The only tanks rolling anywhere in recent history are the US ones on Falluja. I am not concerned with Putin's tanks (presumably sent to restore... USSR? Bring the Tzar back? Reclaim Alaska? What?!) and any other deluded fantasies you might harbour.
Re:Good luck building a military when you need it
on
Business Under Fire
·
· Score: 1
Oh, come on. Hitler thought of it long ago, and he's just my generation's boogeyman of the ages
It is precisely because of experiences of WWII that most reasonable people thought that civilised democracies, USA in particular, were too enlightened for such a thing. There goes that theory.
Re:How Israeli Companies Are Succeeding...
on
Business Under Fire
·
· Score: 1
Do you rewrite that sermon every time - complete with the bold tags and everything - or is it just a copy-and-paste affair?
No, I react to what I see, but I admit, jingoistic, militaristic morons push my buttons. Also, tags are trivial to make as you go, thank you.
I think has a lot to do with Chinese policies. Can you give them a little credit?
Oh I do give them credit, they are cleverly using USA's own greed against it, no doubt about it. But without that unthinking, base, animalistic greed overriding all reason, the Chinese would be left to their own devices and thus condemned to a slow progress which could be counterbalanced by the world community. As it stands, China will indeed become (if it already isnt) a huge powerhouse and I sure hope its focus will remain internal rather then expansionist. Because if not so, US would have financed and created its own greates foe (and then no doubt demanded undying and faithful support and sacrifices from all of us in order to protect us from it).
Re:Good luck building a military when you need it
on
Business Under Fire
·
· Score: 1
The main problem with that idea is that it takes many years to build (outfit, train, etc) a military.
So it does for your foes. But I admit that USA has at this point disprortionately powerful army which is being used in a way unthinkable just a decade ago: an uprovoked war of aggression and occupation.
Historically, the politicians haven't been exactly fast reacting when the storm clouds are showing up, either...
That indeed is a problem and we citizens of the countries in question are the ones that have to stay vigillant and make sure that this does not occur.
Re:How Israeli Companies Are Succeeding...
on
Business Under Fire
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Says who? Those two big guns we dropped on Japan in WWII were really, really big. That ended the war pretty fast.
You are also forgetting that USA was directly attacked by Japan and was merely defending itself. Its involment in Europe in WWII is a different matter, but its present behaviour detracts from any noble reasons it might have had back then and makes many people far more suspicious of them then in the past.
When Canadian courts grant Muslim Imams the right to arbitrate civil matters (it happened, look it up), you don't need to attack, you've assimilated.
A classic strategy of a bigot: to point out an element of what Canada does and then try to make it seem as it somehow is a unique example. For your ignorant information: the same rule applies to Jews (who can use Hassidic law), Hindus, Seikhs, Quakers, Mennonites, Native Americans (tribal courts) etc etc. Oh, yes, total back-bacon-eating surrender monkeys we are, us Canadians instead of defending the One and Only, True, Christian Faith (as defined by Rev. Falwell) and persecuting everyone else.
Re:How Israeli Companies Are Succeeding...
on
Business Under Fire
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Chill out.
How can one "chill out" in face of such retarded view-pont which is so incredibly popular in America. "The Great Defenders" of the entire planet who do not get their "due respect". It is like listening to some neigbourhood thug who is complaining in a bar that he is getting no respect for his "protection" of the block from some mythical boogeyman purported to be living in the city dump and thus he is reduced to shaking down old ladies for money to buy himself a new switch-blade. Oh and those "lazy young boys" in the area are going to school instead of heping him to "patrol". Freeloaders all of them! They value their "fancy education" more then the noble duty of preventively beating up some people (they could be in cahoots with the boogeyman you know).
My blood boils.
Re:How Israeli Companies Are Succeeding...
on
Business Under Fire
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
So, we pay for the Canadians and the Europeans to have a fancy ``social safety net'', then they laugh at us because we don't have one, and insult us because we have a big military.
As soon as an actual "military" threat arises that has at least 1/100 of plausibility and importance as compared to our fancy social "safety net" we will sacrifice a lot of it to fund our military. As it stands, the USA seems to be shaping to be that threat to all of us in not so remote future.
Get it through your jingoisting, deluded head: Even at the worst times of anti-communist paranoia, the USSR (as it is now clearly apparent from documents which became available after its fall) was always in a defensive stance to a belligerent US military preasure.
I am sick and tired of would be hegemons inventing straw-men so that they can go fight them "in our defense" either by proxy like in Colombia, Nicaragua or Venesuela or directly as in Vietnam, Panama or Iraq.
So quit whining that noone wants to join your imbecillic crusades for fun, mayhem, expansion of religion and profit and be wary because longer you keep at it more likely it is that we (the vast majority of the people of planet Earth) will end up correcting your belligerence in a way you might find less amusing then a session with Rush Limbaugh.
Oh and yes, you should get the fuck out of all the ex-soviet republics where you are attempting to estabilish forward military (and incidently US corporate) bases. Russia is only in its adversarial stance because of your insistence on aggressive expansion of NATO. You are the source of the problem in China with your brainless, unbridled orgy of corporate greed that makes that country more powerful by the minute. It is your unquestioning, insane, support for Israel's mad policies, as well as those of Arab dictatorships in places like Saudi Arabia that causes the mess in Middle-East. Not to mention that is your country that fabricated evidence for a war of agression and greed it had planned for years in advance. In short, it is you who are the prime and foremost danger to the safety of the planet, noone else is even a remote second place condender.
And as far as rights go, those with money still have more.
Which is an aberration, luckily for us all existing only in trivial areas, unless you mean to tell me that Michael Jackson can go on a shooting spree in a mall every Tuesday, treating mall goers as ducks? Or perheaps play a little "doctor" game with some teenage boys? Surely such a rich man could do it with no fear of consequences, no?
And yes that tribal Einstein would achieve more than Britney, if there were any tribal Einsteins to begin with. The fact that it has not happened yet is proof that there are not.
This basically concludes any possiblity of sane discussion with you. Tribal "Einsteins" do exist and have existed for eons. What we are discussing here is a capacity for thought. In the absence of education, scientific institutions, generations of effort prior to the lucky birth of our genius, and him having access to all of that, his superior brainpower, even though outclassing all of his tribe mates, results in him becoming a really, really good shaman. Only sometimes we get to see a glimpse of what their talent could have achieved if only they were born elsewhere, when via lucky coincidence they get a chance to communicate with the world, such as for example Srinivasa Ramanujan did. It is the combination of potential with social conditions that resulted in "our" Einstein coming into being, for if he was indeed born in a tribe in Borneo, we would have someone named perheaps Ipkis to thank for coming up with General Relativity say in 1975 in Vancouver. Yet you seem to fail to grasp this rather simple and obvious logic.
A great nation accurately defined is one that does right by its own people. The former Iraqi government did not do that.
Neither does the US. Nor does China which appears to nearly own the USA these days. Your point?
And the citizens themselves are getting in the way of having a proper government installed for them. The longer they keep acting up, the longer they will suffer.
Did it ever cross your mind that the people of Iraq might value their own self-determination more then "proper government" (you get to decide what is "proper" no doubt) installed for them (talk about hubris!) by the likes of you?
Cartels are highly unstable, as long as you assume each member places their own interest above the group.
And they are also very profitable and very common. If it were not for various governments trying (with questionable success) to break them, they would be even more profitable. Some recent examples: virtually all world's drug makers conspired to control prices of vitamins, doing it successfully for decades until caught; computer memory makers were caught doing so; the chemical companies were caught doing so to cerain compounds used in plastic; etc etc.
Are cartels unstable? That depends on a singular factor: if by breaking away from a cartel one can make more money then if staying within. If you break, you can make more in short term but then you actually have to do the efficient manufacturing. If you stay, you need to produce much less and still obtain similiar profit due to your margins being 10 or sometimes 100-fold more then otherwise. This of course assumes that we are discussing industries which are already consolidated and have exceedingly high barriers to entry, as the examples I mentioned indicate. Besides, as I mentioned, cartels are only one mechanism through which monopolies arise.
Startups can and do succeed. Big, old, slow businesses die.
It is only so because the governments impose rules preventing the "big old" companies from squashing the startups at their whim due to their vastly superior resources. It is the external conrtrols introduced by the governments that do slow down coerced "buyouts" and other abuse from totally preventing any sort of meaningful competition, althogh it is quite common, most visibly in large companies purchasing the miniscule startups in order to shut them down.
But this isn't a bad thing, because as you point out, efficiency is increasing. This business only increases its market share by offering a better product or a lower price. So the consumers are winning throughout this process.
Again this is a classic oversimplification based on uncritical acceptance of religious dogma of "free market" which claims that endless improvement in "efficiency" is a good thing. For one, as the company grows in size and is able to overtake more and more market share, it forces all related companies which exist in symbiotic ecosystem of products to adjust so that they are less and less capable of supporting other types of products. What results is a decrease in consumer choice combined with decrease of price of the remaining products. One just has to look in BestBuy or such and compare the amount of choices for stereo equipment and their features and contrast it with say a decade ago. The indvidual units are now much cheaper but they also have far less features and their differences are superficial. This sort of consolidation in the name of efficiency occured in many industries. Is the consumer the winner? Is a less choice at lower price better then more choice at higher price? This is not a clear cut advantage by any means.
Furthermore, on the idea of "efficiency" itself, which seems to be elevated to truly revered status amongst believers in "free market", if pursuit of efficiency is the ultimate goal of every corporation, then the ultimate, most successful market condition is that of a small number of fully automated production lines belonging to companies which own their entire supply chain all the way from mining of raw materials, each having exactly one employee: the CEO. Everyone else on the surface of Earth remaining unemployed. That would guarantee maximum "efficiency" as in operating cost equal to the CEO's salary, 0 employee and other operating costs and 100% profit on everything, if you can find anyone to "sell" your stuff to that is.
This is just one example of how the tennents of "free market" can be shown false by reducto ad absurdum.
They can try, but as soon as they do their efficiency is out the window, and they're ripe for destruction by a new entry.
But the real target of anger should be the legal system (US and others) that permits such cynical abuse by such as Microsoft.
I fully concur, even more so then you imagine since I am a vehement opponent of the whole idea of the so called "Intellectual Property" on phillosophical and ethical grounds.
In my view, it is impossible to reform patent and copyright law in any way that makes sense since the very foundations of those laws, i.e. an attempt to treat information as if it were physical "private property", is contrary to reason.
Or software development will end in the US.
The "software industry", "music industry", "film industry" etc as we know them are walking dead, entirely dependant on an external, tax payer funded, lung-heart machine. As time goes on and their corpses are deteriorating, a point will come when it will become obvious to even most stubborn dunderheads that to prolong their agony some utterly extreme measures will be required such as estabilishment of a ruthless, global, police state.
Should people come to their senses, the only software in the future will be developed under GPL/BSD/shareware (that is arts patronage system) type licenses and in some special vertical cases as closed source systems, protection of which from duplication is based on the environment in which they operate, e.g. need for extensive training to deploy, dependance on proprietary hardware etc.
No it is not. As I indicated, the US was clearly an instigator but the blame can be also put in a large proportion on the other members of the Security Council who proved spineless or proceeded to profit from their own conflicting interests while claiming to be on the side of the "Iraqi people". The US is indeed recently acting a big, belligerent, foaming at the mouth bully but the UN plays the part of a bunch of victorian school girls screeming in panic while jumping on the table: "Look he is looking at us again! Waaaaah!".
But buying food from any specific producer is voluntary, in the sense that you can always go to another
That is true, but in an unrestricted free market, a self-inducing and self-reinforcing condition occurs in the absence of external controls: a spontaneous formation of cartels and eventually a monopoly. The process is simple: under ideal market conditions, one company will be slightly better then others, it will allow it to obtain higher market share and if done right, that will give it more resources to become more efficient etc. In this process a critical element is called "barrier to entry". That is as companies become larger, the higher the initial capital required to start a brand new "competition" company capable of challenging the entrenched behemoths. In the final stage only a few mega companies remain, eventually merging into one. Once that occurs, the barriers to entry become insurmountable and once the suply chain is purchased by the company, there is not only economical but even physical possibility of competition, i.e. the fields on which the crops grow and the fertilizer and herbicide production as well as related transportation etc are all owned by the same company. Then the price of the product becomes irrelevant and the company can proceed to introduce monopolistic pricing.
In a simplier conceptual scenario, imagine the humanity as a tribe on an island: once one person owns all the fields and all the fruit trees, no "free choice" is any longer possible for his "customers".
Truly free market economy, like most 19th century social engineering ideas, has a built-in self-destruct mechanism. If allowed to function as intended, it will inevietably self-destruct at a great price to human societies.
Your concept of economic violence is unclear to me.
One only has to examine the conditions that existed during the industrial revolution to see what I meant. The process is simple: one creates an economic situation whereby the victim is unable to extract themselves from under your control due to his inability to earn enough even though he is in theory capable of making the "free market" choice. But by making the employee of your company so poor that he/she can only afford to obtain his/her food and shelter from you, cost of which is provided as a debt towards his/her future earnings makes the person get into more debt more she/he works for you. So her "free market" choice is to be your slave or die. This condition was wide-spread in the world, most companies providing their own stores, hospitals and housing all of which was credited against employee "debt" to the company. No savings were thus possible and whole generations of people had to work permanently as essentially indentured slave force. This and many other tricks of that sort is what lead to the Marxist revolts etc.
Note that in this scenario, if executed properly, the capitalist is the phisically "non-violent" one and the only option the worker has is to violently revolt, a trick that allows the one commiting economic aggression to later claim being a victim when eventual physical retaliation occurs.
So you're in favor of punishing people for the potential to commit crimes? What happened to innocent until proven guilty? Should we lock up all the young black males in the US simply because they're statistically more likely to commit crimes?
This is simply not an issue of guilt or innocence. The simple truth is that some people are hell-bent on dominating others. In any social system some of them end up winners and some other losers. I dont think it is possible to avoid this unless you come up with a method to make everyone a rational, cooperative person interested in welfare of society and his fellow human beings. One sociopath can ruin any utopia and that is why precisely no utopia can exist, be it "free market" or Communism one. Note that communists were destroyed by sociopaths taking over their "commune" and turning it into a feudal fiefdom, just as the "robber barrons" were proceeding to do it to the attempts at "free market" economy until they were slowed down and stymied by aggressive government intervention regulating the markets and labour.
Oh I am sure you are correct, I simply recalled a particularly loud and widespread discussion of the stuff in the 1980s, which made this patent so particularly arrogant and obnoxious. I even have the famous 1986 "dragon" book "Compilers, principles, techniques and tools" by A.Aho, R.Sethi and J.Ullman still on my shelf. The stuff is in there in chapter 8 titled "Intermediate Code Generation".
The UN is a US lapdog? Why didn't it support the US invasion of Iraq then?
In most situations UN is bullied and browbeaten into things by the US. The US routinely and copiously vetoes the Security Council, particularly if it has anything to do with Israel. The lack of UN "support" for invasion of Iraq was an aberration, US simply went too far and some found themselves too threatened on domestic fronts to simply roll over as usual.
If you look back in recent history, in between all the important decisions in favour of US, the UN has been threatened with withdrawal of US funds on nearly a yearly basis, the Republicans in congress called for abolishment/reform/castration of UN everytime they figured a decision might not go their way in that institution etc etc. And it worked up to a point but an unprovoked, unjustified invasion of Iraq however clearly was too much (and even then some on the Security Council rolled over).
If you really think a bunch of no-bid contracts to politically connected corporations constitutes a free market, you're confused.
This has nothing to do with the contracts. Bremer instituted rules to be applied to all Iraqi businesses. The idea was to stimulate a free market orgy and expectation was of investors killing each other in a wild stampede to invest. The corrupt Halliburton/KBR/US Government dance is playing on a different stage altogether and it does have a lot to do with fascist tendencies, although you gotta be careful not to go overboard in tax-hatred since no taxes = no social services.
.Capitalism is the system you get when the only rule is "don't hurt others or take their stuff". Capitalism is the system designed to minimize aggression, by making all economic relations voluntary.
There is no such thing as "voluntary" unless you consider the instinct of self-preservation to be "voluntary". You gotta eat, therefore you will do things to get food. From there flows all the other stuff people do. So as soon as you have a system where one group controls food and resources for some other: goodbye "voluntary". So lets drop pretenses. As to aggression, once you have that sort of power (life and death) over others, aggression insues. Having someone deprived of livehood by your economic action is only different in method from using a rifle to shoot him/her in the head.
If you can suggest a better system, I'd love to hear about it. Every alternative I know of requires massive government-sponsored violence against peaceful people.
True. The "peaceful people" are usually defined as "those who would be doing the violence if they were in charge". The violence can be economic or physical. If a group of people wishes to have a system which makes even bigger group their slaves (they can call things by nice terms like "wage" slaves to soften the impact) they are not "peaceful" in my book.
In my opinion the system that produces the least violence and most social justice wins. I would argue that a strong representative democracy, with strongly independent and protected by law media with a strong social safety net (public medical care and education) and with market driven economic system structred so it effectively forbids formation of businesses beyond certain size complete with strong import/export controls would be optimal.
Governments, as a rule, hate real capitalism because it leaves them with vastly less power than they have today. Government is the problem.
Governments are both a problem and a solution. Without government, there is absolutely noone to enforce any rules. With no rules any man with a bigger gun wins. Without government, there is no social safety net and that means that poor will become poorer and rich richer much faster then they do now. Essentialy, if you remove government a void forms which will be quickly filled by would be feudal lords and/or paramilitary gangs. An example of government-less place where anything goes was Afghanistan. Under such conditions, a group of religious fanatics which had the most coherent organization and were willing to do what it takes, became the government.
I *love* how it's the US's fault that people are destitute because the UN (not just the US) refuses to do business with their dictator government.
In this particular case US bears a dis-proportionate share of responsibility. The sanctions were instituted mainly as a result of US arm-twisting of the UN, a common practice employed so that any negative effects can be then blamed on the UN which is the scapegoat of choice for any self-respecting right-winger. The stated purpose of sanctions was restriction of military technology, but the unstated purpose was economic devastation in order to induce a revolt against Saddam. That is why importing of medicines for example was severely restricted. There are many people who take issue with that approach, myself included. Neo-con and Zionist influenced fixation on exaggerated hatred of Saddam by the US political elite was no excuse to cost over 500,000 lives. Was Saddam complicit? Of course. But how does that justify trying to out-murder the murderer in order to overthrow him?
They are enjoying too much the wealth, and yes power, that private enterprize brings.
I think you are deeply mis-understanding the Chinese social system. The wealth and power are meaningless unless they can be wielded by the ruling class of that country, its on the surface "communist" government. As soon as that wealth is not theirs to control they will not hesitate in using brute force to end its reign. Also you missed the main point I was making that "free trade" in case of China is a one-sided game run under complete control of China and benefits only China. Should that cease to be the case, China will revert to import/export controls because unlike the West, their government has no attachment to the "free market" ideology and in fact quite the opposite, it is at least nominally "communist" (which is a great gig in itself, maintaining a slave labour force for the benefit of a few ex-patriots and multinationals, another great example of the conditions under which "free trade" really flourishes).
It was only when China liberalized and privatized their means of production that they began to make serious improvements in their prosperity.
You surely jest. China considers economics to be a tool of warfare. The "liberalization" is only and exlusively benefiting China at the expense of all its trading partners since China still employs quite effectively its authocratic system in order to ensure cheapnes of its labour. The Huan is artifically pegged to the US dollar for example. This clever strategy allowed China to become largest US creditor. Power over other nations is the name of that game. I guarantee you this: as soon as China will no longer be able to play the western greed to its advantage, the "free trade" will end overnight, complete with nationalization of all those beatiful high-tech factories the West has so kindly built in there.
How on earth is controlling the flow of goods and services supposed to make the local population's income go up? It's like screwing for virginity
Sigh. Think for a bit before saying ludicrous things like that. Here are some examples: you penalize imports of finished goods while promoting exports of finished goods... or promote exports of processed foods while penalizing exports of raw produce...or promote exports of finished goods while penalizing exports of raw materials.. etc etc. In each of these cases a balancing act occures, where your trading partners and you have to arrive at an equillibrium. This not only enables control of relative motion of incomes for citizens, it also allows for nations to buy needed time to allow for slow process of social adjustements required to reduce impact of negative effects of trade. Unless of course you are an ideologue and believe that trade has only good effects? That rapid change in centuries-old social structures which displaces entire generations of people while destroying their age old communities is a good thing?
On the other hand, eliminating all trade barriers leads to a rapid movement of capital not followed by rapid movement of labour. An equalization occurs, but unfortunately since the amount of wealth is highly concentrated in wealthy countries and the populations of poor countries are vast the per-person increase in wealth in most countires is minimal and decrease of wealth of industrialized nations rapid and great. The only entities that benefit greatly are those which control the conduits through which the wealth flows during that process: the multinational corporations.
Recent economic studies have found that the benefits of increasing prosperity are not limited to the richest stratas of society. but instead tend to be wide spread. Indeed, they have found that lower-income people often benefit more than the rich from improved prosperity. Your claim that only the richest 1% benefit has no basis in fact.
Studies of what? Under what conditions? Where? Are you referring perheaps to that great and totally discredited system of "trickle-down" economics we are so familiar with?
And economics say that free trade is an essential component of prosperity.
Yes but it does not mean unrestricted trade under all conditions. An economic theory does not take into account history, culture and geography. It is merely concerned with flow of numbers from column A to column B. That is why common-sense adjustements have to be made to moderate the effects of the clash between an ideological, simplistic, theory and the vastly more complicated facts on the ground.
In truth, I am completely at a loss to understand how poverty can be eleviated without free trade. Do you think poor countries are capable of bootstrapping themselves into the 21st century by themselves? They need investment and open markets for their goods, not closed borders.
The truth is that they cannot get out of poverty without trade. Notice use of "trade" as opposed to "free trade". Trade is an ancient system of exchange of goods and services. Free trade is an ideology. While in an ideal world, where all countries are on equal footing and have appropriate social safety infrastructure, free trade would indeed be optimal, in the real world of today it is a recipe for pain, misery and growth of power of rich over poor. So in the real world, trade has to be controlled in such ways as to shape the economies of some countries in ways different to other countries. Investment can be promoted in certain areas, while penalized in others, borders opened to some goods while closed to others. As time goes on, and the differences between countries decrease, the rules can be relaxed until they are no longer needed. Only then "free trade" will be plausible.
I mean, if the patent explicitly states that GCC has been doing this for years, then don't they have a pretty strong legal basis for being allowed to continue to do so?
While clearly beyond reach of the patent as it stands now, GCC might be vulnerable if it seeks to improve its own method of operation in some ways. Microsoft then can claim that the new additions are "derrivative" from their patent.
This is actually much more evil and imbecillic then vulnerability of GCC to this patent. In essence Microsoft no longer feels the need to even obsucre their theft of other people's work... they simply brazenly patent what others have done for decades before, banking on that their superior lawyer power and deep pockets is all that is required to take control of the future of OSS (and any other) software. Finally, as many have predicted for years (RMS being chief among them), the Intellectual Property is coming into its own as a tool of outright aggression and opression.
The idea being that you took this prior work and make a new non-trivial and unique work from it.
Trouble is that the patent essentialy describes verbatim the pcode system GCC uses and which in turn was discussed in many works on compilers in the 1980s.
We are all using egcs, it replaced the original gcc years ago.
No, we are all using gcc which at one time had a fork called egcs which was later adopted as the main branch. If what the poster I replied to was saying was correct, the egcs fork along with its name and phillosophy would be described as such explicitely in daily use. Instead what happened is a natural consequence of a fact that egcs was but a small ripple in a surface of a vastly more comprehensive system called gcc under the umbrella of even more wide reaching project called GNU.
So, in the specific case of Iraq, I wouldn't say that "unrestricted capitalism" was the problem.
I was referring to the post-invasion attempts at "reconstruction", specifically to the Bremer rules which are basically a textbook adaptation of extreme market conditions as advocated by Rand. They had over a year to work now and even in the areas which are not affected by the fighting (the Shia south) are nothing but a total failure.
The problem is the American version of unrestricted capitalism, which is that politically connected American companies get to do whatever they want and have the US military back them up if they decide they want to pay less for oil or labor.
This is a problem with any form of unrestricted capitalism and the true evil of Ayn Rand theories. They are an excercise in one of the oldest pursuits in "phillosophy": an attempt justify naked agression and dominantion in some "moral" terms. It is an inevietable path for any unrestricted "capitalism" model to devolve into a feudal-like oligarchy of a tiny super-wealthy minority who would own and rule everything and everybody. People who see themselves poised to join that elite are those who promote such ideas most enthusiastically.
it has tricked some folks into believing we're all equal
Really? So you mean that those who are more talented and intelligent and faster are to be treated preferentially? If so in what ways? The only way the laws of society work is to define rights and responsibilites... So we are unequal when it comes to our rights? Some are destined to be masters and some property? No?
I have news for you dude. Each person's skill and aptitude play only a small part in their destiny. Your initial starting point in life, the confluences of geography and history are far more important. Or are you going to tell me that an Einstein level genius born in a tribe in the middle of jungle on some remote island is going to achieve the same financial status in the world as, say, Titney Spears?
When the people of Iraq want to stop acting like jackasses they too shall be able to build a great nation.
This might come as a great shock to you, but the definition of a "Great Nation" varies wildly from person to person. To a Muslim extremist, a "great nation" is a Caliphate. To a Socialist a "great nation" has a well constructed and efficient government run social support structure, to a Nazi a "great nation" is one run by a "great leader" of his superior race, to an Ayn Rand follower a "great nation" is one where everything is decided by dog-eats-dog capitalism which would surpass the darkest of the darkest moments of the 19th century industrial revolution, etc etc.
As you can see you just spouted a piece of useless propaganda sound bite which brought nothing to this discussion and only sought to obscure the unpleasant facts that the economic reforms introduced by Bremer are a total disaster, even in areas of Iraq that are not overrun by the guerillas.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude you sarcasm detector is broken, you need it recalibrated.
The only tanks rolling anywhere in recent history are the US ones on Falluja. I am not concerned with Putin's tanks (presumably sent to restore... USSR? Bring the Tzar back? Reclaim Alaska? What?!) and any other deluded fantasies you might harbour.
It is precisely because of experiences of WWII that most reasonable people thought that civilised democracies, USA in particular, were too enlightened for such a thing. There goes that theory.
No, I react to what I see, but I admit, jingoistic, militaristic morons push my buttons. Also, tags are trivial to make as you go, thank you.
I think has a lot to do with Chinese policies. Can you give them a little credit?
Oh I do give them credit, they are cleverly using USA's own greed against it, no doubt about it. But without that unthinking, base, animalistic greed overriding all reason, the Chinese would be left to their own devices and thus condemned to a slow progress which could be counterbalanced by the world community. As it stands, China will indeed become (if it already isnt) a huge powerhouse and I sure hope its focus will remain internal rather then expansionist. Because if not so, US would have financed and created its own greates foe (and then no doubt demanded undying and faithful support and sacrifices from all of us in order to protect us from it).
So it does for your foes. But I admit that USA has at this point disprortionately powerful army which is being used in a way unthinkable just a decade ago: an uprovoked war of aggression and occupation.
Historically, the politicians haven't been exactly fast reacting when the storm clouds are showing up, either...
That indeed is a problem and we citizens of the countries in question are the ones that have to stay vigillant and make sure that this does not occur.
You are also forgetting that USA was directly attacked by Japan and was merely defending itself. Its involment in Europe in WWII is a different matter, but its present behaviour detracts from any noble reasons it might have had back then and makes many people far more suspicious of them then in the past.
When Canadian courts grant Muslim Imams the right to arbitrate civil matters (it happened, look it up), you don't need to attack, you've assimilated.
A classic strategy of a bigot: to point out an element of what Canada does and then try to make it seem as it somehow is a unique example. For your ignorant information: the same rule applies to Jews (who can use Hassidic law), Hindus, Seikhs, Quakers, Mennonites, Native Americans (tribal courts) etc etc. Oh, yes, total back-bacon-eating surrender monkeys we are, us Canadians instead of defending the One and Only, True, Christian Faith (as defined by Rev. Falwell) and persecuting everyone else.
How can one "chill out" in face of such retarded view-pont which is so incredibly popular in America. "The Great Defenders" of the entire planet who do not get their "due respect". It is like listening to some neigbourhood thug who is complaining in a bar that he is getting no respect for his "protection" of the block from some mythical boogeyman purported to be living in the city dump and thus he is reduced to shaking down old ladies for money to buy himself a new switch-blade. Oh and those "lazy young boys" in the area are going to school instead of heping him to "patrol". Freeloaders all of them! They value their "fancy education" more then the noble duty of preventively beating up some people (they could be in cahoots with the boogeyman you know).
My blood boils.
As soon as an actual "military" threat arises that has at least 1/100 of plausibility and importance as compared to our fancy social "safety net" we will sacrifice a lot of it to fund our military. As it stands, the USA seems to be shaping to be that threat to all of us in not so remote future.
Get it through your jingoisting, deluded head: Even at the worst times of anti-communist paranoia, the USSR (as it is now clearly apparent from documents which became available after its fall) was always in a defensive stance to a belligerent US military preasure.
I am sick and tired of would be hegemons inventing straw-men so that they can go fight them "in our defense" either by proxy like in Colombia, Nicaragua or Venesuela or directly as in Vietnam, Panama or Iraq.
So quit whining that noone wants to join your imbecillic crusades for fun, mayhem, expansion of religion and profit and be wary because longer you keep at it more likely it is that we (the vast majority of the people of planet Earth) will end up correcting your belligerence in a way you might find less amusing then a session with Rush Limbaugh.
Oh and yes, you should get the fuck out of all the ex-soviet republics where you are attempting to estabilish forward military (and incidently US corporate) bases. Russia is only in its adversarial stance because of your insistence on aggressive expansion of NATO. You are the source of the problem in China with your brainless, unbridled orgy of corporate greed that makes that country more powerful by the minute. It is your unquestioning, insane, support for Israel's mad policies, as well as those of Arab dictatorships in places like Saudi Arabia that causes the mess in Middle-East. Not to mention that is your country that fabricated evidence for a war of agression and greed it had planned for years in advance. In short, it is you who are the prime and foremost danger to the safety of the planet, noone else is even a remote second place condender.
Which is an aberration, luckily for us all existing only in trivial areas, unless you mean to tell me that Michael Jackson can go on a shooting spree in a mall every Tuesday, treating mall goers as ducks? Or perheaps play a little "doctor" game with some teenage boys? Surely such a rich man could do it with no fear of consequences, no?
And yes that tribal Einstein would achieve more than Britney, if there were any tribal Einsteins to begin with. The fact that it has not happened yet is proof that there are not.
This basically concludes any possiblity of sane discussion with you. Tribal "Einsteins" do exist and have existed for eons. What we are discussing here is a capacity for thought. In the absence of education, scientific institutions, generations of effort prior to the lucky birth of our genius, and him having access to all of that, his superior brainpower, even though outclassing all of his tribe mates, results in him becoming a really, really good shaman. Only sometimes we get to see a glimpse of what their talent could have achieved if only they were born elsewhere, when via lucky coincidence they get a chance to communicate with the world, such as for example Srinivasa Ramanujan did. It is the combination of potential with social conditions that resulted in "our" Einstein coming into being, for if he was indeed born in a tribe in Borneo, we would have someone named perheaps Ipkis to thank for coming up with General Relativity say in 1975 in Vancouver. Yet you seem to fail to grasp this rather simple and obvious logic.
A great nation accurately defined is one that does right by its own people. The former Iraqi government did not do that.
Neither does the US. Nor does China which appears to nearly own the USA these days. Your point?
And the citizens themselves are getting in the way of having a proper government installed for them. The longer they keep acting up, the longer they will suffer.
Did it ever cross your mind that the people of Iraq might value their own self-determination more then "proper government" (you get to decide what is "proper" no doubt) installed for them (talk about hubris!) by the likes of you?
And they are also very profitable and very common. If it were not for various governments trying (with questionable success) to break them, they would be even more profitable. Some recent examples: virtually all world's drug makers conspired to control prices of vitamins, doing it successfully for decades until caught; computer memory makers were caught doing so; the chemical companies were caught doing so to cerain compounds used in plastic; etc etc.
Are cartels unstable? That depends on a singular factor: if by breaking away from a cartel one can make more money then if staying within. If you break, you can make more in short term but then you actually have to do the efficient manufacturing. If you stay, you need to produce much less and still obtain similiar profit due to your margins being 10 or sometimes 100-fold more then otherwise. This of course assumes that we are discussing industries which are already consolidated and have exceedingly high barriers to entry, as the examples I mentioned indicate. Besides, as I mentioned, cartels are only one mechanism through which monopolies arise.
Startups can and do succeed. Big, old, slow businesses die.
It is only so because the governments impose rules preventing the "big old" companies from squashing the startups at their whim due to their vastly superior resources. It is the external conrtrols introduced by the governments that do slow down coerced "buyouts" and other abuse from totally preventing any sort of meaningful competition, althogh it is quite common, most visibly in large companies purchasing the miniscule startups in order to shut them down.
But this isn't a bad thing, because as you point out, efficiency is increasing. This business only increases its market share by offering a better product or a lower price. So the consumers are winning throughout this process.
Again this is a classic oversimplification based on uncritical acceptance of religious dogma of "free market" which claims that endless improvement in "efficiency" is a good thing. For one, as the company grows in size and is able to overtake more and more market share, it forces all related companies which exist in symbiotic ecosystem of products to adjust so that they are less and less capable of supporting other types of products. What results is a decrease in consumer choice combined with decrease of price of the remaining products. One just has to look in BestBuy or such and compare the amount of choices for stereo equipment and their features and contrast it with say a decade ago. The indvidual units are now much cheaper but they also have far less features and their differences are superficial. This sort of consolidation in the name of efficiency occured in many industries. Is the consumer the winner? Is a less choice at lower price better then more choice at higher price? This is not a clear cut advantage by any means.
Furthermore, on the idea of "efficiency" itself, which seems to be elevated to truly revered status amongst believers in "free market", if pursuit of efficiency is the ultimate goal of every corporation, then the ultimate, most successful market condition is that of a small number of fully automated production lines belonging to companies which own their entire supply chain all the way from mining of raw materials, each having exactly one employee: the CEO. Everyone else on the surface of Earth remaining unemployed. That would guarantee maximum "efficiency" as in operating cost equal to the CEO's salary, 0 employee and other operating costs and 100% profit on everything, if you can find anyone to "sell" your stuff to that is.
This is just one example of how the tennents of "free market" can be shown false by reducto ad absurdum.
They can try, but as soon as they do their efficiency is out the window, and they're ripe for destruction by a new entry.
As I explained, the monopo
I fully concur, even more so then you imagine since I am a vehement opponent of the whole idea of the so called "Intellectual Property" on phillosophical and ethical grounds.
In my view, it is impossible to reform patent and copyright law in any way that makes sense since the very foundations of those laws, i.e. an attempt to treat information as if it were physical "private property", is contrary to reason.
Or software development will end in the US.
The "software industry", "music industry", "film industry" etc as we know them are walking dead, entirely dependant on an external, tax payer funded, lung-heart machine. As time goes on and their corpses are deteriorating, a point will come when it will become obvious to even most stubborn dunderheads that to prolong their agony some utterly extreme measures will be required such as estabilishment of a ruthless, global, police state.
Should people come to their senses, the only software in the future will be developed under GPL/BSD/shareware (that is arts patronage system) type licenses and in some special vertical cases as closed source systems, protection of which from duplication is based on the environment in which they operate, e.g. need for extensive training to deploy, dependance on proprietary hardware etc.
No it is not. As I indicated, the US was clearly an instigator but the blame can be also put in a large proportion on the other members of the Security Council who proved spineless or proceeded to profit from their own conflicting interests while claiming to be on the side of the "Iraqi people". The US is indeed recently acting a big, belligerent, foaming at the mouth bully but the UN plays the part of a bunch of victorian school girls screeming in panic while jumping on the table: "Look he is looking at us again! Waaaaah!".
That is true, but in an unrestricted free market, a self-inducing and self-reinforcing condition occurs in the absence of external controls: a spontaneous formation of cartels and eventually a monopoly. The process is simple: under ideal market conditions, one company will be slightly better then others, it will allow it to obtain higher market share and if done right, that will give it more resources to become more efficient etc. In this process a critical element is called "barrier to entry". That is as companies become larger, the higher the initial capital required to start a brand new "competition" company capable of challenging the entrenched behemoths. In the final stage only a few mega companies remain, eventually merging into one. Once that occurs, the barriers to entry become insurmountable and once the suply chain is purchased by the company, there is not only economical but even physical possibility of competition, i.e. the fields on which the crops grow and the fertilizer and herbicide production as well as related transportation etc are all owned by the same company. Then the price of the product becomes irrelevant and the company can proceed to introduce monopolistic pricing.
In a simplier conceptual scenario, imagine the humanity as a tribe on an island: once one person owns all the fields and all the fruit trees, no "free choice" is any longer possible for his "customers".
Truly free market economy, like most 19th century social engineering ideas, has a built-in self-destruct mechanism. If allowed to function as intended, it will inevietably self-destruct at a great price to human societies.
Your concept of economic violence is unclear to me.
One only has to examine the conditions that existed during the industrial revolution to see what I meant. The process is simple: one creates an economic situation whereby the victim is unable to extract themselves from under your control due to his inability to earn enough even though he is in theory capable of making the "free market" choice. But by making the employee of your company so poor that he/she can only afford to obtain his/her food and shelter from you, cost of which is provided as a debt towards his/her future earnings makes the person get into more debt more she/he works for you. So her "free market" choice is to be your slave or die. This condition was wide-spread in the world, most companies providing their own stores, hospitals and housing all of which was credited against employee "debt" to the company. No savings were thus possible and whole generations of people had to work permanently as essentially indentured slave force. This and many other tricks of that sort is what lead to the Marxist revolts etc.
Note that in this scenario, if executed properly, the capitalist is the phisically "non-violent" one and the only option the worker has is to violently revolt, a trick that allows the one commiting economic aggression to later claim being a victim when eventual physical retaliation occurs.
So you're in favor of punishing people for the potential to commit crimes? What happened to innocent until proven guilty? Should we lock up all the young black males in the US simply because they're statistically more likely to commit crimes?
This is simply not an issue of guilt or innocence. The simple truth is that some people are hell-bent on dominating others. In any social system some of them end up winners and some other losers. I dont think it is possible to avoid this unless you come up with a method to make everyone a rational, cooperative person interested in welfare of society and his fellow human beings. One sociopath can ruin any utopia and that is why precisely no utopia can exist, be it "free market" or Communism one. Note that communists were destroyed by sociopaths taking over their "commune" and turning it into a feudal fiefdom, just as the "robber barrons" were proceeding to do it to the attempts at "free market" economy until they were slowed down and stymied by aggressive government intervention regulating the markets and labour.
Oh I am sure you are correct, I simply recalled a particularly loud and widespread discussion of the stuff in the 1980s, which made this patent so particularly arrogant and obnoxious. I even have the famous 1986 "dragon" book "Compilers, principles, techniques and tools" by A.Aho, R.Sethi and J.Ullman still on my shelf. The stuff is in there in chapter 8 titled "Intermediate Code Generation".
Microsoft just makes me sick.
In most situations UN is bullied and browbeaten into things by the US. The US routinely and copiously vetoes the Security Council, particularly if it has anything to do with Israel. The lack of UN "support" for invasion of Iraq was an aberration, US simply went too far and some found themselves too threatened on domestic fronts to simply roll over as usual.
If you look back in recent history, in between all the important decisions in favour of US, the UN has been threatened with withdrawal of US funds on nearly a yearly basis, the Republicans in congress called for abolishment/reform/castration of UN everytime they figured a decision might not go their way in that institution etc etc. And it worked up to a point but an unprovoked, unjustified invasion of Iraq however clearly was too much (and even then some on the Security Council rolled over).
This has nothing to do with the contracts. Bremer instituted rules to be applied to all Iraqi businesses. The idea was to stimulate a free market orgy and expectation was of investors killing each other in a wild stampede to invest. The corrupt Halliburton/KBR/US Government dance is playing on a different stage altogether and it does have a lot to do with fascist tendencies, although you gotta be careful not to go overboard in tax-hatred since no taxes = no social services.
.Capitalism is the system you get when the only rule is "don't hurt others or take their stuff". Capitalism is the system designed to minimize aggression, by making all economic relations voluntary.
There is no such thing as "voluntary" unless you consider the instinct of self-preservation to be "voluntary". You gotta eat, therefore you will do things to get food. From there flows all the other stuff people do. So as soon as you have a system where one group controls food and resources for some other: goodbye "voluntary". So lets drop pretenses. As to aggression, once you have that sort of power (life and death) over others, aggression insues. Having someone deprived of livehood by your economic action is only different in method from using a rifle to shoot him/her in the head.
If you can suggest a better system, I'd love to hear about it. Every alternative I know of requires massive government-sponsored violence against peaceful people.
True. The "peaceful people" are usually defined as "those who would be doing the violence if they were in charge". The violence can be economic or physical. If a group of people wishes to have a system which makes even bigger group their slaves (they can call things by nice terms like "wage" slaves to soften the impact) they are not "peaceful" in my book.
In my opinion the system that produces the least violence and most social justice wins. I would argue that a strong representative democracy, with strongly independent and protected by law media with a strong social safety net (public medical care and education) and with market driven economic system structred so it effectively forbids formation of businesses beyond certain size complete with strong import/export controls would be optimal.
Governments, as a rule, hate real capitalism because it leaves them with vastly less power than they have today. Government is the problem.
Governments are both a problem and a solution. Without government, there is absolutely noone to enforce any rules. With no rules any man with a bigger gun wins. Without government, there is no social safety net and that means that poor will become poorer and rich richer much faster then they do now. Essentialy, if you remove government a void forms which will be quickly filled by would be feudal lords and/or paramilitary gangs. An example of government-less place where anything goes was Afghanistan. Under such conditions, a group of religious fanatics which had the most coherent organization and were willing to do what it takes, became the government.
In this particular case US bears a dis-proportionate share of responsibility. The sanctions were instituted mainly as a result of US arm-twisting of the UN, a common practice employed so that any negative effects can be then blamed on the UN which is the scapegoat of choice for any self-respecting right-winger. The stated purpose of sanctions was restriction of military technology, but the unstated purpose was economic devastation in order to induce a revolt against Saddam. That is why importing of medicines for example was severely restricted. There are many people who take issue with that approach, myself included. Neo-con and Zionist influenced fixation on exaggerated hatred of Saddam by the US political elite was no excuse to cost over 500,000 lives. Was Saddam complicit? Of course. But how does that justify trying to out-murder the murderer in order to overthrow him?
I think you are deeply mis-understanding the Chinese social system. The wealth and power are meaningless unless they can be wielded by the ruling class of that country, its on the surface "communist" government. As soon as that wealth is not theirs to control they will not hesitate in using brute force to end its reign. Also you missed the main point I was making that "free trade" in case of China is a one-sided game run under complete control of China and benefits only China. Should that cease to be the case, China will revert to import/export controls because unlike the West, their government has no attachment to the "free market" ideology and in fact quite the opposite, it is at least nominally "communist" (which is a great gig in itself, maintaining a slave labour force for the benefit of a few ex-patriots and multinationals, another great example of the conditions under which "free trade" really flourishes).
You surely jest. China considers economics to be a tool of warfare. The "liberalization" is only and exlusively benefiting China at the expense of all its trading partners since China still employs quite effectively its authocratic system in order to ensure cheapnes of its labour. The Huan is artifically pegged to the US dollar for example. This clever strategy allowed China to become largest US creditor. Power over other nations is the name of that game. I guarantee you this: as soon as China will no longer be able to play the western greed to its advantage, the "free trade" will end overnight, complete with nationalization of all those beatiful high-tech factories the West has so kindly built in there.
Sigh. Think for a bit before saying ludicrous things like that. Here are some examples: you penalize imports of finished goods while promoting exports of finished goods... or promote exports of processed foods while penalizing exports of raw produce...or promote exports of finished goods while penalizing exports of raw materials .. etc etc. In each of these cases a balancing act occures, where your trading partners and you have to arrive at an equillibrium. This not only enables control of relative motion of incomes for citizens, it also allows for nations to buy needed time to allow for slow process of social adjustements required to reduce impact of negative effects of trade. Unless of course you are an ideologue and believe that trade has only good effects? That rapid change in centuries-old social structures which displaces entire generations of people while destroying their age old communities is a good thing?
On the other hand, eliminating all trade barriers leads to a rapid movement of capital not followed by rapid movement of labour. An equalization occurs, but unfortunately since the amount of wealth is highly concentrated in wealthy countries and the populations of poor countries are vast the per-person increase in wealth in most countires is minimal and decrease of wealth of industrialized nations rapid and great. The only entities that benefit greatly are those which control the conduits through which the wealth flows during that process: the multinational corporations.
Recent economic studies have found that the benefits of increasing prosperity are not limited to the richest stratas of society. but instead tend to be wide spread. Indeed, they have found that lower-income people often benefit more than the rich from improved prosperity. Your claim that only the richest 1% benefit has no basis in fact.
Studies of what? Under what conditions? Where? Are you referring perheaps to that great and totally discredited system of "trickle-down" economics we are so familiar with?
And economics say that free trade is an essential component of prosperity.
Yes but it does not mean unrestricted trade under all conditions. An economic theory does not take into account history, culture and geography. It is merely concerned with flow of numbers from column A to column B. That is why common-sense adjustements have to be made to moderate the effects of the clash between an ideological, simplistic, theory and the vastly more complicated facts on the ground.
In truth, I am completely at a loss to understand how poverty can be eleviated without free trade. Do you think poor countries are capable of bootstrapping themselves into the 21st century by themselves? They need investment and open markets for their goods, not closed borders.
The truth is that they cannot get out of poverty without trade. Notice use of "trade" as opposed to "free trade". Trade is an ancient system of exchange of goods and services. Free trade is an ideology. While in an ideal world, where all countries are on equal footing and have appropriate social safety infrastructure, free trade would indeed be optimal, in the real world of today it is a recipe for pain, misery and growth of power of rich over poor. So in the real world, trade has to be controlled in such ways as to shape the economies of some countries in ways different to other countries. Investment can be promoted in certain areas, while penalized in others, borders opened to some goods while closed to others. As time goes on, and the differences between countries decrease, the rules can be relaxed until they are no longer needed. Only then "free trade" will be plausible.
While clearly beyond reach of the patent as it stands now, GCC might be vulnerable if it seeks to improve its own method of operation in some ways. Microsoft then can claim that the new additions are "derrivative" from their patent.
This is actually much more evil and imbecillic then vulnerability of GCC to this patent. In essence Microsoft no longer feels the need to even obsucre their theft of other people's work ... they simply brazenly patent what others have done for decades before, banking on that their superior lawyer power and deep pockets is all that is required to take control of the future of OSS (and any other) software. Finally, as many have predicted for years (RMS being chief among them), the Intellectual Property is coming into its own as a tool of outright aggression and opression.
Trouble is that the patent essentialy describes verbatim the pcode system GCC uses and which in turn was discussed in many works on compilers in the 1980s.
No, we are all using gcc which at one time had a fork called egcs which was later adopted as the main branch. If what the poster I replied to was saying was correct, the egcs fork along with its name and phillosophy would be described as such explicitely in daily use. Instead what happened is a natural consequence of a fact that egcs was but a small ripple in a surface of a vastly more comprehensive system called gcc under the umbrella of even more wide reaching project called GNU.
I was referring to the post-invasion attempts at "reconstruction", specifically to the Bremer rules which are basically a textbook adaptation of extreme market conditions as advocated by Rand. They had over a year to work now and even in the areas which are not affected by the fighting (the Shia south) are nothing but a total failure.
The problem is the American version of unrestricted capitalism, which is that politically connected American companies get to do whatever they want and have the US military back them up if they decide they want to pay less for oil or labor.
This is a problem with any form of unrestricted capitalism and the true evil of Ayn Rand theories. They are an excercise in one of the oldest pursuits in "phillosophy": an attempt justify naked agression and dominantion in some "moral" terms. It is an inevietable path for any unrestricted "capitalism" model to devolve into a feudal-like oligarchy of a tiny super-wealthy minority who would own and rule everything and everybody. People who see themselves poised to join that elite are those who promote such ideas most enthusiastically.
Really? So you mean that those who are more talented and intelligent and faster are to be treated preferentially? If so in what ways? The only way the laws of society work is to define rights and responsibilites... So we are unequal when it comes to our rights? Some are destined to be masters and some property? No?
I have news for you dude. Each person's skill and aptitude play only a small part in their destiny. Your initial starting point in life, the confluences of geography and history are far more important. Or are you going to tell me that an Einstein level genius born in a tribe in the middle of jungle on some remote island is going to achieve the same financial status in the world as, say, Titney Spears?
When the people of Iraq want to stop acting like jackasses they too shall be able to build a great nation.
This might come as a great shock to you, but the definition of a "Great Nation" varies wildly from person to person. To a Muslim extremist, a "great nation" is a Caliphate. To a Socialist a "great nation" has a well constructed and efficient government run social support structure, to a Nazi a "great nation" is one run by a "great leader" of his superior race, to an Ayn Rand follower a "great nation" is one where everything is decided by dog-eats-dog capitalism which would surpass the darkest of the darkest moments of the 19th century industrial revolution, etc etc.
As you can see you just spouted a piece of useless propaganda sound bite which brought nothing to this discussion and only sought to obscure the unpleasant facts that the economic reforms introduced by Bremer are a total disaster, even in areas of Iraq that are not overrun by the guerillas.