It's not absurd. It's reality. All other things being equal, jobs, of any kind, always go to where they can be most cheaply done. The trick is to make sure that all other things AREN'T equal: that you learn ways to be significantly more productive, in some way, than your Third World peers, so that businesses can afford to pay significantly more for your labor and still come out ahead.
Not necessarily true. First, real (inflation-adjusted) wages are rising in India and falling here. Second, businesses will pay more per hour if they are getting correspondingly more per hour. If U.S. workers were twice as productive as Indian workers, businesses would be willing to pay twice as much for their services. What they are looking for is not maximum output per unit of time, but per unit of money.
Actually, they would, if allowed to. But true competition would be necesssary, and that's what we don't have, because governments artificially restrict the number of schools allowed to train medical professionals, and medical cartels artificially limit entry into those professions, ostensibly to protect quality, but in reality to maintain their own artificially inflated incomes through the artificial lack of competition. In a free market, the high price of medical services would attract more providers into the industry, at all levels. Eventually - not necessarily immediately - competition would bring prices back down toward reason. The link in my sig has much more info on this topic for anyone interested in learning more.
That will happen, because no one will knowingly pay workers more than they have to. That's basic economics. From a macroeconomic standpoint, labor is a commodity like any other, although it does have some unusual properties (it is less mobile than most others, and highly capital-intensive in that it does not generate much value unless highly skilled, trained, and experienced).
If the world gets warmer overall, regions like Canada and Siberia obviously benefit. Food production is positively correlated with temperature, so there should be considerably more agricultural capacity. Here's the problem: already hot and poor regions such as Africa and the Middle East suffer considerably, as do the coastal areas in which much of the world's population currently resides.
The best way to mitigate the effects of global warming, if it continues to occur, is freedom. Both political and economic. People must be free to move from the places that will soon be under water, to those that will not, and from the places from which agriculture is no longer viable, to those in which it is or soon will be. Both individuals and groups of individuals also must be free to trade, so that every region of the world can specialize in those areas in which it has competitive advantage, and people can benefit from the production of not only their own region but every other.
The "solution" proposed by communists, fascists, and other totalitarians - to restrict industrial growth and travel - will cause exactly the opposite effects. Trade wars, followed by shooting wars, will result as the big players fight to gain control of the most economically productive regions. The average person's living standards will plummet, and soon most of the world population will be gone. Many so-called "environmentalists" openly advocate this result anyway. They are of course free to commit suicide if they wish. However, they do not have the right to take anyone else with them, much less nearly all the rest of us.
I agree, and there's a simple explanation. In the strictest sense of the term at least, it is not science (on either side). Science deals in that which is falsifiable, observable and repeatable. Climatology deals primarily in two things that are not falsifiable, observable, and repeatable: (a) the past state of the climate, and (b) the future state of the climate. We can't do a controlled experiment changing manmade CO2 emissions and holding all other variables constant. Thus, we can't really apply the scientific method in such a way as to make predictions about the future in which we can be fairly confident. This is not to say that climatology does not have value, and it is not to take either side in the debate (which I do, but for reasons rooted in ethics, not science). It is to debunk the fallacy of argument from supposed authority: that "scientific experts [sic] say XYZ; therefore, XYZ must be true." In this case, especially, even if the premise were correct, which is itself questionable, the conclusion does not follow.
The facts as I understand them suggest that the earth is getting warmer (since we do have evidence that it was colder recently), but that human activity is not responsible (since it is a very small emitter of only one of many greenhouse gases, and one of probable insignificance compared to the others). Even if human activity were responsible, no person, group, or government has a right to dictate the actions of another, and thus there is no legitimate action any person, group or government could take to combat "global warming" other than by altering its own actions. I will do so when and if it seems like the right thing to do, but I will never attempt to coerce others into doing the same. I don't have that right, and neither does anyone else, on any side of this or any other debate.
My impression is that you would still enjoy these rights in places like Canada, but with far less chance of being thrown into Guantanamo for having a name similar to a "known terrorist."
And for what it's worth you arguably can't practice biblical Christianity in much of the world either. Christianity is based on love, and there is nothing remotely loving about torture, wars of aggression, tax-slavery, or imprisoning anyone not sufficiently like the "majority." But there are few places where one is not forced to participate in those activities, at least indirectly (through taxation and such).
>>There's nothing more frustrating than trying to track down a tiny little package on RPMFind because the distro doesn't support it in the repository
>I swear, in 15 years of using Linux I've never had to do this.
Well, it's not like you were Project Leader for Debian or anything like that, that might explain your lack of experience with RPMFind.:)
I'm mostly a Gentoo guy myself, but I use Ubuntu on occasion, and I have to say I do like Apt and the related technologies: they appear to do a better job than RPM, at least in my limited experience, of knowing about and installing correct and non-system-breaking dependencies.
I agree in general that freedoms are inseparable. However, in SE Asia, many countries have seen a "spiral" effect where increased freedom in one sphere has sparked demands for increased freedom in the others. Singapore is the classic example, where political freedom has always lagged behind - but has nonethless grown with - economic freedom. However, China itself may offer the best example. 15 years ago, the Chinese government was able to suppress most public knowledge of Tiananmen Square. Today however this would be impossible. The legions of middle-class consumers, with cell phones, computers, and other means of communication, have made it impossible to effectively censor information such as the spread of SARS. My hope is that not only economic freedom, but all of the others, will continue to grow there. (And I wish the decline in all of these freedoms in the West would somehow reverse itself, although frankly that seems much less likely.)
Unfortunately, I cannot trust this administration to tell the truth about _anything_. I am not a seismologist, but I can compare graphs, and use what God supposedly gave me. I was totally sucked into Gulf War 2 in 2003, and I'll be damned if I'll take _anything_ this administration says at face value any longer. Earlier this week I read some of my usenet postings from 2003 supporting the invasion and I am embarrassed by my own gullibility.
But in the process you've learned something that will help you not to be fooled again. And also demonstrated the integrity and honesty to admit that you had been wrong. Traits from which our so-called "leaders" could learn a lot, if they were inclined to do so.
Hopefully, by then, there will be a firmly-entrenched history of economic freedom within China itself - contrasting vividly and sadly with some of its former Cold War opponents, which have become far less free, economically and otherwise, than in the past.
I also would likely try to avoid immunizing my child to the extent that it is legally possible.
It is, at least in the U.S., and many parents, myself included, avoid most immunizations (in our case not all but most). However, day care centers and public schools may require certain immunizations as a condition of participation. In that case, it can make very good medical sense to delay certain immunizations, since, all other things being equal, the risk of adverse vaccine reactions usually lessens with age. Also, the adverse effects of many of the diseases that are vaccinated for increase with age; some examples are chicken pox and mumps. However, pertussis (whooping cough) is an exception: it is vastly more dangerous in small babies than in older children. Do some research, assume as little as possible, and make an informed decision, and chances are almost 100% that everything will be fine.
Probably because a large fraction of white Americans were of at least partial German ancestry. Plus, during the "Great War" (now known as World War 1), significant anti-German prejudice did occur, with one result being that many German-Americans altered their last names, to sound less German. (For instance, my great-great grandfather changed our family name from "von Adam" to "Adams.")
I agree that Western Union shouldn't allow anyone supporting terrorism to use their service, . ..
But aggressive war waged on civilians is the worst form of terrorism, and anyone who votes for pro-war Republicans or pro-war Democrats is actively supporting this terrorism. That includes the great majority of those who vote in the U.S.
Therefore, for Western Union to stop supporting terrorism, it would effectively have to stop doing business in the U.S.
Bombs can be useful to a resistance movement (see Iraq) but unfortunately also can and frequently do kill the innocent. With firearms you have a decent chance of hitting the intended target and only that target. Furthermore, firearms are infinitely more practical for personal defense against individual or smaller groups of thugs, such as jackers, rapists, muggers, and such.
I took that same oath, and intend to keep it. If that requires a fight, which it may, then I am as ready as I possibly can be. But it need not and should not come to that.
Violence would be potentially justifiable only if there were no better way, and there is. Passive, nonviolent resistance, especially if it took the form of widespread refusal to obey unjust and/or illegal federal statutes (e.g., those that are null and void under the Bill of Rights), could bring the fedgov down in a matter of days. It would require fewer people and far less risk than an armed revolt.
There used to be a saying in the, er, "concerned citizens" group in which I participated a decade or so back. The idea was that the 2nd Amendment was there to preserve our rights, if it came down to that, but that the 1st Amendment guaranteed the right to speak, to seek out information, and thereby to educate ourselves and others about how we can resist injustice WITHOUT having to resort to force of arms.
Libertarian theory is pretty straightforward. LewRockwell.com covers this kind of issue on occasion so I'm sure you've seen all of this before. Simply put, if you don't own it, you can't pollute it, at least not without the consent of whoever does. If you do pollute it then you are responsible for cleaning it up, and appropriately compensating those harmed by it. If the harm is irreparable then it becomes a criminal matter. Knowingly causing deaths by pollutoin is no different than any other kind of murder.
Allowing some people to pollute resources owned by others, or resources not nominally owned by anyone (such as air or groundwater), is a subsidy to the polluter and an obvious violation of the rights of those being harmed by the pollution.
Industry would look very different in a libertarian society. It would exist, but with no subsidies (including no right to pollute other people's air, water, land, etc.) and no regulations save those designed to protect against imminent and irreparable harm to life, liberty or property, and even these regulations would likely be enforced by insurance entities, not a government. It is possible that some inherently polluting industries, such as coal-fired power plants or steel mills, could not exist in a libertarian society, in their present forms, although it is much more likely that they would exist on large tracts of land owned by the owners of these plants, and mostly automated so as to avoid the need to pay workers for their willingness to knowingly and voluntarily endanger their health. Furthermore, in an even semi-free society, knowledge always increases, and along with it better processes for making materials and goods, and better substitutes for those goods with large costs (external or otherwise).
For starters, because future "upgrades" to Windows or other software may eventually break the DLL environment upon which VB6 and/or your VB6 apps depend. We've already started to see this at the company I work for, and are scrambling to figure out ways to move this stuff (including very old versions of Apex controls, Crystal Reports, etc.) into a slightly more modern environment.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not absurd. It's reality. All other things being equal, jobs, of any kind, always go to where they can be most cheaply done. The trick is to make sure that all other things AREN'T equal: that you learn ways to be significantly more productive, in some way, than your Third World peers, so that businesses can afford to pay significantly more for your labor and still come out ahead.
Not necessarily true. First, real (inflation-adjusted) wages are rising in India and falling here. Second, businesses will pay more per hour if they are getting correspondingly more per hour. If U.S. workers were twice as productive as Indian workers, businesses would be willing to pay twice as much for their services. What they are looking for is not maximum output per unit of time, but per unit of money.
Actually, they would, if allowed to. But true competition would be necesssary, and that's what we don't have, because governments artificially restrict the number of schools allowed to train medical professionals, and medical cartels artificially limit entry into those professions, ostensibly to protect quality, but in reality to maintain their own artificially inflated incomes through the artificial lack of competition. In a free market, the high price of medical services would attract more providers into the industry, at all levels. Eventually - not necessarily immediately - competition would bring prices back down toward reason. The link in my sig has much more info on this topic for anyone interested in learning more.
That will happen, because no one will knowingly pay workers more than they have to. That's basic economics. From a macroeconomic standpoint, labor is a commodity like any other, although it does have some unusual properties (it is less mobile than most others, and highly capital-intensive in that it does not generate much value unless highly skilled, trained, and experienced).
If the world gets warmer overall, regions like Canada and Siberia obviously benefit. Food production is positively correlated with temperature, so there should be considerably more agricultural capacity. Here's the problem: already hot and poor regions such as Africa and the Middle East suffer considerably, as do the coastal areas in which much of the world's population currently resides.
The best way to mitigate the effects of global warming, if it continues to occur, is freedom. Both political and economic. People must be free to move from the places that will soon be under water, to those that will not, and from the places from which agriculture is no longer viable, to those in which it is or soon will be. Both individuals and groups of individuals also must be free to trade, so that every region of the world can specialize in those areas in which it has competitive advantage, and people can benefit from the production of not only their own region but every other.
The "solution" proposed by communists, fascists, and other totalitarians - to restrict industrial growth and travel - will cause exactly the opposite effects. Trade wars, followed by shooting wars, will result as the big players fight to gain control of the most economically productive regions. The average person's living standards will plummet, and soon most of the world population will be gone. Many so-called "environmentalists" openly advocate this result anyway. They are of course free to commit suicide if they wish. However, they do not have the right to take anyone else with them, much less nearly all the rest of us.
The science on both sides looks questionable
I agree, and there's a simple explanation. In the strictest sense of the term at least, it is not science (on either side). Science deals in that which is falsifiable, observable and repeatable. Climatology deals primarily in two things that are not falsifiable, observable, and repeatable: (a) the past state of the climate, and (b) the future state of the climate. We can't do a controlled experiment changing manmade CO2 emissions and holding all other variables constant. Thus, we can't really apply the scientific method in such a way as to make predictions about the future in which we can be fairly confident. This is not to say that climatology does not have value, and it is not to take either side in the debate (which I do, but for reasons rooted in ethics, not science). It is to debunk the fallacy of argument from supposed authority: that "scientific experts [sic] say XYZ; therefore, XYZ must be true." In this case, especially, even if the premise were correct, which is itself questionable, the conclusion does not follow.
The facts as I understand them suggest that the earth is getting warmer (since we do have evidence that it was colder recently), but that human activity is not responsible (since it is a very small emitter of only one of many greenhouse gases, and one of probable insignificance compared to the others). Even if human activity were responsible, no person, group, or government has a right to dictate the actions of another, and thus there is no legitimate action any person, group or government could take to combat "global warming" other than by altering its own actions. I will do so when and if it seems like the right thing to do, but I will never attempt to coerce others into doing the same. I don't have that right, and neither does anyone else, on any side of this or any other debate.
So if a country's leaders are assholes, then the US has the right to butcher its people????
My impression is that you would still enjoy these rights in places like Canada, but with far less chance of being thrown into Guantanamo for having a name similar to a "known terrorist."
And for what it's worth you arguably can't practice biblical Christianity in much of the world either. Christianity is based on love, and there is nothing remotely loving about torture, wars of aggression, tax-slavery, or imprisoning anyone not sufficiently like the "majority." But there are few places where one is not forced to participate in those activities, at least indirectly (through taxation and such).
How to run on non-Microsoft platforms?
>>There's nothing more frustrating than trying to track down a tiny little package on RPMFind because the distro doesn't support it in the repository
>I swear, in 15 years of using Linux I've never had to do this.
Well, it's not like you were Project Leader for Debian or anything like that, that might explain your lack of experience with RPMFind. :)
I'm mostly a Gentoo guy myself, but I use Ubuntu on occasion, and I have to say I do like Apt and the related technologies: they appear to do a better job than RPM, at least in my limited experience, of knowing about and installing correct and non-system-breaking dependencies.
I agree in general that freedoms are inseparable. However, in SE Asia, many countries have seen a "spiral" effect where increased freedom in one sphere has sparked demands for increased freedom in the others. Singapore is the classic example, where political freedom has always lagged behind - but has nonethless grown with - economic freedom. However, China itself may offer the best example. 15 years ago, the Chinese government was able to suppress most public knowledge of Tiananmen Square. Today however this would be impossible. The legions of middle-class consumers, with cell phones, computers, and other means of communication, have made it impossible to effectively censor information such as the spread of SARS. My hope is that not only economic freedom, but all of the others, will continue to grow there. (And I wish the decline in all of these freedoms in the West would somehow reverse itself, although frankly that seems much less likely.)
Unfortunately, I cannot trust this administration to tell the truth about _anything_. I am not a seismologist, but I can compare graphs, and use what God supposedly gave me. I was totally sucked into Gulf War 2 in 2003, and I'll be damned if I'll take _anything_ this administration says at face value any longer. Earlier this week I read some of my usenet postings from 2003 supporting the invasion and I am embarrassed by my own gullibility.
But in the process you've learned something that will help you not to be fooled again. And also demonstrated the integrity and honesty to admit that you had been wrong. Traits from which our so-called "leaders" could learn a lot, if they were inclined to do so.
Hopefully, by then, there will be a firmly-entrenched history of economic freedom within China itself - contrasting vividly and sadly with some of its former Cold War opponents, which have become far less free, economically and otherwise, than in the past.
I also would likely try to avoid immunizing my child to the extent that it is legally possible.
It is, at least in the U.S., and many parents, myself included, avoid most immunizations (in our case not all but most). However, day care centers and public schools may require certain immunizations as a condition of participation. In that case, it can make very good medical sense to delay certain immunizations, since, all other things being equal, the risk of adverse vaccine reactions usually lessens with age. Also, the adverse effects of many of the diseases that are vaccinated for increase with age; some examples are chicken pox and mumps. However, pertussis (whooping cough) is an exception: it is vastly more dangerous in small babies than in older children. Do some research, assume as little as possible, and make an informed decision, and chances are almost 100% that everything will be fine.
[I]s everyone ENTITLED to have children?
Is anyone entitled to tell anyone else NOT to???
I believe that aggressive warfare fits your definition of terrorism, as well as your definition of war.
Probably because a large fraction of white Americans were of at least partial German ancestry. Plus, during the "Great War" (now known as World War 1), significant anti-German prejudice did occur, with one result being that many German-Americans altered their last names, to sound less German. (For instance, my great-great grandfather changed our family name from "von Adam" to "Adams.")
From the summary:
I agree that Western Union shouldn't allow anyone supporting terrorism to use their service, . . .
But aggressive war waged on civilians is the worst form of terrorism, and anyone who votes for pro-war Republicans or pro-war Democrats is actively supporting this terrorism. That includes the great majority of those who vote in the U.S.
Therefore, for Western Union to stop supporting terrorism, it would effectively have to stop doing business in the U.S.
Bombs can be useful to a resistance movement (see Iraq) but unfortunately also can and frequently do kill the innocent. With firearms you have a decent chance of hitting the intended target and only that target. Furthermore, firearms are infinitely more practical for personal defense against individual or smaller groups of thugs, such as jackers, rapists, muggers, and such.
I took that same oath, and intend to keep it. If that requires a fight, which it may, then I am as ready as I possibly can be. But it need not and should not come to that.
Violence would be potentially justifiable only if there were no better way, and there is. Passive, nonviolent resistance, especially if it took the form of widespread refusal to obey unjust and/or illegal federal statutes (e.g., those that are null and void under the Bill of Rights), could bring the fedgov down in a matter of days. It would require fewer people and far less risk than an armed revolt.
There used to be a saying in the, er, "concerned citizens" group in which I participated a decade or so back. The idea was that the 2nd Amendment was there to preserve our rights, if it came down to that, but that the 1st Amendment guaranteed the right to speak, to seek out information, and thereby to educate ourselves and others about how we can resist injustice WITHOUT having to resort to force of arms.
Serious accidents do occasionally happen in high school chemistry labs, including this one a few months ago near Cleveland, Ohio.
welcome our new sound-money-containing overlords.
Libertarian theory is pretty straightforward. LewRockwell.com covers this kind of issue on occasion so I'm sure you've seen all of this before. Simply put, if you don't own it, you can't pollute it, at least not without the consent of whoever does. If you do pollute it then you are responsible for cleaning it up, and appropriately compensating those harmed by it. If the harm is irreparable then it becomes a criminal matter. Knowingly causing deaths by pollutoin is no different than any other kind of murder.
Allowing some people to pollute resources owned by others, or resources not nominally owned by anyone (such as air or groundwater), is a subsidy to the polluter and an obvious violation of the rights of those being harmed by the pollution.
Industry would look very different in a libertarian society. It would exist, but with no subsidies (including no right to pollute other people's air, water, land, etc.) and no regulations save those designed to protect against imminent and irreparable harm to life, liberty or property, and even these regulations would likely be enforced by insurance entities, not a government. It is possible that some inherently polluting industries, such as coal-fired power plants or steel mills, could not exist in a libertarian society, in their present forms, although it is much more likely that they would exist on large tracts of land owned by the owners of these plants, and mostly automated so as to avoid the need to pay workers for their willingness to knowingly and voluntarily endanger their health. Furthermore, in an even semi-free society, knowledge always increases, and along with it better processes for making materials and goods, and better substitutes for those goods with large costs (external or otherwise).
For starters, because future "upgrades" to Windows or other software may eventually break the DLL environment upon which VB6 and/or your VB6 apps depend. We've already started to see this at the company I work for, and are scrambling to figure out ways to move this stuff (including very old versions of Apex controls, Crystal Reports, etc.) into a slightly more modern environment.
Some of the licenses allow for people to charge for distributing the software
Not just some but all free software licenses, by definition.