What constitutes illegal clicking? Is it just clicking without the intent to buy? In which case an accidental click would be illegal. Or is there some sort of threshold... 5 clicks in a minute? What I'm trying to say is that this should not be a legal problem, it is clearly a problem with the system. Ace Karaoke, though unethically, was taking advantage of what is obviously a system with a major flaw.
The idea is that intent == fraud. If I accidentally click...that's par for the course for click advertising. No one guaranteed every click would be a sale. However, writing a script to simulate clicks in order to screw your competitors, that's fraud. That's beyond ethics, I believe that might actually be illegal.
A simple solution would be to have an anti-bot confirmation pop up in order to approve the click through (much like the one that I must fill out in order to submit this), though Google would never do something like that. Their business would take a major dive.
I think the idea is rather to use the power of Google to determine from their behavior which click patterns are likely to be fraudulent.
I would pick apart the autogenerated code and find the places where my weird-named objects would turn up, then I would try to figure out how it got called and what it called in turn. Basically, I would build a hypothetical call stack and unravel the "secrets" of autogenerated code. It's an amazingly effective way for me to learn. You might give it a shot sometime.
That's pretty interesting, and sounds effective, but I don't think it would work for everybody. That's pretty cool, though.
Screw that "by hand" stuff, though. If there's a wizard, it's there for a reason and I should use it. I just need to know why, when, and how.
Oh, I fully agree. Wizards are great - as I said, as long as you know exactly what the wizard does. But I stick with my original point, which was that a wizard in the hands of a beginner is no way to learn to program. I also think that what you did is a fantastic way for an expert in a language to learn exactly what the wizard is doing.
I agree that clicking on a wizard is not programming, but for someone who's just starting, built-in IDE tools (like wizards) can really help. As an expirienced user, I have no problem manually typing
Bad idea. A new programmer should start with small command-line programs, and grow into coding bigger things *by hand* at first. Only when they understand exactly what the wizard does should they start using them as time savers.
That, I think is the point of wizards - to save you time, not to do for you things you don't understand. When new users start using wizards, bad code WILL result.
Microsoft or any other company, even monpolies, can create whatever product they like and sell it however they want (obviously it has to be legal.) And thats' the issue with Microsoft. It's not that Microsoft is a near monopoly, it's that Microsoft frequently abuses it's monopoly position. The abuse is what's illegal, not the monopoly.
No shit. And my point is that Apple's handling of the iPod accessory market is in the same mold.
Are you saying MS shouldn't be allowed to create programs for Windows? That doesn't make any sense.
The thread is referring to Apple's ability to control what accessories are made for iPod - potentially becoming the SOLE producer. Consider what would happen if one made the argument that MS should be the SOLE producer of windows programs - or to toghtly control who was allowed to do so. Anti-trust would apply.
OK, so apple created the ipod, they can create accessories if they want
If other companies are too slow to release new ipod accessories and apple beats them to it, well thats just too freakin bad for those other companies now isnt it?
Um, not when they have a near monopoly. Let's change that to "MS created Windows, they can create the programs for it if they want."
Still agree with that statement? Didn't think so. And I'm not sure where you're going wieh the speed argument. Apple isn't "beating" anyone, in fact they're trying to artificially restrict the marketplace.
Anti-patent, you're probably right, but anti-copyright? That's the basis for the GPL, and many people here author software and like to have rights over it. I think you're confusing anti-RIAA/MPAA with anti-copyright.
Good point, I should be more clear: 75% of the slashdot crowd is a bunch of hypocrites. They're anti-copyright when it comes to media they want to download for free. They're also in favor of copyright when it's software written someone who forwards their social or political philosophy (ie, OSS).
For those who are familiar with my typical rants and raves on Slashdot, this post isn't much different. I'm the sole anti-copyright activist in most threads,
Wait - what? I'd say 75% of slashdot is anti-copyright, 50% of it anti-patent, and 90% anti-software-patent. Your threads must be small.
2. Why the crys of "bullshit" from other researchers? There is a piece of evidence, not just a claim. It seems easy to figure out what's going on by analyzing the contents of that bottle.
That begs the question: Are the contents of the bottle guaranteed to be sterile, uncontaminated by their trip from space (theoretically) to the bottle? From reports of the collection methods, chances are slim.
It's funny, because when MS tried that with Office (having minimalist menus with only the commonly-used functionality exposed by default, and having install-on-demand features) it was called an abomination...
That's not because it was a generally poor idea, but poorly executed. What they did is hide crap it thinks I don't need because 1) they can't design uncluttered menus in the first place and 2) they think I can't use a menu. What is being suggested is that the user be given the ability to de-activate things himself.
Nothing you've said even suggests that we're somehow less likely to turn into a third world nation the way things are going now.
That's the sort of myopic thinking that leads to the US losing its competitive advantage. Put another way - what do *you* think is keeping our wages elevated above the rest of the world?
The unemployment rate which is manipulated so that it doesn't look so bad? That one? Independent phone polling with large enough samples has its problems too (young people have cells, not landlines), but it gives numbers wildly different than what the Dept of Labor does.
You're going to have to do better than paranoia and produce some evidence. The unemployment rate, by all accounts, has been very low by historical standards for some time now. There are plenty of jobs for people willing to work.
Uh, what fucking planet are you from? Jobs are sent overseas because someone at the middle management level or above decides it would be cheaper to hire indians or chinese or whatever. What kind of weasel-speak translates that to "no one wants to perform them" ?
You're too damned myopic. Yes, for a given job, some manager sends a job overseas. What you are completely incapable of is stepping back and asking the question of WHY it got to that point. And what caused that is that American labor is expensive. That job got sent overseas not because Indians are more *qualified*, but because we're too expensive. And guess what? Unless you want to cut your salary byu a factor of 10, we want to be expensive! What it means is that trivial tasks like call centers don't belong in this country because no one wants to do them at the prevailing wage. Labor is subject to supply and demand just like anything else.
Everyone raise a hand that's seen a tech job outsourced. Oh wait, we're only allowed to count *high*-tech jobs... guess that means that unless you're a Phd in materials science whose had his nanotech research job sent to India, doesn't count?
High-tech doesn't mean PhD. High-tech requires a lot of support workers at levels between AA and PhD. That's why high tech is great - it raises everyone's wages. I asked you before - why does a janitor in America make 10x as much as one in India? Is it because he pushes the broom that much better? No - he got pulled up by a labor market made expensive by America's cutting edge industries.
Look, this is simple. If we create an expensive new high tech job, and toss a low tech job to India, THAT'S GOOD. Otherwise, India in 50 years becomes higher tech than we are, and they command better wages than we do. Want that? Me either. The situation is good because 1) Unemployment isn't going up, and 2) we're keeping the better jobs.
I can. Above average intelligence. Finely honed sense of intuition. I feel that way, because at some fundamental level, I am right.
All I hear is arrogance and paranoia. Back up your claims with a shred of evidence. And what is your claim, precisely? That all our jobs are going to India? Doesn't jive with *anyone's* unemployment and wage statistics.
Look, I could continue with this forever, but I'd suggest some background in macroeconomics. And other than pissing and moaning, I've yet to hear a solution from you. What do you do? How do you prevent jobs from going overseas? I hate to tell you, but we can't isolate our economy from the rest of the world's. If you like your incredibly high wages (from a worldly perspective), then the way to maintain that is a steady flow of high-tech jobs into this country, and a flow out of low-tech jobs. Just like we're doing.
What, do you want to be a nuclear engineer after studying at DeVry for 2 years? Not going to happen.
If there's any complaint, it's that you need a college degree at all to land a typical white collar office job. Fair enough - but really, what it comes down to is that these businesses don't want to hire 18 year olds, and 18 year olds need something to do for a few years while they theoretically mature a bit. How about a 4-year keg party? Why not?
Put another way: College is a helluvalot of fun - why the hell would you want to shorten the experience?
I would set up an economy that doesn't require a BS at minimum or a Phd at higher income levels just to get a reasonably secure job in a real field, not gizmometry.
You can get that job in this economy, but you'll probably have your name on your shirt.;)
Now you just have to work 1 job for 2 years, change to another, then another, then another... then oops you dont find one... then you find one, then you get outsourced, then you find another, you're fired, you change jobs... change.. change change.
It's not that bad, really. Not that many jobs get outsourced, and most of them suck.
But it used to be... 1 stable job that you could depend on, for your entire life, that would raise a family, afford a house, your retirement...
That's mostly a myth. When the hell was this? During the 1800s when eveybody was subsistence farmers or working in sweat-shop factories? During the Great Depression? During the 70s gas-crisis recession? The 80s-90s recession? The dot bomb bubble? The effect you're speaking of lasted for a generation (1945-70) at most during the post-war period, when a ton of farms were busted up into cheap land for returning soldiers in the suburbs. And yeah, it would have been nice (economically) to live back then, but I'm sure the Cuban missile crisis was nerve wracking enough to make up for it.
Look at the inflation rate and unemployment rates, we're doing pretty good.
Does anyone that is struggling to find a new job, to afford rent, and to feed their kids really worried whether or not the US is an economic leader? I'm sure they feel proud to make the sacrifice so that XYZ Corp.'s stock is up 3 points above it's 52 week high, and that's all they *really* need, isn't it?
Yes, it sucks for individuals when jobs are lost. What would suck more would be for the US to turn into a third-world nation because we engage in some brain-dead protectionist scheme.
Really? So it's impossible for them to get rid of jobs without replacing them here? After all, the labor market is zero sum. They could send all the jobs overseas, and leave none here. Or is there some magical economic phenomena that replaces any job that is outsourced?
Yes, you're looking at it backwards - jobs are sent overseas because no one here wants to perform them, meaning that the crappiest jobs leave. Just like we like it! Your argument falls when one considers the unemployment rate of under 5%. Everyone who is trying to work, essentially, has a job or will have one soon. That makes it a question - are the new jobs better than the old ones? The answer is yes. The quality of jobs maintained here is high, and that's the relevant issue. Again, consider what jobs we're losing, and why they're being outsourced. If we were losing tons of high-tech jobs, *then* I'd be concerned. Look at it long term - are the jobs that Americans did 50 or 100 years ago better than the ones now? Don't think so.
Put it another way - how many tech jobs have been created in the last 10 years (net job creation, not counting the bubble crap)? A lot have been. Well, there have been more jobs created than the size of the labor market has increased. So we don't have enough people to do the jobs, but they need to be done! Thus, jobs have to be outsourced.
Why am I the only one here that feels as if we're all being lied to? That the happy-go-lucky "you just don't understand the wonderful economics of it all!" propaganda is just that? They do this in pyramid schemes all the time, just long enough for the culprits to make off with all the money that we paid for the "training materials".
Well, I can't really explain your feeling the way you do. I'm not saying "they" always tell you the truth, but it doesn't mean that offshoring is inherently bad. Think about it analytically - consider the world in a dynamic sense, instead of a static one. In other words, ignore for a minute that Dell is offshoring its call centers. Ask yourself, how did the American economy become the best in the world, and what do we need to do to ensure it stays that way? The answer is ingenuity. Research. Development. Make the new things that the world will want or need and it will pay a high price for them. The result is a strong economy, and these industries make tons of jobs, and pull the average wage up with them. That's what makes a janitor in America earn 10 times as much as one in Bangladesh, despite doing the same job.
If you want to ensure our economy stays strong, don't try to put a band aid on small problems. If we face a serious threat, it's that we've stopped investing like we used to in research and development at the University level. There's also that our new immigration policies turn away skilled workers who would help develop the "next big thing" here. And, yes, there's also the fact that developing nations are finally becoming competitive. But rather than worry that they're getting our old, crappy jobs now, let's make sure that our Universities still get their best in this country, and keep them working for America, to ensure they don't take our high-tech jobs later.
If you disagree, how would you maintain this country so our economy is still the best for our kids? I say strong R&D funding, strong education funding, and an environment favorable to risk-taking entrepeneurs. If we maintain that, we'll have all the good jobs we want, tossing the rest to the 3rd world.
For instance, biotech....er, oops, we're outsourcing that too!
If you mean that American companies are trying to have a presence in multiple countries for strategic reasons, then you're right. But all large companies do that, and I imagine the German economy is really screwed since Siemens has a number of Americans employed here. If you mean that American biotech operations are being closed and moved to India, you're dead wrong. Especially research and development jobs.
At some point, there are no industries left.
Manufacturing is no longer cutting edge. The entire point - which you don't grasp - is that to maintain a position of world leadership economically, you have to be doing what is cutting edge all the time. You develop new things, generate jobs from them, and as you do this, you slough off some of the jobs from what was cutting-edge 20 years ago to developing countries. We've been doing this for about 100 years.
Take a step back 50 years. What was high-tech then was transistors, radios, and TVs. Let's say your grandfather made the same basic argument you are, namely that we need to maintain the jobs we have manufacturing TVs, radios, and semiconductors. Forget that research crap, we don't need it.
What would we have today? Jobs that no one would want. No one today wants to have a job making radios and TVs. No industry here wants to do it. THere's just no money in it, certainly not enough to sustain an American wage.
You can't think of an economy statically. Things are always changing. Our economy depends on American research institutions and companies to keep developing the next big thing, while offshoring the manufacturing of the last big thing to somebody poor.
As somebody else tried to tell you, economic growth is not a zero sum game, but the labor market is. There are only enough jobs to go around. As long as we're outsourcing the crappy jobs, that's an indication that the American economy is humming along just fine.
OK smart guy. Give me that half a clue. Tell me how email works under this hare-brained micropayment scheme. Who controls it? Who's in charge? Who prevents abuse? How do payments get from point A to point B? How does this work with national boundaries? How do you fiat worldwide adoption to actually get acceptance?
Those and 1000 more unresolved questions are why micropayments will never work.
I didn't see the protocol (was it wifi?) in the article, but why not ask the church to put a repeater in their tower in exchange for setting up their computer to access the same ISP?
Since this is a digg repeat, I'll tell you what he said.;) Evidently, he asked them if they could work something out and they said no.
It is overengineering a bit, but not so much if you actually do have access to the crap he has and the ability to do it.
Oh God, not the micropayments crap again. Please, not a system that requires an enormously bloated bureaucracy to work, tying *every single email address* to a bank account. This effectively kills what's great about the internet, namely that it Just Works.
Consumers, which we all are, benefit as well because cheaper labor means a cheaper product. Sucks for the laborer who loses his job, but hey, that's free market capitalism.
Not only that, but people have been making these silly arguments for labor protectionism for years. Specifically, for around 300 years, since the time of Ludd at least. The fact is that the US has one of the highest average incomes on the planet, and we do this by sloughing off the job that don't lead to growth. These jobs are invariably replaced by better jobs. The fact is, that jobs and job markets change. If they didn't, we'd all be subsistence farmers or working in crappy factories, and no one wants that.
I think we can separate a feeling of empathy for the employee from a sense of doing what's best for the country. No form of protectionism has ever been good, labor or otherwise.
I think you missed the fact that he left his friend in the hospital and went home for 24 hours before coming forward. Most of the time when you shoot someone in the face and then dodge police for 24 hours, people accuse you of destroying evidence.
Nope. The sheriff was notified with an hour and a half. For a scenario such as this, I think you'd find that to be rather quick.
The press' beef wasn't that he didn't notify the *cops*, but rather that he didn't notify *them*.
Not sure what evidence you'd destroy, the buckshot was rather prominent.
Thank God somebody said it. Every time I see one of these studies, I remind myself that they're being performed by the same idiot pre-meds who were struggling through basic physics and chemistry courses. Even that's when they didn't get special dumbed-down "premed" versions of those classes. Somehow, this is not surprising. Not saying all doctors are dumb, just most of them.
Who needs an actual mechanism, as long as I repeat the experiment enough times to get the right confidence level from the stat table!
And oddly enough, the Cheney story was heralded as an example of information not freely flowing to the general public in a timely fashion.
Which is stupid. I'm no Cheney defender, but I don't personally feel a need to know within 10 minutes whenever he takes a piss. The guy had just seriously injured a friend of his, and if his focus is more on that, fine. The media always throws a fit whenever public figures don't bow to their will. Meanwhile, they ignore actual stories, as previously mentioned - such as the Patriot Act.
Also, part of the problem is that journalists are (at least 80% of them, anyway) really dumb, so anything that involves more than a cursory analysis is going to be way over their heads. That goes double for TV reporters. So they cover things that are best left to the tabloids.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea is that intent == fraud. If I accidentally click...that's par for the course for click advertising. No one guaranteed every click would be a sale. However, writing a script to simulate clicks in order to screw your competitors, that's fraud. That's beyond ethics, I believe that might actually be illegal.
A simple solution would be to have an anti-bot confirmation pop up in order to approve the click through (much like the one that I must fill out in order to submit this), though Google would never do something like that. Their business would take a major dive.
I think the idea is rather to use the power of Google to determine from their behavior which click patterns are likely to be fraudulent.
That's pretty interesting, and sounds effective, but I don't think it would work for everybody. That's pretty cool, though.
Screw that "by hand" stuff, though. If there's a wizard, it's there for a reason and I should use it. I just need to know why, when, and how.
Oh, I fully agree. Wizards are great - as I said, as long as you know exactly what the wizard does. But I stick with my original point, which was that a wizard in the hands of a beginner is no way to learn to program. I also think that what you did is a fantastic way for an expert in a language to learn exactly what the wizard is doing.
OK, yeah, I didn't read that from what I've heard from them. I thought they were going to demand a cut from *anyone* making iCrap.
Bad idea. A new programmer should start with small command-line programs, and grow into coding bigger things *by hand* at first. Only when they understand exactly what the wizard does should they start using them as time savers.
That, I think is the point of wizards - to save you time, not to do for you things you don't understand. When new users start using wizards, bad code WILL result.
No shit. And my point is that Apple's handling of the iPod accessory market is in the same mold.
The thread is referring to Apple's ability to control what accessories are made for iPod - potentially becoming the SOLE producer. Consider what would happen if one made the argument that MS should be the SOLE producer of windows programs - or to toghtly control who was allowed to do so. Anti-trust would apply.
Um, not when they have a near monopoly. Let's change that to "MS created Windows, they can create the programs for it if they want."
Still agree with that statement? Didn't think so. And I'm not sure where you're going wieh the speed argument. Apple isn't "beating" anyone, in fact they're trying to artificially restrict the marketplace.
In this case, yes it most certainly does. Take a logic class.
Good point, I should be more clear: 75% of the slashdot crowd is a bunch of hypocrites. They're anti-copyright when it comes to media they want to download for free. They're also in favor of copyright when it's software written someone who forwards their social or political philosophy (ie, OSS).
Wait - what? I'd say 75% of slashdot is anti-copyright, 50% of it anti-patent, and 90% anti-software-patent. Your threads must be small.
That begs the question: Are the contents of the bottle guaranteed to be sterile, uncontaminated by their trip from space (theoretically) to the bottle? From reports of the collection methods, chances are slim.
Thus, bullshit I cry.
That's not because it was a generally poor idea, but poorly executed. What they did is hide crap it thinks I don't need because 1) they can't design uncluttered menus in the first place and 2) they think I can't use a menu. What is being suggested is that the user be given the ability to de-activate things himself.
That's the sort of myopic thinking that leads to the US losing its competitive advantage. Put another way - what do *you* think is keeping our wages elevated above the rest of the world?
The unemployment rate which is manipulated so that it doesn't look so bad? That one? Independent phone polling with large enough samples has its problems too (young people have cells, not landlines), but it gives numbers wildly different than what the Dept of Labor does.
You're going to have to do better than paranoia and produce some evidence. The unemployment rate, by all accounts, has been very low by historical standards for some time now. There are plenty of jobs for people willing to work.
Uh, what fucking planet are you from? Jobs are sent overseas because someone at the middle management level or above decides it would be cheaper to hire indians or chinese or whatever. What kind of weasel-speak translates that to "no one wants to perform them" ?
You're too damned myopic. Yes, for a given job, some manager sends a job overseas. What you are completely incapable of is stepping back and asking the question of WHY it got to that point. And what caused that is that American labor is expensive. That job got sent overseas not because Indians are more *qualified*, but because we're too expensive. And guess what? Unless you want to cut your salary byu a factor of 10, we want to be expensive! What it means is that trivial tasks like call centers don't belong in this country because no one wants to do them at the prevailing wage. Labor is subject to supply and demand just like anything else.
Everyone raise a hand that's seen a tech job outsourced. Oh wait, we're only allowed to count *high*-tech jobs... guess that means that unless you're a Phd in materials science whose had his nanotech research job sent to India, doesn't count?
High-tech doesn't mean PhD. High-tech requires a lot of support workers at levels between AA and PhD. That's why high tech is great - it raises everyone's wages. I asked you before - why does a janitor in America make 10x as much as one in India? Is it because he pushes the broom that much better? No - he got pulled up by a labor market made expensive by America's cutting edge industries.
Look, this is simple. If we create an expensive new high tech job, and toss a low tech job to India, THAT'S GOOD. Otherwise, India in 50 years becomes higher tech than we are, and they command better wages than we do. Want that? Me either. The situation is good because 1) Unemployment isn't going up, and 2) we're keeping the better jobs.
I can. Above average intelligence. Finely honed sense of intuition. I feel that way, because at some fundamental level, I am right.
All I hear is arrogance and paranoia. Back up your claims with a shred of evidence. And what is your claim, precisely? That all our jobs are going to India? Doesn't jive with *anyone's* unemployment and wage statistics.
Look, I could continue with this forever, but I'd suggest some background in macroeconomics. And other than pissing and moaning, I've yet to hear a solution from you. What do you do? How do you prevent jobs from going overseas? I hate to tell you, but we can't isolate our economy from the rest of the world's. If you like your incredibly high wages (from a worldly perspective), then the way to maintain that is a steady flow of high-tech jobs into this country, and a flow out of low-tech jobs. Just like we're doing.
What, do you want to be a nuclear engineer after studying at DeVry for 2 years? Not going to happen.
If there's any complaint, it's that you need a college degree at all to land a typical white collar office job. Fair enough - but really, what it comes down to is that these businesses don't want to hire 18 year olds, and 18 year olds need something to do for a few years while they theoretically mature a bit. How about a 4-year keg party? Why not?
Put another way: College is a helluvalot of fun - why the hell would you want to shorten the experience?
You can get that job in this economy, but you'll probably have your name on your shirt. ;)
It's not that bad, really. Not that many jobs get outsourced, and most of them suck.
But it used to be... 1 stable job that you could depend on, for your entire life, that would raise a family, afford a house, your retirement...
That's mostly a myth. When the hell was this? During the 1800s when eveybody was subsistence farmers or working in sweat-shop factories? During the Great Depression? During the 70s gas-crisis recession? The 80s-90s recession? The dot bomb bubble? The effect you're speaking of lasted for a generation (1945-70) at most during the post-war period, when a ton of farms were busted up into cheap land for returning soldiers in the suburbs. And yeah, it would have been nice (economically) to live back then, but I'm sure the Cuban missile crisis was nerve wracking enough to make up for it.
Look at the inflation rate and unemployment rates, we're doing pretty good.
Yes, it sucks for individuals when jobs are lost. What would suck more would be for the US to turn into a third-world nation because we engage in some brain-dead protectionist scheme.
Really? So it's impossible for them to get rid of jobs without replacing them here? After all, the labor market is zero sum. They could send all the jobs overseas, and leave none here. Or is there some magical economic phenomena that replaces any job that is outsourced?
Yes, you're looking at it backwards - jobs are sent overseas because no one here wants to perform them, meaning that the crappiest jobs leave. Just like we like it! Your argument falls when one considers the unemployment rate of under 5%. Everyone who is trying to work, essentially, has a job or will have one soon. That makes it a question - are the new jobs better than the old ones? The answer is yes. The quality of jobs maintained here is high, and that's the relevant issue. Again, consider what jobs we're losing, and why they're being outsourced. If we were losing tons of high-tech jobs, *then* I'd be concerned. Look at it long term - are the jobs that Americans did 50 or 100 years ago better than the ones now? Don't think so.
Put it another way - how many tech jobs have been created in the last 10 years (net job creation, not counting the bubble crap)? A lot have been. Well, there have been more jobs created than the size of the labor market has increased. So we don't have enough people to do the jobs, but they need to be done! Thus, jobs have to be outsourced.
Why am I the only one here that feels as if we're all being lied to? That the happy-go-lucky "you just don't understand the wonderful economics of it all!" propaganda is just that? They do this in pyramid schemes all the time, just long enough for the culprits to make off with all the money that we paid for the "training materials".
Well, I can't really explain your feeling the way you do. I'm not saying "they" always tell you the truth, but it doesn't mean that offshoring is inherently bad. Think about it analytically - consider the world in a dynamic sense, instead of a static one. In other words, ignore for a minute that Dell is offshoring its call centers. Ask yourself, how did the American economy become the best in the world, and what do we need to do to ensure it stays that way? The answer is ingenuity. Research. Development. Make the new things that the world will want or need and it will pay a high price for them. The result is a strong economy, and these industries make tons of jobs, and pull the average wage up with them. That's what makes a janitor in America earn 10 times as much as one in Bangladesh, despite doing the same job.
If you want to ensure our economy stays strong, don't try to put a band aid on small problems. If we face a serious threat, it's that we've stopped investing like we used to in research and development at the University level. There's also that our new immigration policies turn away skilled workers who would help develop the "next big thing" here. And, yes, there's also the fact that developing nations are finally becoming competitive. But rather than worry that they're getting our old, crappy jobs now, let's make sure that our Universities still get their best in this country, and keep them working for America, to ensure they don't take our high-tech jobs later.
If you disagree, how would you maintain this country so our economy is still the best for our kids? I say strong R&D funding, strong education funding, and an environment favorable to risk-taking entrepeneurs. If we maintain that, we'll have all the good jobs we want, tossing the rest to the 3rd world.
For instance, biotech....er, oops, we're outsourcing that too!
If you mean that American companies are trying to have a presence in multiple countries for strategic reasons, then you're right. But all large companies do that, and I imagine the German economy is really screwed since Siemens has a number of Americans employed here. If you mean that American biotech operations are being closed and moved to India, you're dead wrong. Especially research and development jobs.
At some point, there are no industries left.
Manufacturing is no longer cutting edge. The entire point - which you don't grasp - is that to maintain a position of world leadership economically, you have to be doing what is cutting edge all the time. You develop new things, generate jobs from them, and as you do this, you slough off some of the jobs from what was cutting-edge 20 years ago to developing countries. We've been doing this for about 100 years.
Take a step back 50 years. What was high-tech then was transistors, radios, and TVs. Let's say your grandfather made the same basic argument you are, namely that we need to maintain the jobs we have manufacturing TVs, radios, and semiconductors. Forget that research crap, we don't need it.
What would we have today? Jobs that no one would want. No one today wants to have a job making radios and TVs. No industry here wants to do it. THere's just no money in it, certainly not enough to sustain an American wage.
You can't think of an economy statically. Things are always changing. Our economy depends on American research institutions and companies to keep developing the next big thing, while offshoring the manufacturing of the last big thing to somebody poor.
As somebody else tried to tell you, economic growth is not a zero sum game, but the labor market is. There are only enough jobs to go around. As long as we're outsourcing the crappy jobs, that's an indication that the American economy is humming along just fine.
Those and 1000 more unresolved questions are why micropayments will never work.
Since this is a digg repeat, I'll tell you what he said. ;) Evidently, he asked them if they could work something out and they said no.
It is overengineering a bit, but not so much if you actually do have access to the crap he has and the ability to do it.
Talk about the cure being worse than the disease.
Not only that, but people have been making these silly arguments for labor protectionism for years. Specifically, for around 300 years, since the time of Ludd at least. The fact is that the US has one of the highest average incomes on the planet, and we do this by sloughing off the job that don't lead to growth. These jobs are invariably replaced by better jobs. The fact is, that jobs and job markets change. If they didn't, we'd all be subsistence farmers or working in crappy factories, and no one wants that.
I think we can separate a feeling of empathy for the employee from a sense of doing what's best for the country. No form of protectionism has ever been good, labor or otherwise.
Nope. The sheriff was notified with an hour and a half. For a scenario such as this, I think you'd find that to be rather quick.
The press' beef wasn't that he didn't notify the *cops*, but rather that he didn't notify *them*.
Not sure what evidence you'd destroy, the buckshot was rather prominent.
Who needs an actual mechanism, as long as I repeat the experiment enough times to get the right confidence level from the stat table!
Which is stupid. I'm no Cheney defender, but I don't personally feel a need to know within 10 minutes whenever he takes a piss. The guy had just seriously injured a friend of his, and if his focus is more on that, fine. The media always throws a fit whenever public figures don't bow to their will. Meanwhile, they ignore actual stories, as previously mentioned - such as the Patriot Act.
Also, part of the problem is that journalists are (at least 80% of them, anyway) really dumb, so anything that involves more than a cursory analysis is going to be way over their heads. That goes double for TV reporters. So they cover things that are best left to the tabloids.