Oh no. It was the G8 that came up with the brilliant idea of holding a meeting in a location where public protest is illegal (Quatar, I believe it was.)
Funny thing, huh? Its almost like countries themselves have become conference halls, each with its own set of convenient or inconvenient services (er, laws) for the planners of our future.
> As long as USian presidents keep spreading their ass cheeks for their corporate paymasters
Let me get this straight. In a free market, there are no regulations. But in a regulated market, we prevent any one company from becoming _too_ big, and generally set some limits and try and prevent any minority from reaping the benifits of the system at the cost of others. (I work in advertising, so you'd have a hard time convincing me that failure in a free market doesn't have anything to do with current market leaders using their marketing clout and screwing with industry standards to create artificially high barriers to market.)
Except we can't get to the free market, because when companies because _too_ big, it becomes _too_ easy to influence the policies set by the government.
The 'free market' is its own worst enemy. It allows entities to reach the kind of unbridled success, wealth, and power that corrupts.
If you believe in democracy, in the checks and balances we _regulate_ in politics (ie, no body as abolute power), I'm not sure why people are so shy about instilling the same kind of rule-based checks and balances in the economy. (Well, we do, but some fight them.) Clearly the fact that you can't achieve _absolute_ power in government hasn't prevented people from wanting to work for it and participate, so why does the idea of regulating the economy through distributed decentralized processes (read: not centrally set policies) scare people so much?
Polyani had much to say about this, I think. Basically, when people hear about regulating markets, they assume one group with no oversight or accountability will make the decisions required to minimize human suffering at the hand of the invisible hand (not all humans that suffer deserve it donchaknow).. why not make it a decentralized processes with groups of consumers and groups of producers getting together and deciding what regulations are best for everybody?
To me, a free market is simply tantamount to anarchy, where due to a complete lack of limitations and rules allows a small driven minority to use their combined might to create their own 'rules', making the lack of any a moot point.
> who claim that the market is always smarter than any individual
Except doubtless there were some VC's who _did_ sense the rediculousness and opted not to meet that demand. (Not that we'd hear about it as news, but clearly not 100% of all VCs threw money at the public sector.)
In that case, I'd say some individuals were smarter than the market..
Although the real problem is: define smarter? Do we need bubbles and crashes?
Rats. Any chance you're in the south? Some of the laws down there I've heard regarding the sale of sex toys explains quite succinctly why the south is having touble rising again.
> their parent's basement, complete with folding chairs, ramen noodles for food, and a barely functioning PC
and
> This post was written in a relatively successful 4 week old store while sitting on a chair from the 1970's found in a broom closet, using an old P233, which also functions as the POS system, music player for the store, bookkeeping system, and graphic design station, in a store that was painted, lighted, and outfitted solely by the owner.
Let me guess. You're a sadomasochist running a BSDM store.
But your governments mantate is not to grow with that money. Your government is _supposed_ to put that money towards services and infrastructure that benifit you and your disabled child. Dont have a disabled child? Well some do, through no fault of their own, and the goal of equality is to attempt to pool some of our collective successes together to help those who havn't the opportunity to attain that success in the first place (ie, they're not lazy, they just cant). And if they don't, instead of putting them 'out of business' like you would a company, and risk maybe having nobody to step in and keep providing these services, you can actually vote.. and you don't even have to spend a dime or *go without*!
Nintendo takes your money and becomes a bigger Nintendo. And bigger and bigger. I'm not sure why people are scared of their government getting bigger but companies not when, if companies get bigger than government, they _become_ government with no precendent or structure for democratic representation! (And this is what we're seeing today, isn't it? Companies can only buy the government if the government -needs- the money, so its in your interest to support your government financially so they -dont- have to become the corperations' plaything.)
Or, you can stop using roads (or get everyone to stop paying taxes and watch them become unusable as trees and powerlines litter across them), drinking water, and the plethora of other services you need from your government to facilitate your life. As another poster noted, go find a government that doesn't need taxes from you and watch your quality of life plummet (or the quality of life of someone you love.)
In countries where (american, so they know what they're doing, right?) companies have taken over basic services such as water, water suddenly becomes too expensive for many people to afford. If you want making people go without clean drinking water on your concience as a tradeoff for making more money than youre currently making (and I assume you can afford a computer and net connection, so youre better off than 99% of the people on this entire planet), go to it, but dont expect droves to support that mentality.
Patently untrue. Microsoft is FUD-dy, not stupid. They wouldn't be touting performance reports if it didn't matter to purchasers and adopters.
Whether or not it _actually_ matters is a whole other ball of wax, but I contend it still does. We're not a big business by any stretch of the imagination, but we need 20 servers to handle the load we do (400-600 'requests' per secondwith each request resulting in anywhere from 2 to 4 additional connections made for each request generated).. if we ever moved to.NET or J2EE, you can bet your ass performance would be a big issue in making our selection.
You might try rewording: In the *majority* of cases where people are selecting platforms, performance is not always the #1 issue.
That might approach the truth, but to say performance only matters if it sucks assumes you can afford the hardware to meet your demand with room to spare on the first day you go live. In enterprise applcations (lots of customers) and high load applications (less customers but each customer generates tons of load - like an ad server), performance is _exactly_ where you're going to make or break your ability to supply the demand without buying the Noah's Ark of hardware.
Amen. What the parent poster didnt realize is that when youre dealing with 3 tables, one of which has 52 million records in it, joins are the non-option. 4 day queries are not permitted. We get around it denormalizing to certain degrees (certainly not rigorously all the way to 3NF), using tmp tables, being as religious as possible about indexing.. all with mysql, baby.
> a million records
Thats chump change! Try 50 million and then we'll talk database;)
> why don't we see more companies acting for the good of the community as a whole?
I dunno. All the shows on TV all seem to promote cheating people and getting a leg up (especially reality shows). We seem to have a very competative culture that values success and wealth over contributing more meaningfully to humanity. Or a culture that believes the best way to contribute to humanity is to be successful and get rich.
I'm not sure how to say this in non flame bait terms, so I will follow Ed the Sock's advice: "If you dont have anything nice to say, say it often."
So, I'm going to punch the next person who says what you said. Everybody knows companies must make a profit. Nobody doesn't know.
I am so sick of posters quickly pointing out that company A isn't making move B because they've turned into gum-drop fairies who suddendly transcend the need to make money. Of course they don't! Who thinks they do?! Companies are meant to serve a market and can only exist in the absense of selflessness. While you can definately make a case that individual companies may sacrifice time to time in the interest of the overall health of the market, companies *must* and *do* place self interest (survival of the company) above the health of the system (the market).
Now humans, we can be selfless, because we have different goals other that simply surviving as individuals. Our desire to see others succeed where we may not, for example, may cause a human to sacrifice in order to contibute to another human or an overall social order. You can find humans who would _happily_ die if they could sufficiently contibute to an external social order they are ideologically aligned with (think of everything from organ donations to suicide bombers.)
If you were to ask me, the existance of apparent altruism shows how humans (at least some, I contend most) ultimately seek to live lives with a minimal amount of social conflict. We will 'pay it forward' and risk acting in selfless manners even if we cannot be garaunteed that our actions will result in the desired consequence (ie, less social conflict.) Much how people are willing to spend 2 dollars a day for lottery tickets despite no garauntee of winning. The perceived result of acting selflessly is sufficiently wanted enough to motivate us to engage in said behaviour even in the face of evidence that might suggest we may never experience it; just like the lottery.
But the bottom line is, who cares if they're being altruistic or not.. is this good for us or bad? Any discussion on whether Real Networks is being selfless or not is moot and a waste of time.
Please pass this message on to other folks. These kinds of parent posts get people all worked up, but for no reason at all!
We have a box at work serving anywhere from 20 to 40 requests per second, 24/7.. its been up, no reboot required, for over 2 years. Its been through software upgrades too, so its not like we havn't touched it in this time. (Warning: Thats just one example. I'm not looking to get into an 'uptime' pissing contest. I'm sure Linux can do this too.. or at least I think it can.:)
There are lots of differences between FreeBSD and Linux that are more esotaric in nature, but to me, FreeBSD represents the best balance between a stable, time tested code base and active development.
I have to imagine there is a reason why FreeBSD is used in so many ISPs and server farms (like Yahoo.) For us, the choice has been well worth it, save for a few troubles, like the lack of native threads.
To me, FreeBSD is the OS of choice for sysadmins who're well past the 'gee wizz aint this cool' phase of their computing life and just want something stable and tidy; even if its not bleeding edge with respect to hardware support. To me, FreeBSD is an experienced performer that does very little complaining, even if it can't do *all* the tricks Linux users might wish it did.
Part of my point was they would mind because the US has been so pro-free-trade that to have them selectively go protectionist would not be a popular move.
Yes, duties go up, industries in other markets will complain. Thats fairly natural and should happen when you impose virtually any duty on a product you're importing.
But a bigger issue which most people would base their reaction off of (ie, if they weren't the ones on the receiving end of the duty-increase) is simply the gains the US has been able to make from free-trade policy and how infuriating it would be for the US to be selectively protectionist whenever it suits its whim. That'd be the larger picture attitude that would get industries worried or frusterated even if they wern't specifically on the receiving end of a specific increase in duties.
But only somewhat, as I realize Canada may have been selling the lumber at a loss. This wasn't a situation where the tarrifs were simply designed to protect domestic business at any cost; just to even out the disadvantage they had of losing money if they matched Canadian prices.
I guess it really comes down to whether you feel selling at a loss to gain market access is fair game under free trade? My interpretation is that if you're a true 'laissez faire' kind guy, then you have to accept other markets may try things like this and that its still no justification for imposing duties. Thats why the US sometimes comes off as hypocritical sometimes with respect to trading policies. They seem to be for free trade, so long as they are able to remain the leader in markets. When some of our own industries have all but caved to the American invasion (retail, in this case), American industries which feel the threat of international competition sometimes go running off to seek protection via duties. If that isn't shades of hypocracy, I'm not sure what is?
That first line in your post is hilarious.:P No tarrifs == sharing of wealth? Laugh.
More likely it would piss off the world because multilateral free trade is how american multinationals get into foreign markets (b/c it weakens the foreign governments' ability to protect industries.) Consider all the conditions of IMF aid.. lets see, privatization, liberalized trade.. for business for all of which, for some odd reason, seems to go to american multinationals!
The US doesn't _need_ tarrifs, which is why it doesn't have any. You don't really suppose American international trade policy has anything to do with whats nice, do you? I mean, the trading policies in place are pretty much what heads of multinationals want them to be.. and they wouldn't give a flying fuck how anybody sees the US, so long as they can start selling Pillsbury to Venezualans.
So no, its not foreign countries that would be pissed if tarrifs increased. It'd be heads of US corps that would freak.. cause tarrif wars make it exeedingly difficult to gain access to foreign markets. The inevitable tarrifs that would go up in other countries as soon as the US started using them more would have the effect of making it more difficult to exploit foreign markets.
Just look at some of the prominant trade agreements in place. NAFTA was dreampt up by american corperate heads, and then pitched to Canada and Mexico through 'figure heads' inside those countries. The biggest opponants to increasing tarrifs would be growth-minded CEOs inside the US's border fearing a tarrif war with markets they're trying to expand in.
But the US needs free trade more than anybody to soften the risk of entering foreign markets. Most of the 'free trade' agreements in place (at least with Canada and Mexico) were the brainchildren of US business men in order to make it easy to get into other markets (well, really, to make it difficult for local governments to protect domestic markets - same thing).. I'm not sure setting up tarrifs would go over well at this point.
It'd seem pretty hypocritical of the US, and it'd probably be difficult to get away with, given the amount of trade agreements in place that purpot to provide free trade with various foreign markets.
Uh, isn't this just a good example of the western fixation on being #1 (not #2, #3, or even thinking about the journey itself as being rewarding?)
And please, I'm on western soil, so I'm all my rocks are staying inside our glass house here.:)
Thats the way I see it; Western culture lives by the 'ends justify the means' mantra, where as other cultures seem realize that investing too much in realizing ones goals just means you cant have any fun or learn much from the journey. Or worse yet, this attitude encourages attempting to find loopholes in the rules of the journey for the end's sake.. I think alot of corperate America's 'growth at all costs' fiasco of recent years was a good example of this.
One last thing. If it means that much to them when they lose, do they really wish that kind of emotional pain on other people.. and what does that say about them?;)
> I realize that you're still paying the MS tax, but the overall price still works out to less than a TiBook.
I'm paying MS for something I won't use, but its alright, because its possible to find a more expensive alternative?
If I can find more expensive alternatives to things you buy, and you throw another 20$ my way on every purchase? Cause, you know, its still cheaper than the most expensive alternative..:)
I'm not so concerned about the price, but its kinda hard to 'vote with your wallet' when you're stuffing the ballot box with votes for your enemy just to get into the polling station.
Slashdot Mirror
Joe PC - With PC in his name. Which I assume means he likes PCs. And if he knows abit about PCs, and spends time with PCs, this might interest him.
There's a reason they didn't use the name "abacus-granny".
Oh no. It was the G8 that came up with the brilliant idea of holding a meeting in a location where public protest is illegal (Quatar, I believe it was.)
Funny thing, huh? Its almost like countries themselves have become conference halls, each with its own set of convenient or inconvenient services (er, laws) for the planners of our future.
> Putting University funding and appointment behind close doors
Is this before of after the school changes its name to The Pepsi Insitute for Higher, Fizzier Learning?
> As long as USian presidents keep spreading their ass cheeks for their corporate paymasters
.. why not make it a decentralized processes with groups of consumers and groups of producers getting together and deciding what regulations are best for everybody?
Let me get this straight. In a free market, there are no regulations. But in a regulated market, we prevent any one company from becoming _too_ big, and generally set some limits and try and prevent any minority from reaping the benifits of the system at the cost of others. (I work in advertising, so you'd have a hard time convincing me that failure in a free market doesn't have anything to do with current market leaders using their marketing clout and screwing with industry standards to create artificially high barriers to market.)
Except we can't get to the free market, because when companies because _too_ big, it becomes _too_ easy to influence the policies set by the government.
The 'free market' is its own worst enemy. It allows entities to reach the kind of unbridled success, wealth, and power that corrupts.
If you believe in democracy, in the checks and balances we _regulate_ in politics (ie, no body as abolute power), I'm not sure why people are so shy about instilling the same kind of rule-based checks and balances in the economy. (Well, we do, but some fight them.) Clearly the fact that you can't achieve _absolute_ power in government hasn't prevented people from wanting to work for it and participate, so why does the idea of regulating the economy through distributed decentralized processes (read: not centrally set policies) scare people so much?
Polyani had much to say about this, I think. Basically, when people hear about regulating markets, they assume one group with no oversight or accountability will make the decisions required to minimize human suffering at the hand of the invisible hand (not all humans that suffer deserve it donchaknow)
To me, a free market is simply tantamount to anarchy, where due to a complete lack of limitations and rules allows a small driven minority to use their combined might to create their own 'rules', making the lack of any a moot point.
> who claim that the market is always smarter than any individual
..
Except doubtless there were some VC's who _did_ sense the rediculousness and opted not to meet that demand. (Not that we'd hear about it as news, but clearly not 100% of all VCs threw money at the public sector.)
In that case, I'd say some individuals were smarter than the market
Although the real problem is: define smarter? Do we need bubbles and crashes?
Rats. Any chance you're in the south? Some of the laws down there I've heard regarding the sale of sex toys explains quite succinctly why the south is having touble rising again.
oops, got a little too vanilla there for a second
> their parent's basement, complete with folding chairs, ramen noodles for food, and a barely functioning PC
and
> This post was written in a relatively successful 4 week old store while sitting on a chair from the 1970's found in a broom closet, using an old P233, which also functions as the POS system, music player for the store, bookkeeping system, and graphic design station, in a store that was painted, lighted, and outfitted solely by the owner.
Let me guess. You're a sadomasochist running a BSDM store.
> My government takes 55% of my income EVERY year
.. and you don't even have to spend a dime or *go without*!
But your governments mantate is not to grow with that money. Your government is _supposed_ to put that money towards services and infrastructure that benifit you and your disabled child. Dont have a disabled child? Well some do, through no fault of their own, and the goal of equality is to attempt to pool some of our collective successes together to help those who havn't the opportunity to attain that success in the first place (ie, they're not lazy, they just cant). And if they don't, instead of putting them 'out of business' like you would a company, and risk maybe having nobody to step in and keep providing these services, you can actually vote
Nintendo takes your money and becomes a bigger Nintendo. And bigger and bigger. I'm not sure why people are scared of their government getting bigger but companies not when, if companies get bigger than government, they _become_ government with no precendent or structure for democratic representation! (And this is what we're seeing today, isn't it? Companies can only buy the government if the government -needs- the money, so its in your interest to support your government financially so they -dont- have to become the corperations' plaything.)
Or, you can stop using roads (or get everyone to stop paying taxes and watch them become unusable as trees and powerlines litter across them), drinking water, and the plethora of other services you need from your government to facilitate your life. As another poster noted, go find a government that doesn't need taxes from you and watch your quality of life plummet (or the quality of life of someone you love.)
In countries where (american, so they know what they're doing, right?) companies have taken over basic services such as water, water suddenly becomes too expensive for many people to afford. If you want making people go without clean drinking water on your concience as a tradeoff for making more money than youre currently making (and I assume you can afford a computer and net connection, so youre better off than 99% of the people on this entire planet), go to it, but dont expect droves to support that mentality.
Patently untrue. Microsoft is FUD-dy, not stupid. They wouldn't be touting performance reports if it didn't matter to purchasers and adopters.
.. if we ever moved to .NET or J2EE, you can bet your ass performance would be a big issue in making our selection.
Whether or not it _actually_ matters is a whole other ball of wax, but I contend it still does. We're not a big business by any stretch of the imagination, but we need 20 servers to handle the load we do (400-600 'requests' per secondwith each request resulting in anywhere from 2 to 4 additional connections made for each request generated)
You might try rewording: In the *majority* of cases where people are selecting platforms, performance is not always the #1 issue.
That might approach the truth, but to say performance only matters if it sucks assumes you can afford the hardware to meet your demand with room to spare on the first day you go live. In enterprise applcations (lots of customers) and high load applications (less customers but each customer generates tons of load - like an ad server), performance is _exactly_ where you're going to make or break your ability to supply the demand without buying the Noah's Ark of hardware.
Amen. What the parent poster didnt realize is that when youre dealing with 3 tables, one of which has 52 million records in it, joins are the non-option. 4 day queries are not permitted. We get around it denormalizing to certain degrees (certainly not rigorously all the way to 3NF), using tmp tables, being as religious as possible about indexing .. all with mysql, baby.
;)
> a million records
Thats chump change! Try 50 million and then we'll talk database
> why don't we see more companies acting for the good of the community as a whole?
I dunno. All the shows on TV all seem to promote cheating people and getting a leg up (especially reality shows). We seem to have a very competative culture that values success and wealth over contributing more meaningfully to humanity. Or a culture that believes the best way to contribute to humanity is to be successful and get rich.
> Is connecting an AI unit to the NET really an ethically responsible thing to do?
Its certainly more ethical than connecting it to dot-NET!
> PHP has made a grep step forward in disabling register_globals by default
;)
as usual, theonion.com has covered this
> IT industry is create a web-site where everyone puts in the prices they pay for licenses
.. PLEASE NO, NOT AN OPEN MARKET!"
I can hear the IT sector scream from here: "OH GOD, NO
Hopefully followed shortly by the *crash* of the Web of Lies(tm).
> They're a company. They want to make a profit.
.. is this good for us or bad? Any discussion on whether Real Networks is being selfless or not is moot and a waste of time.
I'm not sure how to say this in non flame bait terms, so I will follow Ed the Sock's advice: "If you dont have anything nice to say, say it often."
So, I'm going to punch the next person who says what you said. Everybody knows companies must make a profit. Nobody doesn't know.
I am so sick of posters quickly pointing out that company A isn't making move B because they've turned into gum-drop fairies who suddendly transcend the need to make money. Of course they don't! Who thinks they do?! Companies are meant to serve a market and can only exist in the absense of selflessness. While you can definately make a case that individual companies may sacrifice time to time in the interest of the overall health of the market, companies *must* and *do* place self interest (survival of the company) above the health of the system (the market).
Now humans, we can be selfless, because we have different goals other that simply surviving as individuals. Our desire to see others succeed where we may not, for example, may cause a human to sacrifice in order to contibute to another human or an overall social order. You can find humans who would _happily_ die if they could sufficiently contibute to an external social order they are ideologically aligned with (think of everything from organ donations to suicide bombers.)
If you were to ask me, the existance of apparent altruism shows how humans (at least some, I contend most) ultimately seek to live lives with a minimal amount of social conflict. We will 'pay it forward' and risk acting in selfless manners even if we cannot be garaunteed that our actions will result in the desired consequence (ie, less social conflict.) Much how people are willing to spend 2 dollars a day for lottery tickets despite no garauntee of winning. The perceived result of acting selflessly is sufficiently wanted enough to motivate us to engage in said behaviour even in the face of evidence that might suggest we may never experience it; just like the lottery.
But the bottom line is, who cares if they're being altruistic or not
Please pass this message on to other folks. These kinds of parent posts get people all worked up, but for no reason at all!
We have a box at work serving anywhere from 20 to 40 requests per second, 24/7 .. its been up, no reboot required, for over 2 years. Its been through software upgrades too, so its not like we havn't touched it in this time. (Warning: Thats just one example. I'm not looking to get into an 'uptime' pissing contest. I'm sure Linux can do this too .. or at least I think it can. :)
There are lots of differences between FreeBSD and Linux that are more esotaric in nature, but to me, FreeBSD represents the best balance between a stable, time tested code base and active development.
I have to imagine there is a reason why FreeBSD is used in so many ISPs and server farms (like Yahoo.) For us, the choice has been well worth it, save for a few troubles, like the lack of native threads.
To me, FreeBSD is the OS of choice for sysadmins who're well past the 'gee wizz aint this cool' phase of their computing life and just want something stable and tidy; even if its not bleeding edge with respect to hardware support. To me, FreeBSD is an experienced performer that does very little complaining, even if it can't do *all* the tricks Linux users might wish it did.
Ah well, any was a bad choice in words.
.. but these are exceptions.
Few. I'm aware of the softwood tarrif, and Hollywood lobbying for entertainment industry subsidies, etc
My point was still that _when_ they impose tarrifs, they look pretty hypocritical, and for the good reasons you list.
Part of my point was they would mind because the US has been so pro-free-trade that to have them selectively go protectionist would not be a popular move.
Yes, duties go up, industries in other markets will complain. Thats fairly natural and should happen when you impose virtually any duty on a product you're importing.
But a bigger issue which most people would base their reaction off of (ie, if they weren't the ones on the receiving end of the duty-increase) is simply the gains the US has been able to make from free-trade policy and how infuriating it would be for the US to be selectively protectionist whenever it suits its whim. That'd be the larger picture attitude that would get industries worried or frusterated even if they wern't specifically on the receiving end of a specific increase in duties.
Yep, that was somewhat hypocritical.
But only somewhat, as I realize Canada may have been selling the lumber at a loss. This wasn't a situation where the tarrifs were simply designed to protect domestic business at any cost; just to even out the disadvantage they had of losing money if they matched Canadian prices.
I guess it really comes down to whether you feel selling at a loss to gain market access is fair game under free trade? My interpretation is that if you're a true 'laissez faire' kind guy, then you have to accept other markets may try things like this and that its still no justification for imposing duties. Thats why the US sometimes comes off as hypocritical sometimes with respect to trading policies. They seem to be for free trade, so long as they are able to remain the leader in markets. When some of our own industries have all but caved to the American invasion (retail, in this case), American industries which feel the threat of international competition sometimes go running off to seek protection via duties. If that isn't shades of hypocracy, I'm not sure what is?
That first line in your post is hilarious. :P No tarrifs == sharing of wealth? Laugh.
.. lets see, privatization, liberalized trade .. for business for all of which, for some odd reason, seems to go to american multinationals!
.. and they wouldn't give a flying fuck how anybody sees the US, so long as they can start selling Pillsbury to Venezualans.
.. cause tarrif wars make it exeedingly difficult to gain access to foreign markets. The inevitable tarrifs that would go up in other countries as soon as the US started using them more would have the effect of making it more difficult to exploit foreign markets.
More likely it would piss off the world because multilateral free trade is how american multinationals get into foreign markets (b/c it weakens the foreign governments' ability to protect industries.) Consider all the conditions of IMF aid
The US doesn't _need_ tarrifs, which is why it doesn't have any. You don't really suppose American international trade policy has anything to do with whats nice, do you? I mean, the trading policies in place are pretty much what heads of multinationals want them to be
So no, its not foreign countries that would be pissed if tarrifs increased. It'd be heads of US corps that would freak
Just look at some of the prominant trade agreements in place. NAFTA was dreampt up by american corperate heads, and then pitched to Canada and Mexico through 'figure heads' inside those countries. The biggest opponants to increasing tarrifs would be growth-minded CEOs inside the US's border fearing a tarrif war with markets they're trying to expand in.
But the US needs free trade more than anybody to soften the risk of entering foreign markets. Most of the 'free trade' agreements in place (at least with Canada and Mexico) were the brainchildren of US business men in order to make it easy to get into other markets (well, really, to make it difficult for local governments to protect domestic markets - same thing) .. I'm not sure setting up tarrifs would go over well at this point.
It'd seem pretty hypocritical of the US, and it'd probably be difficult to get away with, given the amount of trade agreements in place that purpot to provide free trade with various foreign markets.
Uh, isn't this just a good example of the western fixation on being #1 (not #2, #3, or even thinking about the journey itself as being rewarding?)
:)
.. I think alot of corperate America's 'growth at all costs' fiasco of recent years was a good example of this.
.. and what does that say about them? ;)
And please, I'm on western soil, so I'm all my rocks are staying inside our glass house here.
Thats the way I see it; Western culture lives by the 'ends justify the means' mantra, where as other cultures seem realize that investing too much in realizing ones goals just means you cant have any fun or learn much from the journey. Or worse yet, this attitude encourages attempting to find loopholes in the rules of the journey for the end's sake
One last thing. If it means that much to them when they lose, do they really wish that kind of emotional pain on other people
> Which shows simultaneously what an objective "journalist" he is, and how he's an insightful "computer expert".
Whats funny is people who think he has any obligation to be either of those things.
Let me get this straight:
.. :)
> I realize that you're still paying the MS tax, but the overall price still works out to less than a TiBook.
I'm paying MS for something I won't use, but its alright, because its possible to find a more expensive alternative?
If I can find more expensive alternatives to things you buy, and you throw another 20$ my way on every purchase? Cause, you know, its still cheaper than the most expensive alternative
I'm not so concerned about the price, but its kinda hard to 'vote with your wallet' when you're stuffing the ballot box with votes for your enemy just to get into the polling station.