrated into the kernel.
I understand your point but your terminology was confusing. It was an instance of a common terminological mistake that I thought was worth correction. UTF-8 and Unicode are not alteratives. UTF-8 and UTF-16 are alternatives. UTF-8 and UTF-16 are both Unicode.
One historical root of this terminological mistake is that there was a time where UTF-16 was a sort of blessed or default Unicode encoding. But that is no longer the case.
Slashdot Mirror
things have changed, more than you might think. while previously this kind of slave labour has boosted the economy in the long term, through tax, enabling better infrastructure, this is no longer true. large corporations are often not paying _ANY_ tax on anything they do in a poor country. This means that nothing is being added to the country in question, it is merely being used. When it is all used, it will be discarded.
Since when are corporate taxes the only way to "contribute" to a country. When a company employs people it sends money in. That money gets recycled throughout the economy and it can also be used to educate children. The government can get its hands on a slice of it in a variety of ways.
It is the fundamental premise of this scenario that is wrong. Somehow in the west we inevitably make the assumption that all nations without a western-style workforce and labor system are "underdeveloped" and that subsistence must always give way to organized labor.
When we do not bring industrialized labor to people, they move to where the industrialized labor is. This is the pattern everywhere in the world. People want the fruits of modernization. First and foremost they want modern medicine. People do not like watching their children or siblings die. That's what happens often when you do not have access to modern healthcare. Therefore people want money to pay for healthcare. And let's not forget education. Those of us with access to Western high schools and universities have a wonderful gift that I believe should be shared with everybody, everywhere.
I believe that anywhere in the world you should have choice. If you want to live on a farm you should have that choice. My wife's father is a farmer and all of his kids had the choice to stay on the farm. None of them chose to. And of course a North American farmer's life is much, much better than a subsistence farmer's. So choice is much more important for them.
Dualism rearing it's ugly head. Life might not be fair, but it doesn't have to be cruel! Why not raise the bar completely, so no one has to work 20 hour shifts? If there was a world law that everyone ratified, then there would be NO PLACE to get 20 hours for 5 cents a day. Right? It wouldn't HARM anyone, and we'd all be happy to pay 50 cents more for a T-shirt.
Who would ratify a world law? Who would enforce it and how? I would have no problem with a globalized union movement. But that is a COMPLEMENT to a globalized trade movement.
Globalism is never a problem for anyone -- it allows competition to level the paying field for even the poorest nations as long as they have the people who want to work for it.
Sorry, I'm pro-globalization but I would never make a blanket statement like that. Every social change has winners and losers. The hope is that the winners outnumber the losers. I know people who have lost jobs due to globalization. I know OTHER people have got new jobs due to globalization. But the benefits are certainly not spread around equally.
Where globalism, capitalism, and "Big Business" get ugly is when the government (any government) intervenes in any way: whether its a subsidy, a tariff, an embargo, even a bailout (a la airlines). The minute a government steals from the citizens in order to help a business, the system falls apart.
Here we go with that absolutist statements again. So if the government bails out the airplanes, it won't just be a waste of taxpayer money but the whole system will "fall apart". The sky is falling. The sky is falling!
It's evident that totally free trade can "save the world." It's more evident that our country will never allow it. Sanctions against Iraq destroyed that country (NOT Saddam Hussein as the media and government portrays as the culprit).
It would be just wonderful if Iraq was an economic super power. Imagine Saddam Hussein with the manufacturing base of Japan behind him. Oh, we don't need to, we've already seen it. 1930s era Germany.
In order to have a peaceful society, we need to get government ENTIRELY out of free trade. Let businesses and people deal with whomever they want, bar none. I can understand if government may want to limit arms sales, but other than that, I can see no reason to ever limit or subsidies trade or business of any kind.
So it would be okay if American producers buy products from a foreign slave plantation? As long as somebody gets paid it is "free" trade, right?
Hell, even the Libertarians are falling for this one. A little hint for the Randoids: You get a bunch of governments together in a room to agree on a set of rules and regulations about the economy and I guarandamntee you that "free trade" isn't going to come out the other end.
So are you claiming that trade between Canada, the US and Mexico was MORE FREE before NAFTA? Or that China will have more trade barriers AFTER it joins the WTO?
So their options are either (a) work 20 hour shifts, or (b) die. I'm glad to hear they have a choice in the matter. :^P
They don't have a choice in how hard they work. Poor people have to work harder than rich people to survive. The universe is not fair. We can't make it fair, no matter how much we would like to. The choice they have is working 20 hours for Nike or working 20 hours in a rice paddy. Or maybe working 15 hours as a prostitute. That they choose Nike demonstrates something important about their other options.
Ask yourself: If you were in the above situation, would you feel that you were being treated fairly? Be honest.
I don't think I would really think about it terms of fair or unfair. I would think about it in terms of: "Nike is paying 5 cents a day better than my alternative. I guess I'll go do that." They would think about it in terms of survival and making a better life for their kids and so should we.
It isn't really fair that baseball players get paid so much more than soccer players either. Or that Bill Gates is so much richer than Linus Torvalds. If I was born before the failed Soviet Union experiment I would probably be a lot more motivated to set up a system that was "fair" rather than one that was economically efficient.
That said, I'm all for creative solutions like fair trade coffee and better labelling on clothes. If I heard protesters demanding a kinder, gentler, more accountable globalization, I would be in their corner. But what I actually hear is bashing globalization per se.
Before, the person had one choice: be a rice farmer. Okay, they're a rice farmer. Not much web development in that part of the world, you see. Can't really work at Starbucks.
If they were a rice farmer before, they can go back to being a rice farmer. But guess what: most people prefer to live in a city because being a rice farmer is also back breaking work but you don't get as much money for it.
Now, the factory is built where the farmer's rice paddies used to be, and the farmer is moved, along with everybody else in the hamlet, to a dirty shanty-town.
I do not believe that is an accurate presentation of how things work. You can employ a thousand people in a factory the size of a farm. Therefore you don't build the factory until you hvae a thousand people available to work there. So for the one farmer pushed off his land (or, perhaps the one farmer who gets rich from selling his land) you have 999 people who CHOSE to leave the farm to come to the factory because they can make more money.
It is important to note that often the money was borrowed by long-since removed corrupt regimes. As an individual you are not responsible for your father's debt but as a country you must pay for the gambling losses of every psycho that has ever run the country. Therefore there is a case to be made for the cancelling of third-world debt in some cases. Countries like the US and Britain have similar problems historically theselves. [1], [2],
The vast majority of the workers are underpaid. I see this myself everyday here in Brazil.
You can choose where to look at. You can see the manager, well paid, living as a king. Or, you can look at the bulk of workers, the other 99%, with low wages. It's all a question of choice.
Would Brazil be better off if we shut down globalization and Americans were disallowed even from paying Brazilians LOW wages? People seem to forget that a low wage is better than NO wage and that people (even in Brazil) would not CHOOSE a particular job unless they felt it was better than their alternatives.
You clearly do not know what you are talking about. Ask anyone who has visited the free trade zones in China, or the sweatshop labor factories in Indonesia. Apart from anything else, these people are forced to work ludicrously long hours for peanuts.
There is one word that is wrong in there and it is the central point you are missing. Those people are NOT forced. Even China, I believe has long since ceased slave labor. Those people work those ridiculously long hours because it is better work for more money than whatever their alternatives are. If we withdraw the option, then they have to go back to whatever even worse work they had before.
As a libertarian, you should realise that coercion cannot play a part in any civilised society, so why then do you think people are working 20 hour shifts ?
They are working 20 hour shifts because that is how much they need to work to make the amount of money they need to survive. If they were given the option of 8 hour shifts, they probably wouldn't make enough money to survive and they probably wouldn't survive. I don't think that's what your advocating.
Of course the reason these meetings are held in secret is that the G7 leaders (and others) are discussing and agreeing things that their voters would not agree with. So much for democracy.
Actually, the problem is that much of what they are discussing is things that their corporations would not agree with. When the American representative says to the Japanese representative, "Okay, we'll lower our tariffs on steel if you lower your tarrifs on computer chips" they hear screams of bloody murder from their steel and computer chip manufacturers. The beneficiaries of these policies are ordinary people, Joe Blow. But we can't be bothered to lobby on our own behalf. "Lower steel prices NOW!"
As Naomi Klein [nologo.org] said in her bestselling book on the subject, 'No Logo [amazon.com]' the problem with globalization is that corporations simply move to the country with the weakest labor protection laws.
The majority of the world has essentially no labor protection whatsoever. That's because they are too poor to be able to afford that protection. When companies move jobs to places where there is no labor protection, they are moving jobs to poor countries. That helps the poor people there. Preventing corporations from moving the jobs hurts those people.
Even in rich countries, organized labor is a sell out of the impoverished for the middle class. How many times have we heard labor fight against a company trying to hire part-timers. The part-timers tend to be immigrants working three or four jobs. The full-timers tend to be well-connected people with relatively hefty salaries.
If we are going to have globalization of business profit making, should we not also have globalization of ethical awareness too ?
Yes. We should. So let's globalize ethical awareness, not prevent the movement of jobs to the places where people need them most. It is pretty clear world-wide that once a particular society gets to a particular level of income they develop the same labor protections we have here. Why would you deny them the opportunity to work up to that point?
Speaking of TiVo, when is somebody going to make a convergence device that does TiVo-like stuff and MP3-like stuff. Once you've got all of the connectors and the hard drive it is really just a question of software.
Personally, I think Perl is the "Nike-language": Just Do It. When I want to code in C or C++ (I like C, I'm not too happy about C++) I always have to do all these things first.
What makes my threshhold go up is people who think that there are only three or four languages in the world. Perl is more productive than C or Java. Wow! And my Camry has better pickup than dump truck.
Is Perl more productive than Python? Lisp? Ruby? SmallTalk? Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. Those languages at least a better point of comparison.
It's a big world out there! C, Perl and Java are not your only choices.
And it is the poor who are the footsoldiers, without whom the mullahs would just be wackos standing on a street corner annoying people.
You have no evidence to that effect. I'll point out again that there are lots of poor people in the world who don't blow things up. Mexico is pretty close to LA. You don't see Mexicans crossing the border with munitions strapped to them.
However, it the US had spent 1 billion in Afghanistan after the Soviet pullout, building levees, educating farmers, building infrastructure, there would be significantly less support for "fundamentalists" or other rabble rousers. IIRC, the Taliban didn't arise in Afghanistan, but came in from outside the country and filled a power vaccuum, left by warring tribal factions and a weak central government. .
So your claim is that the US now has the responsibility to directly pay to alleviate ALL poverty EVERYWHERE in the world because if we don't, they may grow up to be terrorists. Does that seem right to you?
Americans should be shocked and appalled by the treatment palestinians have recieved, which even the UN has condemned, yet we're indifferent to.
I don't know anybody indifferent. There was an excellent article in Harper's magazine just before Sept 11. But what exactly do you expect the US to do? The Israelis believe that they have a God-given right to the land and they believe the Palestinians have no right to it. The Palestinians have an equally xenophobic view. US presidents have spent thousands of hours sitting down with the leaders of both parties. It isn't as if the US has come down on the side of Israel. Actually the US has always asked both sides for moderation and to use non-violence. I'm not saying that the US' hands are clean but neither are the Palestinians', the Lebanese, the Saudi's or anyone else.
Nasty shit happens in the world and did before so-called globalization and it will if we ban so-called globalization. So let's put blame where blame is due: on fundamentalism and xenophobia of all kinds!
We compete on the gloabl stage for work. We offer a business advantage over third world competitors in that we are stable and are run by the rule of law. And because we have this advantage over 3rd world, that is the only reason why we have work here at all. Otherwise we would have no work here because we CHARGE HIGH WAGES. People, that is a GOOD THING! WE WANT HIGH WAGES!
High wages for Westerners. Screw the poor elsewhere! They want to work for us but don't let them! Let them starve instead. We want them to work for us to lower the price of our goods. But don't let them! Let's have our products be overpriced instead! The most important thing is to protect the wages of the middle class.
Even if a person were as short-sighted and narrow-minded as that, it would still be no argument against globalization. The economics of the situation are that when we send money abroad those people become consumers and they buy stuff we make like K-rad computer games and Intel processors. So they can escape poverty, we get cheaper basic goods and we get paid to do more interesting work than working in a t-shirt factory. What a ripoff, eh?
If you don't believe the economics, just look at recent history. Ross Perot claimed that NAFTA would send tons of American jobs to Mexico but until the recent slowdown there was virtually no unemployment in the US. We know that low-end jobs did move to Mexico. But we also know that new, high-paying jobs have been created in the tech sector in the last several years. That seems like a good trade to me!
In my own humble, ininformed, and probably stupid view,
You make it pretty hard for a guy to flame you for being uninformed.
the reason Fundamentalists gain so much support is that Globalization is basically capitalism, whereas the societies where it fails are those where people are so dirt poor that they can't afford the products or services offered by cosmopolitan societies. People no better or worse for the fate of their placement of birth, limited access to opportunity and ability to be brainwashed by zealous ideologues.
This "poverty breeds fundamentalism" view is not supported by the facts. It is usually the middle class and upper middle class that leads the revolution for or against fundamentalism. Where are the fundamentalists from sub-saharan Africa? Why aren't poor Nigerians blowing up planes? Look at Bin Laden and the university-educated students. Do they cite poverty as an issue? The issues are much more subtle and poverty is only one issue, if even that.
Drop a bunch of money on these people, then drop a bunch of catalogs, for the cost of one B-1 bomber we could have full employment, they could have all kinds of toys and we'd have peace.
Sorry. It doesn't work that way. Our billion dollars would be turned into weapons and turned back towards us. Nation building isn't about dumping cash into a cauldron of discontent and factionalism.
Well, peace if that bully in Israel would stop the acts of war against the palestinians.
Yeah, the fault is all Israel's. The fact that many Palestinians are dedicated to the distruction of the Israeli state and the murder of all Jews isn't relevant. This issue is simple like the other one: just tell those evil Jews to stop beating up on the virtuous Palestinians.
The Army of God is on the suspect list. And it's completely homegrown American.
It sounds like a fundamentalist outfit. That's in line with the article's thesis.Why is it that this guy writes a message with a blatantly incorrect premise (that Windows XP won't have a command prompt) is corrected by several people and yet his score is much higher than those of the corrections? Slashdot isn't just a place where misunderstandings are created and perpetuated. They are even rewarded!
But even technologically, it is an error to confuse a scripting language with a system like .NET or Java.
.NET and Java are not even in the same class. One is a language. The other is a marketing buzzword that covers a variety of technologies. Be more precise. What part of .NET are you talking about?
Yes, Rebol, Python, and Perl are much simpler to program than .NET or Java. Yes, they run a few important things somewhat faster. But .NET and Java are natively compiled, fast,
In general, Java is bytecompiled, just as most scripting languages are. Sometimes Java can be JIT-ted to native code. Sometimes scripting languages can be JIT-ted to native code.
general-purpose programming environments with static type checking and large libraries (written in Java itself in the case of Java)
Java's library is not larger than CPAN and certainly is not larger than Jython's. The scripting languages originated the idea of large standard libraries. Python is known as the "batteries included" language. Java and C# (.NET is not a language) are relative johnny-come-latelies.
and that just makes them much more useful for large-real world problems. You see, another misconception is that the easier you make programming in a language, the more useful it is in real-world applications.
It isn't just about ease. Dynamically typed programming languages allow you to radically decrease your line count and all else being equal that reduces your original development cost and your maintenance costs. We could argue whether "all else is equal" but I think rather that I'll point you to some evidence that significant systems can be created in dynamically typed programming languages. Python case study, Using Lisp to Beat your Competition, Smalltalk in the Large
I'm not the original poster, but I expect he/she would actually agree with you... he/she would say that trademarks, patents, and copyrights aren't "property" either. This is not the usual position but it is a defensible one.
Well it comes down to your definition of property. I think that property is an abstraction to begin with. And anyhow, isn't a corporation an abstraction? Do you dispute that a corporation can be property?
The alleged similarities between domain names and trademarks, IMHO, serve more to confuse the issues than clarify them. You can register the same trademark as someone else, as long as the two don't compete directly.
The issue isn't competition. I cannot open Coca Cola drycleaning. The issue is likelihood of confusion. Nevertheless, I didn't mean to claim that domain names and trademarks are in all senses the same. I claimed only that they are both abstractions and both property according to international law.
--- Intellectual "property" is to property as fool's gold is to gold.
I am personally glad to live in a world where I can buy Breyer's ice cream and be reasonably certain that it was made by the Breyer's corporation.
The key misunderstanding in all such issues is that people view domain names as a form of property. This is patently untrue. It is impossible to form a logical perspective on this case if you regard something as abstract as a domain name as if it was a subject to ownership.
How is a domain name more "abstract" than a trademark, a patent or a musical copyright? I think the entire basis of your post is flawed and the conclusions it comes to are flawed also.
If the law of supply and demand is to operate properly in the net, they have a duty to break their contract in favour of the highest bidder.
What is "operating properly"? Perhaps the Internet community has a legitimate interest in longevity of domain names because there is a clear relationship between longevity of domain names and the survival of meaningful hyperlinks. Furthermore, domain names and trademarks have many commonalities and there is quite an established body of law and practice around the defense of trademarks.
Moderators! The parent post makes basic errors of fact that are corrected in many of the replies. Please moderate accordingly! For intsance, user-level applications do not have to be rewritten to move from FAT to NTFS or to support zip disks. Porting between versions of Windows is less effort than porting between versions of Unix.
AFAIK, IE is integrated into the kernel and replaces the file manager.
There is a difference between being integrated into the operating system (which is loosely defined as the stuff that comes on the OS install CD) and integrated into the kernel. I do not believe that IE is integrated into the kernel.
One historical root of this terminological mistake is that there was a time where UTF-16 was a sort of blessed or default Unicode encoding. But that is no longer the case.