don't you think big Phara would and should pay for their research when they stand to make not billions, but trillions off of all of these miracle cures?
The real money is in ongoing treatment of symptoms, not in miracle cures. The fact that Big Pharma is sitting on a mountain of cash from the last 8 years where profit growth has outstripped R&D expenditure growth by a factor of 4, not throwing their weight behind stem cell research strongly suggests that they are concerned the research may actually lead to outright cures of conditions that currently require daily medication. There is vastly more money in medicine you have to take every day for many years than medicine you take only once.
If you want the truth, most of the time all you have to do is follow the money.
Jesus fucking Christ, I'm sorry, but how goddamn hard is it to make a machine that can accurately count up to at most a few tens of thousands? The entire world depends on machines that accurately count billions of numbers per second.
So how did Iran - apparently a country containing only religious nutbags, comic book villains, and the lost apprentices of the former Iraqi Intelligence Ministry, according to the news - manage to successfully launch rocket capable of carrying a satellite while Space-X os 0-for-3?
Troll? Have none of you teenybopper arsplorgs never seen Whose Line Is It Anyway? The game is about innuendo, and it's called "If you know what I mean." Youtube is your friend, go enlighten your ignorant selves. You'll laugh along the way.
Unfortunately, the world is also 'flat' and without barriers to trade there is nothing to stop companies going to wherever labor is cheapest. The only thing that offsets using the cheapest labor available are other costs - costs like materials and transportation - but those costs really only apply if you're making a product. If, for example, you make cellphones, the decision to relocate production to China means weighing the cost of getting materials to China and then shipping the cellphones back to stores in the US against the savings of using cheap Chinese labor. If labor is cheap enough, it will offset the other costs. Fine. But with software and other services there ARE no additional costs, so it never makes financial sense NOT to relocate to where labor is cheap.
There is basically nothing anyone can do about this except wait until a) the cost of labor rises in developing countries (not likely until standards of living rise, which will be decades at least) or b) the cost of labor here at home falls - along with standard of living - to a competitive price.
Guess which is already happening, and happening fast...
Viva La Globalization - The Great Equalizer, that reduces everyone's standard of living to the lowest common denominator, as billions fight tooth and nail for jobs offered by fewer and fewer large corporations owned by the tiny rich elite who own everything! Yeah baby!
the integrity of an election, ANY ELECTION, is dependent SOLELY UPON the integrity of the people who carry it out.
Ultimately this is probably true, but it wouldn't take much to put some safeguards in place that would make voter fraud a lot more difficult. Some quick points:
1. Simplify. Go back to basics and make people walk through a turnstyle and put a rock in a box to vote - and cover the turnstyle and box with pictures/braille of candidates so accidentally mis-casting your vote is nearly impossible.
2. Film everything. Put a video camera behind the turnstyle (not filming faces, of course), and then you can just count the number of people who walk past.
Turnstyles and rocks and video, all counted by different folks, and you've got triple-redundancy in counting the votes. For more redundancy, simply add more turnstyles and cameras, all independently set up and monitored by federal state or federal authorities. Yes, these could ALL be corrupted, but it would be vastly harder than doctoring a voting machine that you're keeping in your garage the night before the election (WTF Ohio?).
Now you just need to protect against double-voting and ID fraud. Basic voter registration and ID screening at the polls already takes care of most of this because you know who has voted and where (but NOT who they voted for obviously), and that can keep people from voting more than once or voting out of their registered state. With some slightly higher tech, you can keep people from using a fake ID to double-vote by stamping people's hands with a super-indelible ink or something like that after they vote and building hand-scanners into the turnstyles or something along those lines, but double-voting is a minor problem compared to miscounting.
My dogs can recognize themselves in the mirror too - something that used to be 'uniquely human' (excepting, of course, primates...). And crows can use tools. And elephants can paint self portraits. And dolphins have culture they pass on to others by teaching.
I hate to raise the issue, but the basic reason why we don't respect animals as equals in Western society is that in the Judeo-Christian tradition they are simply sacks of unthinking meat placed at our disposal by a petty, jealous God who loves nothing better than a good burnt offering. In this bronze-age Middle Eastern tradition we're lumped with animals have no 'soul', and so they have no rights, leading to preposterously barbaric morality like giving a 4-cell human zygote more rights than an adult chimpanzee. Of course it wasn't that long ago that we afforded people with dark skin 'animal' status - aka slavery - fully sanctioned by the Bible of course... And before you say that it is inherently human to hunt and kill animals, note that this reckless disrespect of other living creatures is not present in all societies. Cows are sacred to Hindus. ALL creatures are sacred to Jains.
So the notion that other creatures have remarkable degrees of self-awareness and cognition should is utterly unsurprising, once you shake off the massive cultural blindspot we're saddled with.
Yeah, and notice this bullshit line from the arsemonkeys right in the summary:
No civilized society, he adds, can endure 'purely voluntary payment for art, knowledge, and culture.'
What a bunch of shit. Don't get me wrong, I think IP is a legitimate concept, but don't tell me that there is not nor ever has been a civilized society that subsidized the provision of art and knowledge and culture to its citizens. Sure, there are people posting here who point out that they don't want their tax dollars subsidizing the music industry because they don't consume enough of that product/service and its unfair. Well what about public libraries? Or public museums? Or public schools? Do you gripe about using tax dollars to subsidize those venues of art, knowledge and culture? Why is music any different?
The only difference I can see is that libraries have to buy at least one copy of a book before they can start lending it out to people for free. Well, maybe it should be no different with music. Since when does the book publishing industry cry foul and try to litigate over libraries 'stealing' their money by lending books free to the public? And last I checked Borders Books AND Music was doing quite well.
If you still need to do high resolution motion capture to produce your images, you haven't replaced the actor. You've merely edited their appearance in the performance.
Yup, they already did this in the Matrix 2 and 3. And yup, it still looked uncanny. In this article's video, the slow-motion blinking is the most uncanny thing. Real people blink much, much faster.
No offense, but the MIT is un doubtedly fmailiar with all of the points you raise. The reason why this technological development is interesting is not because it is revolutionary, but because it is cheap as well as efficient.
If your read the article, you'll see that whole point is that they've found a way to electrolyze water at room temperature with inexpensive materials. Previously, electrolysis required high temperatures and/or expensive catalysts like platinum for the annodes. Well, that's a pretty big hudrle they've overcome, since high temperatures reduce efficiency (gotta get the energy to elevate temperatures from somewhere...) and obviously cost is a primary obstacle. On this basis, it certainly deserves the title of 'breakthrough', though of course there is still more work to be done.
So science uncovers yet another way in which our world and universe are mediocre instead of special. Is this surprising? Even if the universe were fine tuned so that the characteristics we see are a unique product of its basic configuration, what's to say there aren't an infinite number of other universes which also harbor unique characteristics as a result of their own basic configurations - features that may make them more conducive to what we would call life? Perhaps there are universes in which life is fantastically abundant and our universe is, by comparison, a bland underperformer? Or perhaps life is itself a silly concept? Maybe whole universes are organized such that they are sentient. Perhaps even in our own universe there is complexity in dark matter and dark energy that might be called life, perhaps in great abundance (there is, after all, much more dark matter and energy). Or perhaps rules of logic and consistency - the basis of mathematics, upon which we interpret our universe's configuration - is itself specific to our universe, and in other universes logic and consistency look different or aren't even meaningful.
Even if we are rare, why does that make is so special? It's rare to win the lottery, but it's got to happen to someone doesn't it? If we hadn't won the lottery, we wouldn't be here to talk about it, would we?
Protectionism has been proven time and time again to be a failed path.
It's very easy to spout the line you've been spoon-fed without actually doing any homework yourself. Massive protectionism is responsible for virtually all the economic success stories in the last 150 years, starting with the US. Our economy was massively protected throughout the 19th century. The Great Depression, often blamed (retardedly) on the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, began more more than a year before the act went into place and was the result of an overheated financial sector (much like today's banking crisis) and not at all to do with changes of tariffs of 2-3 percentage points that didn't even go into effect until late in 1930. In the post-war period, the spectacular economic recovery and growth of Germany and Japan were the result of protectionism in those markets following the Marshall plan. During the cold war, the economic explosion of the Asian Tigers - particularly Taiwan and South Korea - were a direct result of massive protectionism policies that were directly subsidized by the US in our effort to contain communism: we allowed all exports from the countries into US markets to be tariff-free, whereas there were massive tariffs and quotas of US goods going to those countries. And most recently, the massive growth of China in the last 10-20 years has occurred while China's markets have been heavily protected. Chinese imports to the US are scarcely impinged by tariffs at all, whereas there are massive tariffs on US goods going to China. In case you haven't noticed, China is kicking ass and taking names.
So yeah, protectionism has been a disaster.
Best to know the actual facts before you spout the standard laisez-faire, Friedman-esque bullshit they spout from University if Chicago for the benefit of the corporate puppeteers in Washington.
Funny thing is that this isn't actually happening.
It is possible you are completely oblivious to the change that has occurred throughout the low-middle class and working class in the US over the last 30 years: real wages are down from their peak (which occurred more than 35 years ago); minimum wage is just over half of its peak (also about 35 years ago); there are 12 million more Americans living in poverty today than 30 years ago; 1 in 4 Americans "cannot make ends meet" according to the Wall Street Journal; millions are now losing their homes, inflation is at a 17-year high, consumer debt is over $1 trillion, and national debt per capita is nearly $35,000. Unemployment is at 6 percent nationwide and 11 percent in my state of Michigan. Things are getting worse in the US, especially for poor people. You might not be aware of this fact it if you come from a background of privilege, but that doesn't say good things about you.
Standard of living is rising in developing countries, but mapping GDP directly to societal well-being is folly. War, hurricanes and cancer are great for GDP, for example, since they create a flurry of economic activity. Are they good for society? Of course not. GDP is just one economic metric, and one we must be extremely cautious of. In the last 8 years, GDP has grown by an average of about 4.2 percent because corporate profits have more than tripled; all that growth has been captured by the wealthiest 2 percent of the population. This pattern holds in developing countries as well: economic growth benefits a tiny wealthy minority while most continue to be left in the shitter. Because of population growth, the "millions of people [who] are being lifted out of absolute poverty in developing countries" you speak of are offset by the many millions more who are born into poverty in those countries. Population growth has outstripped economic growth in most places, and so the absolute number of individuals living in poverty today is higher that at any point in human history, even if percentages living in poverty have fallen.
Well it depends on the details of the protectionism policy - and don't get me wrong, I'm not fan of globalization. But if we had a policy that forbid US companies from selling anything made in a sweatshop-supporting country (basically everywhere outside of the developed world), then companies wouldn't offshore jobs to those cheap labor markets. that level of protectionism is of course unlikely to emerge, but we can always hope. But as long as companies can access those markets, they will, and in doing so they put people at home out of work. There's no getting around this.
Still, what you point out is true: corporate interests are playing up threats from both angles to serve their own interests: they drum up fear about offshoring jobs when they want immigration policy change; then they turn around and drum up fear about protectionism and denied access to global markets when they want economic policy change. It is indeed quite clever. It also means they are two-faced, self-serving pricks who should largely be ignored when it comes to making real policy decisions.
Yes, maybe we will have a standard of living like India, but not because we've gone down in our standard of living... it's because they will have come up.
It is possible that we will meet somewhere in the middle, but that will mean we will fall back as India moves forward. Still, don't hold out your hopes for India. The middle class isn't exactly booming there - the country has a billion people, and those who earn more than a few dollars a day are still a tiny, tiny minority. Yet do note that there are 30 or so Indian billionaires... Plus, from an economic standpoint India and China pose the same threat to the US: massive downward pressure on wages if we have to compete directly with them on a level playing field. How could it be any other way? India will not "counter-balance" China in any meaningful way - it simply means there are 2.5 billion people that American workers now have to compete against for jobs.
you are incorrect, protectionism does NOT hit rich people the hardest, it hits poor people the hardest.
I wasn't clear enough in my post. You are correct, poor people always get hit hardest by everything because they are always hanging on by their fingernails and any little thing can spell disaster. So to clarify, anti-globalization policies (aka protectionist policies) cut off profit-making opportunities for large companies and their wealthy owners. It is massive corporations and wealthy people who want to have access to global markets; it it NOT poor mill-workers in Iowa who want to have to compete with mill workers in India and China. The globalization push serves the agenda of the wealthy elite, and as long as the wealthy and their lobbyists control our economic policy we are unlikely to see any retreat from a pro-globalization stance.
I say, open the borders, let everybody in, in every profession. It'll depress our wages, but at least it'll keep immigrant workers spending their money in *our* economy, and hopefully some of them will decide to become citizens and come to expect our standards of living.
Caught between a rock and a hard place. If we employ protectionism, jobs will get offshored and that screws us by putting downward pressure on wages at home. If we open the borders, the downward wage pressure is the same and we're screwed. Either way, we're screwed. You're right that having people here keeps more money in our economy, but that's like saying, "well they put a boot in our ass but at least it wasn't a steel-toed boot."
Basically, thanks to globalization and the world being 'flat' and all that, our standard of living is going to get reduced to the lowest common denominator worldwide one way or the other. So, we're fucked, because as long as we adhere to a growth-based economy and as long as population worldwide is growing, we're headed inexorably toward a standard of living like India and away from one like, say, Iceland. Viva la globalization!
If there's any solution, it probably involves draconian protectionism. Protectionism usually hits rich people hardest because it fucks big companies (small companies serving local markets do OK without globalization), so as long as the rich and the big corporations control our politics it ain't happenin.
Really? I was just going to say they looked pretty crap to me. I mean, they'd be OK in real-time on the X-Box or PS3 I guess, but certainly they aren't photorealistic and couldn't be used in film CGI. The car itself is fine, it's a nicely done model (Bugatti Veyron?), but it essentially has no textures - it's perfectly smooth. Maybe that's the point of this demo. But it doesn't look real by any stretch. Uncanny valley, big time.
Worst of all is the lack of lighting and shadows in the surrounding environment. What good are reflections on a mirror-smooth car when it still looks like it's floating in mid-air over a blurry grey blob instead of actually casting realistic shadows on the road?
Obviously not, and you know it. I won't dignify this crap with a response.
The 'crap' that got this started was you pulling 'ivory tower academics' out of your ass. Typical republican move - shit all over everything, then refuse to clean up your own mess.
The majority view among ivory tower academics who have little experience with the real world tends to support liberal positions.
Pray tell, what is this 'real world' experience the ivory tower folks lack that is so important for understanding the true horror of gay marriage? What real world experience are they missing that is causing them not to understand the abortion debate?
Or maybe you mean all the valuable real world experience that folks get living in trailers and going to Jesus camp that makes them so well-qualified to make decisions about what economic policies are going to work out best for the nation. Yeah, that 'experience' worked out real well for us: we get poor folks voting completely against their own interests just because the rich old white men running for office say Jesus is their savior (never mind what Jesus said about "a camel has a better chance of passing through the eye of a needle than a rich man has of entering the Kingdom of Heaven"). So they vote for Bush & Co who support offshoring hundreds of thousands of American jobs, who support busting unions, who give themselves raises while letting the minimum wage stagnate, who deregulate the banking industry so they can make more money and then use hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to bail those banks out when they go up in smoke, not to mention who go to war to funnel hundreds of billions into the oil and defense contractor companies they own without giving a shit that its poor people's kids that are getting killed in Iraq and not their own.
So yeah, it's all worked out wonderfully. Thank goodness we have people with 'real world' experience and not those dummies in the ivory towers controlling who gets into power, otherwise we'd be in serious trouble...
There are literally dozens of schools or libertarianism, some of which match your assertions and some of which match mine. I simply refer you to the Nolan Chart, which positions modern American libertarianism to the left of center on social issues and issues of personal freedom - the issues to which I was quite clearly referring. On the economic issues, libertarianism is indeed right of center. As I mentioned in my other posts, I am almost a libertarian, the almost stemming from the fact that history has proven laisez-faire economics to be just as abysmal a failure in practice as communism: totally unregulated markets are a disaster, and one need only look anywhere outside of the regulated markets of the developed world for confirmation of this fact; unregulated markets tend immediately toward inefficiency.
You confuse terms. Libertarians are liberal; i.e. left of center. They happen to be further left than democrats. The term 'liberal' is not to be confused with the term 'democrat'. I, for example, and an extremely liberal person who happens also to be very nearly a libertarian.
I do, however, stand by my assertion that liberals are on average better-educated and more intelligent than conservatives. Of course there are plenty of individual exceptions on both sides of the aisle.
Lots of good info on converting the American Prius to a PHEV (plug-in hybrid EV) here, along with lots of other related DIY projects and conversion kits if you click around the site.
In my opinion, liberalism is labeled progressive because liberalism promotes change. Progress occurs because of change. Conservatism, on the other hand, promotes stability. You have established correlation, but not causation.
Well if liberalism promotes change and conservativism promotes stability (aka stagnation), and progress=change, then in your own terms "liberalism promotes change". Are you seriously suggesting that something other than liberalism actually causes change towards liberalism, other than liberalism itself? If so, I'm keen to hear what that might be.
It sounds more to me like you're just confused. You're not conservative by any chance, are you?
Slashdot Mirror
don't you think big Phara would and should pay for their research when they stand to make not billions, but trillions off of all of these miracle cures?
The real money is in ongoing treatment of symptoms, not in miracle cures. The fact that Big Pharma is sitting on a mountain of cash from the last 8 years where profit growth has outstripped R&D expenditure growth by a factor of 4, not throwing their weight behind stem cell research strongly suggests that they are concerned the research may actually lead to outright cures of conditions that currently require daily medication. There is vastly more money in medicine you have to take every day for many years than medicine you take only once.
If you want the truth, most of the time all you have to do is follow the money.
These voting machines might "lose votes"?
Jesus fucking Christ, I'm sorry, but how goddamn hard is it to make a machine that can accurately count up to at most a few tens of thousands? The entire world depends on machines that accurately count billions of numbers per second.
There. Is. No. Excuse. For. This. Shit.
So how did Iran - apparently a country containing only religious nutbags, comic book villains, and the lost apprentices of the former Iraqi Intelligence Ministry, according to the news - manage to successfully launch rocket capable of carrying a satellite while Space-X os 0-for-3?
Maybe we should be a little concerned...
Troll? Have none of you teenybopper arsplorgs never seen Whose Line Is It Anyway? The game is about innuendo, and it's called "If you know what I mean." Youtube is your friend, go enlighten your ignorant selves. You'll laugh along the way.
I'd bake one in her oven, if you know what I mean.
Unfortunately, the world is also 'flat' and without barriers to trade there is nothing to stop companies going to wherever labor is cheapest. The only thing that offsets using the cheapest labor available are other costs - costs like materials and transportation - but those costs really only apply if you're making a product. If, for example, you make cellphones, the decision to relocate production to China means weighing the cost of getting materials to China and then shipping the cellphones back to stores in the US against the savings of using cheap Chinese labor. If labor is cheap enough, it will offset the other costs. Fine. But with software and other services there ARE no additional costs, so it never makes financial sense NOT to relocate to where labor is cheap.
There is basically nothing anyone can do about this except wait until a) the cost of labor rises in developing countries (not likely until standards of living rise, which will be decades at least) or b) the cost of labor here at home falls - along with standard of living - to a competitive price.
Guess which is already happening, and happening fast...
Viva La Globalization - The Great Equalizer, that reduces everyone's standard of living to the lowest common denominator, as billions fight tooth and nail for jobs offered by fewer and fewer large corporations owned by the tiny rich elite who own everything! Yeah baby!
Well, batteries are heavy, maybe they can double as the weights and provide extra power for the mission.
the integrity of an election, ANY ELECTION, is dependent SOLELY UPON the integrity of the people who carry it out.
Ultimately this is probably true, but it wouldn't take much to put some safeguards in place that would make voter fraud a lot more difficult. Some quick points:
1. Simplify. Go back to basics and make people walk through a turnstyle and put a rock in a box to vote - and cover the turnstyle and box with pictures/braille of candidates so accidentally mis-casting your vote is nearly impossible.
2. Film everything. Put a video camera behind the turnstyle (not filming faces, of course), and then you can just count the number of people who walk past.
Turnstyles and rocks and video, all counted by different folks, and you've got triple-redundancy in counting the votes. For more redundancy, simply add more turnstyles and cameras, all independently set up and monitored by federal state or federal authorities. Yes, these could ALL be corrupted, but it would be vastly harder than doctoring a voting machine that you're keeping in your garage the night before the election (WTF Ohio?).
Now you just need to protect against double-voting and ID fraud. Basic voter registration and ID screening at the polls already takes care of most of this because you know who has voted and where (but NOT who they voted for obviously), and that can keep people from voting more than once or voting out of their registered state. With some slightly higher tech, you can keep people from using a fake ID to double-vote by stamping people's hands with a super-indelible ink or something like that after they vote and building hand-scanners into the turnstyles or something along those lines, but double-voting is a minor problem compared to miscounting.
My dogs can recognize themselves in the mirror too - something that used to be 'uniquely human' (excepting, of course, primates...). And crows can use tools. And elephants can paint self portraits . And dolphins have culture they pass on to others by teaching.
I hate to raise the issue, but the basic reason why we don't respect animals as equals in Western society is that in the Judeo-Christian tradition they are simply sacks of unthinking meat placed at our disposal by a petty, jealous God who loves nothing better than a good burnt offering. In this bronze-age Middle Eastern tradition we're lumped with animals have no 'soul', and so they have no rights, leading to preposterously barbaric morality like giving a 4-cell human zygote more rights than an adult chimpanzee. Of course it wasn't that long ago that we afforded people with dark skin 'animal' status - aka slavery - fully sanctioned by the Bible of course... And before you say that it is inherently human to hunt and kill animals, note that this reckless disrespect of other living creatures is not present in all societies. Cows are sacred to Hindus. ALL creatures are sacred to Jains.
So the notion that other creatures have remarkable degrees of self-awareness and cognition should is utterly unsurprising, once you shake off the massive cultural blindspot we're saddled with.
Yeah, and notice this bullshit line from the arsemonkeys right in the summary:
No civilized society, he adds, can endure 'purely voluntary payment for art, knowledge, and culture.'
What a bunch of shit. Don't get me wrong, I think IP is a legitimate concept, but don't tell me that there is not nor ever has been a civilized society that subsidized the provision of art and knowledge and culture to its citizens. Sure, there are people posting here who point out that they don't want their tax dollars subsidizing the music industry because they don't consume enough of that product/service and its unfair. Well what about public libraries? Or public museums? Or public schools? Do you gripe about using tax dollars to subsidize those venues of art, knowledge and culture? Why is music any different?
The only difference I can see is that libraries have to buy at least one copy of a book before they can start lending it out to people for free. Well, maybe it should be no different with music. Since when does the book publishing industry cry foul and try to litigate over libraries 'stealing' their money by lending books free to the public? And last I checked Borders Books AND Music was doing quite well.
If you still need to do high resolution motion capture to produce your images, you haven't replaced the actor. You've merely edited their appearance in the performance.
Yup, they already did this in the Matrix 2 and 3. And yup, it still looked uncanny. In this article's video, the slow-motion blinking is the most uncanny thing. Real people blink much, much faster.
No offense, but the MIT is un doubtedly fmailiar with all of the points you raise. The reason why this technological development is interesting is not because it is revolutionary, but because it is cheap as well as efficient.
If your read the article, you'll see that whole point is that they've found a way to electrolyze water at room temperature with inexpensive materials. Previously, electrolysis required high temperatures and/or expensive catalysts like platinum for the annodes. Well, that's a pretty big hudrle they've overcome, since high temperatures reduce efficiency (gotta get the energy to elevate temperatures from somewhere...) and obviously cost is a primary obstacle. On this basis, it certainly deserves the title of 'breakthrough', though of course there is still more work to be done.
Even if we are rare, why does that make is so special? It's rare to win the lottery, but it's got to happen to someone doesn't it? If we hadn't won the lottery, we wouldn't be here to talk about it, would we?
Protectionism has been proven time and time again to be a failed path.
It's very easy to spout the line you've been spoon-fed without actually doing any homework yourself. Massive protectionism is responsible for virtually all the economic success stories in the last 150 years, starting with the US. Our economy was massively protected throughout the 19th century. The Great Depression, often blamed (retardedly) on the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, began more more than a year before the act went into place and was the result of an overheated financial sector (much like today's banking crisis) and not at all to do with changes of tariffs of 2-3 percentage points that didn't even go into effect until late in 1930. In the post-war period, the spectacular economic recovery and growth of Germany and Japan were the result of protectionism in those markets following the Marshall plan. During the cold war, the economic explosion of the Asian Tigers - particularly Taiwan and South Korea - were a direct result of massive protectionism policies that were directly subsidized by the US in our effort to contain communism: we allowed all exports from the countries into US markets to be tariff-free, whereas there were massive tariffs and quotas of US goods going to those countries. And most recently, the massive growth of China in the last 10-20 years has occurred while China's markets have been heavily protected. Chinese imports to the US are scarcely impinged by tariffs at all, whereas there are massive tariffs on US goods going to China. In case you haven't noticed, China is kicking ass and taking names.
So yeah, protectionism has been a disaster.
Best to know the actual facts before you spout the standard laisez-faire, Friedman-esque bullshit they spout from University if Chicago for the benefit of the corporate puppeteers in Washington.
Funny thing is that this isn't actually happening.
It is possible you are completely oblivious to the change that has occurred throughout the low-middle class and working class in the US over the last 30 years: real wages are down from their peak (which occurred more than 35 years ago); minimum wage is just over half of its peak (also about 35 years ago); there are 12 million more Americans living in poverty today than 30 years ago; 1 in 4 Americans "cannot make ends meet" according to the Wall Street Journal; millions are now losing their homes, inflation is at a 17-year high, consumer debt is over $1 trillion, and national debt per capita is nearly $35,000. Unemployment is at 6 percent nationwide and 11 percent in my state of Michigan. Things are getting worse in the US, especially for poor people. You might not be aware of this fact it if you come from a background of privilege, but that doesn't say good things about you.
Standard of living is rising in developing countries, but mapping GDP directly to societal well-being is folly. War, hurricanes and cancer are great for GDP, for example, since they create a flurry of economic activity. Are they good for society? Of course not. GDP is just one economic metric, and one we must be extremely cautious of. In the last 8 years, GDP has grown by an average of about 4.2 percent because corporate profits have more than tripled; all that growth has been captured by the wealthiest 2 percent of the population. This pattern holds in developing countries as well: economic growth benefits a tiny wealthy minority while most continue to be left in the shitter. Because of population growth, the "millions of people [who] are being lifted out of absolute poverty in developing countries" you speak of are offset by the many millions more who are born into poverty in those countries. Population growth has outstripped economic growth in most places, and so the absolute number of individuals living in poverty today is higher that at any point in human history, even if percentages living in poverty have fallen.
This is a myth, perpetuated by the globalists.
Well it depends on the details of the protectionism policy - and don't get me wrong, I'm not fan of globalization. But if we had a policy that forbid US companies from selling anything made in a sweatshop-supporting country (basically everywhere outside of the developed world), then companies wouldn't offshore jobs to those cheap labor markets. that level of protectionism is of course unlikely to emerge, but we can always hope. But as long as companies can access those markets, they will, and in doing so they put people at home out of work. There's no getting around this.
Still, what you point out is true: corporate interests are playing up threats from both angles to serve their own interests: they drum up fear about offshoring jobs when they want immigration policy change; then they turn around and drum up fear about protectionism and denied access to global markets when they want economic policy change. It is indeed quite clever. It also means they are two-faced, self-serving pricks who should largely be ignored when it comes to making real policy decisions.
Yes, maybe we will have a standard of living like India, but not because we've gone down in our standard of living... it's because they will have come up.
It is possible that we will meet somewhere in the middle, but that will mean we will fall back as India moves forward. Still, don't hold out your hopes for India. The middle class isn't exactly booming there - the country has a billion people, and those who earn more than a few dollars a day are still a tiny, tiny minority. Yet do note that there are 30 or so Indian billionaires... Plus, from an economic standpoint India and China pose the same threat to the US: massive downward pressure on wages if we have to compete directly with them on a level playing field. How could it be any other way? India will not "counter-balance" China in any meaningful way - it simply means there are 2.5 billion people that American workers now have to compete against for jobs.
you are incorrect, protectionism does NOT hit rich people the hardest, it hits poor people the hardest.
I wasn't clear enough in my post. You are correct, poor people always get hit hardest by everything because they are always hanging on by their fingernails and any little thing can spell disaster. So to clarify, anti-globalization policies (aka protectionist policies) cut off profit-making opportunities for large companies and their wealthy owners. It is massive corporations and wealthy people who want to have access to global markets; it it NOT poor mill-workers in Iowa who want to have to compete with mill workers in India and China. The globalization push serves the agenda of the wealthy elite, and as long as the wealthy and their lobbyists control our economic policy we are unlikely to see any retreat from a pro-globalization stance.
I say, open the borders, let everybody in, in every profession. It'll depress our wages, but at least it'll keep immigrant workers spending their money in *our* economy, and hopefully some of them will decide to become citizens and come to expect our standards of living.
Caught between a rock and a hard place. If we employ protectionism, jobs will get offshored and that screws us by putting downward pressure on wages at home. If we open the borders, the downward wage pressure is the same and we're screwed. Either way, we're screwed. You're right that having people here keeps more money in our economy, but that's like saying, "well they put a boot in our ass but at least it wasn't a steel-toed boot."
Basically, thanks to globalization and the world being 'flat' and all that, our standard of living is going to get reduced to the lowest common denominator worldwide one way or the other. So, we're fucked, because as long as we adhere to a growth-based economy and as long as population worldwide is growing, we're headed inexorably toward a standard of living like India and away from one like, say, Iceland. Viva la globalization!
If there's any solution, it probably involves draconian protectionism. Protectionism usually hits rich people hardest because it fucks big companies (small companies serving local markets do OK without globalization), so as long as the rich and the big corporations control our politics it ain't happenin.
Wow, those screen caps are gorgeous.
Really? I was just going to say they looked pretty crap to me. I mean, they'd be OK in real-time on the X-Box or PS3 I guess, but certainly they aren't photorealistic and couldn't be used in film CGI. The car itself is fine, it's a nicely done model (Bugatti Veyron?), but it essentially has no textures - it's perfectly smooth. Maybe that's the point of this demo. But it doesn't look real by any stretch. Uncanny valley, big time.
Worst of all is the lack of lighting and shadows in the surrounding environment. What good are reflections on a mirror-smooth car when it still looks like it's floating in mid-air over a blurry grey blob instead of actually casting realistic shadows on the road?
Harumph.
Obviously not, and you know it. I won't dignify this crap with a response.
The 'crap' that got this started was you pulling 'ivory tower academics' out of your ass. Typical republican move - shit all over everything, then refuse to clean up your own mess.
The majority view among ivory tower academics who have little experience with the real world tends to support liberal positions.
Pray tell, what is this 'real world' experience the ivory tower folks lack that is so important for understanding the true horror of gay marriage? What real world experience are they missing that is causing them not to understand the abortion debate?
Or maybe you mean all the valuable real world experience that folks get living in trailers and going to Jesus camp that makes them so well-qualified to make decisions about what economic policies are going to work out best for the nation. Yeah, that 'experience' worked out real well for us: we get poor folks voting completely against their own interests just because the rich old white men running for office say Jesus is their savior (never mind what Jesus said about "a camel has a better chance of passing through the eye of a needle than a rich man has of entering the Kingdom of Heaven"). So they vote for Bush & Co who support offshoring hundreds of thousands of American jobs, who support busting unions, who give themselves raises while letting the minimum wage stagnate, who deregulate the banking industry so they can make more money and then use hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to bail those banks out when they go up in smoke, not to mention who go to war to funnel hundreds of billions into the oil and defense contractor companies they own without giving a shit that its poor people's kids that are getting killed in Iraq and not their own.
So yeah, it's all worked out wonderfully. Thank goodness we have people with 'real world' experience and not those dummies in the ivory towers controlling who gets into power, otherwise we'd be in serious trouble...
There are literally dozens of schools or libertarianism, some of which match your assertions and some of which match mine. I simply refer you to the Nolan Chart, which positions modern American libertarianism to the left of center on social issues and issues of personal freedom - the issues to which I was quite clearly referring. On the economic issues, libertarianism is indeed right of center. As I mentioned in my other posts, I am almost a libertarian, the almost stemming from the fact that history has proven laisez-faire economics to be just as abysmal a failure in practice as communism: totally unregulated markets are a disaster, and one need only look anywhere outside of the regulated markets of the developed world for confirmation of this fact; unregulated markets tend immediately toward inefficiency.
I do, however, stand by my assertion that liberals are on average better-educated and more intelligent than conservatives. Of course there are plenty of individual exceptions on both sides of the aisle.
Lots of good info on converting the American Prius to a PHEV (plug-in hybrid EV) here, along with lots of other related DIY projects and conversion kits if you click around the site.
In my opinion, liberalism is labeled progressive because liberalism promotes change. Progress occurs because of change. Conservatism, on the other hand, promotes stability. You have established correlation, but not causation.
Well if liberalism promotes change and conservativism promotes stability (aka stagnation), and progress=change, then in your own terms "liberalism promotes change". Are you seriously suggesting that something other than liberalism actually causes change towards liberalism, other than liberalism itself? If so, I'm keen to hear what that might be.
It sounds more to me like you're just confused. You're not conservative by any chance, are you?