America has just spent the last 5 years torturing people and invading a country against international law with American soldiers massacring its population with impunity. It's a terrible role model for democracy.
There are several comments in this thread that would be good as a jumping-off point for the role of the Net in preventing authoritarian tendencies. Yours seemed good. Congratulations!
Let's look at a few things:
1) The US has, by law if not necessarily by practice, one of the freest flows of information in the world. There is no prior restraint (q.v. UK, Canada), there are no laws restricting hate speech (q.v. Germany), libel cases are notoriously hard to prosecute (lots of places), and judges have historically given a lot of protection to people who bring forth government "secrets" which expose wrongdoing by members of the government.
2) While I won't say there was no vote fraud anywhere, because I don't believe that, the democratic processes here work pretty well on the whole. Let's say that 99% of the voters in the US were able to get to the polls and voted for the candidate of their choice. The US is not Zimbabwe.
3) What was going on vis a vis torture, detentions, illegal declarations of war, etc. was not some big secret that you had to get from samizdat sold in a back alley. Pick up a major newspaper, tune into NPR, or even watch CNN, and what the Bush administration was doing was being lovingly documented, even if there was a lot more deference to state power than the situation deserved. And, of course, any one of a number of bloggers and alternative news sources dug in to their offenses with relish.
So, with all that access to information, Mr. Bush and his enablers won two Presidential elections and three (arguably more if you go back to 1994) congressional elections. While a lot of heat is made of potential vote fraud in Ohio and Florida, the fact is that most states were not very close. (FWIW Bush lost my state by 5% the first time and 7% the second time).
The question this poses is, if so much chicanery can be done in plain sight, with the approval of we the people in a society with some of the best access to information on the planet, what difference can the Internet make in a country without this sort of infrastructure? I would argue that if you control the primary sources of information, what leaks out around it does not make much difference. This is unfortunately a human and not a technical problem.
I'm quite familiar with Libertarian philosophy. Classic Libertarianism falls into the trap of assuming that the majority of participants will be rational players, and seems to overlook the damage that a few irrational players can cause to the public good, expecting that contracts or covenants will stand in the stead of a state that occasionally has to crack the heads of criminals. I do like Breake Breathed's quote "...you'll find the heart of an old-fashioned Libertarian. And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners."
I really am a card-carrying liberal. Social safety net, single-payer health care, progressive taxation, etc. I just want money taken by the state to be used for maximum benefit (and thus minimum cost for that benefit), and I would err on the side of personal liberty if a protective state starts to interfere with that (again, lots of asterisks). I am also leery of social transfers which discourage people from working. You need a safety net to keep people from starving or sleeping on the streets, but you have to be very careful that this doesn't turn into a permanent dole. If that means the safety net ends after a certain number of years (as it does now), so be it.
besides this is all about what Rush thinks Obama is going to try to do. If Obama turns around and starts trying to revive the economy using methods that Rush is espousing, then he'll wish Obama all the success in the world implementing his plans.
Rush is a large part of the problem with the modern Republican Party.
I think the core precepts of conservative government are largely correct. Money that is put in the hands of the private sector will be used to generate more money by adding value. (We hope. Sometimes that goes wrong). Money that is put in the hands of the public sector can help people generate wealth (schools providing educated people, highways being able to transport goods, etc.) but can also result in social transfers which, while they may have some benefits in alleviating poverty (a good thing) do not create wealth in and of themselves. You have a finite quantity of capital and putting capital into the hands of the public sector will render that money (at least initially) unavailable to the private sector.
Mind you, I would put lots of asterixes and "yes, buts" after all of those statements, but I think the fundamental premise is sound enough. Government should run as efficiently as possible with as little money as possible. Feeding money into government for the sake of feeding money in is not constructive. Perhaps, more to the point, the private sector has a natural check and balance in that if you are spending more than you make year in and year out, you'll go out of business sooner or later. The only check on the state spending frivolously are the actions of the people to keep an eye on that spending.
Rush has gone down a blind alley which makes a parody of a basically sound philosophy. "All conservative ideas are good, for all cases, no matter what! All liberal ideas are bad no matter what! Government is the problem! It cannot solve problems! etc. etc."
Rush is a blowhard who talks on the radio four hours a day. BFD. Unfortunately, his idiotically simple-minded philosophy on government and taxation have also been adopted by a lot of people who really should know better. The Republican Party is poorer for listening to him, and is dangerously close to drifting into irrelevance, much to the detriment of the country as a whole.
Sincerely,
Bleeding-Heart Liberal Against a Single-Party State.
I was going to find the constitutional case law behind this, but came up empty-handed after an exhaustive 5 minute search. You'll have to do your own search or take my word for it.
Long story short: There is very old case law which establishes that you do not enjoy the same rights at the border as you do in your home. This is why if you come back from a trip overseas, if the nice person at Customs says "open your suitcase", you argue the 4th amendment with them at your peril. Please note the little signs that state that you may be held at the border for up to 72 hours without charges before you do so. This has permitted Customs to board ships at sea, and border agents to dump your car since the early 1800s. (100 years before cars. Prescient mofos, weren't they?).
I am guessing that the current administration has probably pushed well past the intent granted by the courts in those earlier rulings, but none of the cases of their abuse has come up for judicial review yet, so my guesses aren't worth very much.
There's an issue that a lot of developing countries have.
When you're at Vietnam's level of development, the piracy rate is astonishing. 99% of the software is pirated. All the software used at home is pirated. Most of the software used in government offices is pirated. Most of the software used in companies is pirated. Sometimes some do-gooder will wind up buying legitimate software, but that's really rare.
MS knows this. Everyone knows this. In a country with a per-capita income of $1000 a year, there's simply not a dollar at the end of this conversation. Yell, scream, protest to the World Court. Nothing will happen. There's no money to take.
So nothing happens.
Development moves along. Cheap furniture and rattan baskets turn into power tools. Christmas lights turn into consumer electronics. Power tools become CNC machines. Consumer electronics become silicon fabs.
Suddenly, you're not a dollar-a-day country any more. You've got real money. Moreover, your money comes from exports.
At this point, Microsoft comes back again. This lax attitude towards intellectual property? Beggar countries are allowed to slip by. Middle-to-high income countries? Uh-uh.
Your legislature is given a modest proposal. Produce intellectual property laws and enforce them, or the export-driven capital party comes to a grinding halt.
You now have a nascent IT infrastructure in your government offices which was built on pirated MS software. What was winked at for years is winked at no more.
Your IT managers now have a very expensive problem. Purchase licenses for every machine in government use, or retool for open source. Your choice. Both options suck.
By starting on OSS early, Vietnam is making a smart choice which will save a lot of pain down the road.
#include <truestory.h> I was in Turin over Christmas visiting some relatives by marriage.
One of the relatives at Christmas dinner was a retired Fiat engineer.
He told a story once about working on a seatbelt design. He sat at his drafting table for days. Nothing. The design eluded him.
Finally, after five days of designer's block, he went home, plodded down to the basement, pulled out the 5 gallon demijohn of wine which is standard equipment in any well-appointed household in Italy, and poured a glass. Then another. And another. Pleasantly buzzed proceeded quickly to plowed and then straight to s-faced.
Deep into his cups, the design for the seatbelt came at last. He napkin-sketched the design and drew it out in full the next day at work.
Having heard this story related to me, I was Enlightened.
I agree that it's boring and lame. If Singapore is the logical conclusion to Chinese affluence, we can probably be assured of Yet Another American Century.
I merely was stating that the argument that prosperity -> democracy does not always happen, and that democracy -> a sharp and unpleasant end for the old guard also does always happen.
It won't last though. There's a generation of children being born who will take economic prosperity for granted. It's the nature of humanity, and by that same token they'll want more than just that. With economic power in their hands they'll want political power, and that's when the government will be in trouble.
Maybe, maybe not.
Taiwan went from single-party (and single-family) rule to a full-fledged democracy in the course of about 15 years. The old farts who had been running (and robbing) the country were quietly retired and a generation which was willing to allow more political pluralism were seated in their place. This happened with a lot of protests, legislative fistfights, and more than a few cracked heads on the street, but it did not involve putting the heads of the Old Guard up on a post in the process.
On the other side, Singapore has become wildly prosperous, with no sign of democracy or pluralism anywhere in sight. The People's Action Party (read: Senior Minister Harry Lee and his son Lee Hsien Loong) still run everything. It's a weird place. It's clean, it's modern. People go in, people go out. If living in the Lees's Disneyland pisses you off, you're free to go to Australia, or the US, or wherever you like. Everyone knows the rules, and nobody rocks the boat.
Several people have pointed out variations on this, but we'll try again:
Apple sells hardware. To a certain extent, they sell content. I don't know how much the App Store or iTunes makes for them. Maybe a substantial amount. Hardware is their cash cow. Open source the software, and both pillars of their model are lost.
Microsoft sells software. That's self-evident.
OSS companies are generally in the business of selling professional services. i.e., we'll give you the operating system. We will sell you what amounts to a support contract for a small fee per workstation. If you want to integrate it, or make it do clever things, we have people who do that by the hour for a reasonable fee. If you're giving away software running on servers in the back room of a large company, there's good money to be made using that model. If you're selling $200 iPhones? ehhhh, not so much.
I work for a company in the IT/networking sphere (name omitted to protect the guilty).
The internal (RFC-1918) network is a mess. Years of acquisitions have created overlaps where 10.50.x.x is used in four separate locations on the corporate network, and every owner has given extremely sound reasons why migrating their address space will cause the world to end. If you have to connect two of these locations, you get to do fun stuff with NAT addresses and routing traffic all over creation which will make your eyes bug out.
In addition, there is a point not to far in the future where IP exhaustion will take place. Our numerous public/8s, 10.0.0.0/8, 192.168/16, and 172.16/12 will all be out of IPs to allocate. It is not a "somewhere in the distant future" date. It is on some execs calendar. "This is the day when there will be no more addresses".
Migration to IPv6 is progressing as quickly as humanly possible.
have a strong feeling that if they were polled the results would be heavily skewed towards the candidate that is not announcing large tax increases...
Well, let's get past taxes for a minute.
You have a government of size X. You need funds to pay for that government.
It would be nice if that government could be pared down to a more reasonable size. Every president in my lifetime has promised that. Interestingly, the ones who were most philosophically aligned to do so have done the least to actually do so. How much of that is due to the political difficulties of asking Congress to defund projects to their constituents, and how much of that is because they were being dishonest to one degree or another I will leave to the reader.
The fact is that not one president in the last 30 years I have been paying attention to these things has shrunk the federal government. If you think the next one will, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and I are having a party at my place on Friday. Come by, we'd like to hang out.
Back to reality, as an elected politician, you have a few choices as to how to raise money to pay for the functions of government.
Borrow it from the capital markets and let your successor worry about how to pay for it (strangely popular!)
Raise taxes on the broad base of taxpayers and risk their ire and having them vote you out of office.
Raise taxes on a small percentage of people at the top, knowing their assets are much more fungible than the bottom 95%, and that if they are overtaxed, you will be in the uncomfortable position of having lost both a large part of your revenue base and a large segment of the capital that makes the economy possible.
I don't particularly want my taxes raised, or anyone else's. At the same time, we've had this narrative for the last 8 years that
a) If you slash taxes on the top few percent, the capital markets will flood over and the economy will explode! (it has, but not quite the way we were promised). b) If you raise taxes etc. etc., you'll ruin everything. This ignores that the marginal tax rates through much of the era from WWII through the early 1980s had confiscatory rates (90%) on the top end.
For the record, you'll never see a 90% tax rate ever again. The modern economy wouldn't support it. At the same time, the argument for regressive taxation is growing pretty thin.
I pretty much agree: Fedora was obviously squelched by Red Hat corporate who was apparently afraid of the reaction of their paying customers///////////// shareholders. Despite the token board openings and motions about openness, after this nobody can pretend that Fedora is on anything but a *very* short leash held by Red Hat.
As they say on that snarky message board across town, fixed it for ya.
As a publicly traded company, Red Hat's primary responsibility is to produce a profit for its shareholders. That is the law. If the officers of the company do anything which interferes with that solemn legal duty, they risk lawsuits, and even jail time for breach of fiduciary responsibility.
If an overly open disclosure policy is perceived to affect future sales or the value of the brand (i.e. "goodwill"), legal will tell them to say nothing unless they are breaking a bigger law (i.e. gross negligence) by saying nothing.
It's strange, but it makes money, which the law says is the only thing that matters.
All have far more robust economies than the US at the moment, if national budgets are anything to go by.
By "national budgets" you mean the government is taking in more than it is spending. That doesn't mean very much when you're coming from a low economic base. Neither China nor India have done large spends on infrastructure or educational/social programs. More on that in a minute.
China and India are generating a large growth in GDP. But the base it's coming from is a lot lower than that of the United States, and is not robust at all, since it's based primarily on exports rather than domestic growth.
A low base is easy to explain. If you have an average GDP per capita of $2000/year, and 10% growth, next year your GDP will be $2,200/year. That's nice, but $2,200 x, the economy does well and your coffers swell. Once somewhere cheaper comes along, you either have to take a large percentage of your work force further up the value chain, or suffer significant pain. Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have all had very rough spots as their core manufacturing businesses have moved on to China. For the most part, this has been handled more deftly than the US did 30 years ago as we started "hollowing out", but it hasn't been easy.
When I was a young 'un, we were all convinced the Japanese were going to eat our breakfast and we'd better all learn nihongo in order to get on the right side of history. Well, it didn't quite work out that way. Japan is big, and is a major economic player, but nobody thinks that Japan will go and buy the US outright anymore. That particular fear meme has vanished.
10-15 years from now, we may see African-made mainboards and toys and be cowering in fear of a black planet. I doubt it, but stranger things have come to pass.
In the U.S., rubbing alcohol is typically 70% isopropanol in water.
90% alcohol is available from behind the pharmacy counter. You simply need to convince the pharmacist that you're not likely to drink it once you walk out of the pharmacy.
In Bangalore the local language is Kannada (which most foreigners have never heard of).
I thought Kannada was what they spoke 150 miles North in Vancouver, BC. Silly me. All those hours of listening to tapes and I find out they speak English!
I meant to only addressing mainland China. But, Taiwan also has native dialects. What percent, I don't know. Back in the late 80's, my Taiwanese friends said that most people they knew from Taiwan used native dialects unless doing business.
Yes, it does. Predominantly Hokkien and Hakka. Probably 85-90% of the island has proficiency in one or another of these dialects. What language will be used depends again on social context and location. Educated Taiwanese under the age of 50 or so are generally "Native Mandarin" speakers, regardless of ethnic background. Most of my friends from Taiwan are ethnic Taiwanese and speak Hokkien with their parents or older family members. When they're with friends, they speak Mandarin.
99% of what kids say and do is based on what comes out of someone else's mouth. There's not a lot of volition involved to sort through various inputs and say "this is worthwhile, this isn't". That's called being an adult.
(many adults do not develop this capability either, but that's another story).
If a child is exposed to food X at home and nothing but food X, food Y is going to make the little dears turn up their noses.
While teachers should do their part to try to make the world of their charges larger than it is, I suspect little good will come of this. Being forced to shove down a plate of curry once a month won't make a little yob spawn much less yobbish. The way to do that is to spend time playing with kids who aren't very much like you. I don't know much about how the UK is put together, but here in these United States, we go to a lot of effort to make sure our neighbors are as much like ourselves as possible, and we don't have to do any of that yucky mixing with people who aren't like us.
Good for you! Been there, done that, not only bought the T-shirt, but the entire Chinese furniture collection.
Other than any given Chinese city being much more fun than any given American city, it didn't make a lot of sense financially to stay on. If you've managed to make it work for you, I say good on ya!
A problem to keep in mind is that Mandarin is often not used in "street" conversion. Native people will try a local dialect first, and if that does not work, THEN they use Mandarin.
Depends on where you are.
Beijing, Northeastern China and much of the "heartland" are Mandarin-speaking by default.
Taipei, Taiwan is predominantly Mandarin-speaking, although it depends on the speaker, their origin, age, context, blah blah blah.
Once you go into the South (Guangdong province, Hong Kong, Fujian, Shanghai, Jiangsu/Jiangxi) I'd say you're correct, but again, it depends on context. Your taxi driver will probably speak the local dialect by default. Your university-educated colleague is more likely than not a "native" Mandarin speaker.
Hong Kong is a special case. Fluency in Hong Kong Cantonese is a mark of upbringing and status over Mandarin speakers who are more likely than not from mainland China.
It seems to me that if you are planning on working in the United States, your time would be better spent focusing on your Computer studies. Most foreign engineers here speak English.
1) I strongly advise learning a foreign language just to make yourself a better person. My Mandarin is pretty good, and my Spanish is -- well, enough to get me in trouble when in Spanish-speaking environments.
2) While there are good reasons to learn foreign languages for business purposes, especially if you already have plans on joining the dark side and working for purchasing/marketing/logistics, etc., speaking from a CSci/Engineering point of view, English is the lingua franca of scientific work, and will probably remain so for some time. There are two up-and-coming economies, India and China. University-educated Indians speak English. Chinese for some structural reasons is not likely to become a replacement for English soon. I will explain.
One of the strengths of English is it's effortless ability to absorb foreign words when it becomes necessary to do so. Thus we have acquired cryptography (Greek Kryptos), carnivore (Latin carne and vorare), and otaku (Japanese Otaku), etc. etc.
Chinese cannot do that and maintain the "structural integrity" of the language. Chinese is written in characters. Characters generally apply to meaning. There is no katakana alphabet like Japanese to phonetically express words of foreign origin. While there are exceptions; "coffee" becomes ka fei and "Coca Cola" becomes ke ko ke le ("Happiness in the mouth". No kidding. The "bite the wax tadpole" of urban legend would be a completely different set of characters, and is seldom if ever used). More frequently, things and concepts become Sinicised. "Hard drive" becomes ying die (hard platter), "Printer" becomes yin biao ji (imprint display machine), and "postmodernism" becomes hou xian dai zhu yi (after modern period principle/ideology), etc. etc.
The end result of this is that most hardware engineering in China is done in English. There is generally no parallel chipset documentation put out by UMC or Taiwan Semiconductor documenting the timing and logic in Mandarin, as it would serve no purpose but to drive everyone insane.
If you DO learn to speak Chinese, you will get 50,000 cool points with your Chinese-speaking colleagues. Whether it will ever add a dollar to your bank account I can't say. It hasn't done anything for mine.
My phone bills before the breakup were almost always $15-$20 per month. Now they run at least three times that. I don't now and have never needed unlimited calling anywhere.
Yep.
This is not due to any fundamental change in the operation of the phone company pre or post breakup, or their cost of delivering services.
It was simply a shift as to how the billing was done.
In the old Bell System, long-distance rates were kept high in order to subsidize local phone service. Some schmuck paid $3/minute to call their sister in California so that you had a $15/month phone bill. It worked out fairly well for the average consumer, and put most of the operating costs of the phone company on shoulders that were more able to pay for it, namely businesses and the few people who needed to call long-distance on a regular basis.
Once the RBOCs and long lines AT&T split up from each other, that arrangement went away, and your local phone bill started to climb.
While I'm sorry that your phone bill has gone up so much, while costs of everything else have stayed exactly the same as they were in 1983 * coughs *, it works out pretty well for most people.
I get to talk to my sister in Italy for $0.00/minute, and my wife gets to yammer away happily with relatives in Taiwan for pennies because we're no longer subsidizing the Bell System.
I do not assume that America is the "apogee of human civilization" but it is the place where i happen to live right now, and i like it.
That's good. It sucks to live somewhere you don't like.
I don't want to be mean, because it's not my style, but you really, really need to at least read a book or two before making these "fortune cookie" assumptions about how China works. (Fortune cookies came from San Francisco by the way. They don't exist in the Middle Kingdom). I spent the better part of a decade there, and I don't think I know it all.
The Chinese method is clearly more efficient than our own and they will undoubtedly win the global economic war which is currently being waged.
You're wrong there. There is an input (cheap, but not very efficient labor) which helps, but that only takes you so far. The further up the value-add chain you go, the less you can get by on cheap inputs, and the more original design expertise you need. A lot of the design work is still coming from the US, Japan, Taiwan, Europe, etc. while the manufacturing is done in China. This is not a permanent situation, and you should not assume that Chinese are incapable of doing original design work. Just the same, while throwing a million monkeys on a factory line will make mainboards, it won't design semiconductors or write Hamlet for that matter.
Basic research is still largely done elsewhere, for a large number of reasons.
For hundreds of years (if not thousands) China has regarded itself as the center of the world, the further away you were from China, the more worthless you were.
Consider the neighbors. China considered themselves better because in every demonstrable sense, they WERE better. Japan did not break away from China in terms of wealth, cultural, or technological development until the Meiji Restoration in the 1850s. Of course, Europe had been doing a lot of interesting things, but Europe was far, and nobody who had any influence in China had ever been there, therefore, Europe for all it's castles, cathedrals, science and sages did not exist to China until the 1700s. 150 years of wars, unequal treaties, extraterritorial jurisdictions (i.e. concessions in China that were operated under American, British, or German, and not Chinese law), etc. etc. set straight that the "center of the world" was a pretty backwards place. The Communist revolution was one response as to how to drag China into the modern world. It was decidedly not the best response that could have been come up with.
It was for these reasons that they would export far more than they would allow in.
Nope. It was because finished Chinese goods (porcelains, silks, artwork, etc.) were more valuable than the materials made by "tributary states". In modern business we call this high value-add vs low value-add.
The west see's China as an invading army of merchants ready to undercut their prices to the point of running us out of business. It's only natural for us to fight against this.
Chinese goods are only sold in the US to the extent that American government policies allow them in and American merchandisers are willing to sell them. There is a supermarket near my house owned and operated by overseas Chinese. Their contribution to the GDP of the city of Seattle is negligible. The little building that sits right above them sells more Chinese-owned products in 20 minutes than they sell in a year.
Anything which serves the purpose of reducing their isolation from the rest of the world is good in my book.
Do you live anywhere near a university? Notice one or two students there from China? Guess what? 90% of them will go home to China after finishing their studies here. How many of your American-born friends have lived or studied overseas? Anybody? Bueller?
There is a country which is isolated and needs to be opened up, but that's not China. They know full well how backwards they are and a
Slashdot Mirror
America has just spent the last 5 years torturing people and invading a country against international law with American soldiers massacring its population with impunity. It's a terrible role model for democracy.
There are several comments in this thread that would be good as a jumping-off point for the role of the Net in preventing authoritarian tendencies. Yours seemed good. Congratulations!
Let's look at a few things:
1) The US has, by law if not necessarily by practice, one of the freest flows of information in the world. There is no prior restraint (q.v. UK, Canada), there are no laws restricting hate speech (q.v. Germany), libel cases are notoriously hard to prosecute (lots of places), and judges have historically given a lot of protection to people who bring forth government "secrets" which expose wrongdoing by members of the government.
2) While I won't say there was no vote fraud anywhere, because I don't believe that, the democratic processes here work pretty well on the whole. Let's say that 99% of the voters in the US were able to get to the polls and voted for the candidate of their choice. The US is not Zimbabwe.
3) What was going on vis a vis torture, detentions, illegal declarations of war, etc. was not some big secret that you had to get from samizdat sold in a back alley. Pick up a major newspaper, tune into NPR, or even watch CNN, and what the Bush administration was doing was being lovingly documented, even if there was a lot more deference to state power than the situation deserved. And, of course, any one of a number of bloggers and alternative news sources dug in to their offenses with relish.
So, with all that access to information, Mr. Bush and his enablers won two Presidential elections and three (arguably more if you go back to 1994) congressional elections. While a lot of heat is made of potential vote fraud in Ohio and Florida, the fact is that most states were not very close. (FWIW Bush lost my state by 5% the first time and 7% the second time).
The question this poses is, if so much chicanery can be done in plain sight, with the approval of we the people in a society with some of the best access to information on the planet, what difference can the Internet make in a country without this sort of infrastructure? I would argue that if you control the primary sources of information, what leaks out around it does not make much difference. This is unfortunately a human and not a technical problem.
I'm quite familiar with Libertarian philosophy. Classic Libertarianism falls into the trap of assuming that the majority of participants will be rational players, and seems to overlook the damage that a few irrational players can cause to the public good, expecting that contracts or covenants will stand in the stead of a state that occasionally has to crack the heads of criminals. I do like Breake Breathed's quote "...you'll find the heart of an old-fashioned Libertarian. And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners."
I really am a card-carrying liberal. Social safety net, single-payer health care, progressive taxation, etc. I just want money taken by the state to be used for maximum benefit (and thus minimum cost for that benefit), and I would err on the side of personal liberty if a protective state starts to interfere with that (again, lots of asterisks). I am also leery of social transfers which discourage people from working. You need a safety net to keep people from starving or sleeping on the streets, but you have to be very careful that this doesn't turn into a permanent dole. If that means the safety net ends after a certain number of years (as it does now), so be it.
besides this is all about what Rush thinks Obama is going to try to do. If Obama turns around and starts trying to revive the economy using methods that Rush is espousing, then he'll wish Obama all the success in the world implementing his plans.
Rush is a large part of the problem with the modern Republican Party.
I think the core precepts of conservative government are largely correct. Money that is put in the hands of the private sector will be used to generate more money by adding value. (We hope. Sometimes that goes wrong). Money that is put in the hands of the public sector can help people generate wealth (schools providing educated people, highways being able to transport goods, etc.) but can also result in social transfers which, while they may have some benefits in alleviating poverty (a good thing) do not create wealth in and of themselves. You have a finite quantity of capital and putting capital into the hands of the public sector will render that money (at least initially) unavailable to the private sector.
Mind you, I would put lots of asterixes and "yes, buts" after all of those statements, but I think the fundamental premise is sound enough. Government should run as efficiently as possible with as little money as possible. Feeding money into government for the sake of feeding money in is not constructive. Perhaps, more to the point, the private sector has a natural check and balance in that if you are spending more than you make year in and year out, you'll go out of business sooner or later. The only check on the state spending frivolously are the actions of the people to keep an eye on that spending.
Rush has gone down a blind alley which makes a parody of a basically sound philosophy. "All conservative ideas are good, for all cases, no matter what! All liberal ideas are bad no matter what! Government is the problem! It cannot solve problems! etc. etc."
Rush is a blowhard who talks on the radio four hours a day. BFD. Unfortunately, his idiotically simple-minded philosophy on government and taxation have also been adopted by a lot of people who really should know better. The Republican Party is poorer for listening to him, and is dangerously close to drifting into irrelevance, much to the detriment of the country as a whole.
Sincerely,
Bleeding-Heart Liberal Against a Single-Party State.
I was going to find the constitutional case law behind this, but came up empty-handed after an exhaustive 5 minute search. You'll have to do your own search or take my word for it.
Long story short: There is very old case law which establishes that you do not enjoy the same rights at the border as you do in your home. This is why if you come back from a trip overseas, if the nice person at Customs says "open your suitcase", you argue the 4th amendment with them at your peril. Please note the little signs that state that you may be held at the border for up to 72 hours without charges before you do so. This has permitted Customs to board ships at sea, and border agents to dump your car since the early 1800s. (100 years before cars. Prescient mofos, weren't they?).
I am guessing that the current administration has probably pushed well past the intent granted by the courts in those earlier rulings, but none of the cases of their abuse has come up for judicial review yet, so my guesses aren't worth very much.
There's an issue that a lot of developing countries have.
When you're at Vietnam's level of development, the piracy rate is astonishing. 99% of the software is pirated. All the software used at home is pirated. Most of the software used in government offices is pirated. Most of the software used in companies is pirated. Sometimes some do-gooder will wind up buying legitimate software, but that's really rare.
MS knows this. Everyone knows this. In a country with a per-capita income of $1000 a year, there's simply not a dollar at the end of this conversation. Yell, scream, protest to the World Court. Nothing will happen. There's no money to take.
So nothing happens.
Development moves along. Cheap furniture and rattan baskets turn into power tools. Christmas lights turn into consumer electronics. Power tools become CNC machines. Consumer electronics become silicon fabs.
Suddenly, you're not a dollar-a-day country any more. You've got real money. Moreover, your money comes from exports.
At this point, Microsoft comes back again. This lax attitude towards intellectual property? Beggar countries are allowed to slip by. Middle-to-high income countries? Uh-uh.
Your legislature is given a modest proposal. Produce intellectual property laws and enforce them, or the export-driven capital party comes to a grinding halt.
You now have a nascent IT infrastructure in your government offices which was built on pirated MS software. What was winked at for years is winked at no more.
Your IT managers now have a very expensive problem. Purchase licenses for every machine in government use, or retool for open source. Your choice. Both options suck.
By starting on OSS early, Vietnam is making a smart choice which will save a lot of pain down the road.
#include <truestory.h>
I was in Turin over Christmas visiting some relatives by marriage.
One of the relatives at Christmas dinner was a retired Fiat engineer.
He told a story once about working on a seatbelt design. He sat at his drafting table for days. Nothing. The design eluded him.
Finally, after five days of designer's block, he went home, plodded down to the basement, pulled out the 5 gallon demijohn of wine which is standard equipment in any well-appointed household in Italy, and poured a glass. Then another. And another. Pleasantly buzzed proceeded quickly to plowed and then straight to s-faced.
Deep into his cups, the design for the seatbelt came at last. He napkin-sketched the design and drew it out in full the next day at work.
Having heard this story related to me, I was Enlightened.
old guard also does always happen.
s/does/does not/
Speaking of lame...
But it is also boring and lame.
I agree that it's boring and lame. If Singapore is the logical conclusion to Chinese affluence, we can probably be assured of Yet Another American Century.
I merely was stating that the argument that prosperity -> democracy does not always happen, and that democracy -> a sharp and unpleasant end for the old guard also does always happen.
It won't last though. There's a generation of children being born who will take economic prosperity for granted. It's the nature of humanity, and by that same token they'll want more than just that. With economic power in their hands they'll want political power, and that's when the government will be in trouble.
Maybe, maybe not.
Taiwan went from single-party (and single-family) rule to a full-fledged democracy in the course of about 15 years. The old farts who had been running (and robbing) the country were quietly retired and a generation which was willing to allow more political pluralism were seated in their place. This happened with a lot of protests, legislative fistfights, and more than a few cracked heads on the street, but it did not involve putting the heads of the Old Guard up on a post in the process.
On the other side, Singapore has become wildly prosperous, with no sign of democracy or pluralism anywhere in sight. The People's Action Party (read: Senior Minister Harry Lee and his son Lee Hsien Loong) still run everything. It's a weird place. It's clean, it's modern. People go in, people go out. If living in the Lees's Disneyland pisses you off, you're free to go to Australia, or the US, or wherever you like. Everyone knows the rules, and nobody rocks the boat.
Several people have pointed out variations on this, but we'll try again:
Apple sells hardware. To a certain extent, they sell content. I don't know how much the App Store or iTunes makes for them. Maybe a substantial amount. Hardware is their cash cow. Open source the software, and both pillars of their model are lost.
Microsoft sells software. That's self-evident.
OSS companies are generally in the business of selling professional services. i.e., we'll give you the operating system. We will sell you what amounts to a support contract for a small fee per workstation. If you want to integrate it, or make it do clever things, we have people who do that by the hour for a reasonable fee. If you're giving away software running on servers in the back room of a large company, there's good money to be made using that model. If you're selling $200 iPhones? ehhhh, not so much.
I work for a company in the IT/networking sphere (name omitted to protect the guilty).
The internal (RFC-1918) network is a mess. Years of acquisitions have created overlaps where 10.50.x.x is used in four separate locations on the corporate network, and every owner has given extremely sound reasons why migrating their address space will cause the world to end. If you have to connect two of these locations, you get to do fun stuff with NAT addresses and routing traffic all over creation which will make your eyes bug out.
In addition, there is a point not to far in the future where IP exhaustion will take place. Our numerous public /8s, 10.0.0.0/8, 192.168/16, and 172.16/12 will all be out of IPs to allocate. It is not a "somewhere in the distant future" date. It is on some execs calendar. "This is the day when there will be no more addresses".
Migration to IPv6 is progressing as quickly as humanly possible.
have a strong feeling that if they were polled the results would be heavily skewed towards the candidate that is not announcing large tax increases...
Well, let's get past taxes for a minute.
You have a government of size X. You need funds to pay for that government.
It would be nice if that government could be pared down to a more reasonable size. Every president in my lifetime has promised that. Interestingly, the ones who were most philosophically aligned to do so have done the least to actually do so. How much of that is due to the political difficulties of asking Congress to defund projects to their constituents, and how much of that is because they were being dishonest to one degree or another I will leave to the reader.
The fact is that not one president in the last 30 years I have been paying attention to these things has shrunk the federal government. If you think the next one will, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and I are having a party at my place on Friday. Come by, we'd like to hang out.
Back to reality, as an elected politician, you have a few choices as to how to raise money to pay for the functions of government.
Borrow it from the capital markets and let your successor worry about how to pay for it (strangely popular!)
Raise taxes on the broad base of taxpayers and risk their ire and having them vote you out of office.
Raise taxes on a small percentage of people at the top, knowing their assets are much more fungible than the bottom 95%, and that if they are overtaxed, you will be in the uncomfortable position of having lost both a large part of your revenue base and a large segment of the capital that makes the economy possible.
I don't particularly want my taxes raised, or anyone else's. At the same time, we've had this narrative for the last 8 years that
a) If you slash taxes on the top few percent, the capital markets will flood over and the economy will explode! (it has, but not quite the way we were promised).
b) If you raise taxes etc. etc., you'll ruin everything. This ignores that the marginal tax rates through much of the era from WWII through the early 1980s had confiscatory rates (90%) on the top end.
For the record, you'll never see a 90% tax rate ever again. The modern economy wouldn't support it. At the same time, the argument for regressive taxation is growing pretty thin.
I pretty much agree: Fedora was obviously squelched by Red Hat corporate who was apparently afraid of the reaction of their paying customers///////////// shareholders. Despite the token board openings and motions about openness, after this nobody can pretend that Fedora is on anything but a *very* short leash held by Red Hat.
As they say on that snarky message board across town, fixed it for ya.
As a publicly traded company, Red Hat's primary responsibility is to produce a profit for its shareholders. That is the law. If the officers of the company do anything which interferes with that solemn legal duty, they risk lawsuits, and even jail time for breach of fiduciary responsibility.
If an overly open disclosure policy is perceived to affect future sales or the value of the brand (i.e. "goodwill"), legal will tell them to say nothing unless they are breaking a bigger law (i.e. gross negligence) by saying nothing.
It's strange, but it makes money, which the law says is the only thing that matters.
Ahem. China? India? Heck, Brazil?
All have far more robust economies than the US at the moment, if national budgets are anything to go by.
By "national budgets" you mean the government is taking in more than it is spending. That doesn't mean very much when you're coming from a low economic base. Neither China nor India have done large spends on infrastructure or educational/social programs. More on that in a minute.
China and India are generating a large growth in GDP. But the base it's coming from is a lot lower than that of the United States, and is not robust at all, since it's based primarily on exports rather than domestic growth.
A low base is easy to explain. If you have an average GDP per capita of $2000/year, and 10% growth, next year your GDP will be $2,200/year. That's nice, but $2,200 x, the economy does well and your coffers swell. Once somewhere cheaper comes along, you either have to take a large percentage of your work force further up the value chain, or suffer significant pain. Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong have all had very rough spots as their core manufacturing businesses have moved on to China. For the most part, this has been handled more deftly than the US did 30 years ago as we started "hollowing out", but it hasn't been easy.
When I was a young 'un, we were all convinced the Japanese were going to eat our breakfast and we'd better all learn nihongo in order to get on the right side of history. Well, it didn't quite work out that way. Japan is big, and is a major economic player, but nobody thinks that Japan will go and buy the US outright anymore. That particular fear meme has vanished.
10-15 years from now, we may see African-made mainboards and toys and be cowering in fear of a black planet. I doubt it, but stranger things have come to pass.
In the U.S., rubbing alcohol is typically 70% isopropanol in water.
90% alcohol is available from behind the pharmacy counter. You simply need to convince the pharmacist that you're not likely to drink it once you walk out of the pharmacy.
They purposely created a campaign called "Teach the Controversy" to create this confusion.
And in the process, inspired some really spiffy t-shirts.
(I have no connection with the T-shirt manufacturer other than as a fan).
In Bangalore the local language is Kannada (which most foreigners have never heard of).
I thought Kannada was what they spoke 150 miles North in Vancouver, BC. Silly me. All those hours of listening to tapes and I find out they speak English!
I meant to only addressing mainland China. But, Taiwan also has native dialects. What percent, I don't know. Back in the late 80's, my Taiwanese friends said that most people they knew from Taiwan used native dialects unless doing business.
Yes, it does. Predominantly Hokkien and Hakka. Probably 85-90% of the island has proficiency in one or another of these dialects. What language will be used depends again on social context and location. Educated Taiwanese under the age of 50 or so are generally "Native Mandarin" speakers, regardless of ethnic background. Most of my friends from Taiwan are ethnic Taiwanese and speak Hokkien with their parents or older family members. When they're with friends, they speak Mandarin.
99% of what kids say and do is based on what comes out of someone else's mouth. There's not a lot of volition involved to sort through various inputs and say "this is worthwhile, this isn't". That's called being an adult.
(many adults do not develop this capability either, but that's another story).
If a child is exposed to food X at home and nothing but food X, food Y is going to make the little dears turn up their noses.
While teachers should do their part to try to make the world of their charges larger than it is, I suspect little good will come of this. Being forced to shove down a plate of curry once a month won't make a little yob spawn much less yobbish. The way to do that is to spend time playing with kids who aren't very much like you. I don't know much about how the UK is put together, but here in these United States, we go to a lot of effort to make sure our neighbors are as much like ourselves as possible, and we don't have to do any of that yucky mixing with people who aren't like us.
But then I've also relocated to Asia.
Good for you! Been there, done that, not only bought the T-shirt, but the entire Chinese furniture collection.
Other than any given Chinese city being much more fun than any given American city, it didn't make a lot of sense financially to stay on. If you've managed to make it work for you, I say good on ya!
A problem to keep in mind is that Mandarin is often not used in "street" conversion. Native people will try a local dialect first, and if that does not work, THEN they use Mandarin.
Depends on where you are.
Beijing, Northeastern China and much of the "heartland" are Mandarin-speaking by default.
Taipei, Taiwan is predominantly Mandarin-speaking, although it depends on the speaker, their origin, age, context, blah blah blah.
Once you go into the South (Guangdong province, Hong Kong, Fujian, Shanghai, Jiangsu/Jiangxi) I'd say you're correct, but again, it depends on context. Your taxi driver will probably speak the local dialect by default. Your university-educated colleague is more likely than not a "native" Mandarin speaker.
Hong Kong is a special case. Fluency in Hong Kong Cantonese is a mark of upbringing and status over Mandarin speakers who are more likely than not from mainland China.
It seems to me that if you are planning on working in the United States, your time would be better spent focusing on your Computer studies. Most foreign engineers here speak English.
1) I strongly advise learning a foreign language just to make yourself a better person. My Mandarin is pretty good, and my Spanish is -- well, enough to get me in trouble when in Spanish-speaking environments.
2) While there are good reasons to learn foreign languages for business purposes, especially if you already have plans on joining the dark side and working for purchasing/marketing/logistics, etc., speaking from a CSci/Engineering point of view, English is the lingua franca of scientific work, and will probably remain so for some time. There are two up-and-coming economies, India and China. University-educated Indians speak English. Chinese for some structural reasons is not likely to become a replacement for English soon. I will explain.
One of the strengths of English is it's effortless ability to absorb foreign words when it becomes necessary to do so. Thus we have acquired cryptography (Greek Kryptos), carnivore (Latin carne and vorare), and otaku (Japanese Otaku), etc. etc.
Chinese cannot do that and maintain the "structural integrity" of the language. Chinese is written in characters. Characters generally apply to meaning. There is no katakana alphabet like Japanese to phonetically express words of foreign origin. While there are exceptions; "coffee" becomes ka fei and "Coca Cola" becomes ke ko ke le ("Happiness in the mouth". No kidding. The "bite the wax tadpole" of urban legend would be a completely different set of characters, and is seldom if ever used). More frequently, things and concepts become Sinicised. "Hard drive" becomes ying die (hard platter), "Printer" becomes yin biao ji (imprint display machine), and "postmodernism" becomes hou xian dai zhu yi (after modern period principle/ideology), etc. etc.
The end result of this is that most hardware engineering in China is done in English. There is generally no parallel chipset documentation put out by UMC or Taiwan Semiconductor documenting the timing and logic in Mandarin, as it would serve no purpose but to drive everyone insane.
If you DO learn to speak Chinese, you will get 50,000 cool points with your Chinese-speaking colleagues. Whether it will ever add a dollar to your bank account I can't say. It hasn't done anything for mine.
My phone bills before the breakup were almost always $15-$20 per month. Now they run at least three times that. I don't now and have never needed unlimited calling anywhere.
Yep.
This is not due to any fundamental change in the operation of the phone company pre or post breakup, or their cost of delivering services.
It was simply a shift as to how the billing was done.
In the old Bell System, long-distance rates were kept high in order to subsidize local phone service. Some schmuck paid $3/minute to call their sister in California so that you had a $15/month phone bill. It worked out fairly well for the average consumer, and put most of the operating costs of the phone company on shoulders that were more able to pay for it, namely businesses and the few people who needed to call long-distance on a regular basis.
Once the RBOCs and long lines AT&T split up from each other, that arrangement went away, and your local phone bill started to climb.
While I'm sorry that your phone bill has gone up so much, while costs of everything else have stayed exactly the same as they were in 1983 * coughs *, it works out pretty well for most people.
I get to talk to my sister in Italy for $0.00/minute, and my wife gets to yammer away happily with relatives in Taiwan for pennies because we're no longer subsidizing the Bell System.
1. Establish shell company in Singapore holding obvious patent.
2. Sue web pages all over the Internet asking for money.
3. Profit, lah!
I do not assume that America is the "apogee of human civilization" but it is the place where i happen to live right now, and i like it.
That's good. It sucks to live somewhere you don't like.
I don't want to be mean, because it's not my style, but you really, really need to at least read a book or two before making these "fortune cookie" assumptions about how China works. (Fortune cookies came from San Francisco by the way. They don't exist in the Middle Kingdom). I spent the better part of a decade there, and I don't think I know it all.
The Chinese method is clearly more efficient than our own and they will undoubtedly win the global economic war which is currently being waged.
You're wrong there. There is an input (cheap, but not very efficient labor) which helps, but that only takes you so far. The further up the value-add chain you go, the less you can get by on cheap inputs, and the more original design expertise you need. A lot of the design work is still coming from the US, Japan, Taiwan, Europe, etc. while the manufacturing is done in China. This is not a permanent situation, and you should not assume that Chinese are incapable of doing original design work. Just the same, while throwing a million monkeys on a factory line will make mainboards, it won't design semiconductors or write Hamlet for that matter.
Basic research is still largely done elsewhere, for a large number of reasons.
For hundreds of years (if not thousands) China has regarded itself as the center of the world, the further away you were from China, the more worthless you were.
Consider the neighbors. China considered themselves better because in every demonstrable sense, they WERE better. Japan did not break away from China in terms of wealth, cultural, or technological development until the Meiji Restoration in the 1850s. Of course, Europe had been doing a lot of interesting things, but Europe was far, and nobody who had any influence in China had ever been there, therefore, Europe for all it's castles, cathedrals, science and sages did not exist to China until the 1700s. 150 years of wars, unequal treaties, extraterritorial jurisdictions (i.e. concessions in China that were operated under American, British, or German, and not Chinese law), etc. etc. set straight that the "center of the world" was a pretty backwards place. The Communist revolution was one response as to how to drag China into the modern world. It was decidedly not the best response that could have been come up with.
It was for these reasons that they would export far more than they would allow in.
Nope. It was because finished Chinese goods (porcelains, silks, artwork, etc.) were more valuable than the materials made by "tributary states". In modern business we call this high value-add vs low value-add.
The west see's China as an invading army of merchants ready to undercut their prices to the point of running us out of business. It's only natural for us to fight against this.
Chinese goods are only sold in the US to the extent that American government policies allow them in and American merchandisers are willing to sell them. There is a supermarket near my house owned and operated by overseas Chinese. Their contribution to the GDP of the city of Seattle is negligible. The little building that sits right above them sells more Chinese-owned products in 20 minutes than they sell in a year.
Anything which serves the purpose of reducing their isolation from the rest of the world is good in my book.
Do you live anywhere near a university? Notice one or two students there from China? Guess what? 90% of them will go home to China after finishing their studies here. How many of your American-born friends have lived or studied overseas? Anybody? Bueller?
There is a country which is isolated and needs to be opened up, but that's not China. They know full well how backwards they are and a