Good catch on the bait-and-switch from "child-inappropriate content" to "all that pr0n." However...
Why is it, when talking about gay porn, it is always about two men having sex but no one seems to have a problem with two women having sex? Why is the chant, "It's Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve" rather than, "It's Adam and Eve not Shannon and Eve"?
Because girl-on-girl porn is usually marketed to straight male audiences, while boy-on-boy porn is usually marketed to gay male audiences. It's "gay" because of the viewership, not the participants (who may or may not actually have any interest in the gender they're being filmed with).
For your other question, while some people do get up in arms about gay women, most of the time they're under the radar, because hey, we have more women than men anyway, and upper-class white lesbians with a golden retriever are totally nonthreatening, since they won't take away your son's manhood. But the thought that he might be a catcher someday, oh,::shudders::!! There is still plenty of reaction to any woman who seems a little too "dykey" (pardon the term), it's just on a case-by-case basis, and seems to relate more to society's disapproval of anybody outside the mainstream generally.
Set theory really isn't terribly important to understanding how to run a computer. Logic, yes, but logic is important for day-to-day life -- I mean real logic, not the inaccurate-to-cognition formalisms of symbolic logic, and oh hey, that's actually more significant to computing!...but on a user or even average-programmer level, you really don't need a very high level of that stuff. Yes, you should understand that !!x = x, the contrapositive, some very basic statistics operations, etc., but really, what does the average computer user need to understand beyond these? Personally I learned much more when I learned regexps than when I spent time on the maths.
At the same time, he is strengthening the Chris Anderson brand.
This works very well in a small world, like that of famous-and-accepted technology commentators. However, the number of people who will be able to rise above the mass yammerings in the next generation, without being selected by somebody with money and an established media presence to give them a pulpit, is likely vanishingly small; and the bootstrapping problem will only get worse with collapsing publisher profit margins. In any event, mass selection pressure will continue to promote comfortable mediocrity.
A better way to put it is that even without selling content on its own merit, people will still be able to leverage fame for money; and if they can repackage the old and familiar in a slightly sparklier way, they may get lucky and become famous. JK Rowling is a perfect example there.
(Full disclosure: I've read all the HP books and I found them charming and fun, but there's nary a new idea in them and Rowling's writing, on its own merits, is uninspired.)
Um, not to mention that what's described is essentially academic indentured servitude -- I can see VERY little reason for a company not to exploit any loan recipient who's obliged to work there or suddenly get slammed with $80k of debt, and without even the entry-level worker's minimal ability to negotiate offers from multiple employers and move if conditions are seriously unfavorable, wages for new college graduates would fall through the floor.
Perhaps the market would take care of this, but as mentioned, other sources of funding would likely dry up (they already are; we've been expanding federal loan programs to more people while simultaneously decreasing the total amount of $$ available, in the face of astronomically rising higher-ed costs). Even if they didn't, don't high-school students have it bad enough figuring out what college to go to without also doing tons of research on their post-graduation indenture, too? That's a lot to expect from a 16-year-old.
Who the hell is going to believe that he lost his bid for re-election because he was frequently delinquent in paying his utility bills?
Bear in mind that we live in a nation that's over nine trillion dollars in debt. Whoever believes horseshit like the above has no sense of scale....because obviously voters never use higher standards for public officials than for themselves.
I do hope you're talking about docco, drivers and firmware. If you mean opening up chip architecture completely, then you're saying that AMD should get into the commodity chip-manu business, and commodity businesses are a chump's game, always destined to be won by the guy with the environmentally-unregulated factory and the army of Chinese slave/prison labor.
Hi, I live in a 70-sq ft room in Harlem. A decision I chose, so that I'd have that golden $350/mo rent. (The apartment splits with four roommates, all with private rooms, mine's the smallest... actually, if you're looking for a cheap room in NY, post in my journal or something, we have two rooms opening up in May.)
Add to that that I live very cheaply, so I save about 1/3 of my $2000/mo...
It's doable. Just remember that you need much less than you think you need.
Bulletin boards running Windows that wind up showing the BSoD or just a dialog that says "Fatal error: swpadcnt.dll could not be found." and not running as a result, need a name:
Nobody cares about the consequences anymore. What happens when nobody can sell anything anymore? Why do people ignore the inevitable result of this?
Have you thought about the result of this? If "nobody can sell anything," because it's all available for free -- then that sounds like an incredible world to live in. I'll need no money to buy food or housing, because they'll be available for free; I'll be able to sleep as late as I want and spend all my time in creative endeavors for which I will earn the recognition of my peers. That's the life, my man. And that's what I'd like to see us work towards as a society -- apply the economics of peer-to-peer networks to the corporeal world. The result would be a world of abundance the like of which is unprecedented in human history. We'd still find a way to muck it up of course, but it sure sounds nice, doesn't it?
Or are you operating under a more narrow definition of "anything" than me?
As a previous poster pointed out, you're right, the claim was a little overbroad.
When was the last time you saw an operating system without a web browser, tcp stack, or file manager?
At this point, a file manager is essential in the sense that the computer is unusable without one (though you can still have options!), and a tcp stack is a fairly standard integrated feature. However, web browsers simply aren't something that needs to share a codebase with an operating system. The last time I used an OS without a web browser was about five minutes ago, logged into a Solaris terminal. Remember, "essential to the OS-maker's business model" is not a sufficient condition for something to be "essential to the OS."
Especially on the desktop front, the only way to be competive is the feature set of your OS. End consumers largely aren't going to notice (nor care) about [real OS features]. The only way to sell new OS software to desktop users is to improve the features.
The end users won't notice these things, but they do notice price. One way to be competitive is to provide multiple versions of the operating system, priced according to the features that have come pre-installed. When superfluities like broswers, media players, media-file rights management, etc are rolled into the operating system and can't be removed -- or even, are not sold separately -- the purchase price of the OS is driven up as a result and the end user is required to subsidize them (duh). That's all fine and good, but it is anti-competitive behavior when there is a monopoly on that desktop market which allows a company to force users to subsidize the development of non-OS products. If MS offered a version of Windows that did not include WMP, IE, etc. and that came at a subsequently lower price, then the user would not be compelled by MS' monopoly status to purchase unwanted add-on features; then the company wouldn't be using its monopoly position to provide an unfair advantage over its competitors.
Besides -- MS doesn't need to "stay competitive," that's the whole point -- they have a monopoly on the desktop market. They may need to offer more features in order to maintain that monopoly without resorting to illegitimate means, but practically speaking there isn't really any competition for them yet.
The burden on Microsoft is to do this without being anti-trustish. If they make the components removable, expose APIs so that 3rd parties may install their own functionality into them (Apple writing an iTunes plug-in for WMPlayer for example), and ensure that competing products are easily installable, I don't see how that's bad.
It's not bad, under those circumstances, provided the APIs are accessible free-of-charge -- and provided there are parallel versions of the OS available which do not require the user to pay for unused components as a result of the OS monopoly. (After all, it can't cost MS anything not to include them, if they really are removable.)
Basically, business success to the extent of becoming a monopoly in one field is all well and good if it has come about through product superiority. However, to ensure the possibility of competition (which has been deemed in the consumer's best interest), a company with a tolerable monopoly should be sure to keep that monopoly separate from other markets where the company does not have a monopoly. Sure, it has an immensely successful product, and that'll help it fund subsequent ventures. That's fine. However, it should not force users to purchase unwanted goods, for which competitors exist, by using the leverage of its monopoly.
If MS decided to bundle Office as part of the OS, and raise the price on the OS to include the price of Office, and not offer any OS versions that don't include Office, that would be transparently anti-competitive. And yet they could get away with it, because users are so locked-in to MS products. Forced purchase of a product (based on the monopoly status of another product) for which there is competition and which the user doesn't want -- that is anti-competitve. It's the same situation with WMP.
Windows XP Premium will start shipping with new PCs, which will include a new version of the infamous Windows Media Player. This version will have the ability to shop at on-line stores like the one MS plans to launch later this year. It's their move to 'outflank Apple'.
As if we needed more proof that the antitrust suits have had no effect whatsoever on MS's business practices. Have the previous cases not established precedent that pre-installing non-essential features into the operating system constitutes anti-competitive behavior?
Rather than putting our hope in the courts, I think it's best if everybody contributes as much as possible to the development of desktop linux. We have a two-year window. If linux can achieve mainstream acceptance by the time this goes gold, then we'll be able to avoid widespread adoption of Longhorn, Blackcomb, and everything after.
so anybody got a good project that needs testers? Or documentation-authors?
Yes, it is possible for life to transport itself across interplanetary -- maybe even interstellar -- distances if it's simple enough life.
However, that doesn't mean that all life in the solar system necessarily originated from the same source. If there is life underneath a sheet of ice that's been present since the earliest estimates of life on Earth, for instance, it would be unlikely to be terrestrial. Maybe we have a common ancestor with it, but we shouldn't assume that it's necessarily the same source (or the same sort).
Ok, you got me -- maybe that figure was a little high.
But it's not as ridiculous as you might think. Assume 30 days per month. If you eat 3 meals a day, that's about $3/meal. That hopefully doesn't sound too extravagant; it certainly won't pay for most prepared food. Maybe you have pasta at $.5 per setting with sauce at $1/setting. Maybe in the mornings you have cereal instead, so you have a $4 box of cereal (provides 3 meals) and a $2 pint of milk (provides 3-4 meals' worth) for about $2/meal. At $4-$5 per meal's worth, eating meat is right out on this budget (and note we've already cut out superfluities like sweets and coffee). Now throw in that that amount of money was also supposed to cover your clothing. Assume you have really durable clothes and spend only a negligible $60/year on them (you know, couple pairs of pants etc). You still need to wash them, at $8 every three weeks. That takes $17/mo out of your food budget. Oh right, and you need to get to this job of yours. The cheapest option for New York is public transit, and the cheapest option there is a $70/mo subway card. Maybe $36/year on cleaning supplies. Now our food budget is down to $200/mo (again, for one person -- these ancillaries go up if you assume a child.) Hope you're healthy as a horse, because you probably don't have health insurance, and even if you do it won't cover any intense treatments. (I'm just not going to touch the doctor issue.) And odds are you do not have dental coverage (I don't) -- well, assuming that you're like me and have friends who are dentists who give you a discount, but that for some reason you have only one dental checkup/cleaning a year, that's still $300, assuming no cavities (hardly likely). Not that you could afford to have them filled if you had them. And that cleaning by itself cuts your monthly food budget to $2100/12 = $175/mo, or about $2/meal.
Look, you see the way this is going, I'll spare you the list of all the expenses that are necessary to a reasonably healthy existence -- there are probably more. We've got a poorly fed aching-toothed threadbare family, for which one accident means bankruptcy. They've certainly not spent themselves into poverty through extravagant living.
Anyway, these figures are for one of the most expensive cities in the country. I think it's a fair summary of the problems of the urban poor, though. I don't know if any of it applies to the rural poor as well. But please, before you decide that poverty is all the fault of the poor, at least think about the challenges they face.
You would be hard-pressed to rent a two-bedroom apartment in this city for less than $1000 (house in the suburbs? yeah whatever, I wouldn't even be able to consider it until I hit around $65k/yr). You have at least 20% taxes, probably more like 30%. So your $1600/mo becomes $280/mo after those two items -- not much for two people to eat, have clothes, pay for electricity and water, obtain transit, even buy cleaning supplies. Geez, I spend more than $300/mo on food as one person, you try feeding a growing kid on it.
And before you give me the "people managed to do it for centuries" argument, keep in mind that for most of those centuries you had six or seven people living in one 80-sq-ft room working 80 hour weeks with ubiquitous child labor. Get a clue.
It doesn't even have to be a "capitalism versus !capitalism" debate. The fact of the matter is, even standard economic theory indicates that money spent on services and luxury goods have a detrimental effect on the economy by decreasing the total output and the amount of capital available for reinvestment/growth. When lawyers (service providers, not producers) get ahold of a large chunk of cash and then use it to buy luxuries (and don't support the development of core economic industries), the total supply of value shrinks. A summer home is fine if you rent it to others; it's crap if it just stays unused most of the time -- value set aside that's not going to be used by anyone.
Environmentalists greatly overstate humanity's impact on the planet in their effort to take down industrialized society.
Have you ever thought of why those evil environmentalists might want to do that? Seeing as how they benefit from industrialized society too?
Yeah, I can't think of a reason either. Which is why I as an environmentalist don't want to destroy industrialized society. I only want to sacrifice a little economic efficiency for the sake of long-term viability. And it's why I don't go making up evils as my dissenter's motivations when there are other, more rational explanations.
You can mention the words "Tunguska-type body" for no other reason than that it's an isolated incident. It happened ONCE in our recorded history.
If the odds of a large meteorite strike happening sometime soon are so great, why has there not been one single incident in recorded human history of a city getting struck by meteorites? The fact that we've gone a long time without a hit does not make one any more likely in the future. CF the gambler's fallacy.
in about 500 million years there will be no "elsewhere" to spend the money....It's humanity's only chance for survival.
So we've avoided the inevitable for another 500 million years, perhaps, then the next host world dies. Then the next, if we are extremely lucky, and then the next. And sooner or later, rising entropy catches up and the whole universe becomes roughly the same temperature and nothing can live any more, at which point the human race is extinct anyways...
and what do we have to say for it? "Well, I may be dead, but at least my race made it to the finish line, we were the last species around when life was still possible?" So what?
YOU have a life. YOU as an individual. Live that life as best you can and benefit those living around you the most you can. Don't worry about the endgame because in the endgame everything is dead. At which point there's not even a human memory around to think about the glories of our race for surviving so many close scrapes, just to die out anyway.
Thanks... but yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if you later on found something that doesn't seem to make sense, I've been having a zombie-brained sleep-deprived week myself.
So the service sector really isn't me underproducing - it is the marketization of part of the previously hidden economy of home chores.
Good point, and an example of why it's hard to make universal statements. Food services and childcare are especially tough with this, because they're necessary tasks, and people may be paying for them because they're so busy producing elsewhere. But on the whole I feel like an extremely service-oriented economy will be trouble, if for no other reason than that it's a less capital-driven sector so you can't improve its output with investment in plant, R&D, etc. to the same extent. Well, once you've bought your computers.
I don't disagree with your mathematical analysis. Here's where there's a problem:
Now unless you are a cartel or monopoly, nearly all of these savings will end up having to be passed onto the customer in the long run because of competition.
This assertion fails because of the market-dominating power of our largest multinationals. Example: Dell Computer. Outsources call centers to India; even tries (with varying success rates) to deceive the customer as to the call center's location. Is this necessarily reflected in the price of their PCs? No, I can find a deal with equivalent or better hardware for several hundred dollars less elsewhere; but the smaller shop is unable to leverage a brand name and exert influence over its suppliers the way Dell can, so the price of Dell's goods remains inflated.
The benefit of increased economic efficiency to the American economy is dependent upon the repatriation of corporate profits into the American workforce. Widespread unemployment and underemployment means that this is happening at a vastly decreased rate. Meanwhile, the investment money of the large corporations is going overseas, destroying the long-term growth potential of the American economy. Meanwhile, we are ourselves the beneficiaries of the market inefficiency -- it is those unnecessarily-high paychecks given to us workers that permit us to enjoy our standard of living, and while the world system will see a net gain from increased efficiencies, the American people (and the tech, law, medical, and other knowledge sectors most especially) will see a net loss as inefficiencies in our favor are removed.
Note that I'm not arguing for protectionism here. I agree that globalization is inevitable and we'll have to find some other way to deal with it. But note that our most essential manufacturing industries do not face this logic (steel tariffs anybody?). Also, I believe that our government could avoid being globalization-cheerleaders in a lot of ways by imposing taxes on goods that are produced without adhering to American standards of labor decency; we could lessen the inequalities in tax burdens between hiring American and overseas workers; we could find other ways to make investment within our borders more profitable than investment abroad.
Something else you're overlooking is (as someone else pointed out in this thread) the tendency of departing manufacturing and knowledge-product manufacturing work to leave a vacuum that is filled with an expanding services sector. That's all fine and good in terms of people having jobs, but the problem is that money spent on service sector goods is by definition money thrown down a toilet in terms of corporate reinvestment. Service sector spending is purchasing leisure, thereby decreasing the total output of the economy and acting as a drag on the reinvestment of profits (the people who sit around in newfound idleness are subsequently underproducing). This is the worst & most disingenuous part about terming fast food jobs "manufacturing" jobs -- the hamburger will get made if someone needs to eat, whether it's an engineer flipping the burger or just a tired prole cooking at home. However, if the engineer were engineering instead, the GDP would rise by that additional contribution.
The economy of the US churns more jobs PER MONTH than are out sourced.
The economy of the US churns out fewer jobs PER MONTH than the estimated population growth.
The census estimates indicate an estimated total growth of about 26,000,000 people between 2000 and 2010, which (assuming a linear progression, which might actually be reasonable seeing that our primary driving force behind population growth is immigration these days) amounts to 223,000 new persons per month. Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics there were net 21,000 jobs added to reported payroll in Feb. (latest statistics) which is seen by most as a "recovering" figure compared to, oh, the previous eight to eighteen months.
Not to mention that changes in those reporting rules now mean that a "McDonalds Certified Culinary Engineer" is now considered an equivalent "job" to one in the skilled manufacturing sector.
I'm glad you feel very sanguine about the situation, however. Keep up the cheerleading.
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Good catch on the bait-and-switch from "child-inappropriate content" to "all that pr0n." However...
::shudders::!! There is still plenty of reaction to any woman who seems a little too "dykey" (pardon the term), it's just on a case-by-case basis, and seems to relate more to society's disapproval of anybody outside the mainstream generally.
Why is it, when talking about gay porn, it is always about two men having sex but no one seems to have a problem with two women having sex? Why is the chant, "It's Adam and Eve not Adam and Steve" rather than, "It's Adam and Eve not Shannon and Eve"?
Because girl-on-girl porn is usually marketed to straight male audiences, while boy-on-boy porn is usually marketed to gay male audiences. It's "gay" because of the viewership, not the participants (who may or may not actually have any interest in the gender they're being filmed with).
For your other question, while some people do get up in arms about gay women, most of the time they're under the radar, because hey, we have more women than men anyway, and upper-class white lesbians with a golden retriever are totally nonthreatening, since they won't take away your son's manhood. But the thought that he might be a catcher someday, oh,
Also, "Shannon and Eve" doesn't rhyme.
Quibble:
...but on a user or even average-programmer level, you really don't need a very high level of that stuff. Yes, you should understand that !!x = x, the contrapositive, some very basic statistics operations, etc., but really, what does the average computer user need to understand beyond these? Personally I learned much more when I learned regexps than when I spent time on the maths.
Set theory really isn't terribly important to understanding how to run a computer. Logic, yes, but logic is important for day-to-day life -- I mean real logic, not the inaccurate-to-cognition formalisms of symbolic logic, and oh hey, that's actually more significant to computing!
At the same time, he is strengthening the Chris Anderson brand.
This works very well in a small world, like that of famous-and-accepted technology commentators. However, the number of people who will be able to rise above the mass yammerings in the next generation, without being selected by somebody with money and an established media presence to give them a pulpit, is likely vanishingly small; and the bootstrapping problem will only get worse with collapsing publisher profit margins. In any event, mass selection pressure will continue to promote comfortable mediocrity.
A better way to put it is that even without selling content on its own merit, people will still be able to leverage fame for money; and if they can repackage the old and familiar in a slightly sparklier way, they may get lucky and become famous. JK Rowling is a perfect example there.
(Full disclosure: I've read all the HP books and I found them charming and fun, but there's nary a new idea in them and Rowling's writing, on its own merits, is uninspired.)
Um, not to mention that what's described is essentially academic indentured servitude -- I can see VERY little reason for a company not to exploit any loan recipient who's obliged to work there or suddenly get slammed with $80k of debt, and without even the entry-level worker's minimal ability to negotiate offers from multiple employers and move if conditions are seriously unfavorable, wages for new college graduates would fall through the floor.
Perhaps the market would take care of this, but as mentioned, other sources of funding would likely dry up (they already are; we've been expanding federal loan programs to more people while simultaneously decreasing the total amount of $$ available, in the face of astronomically rising higher-ed costs). Even if they didn't, don't high-school students have it bad enough figuring out what college to go to without also doing tons of research on their post-graduation indenture, too? That's a lot to expect from a 16-year-old.
Who the hell is going to believe that he lost his bid for re-election because he was frequently delinquent in paying his utility bills?
...because obviously voters never use higher standards for public officials than for themselves.
Bear in mind that we live in a nation that's over nine trillion dollars in debt. Whoever believes horseshit like the above has no sense of scale.
Apparently it turns out that people say mean things on the Internet! And teenagers are not immune to this tendency!
This article has given me a new understanding of the world.
I do hope you're talking about docco, drivers and firmware. If you mean opening up chip architecture completely, then you're saying that AMD should get into the commodity chip-manu business, and commodity businesses are a chump's game, always destined to be won by the guy with the environmentally-unregulated factory and the army of Chinese slave/prison labor.
Hi, I live in a 70-sq ft room in Harlem. A decision I chose, so that I'd have that golden $350/mo rent. (The apartment splits with four roommates, all with private rooms, mine's the smallest... actually, if you're looking for a cheap room in NY, post in my journal or something, we have two rooms opening up in May.)
Add to that that I live very cheaply, so I save about 1/3 of my $2000/mo...
It's doable. Just remember that you need much less than you think you need.
Bulletin boards running Windows that wind up showing the BSoD or just a dialog that says "Fatal error: swpadcnt.dll could not be found." and not running as a result, need a name:
Windows XP Unprofessional!
We'd still find a way to muck it up of course, but it sure sounds nice, doesn't it?
Or are you operating under a more narrow definition of "anything" than me?
At this point, a file manager is essential in the sense that the computer is unusable without one (though you can still have options!), and a tcp stack is a fairly standard integrated feature. However, web browsers simply aren't something that needs to share a codebase with an operating system. The last time I used an OS without a web browser was about five minutes ago, logged into a Solaris terminal.
Remember, "essential to the OS-maker's business model" is not a sufficient condition for something to be "essential to the OS."
The end users won't notice these things, but they do notice price. One way to be competitive is to provide multiple versions of the operating system, priced according to the features that have come pre-installed. When superfluities like broswers, media players, media-file rights management, etc are rolled into the operating system and can't be removed -- or even, are not sold separately -- the purchase price of the OS is driven up as a result and the end user is required to subsidize them (duh). That's all fine and good, but it is anti-competitive behavior when there is a monopoly on that desktop market which allows a company to force users to subsidize the development of non-OS products. If MS offered a version of Windows that did not include WMP, IE, etc. and that came at a subsequently lower price, then the user would not be compelled by MS' monopoly status to purchase unwanted add-on features; then the company wouldn't be using its monopoly position to provide an unfair advantage over its competitors.
Besides -- MS doesn't need to "stay competitive," that's the whole point -- they have a monopoly on the desktop market. They may need to offer more features in order to maintain that monopoly without resorting to illegitimate means, but practically speaking there isn't really any competition for them yet.
It's not bad, under those circumstances, provided the APIs are accessible free-of-charge -- and provided there are parallel versions of the OS available which do not require the user to pay for unused components as a result of the OS monopoly. (After all, it can't cost MS anything not to include them, if they really are removable.)
Basically, business success to the extent of becoming a monopoly in one field is all well and good if it has come about through product superiority. However, to ensure the possibility of competition (which has been deemed in the consumer's best interest), a company with a tolerable monopoly should be sure to keep that monopoly separate from other markets where the company does not have a monopoly. Sure, it has an immensely successful product, and that'll help it fund subsequent ventures. That's fine. However, it should not force users to purchase unwanted goods, for which competitors exist, by using the leverage of its monopoly.
If MS decided to bundle Office as part of the OS, and raise the price on the OS to include the price of Office, and not offer any OS versions that don't include Office, that would be transparently anti-competitive. And yet they could get away with it, because users are so locked-in to MS products. Forced purchase of a product (based on the monopoly status of another product) for which there is competition and which the user doesn't want -- that is anti-competitve. It's the same situation with WMP.
Have the previous cases not established precedent that pre-installing non-essential features into the operating system constitutes anti-competitive behavior?
Rather than putting our hope in the courts, I think it's best if everybody contributes as much as possible to the development of desktop linux. We have a two-year window. If linux can achieve mainstream acceptance by the time this goes gold, then we'll be able to avoid widespread adoption of Longhorn, Blackcomb, and everything after.
so anybody got a good project that needs testers? Or documentation-authors?
Yes, it is possible for life to transport itself across interplanetary -- maybe even interstellar -- distances if it's simple enough life.
However, that doesn't mean that all life in the solar system necessarily originated from the same source. If there is life underneath a sheet of ice that's been present since the earliest estimates of life on Earth, for instance, it would be unlikely to be terrestrial. Maybe we have a common ancestor with it, but we shouldn't assume that it's necessarily the same source (or the same sort).
Ok, you got me -- maybe that figure was a little high.
But it's not as ridiculous as you might think. Assume 30 days per month. If you eat 3 meals a day, that's about $3/meal. That hopefully doesn't sound too extravagant; it certainly won't pay for most prepared food. Maybe you have pasta at $.5 per setting with sauce at $1/setting. Maybe in the mornings you have cereal instead, so you have a $4 box of cereal (provides 3 meals) and a $2 pint of milk (provides 3-4 meals' worth) for about $2/meal. At $4-$5 per meal's worth, eating meat is right out on this budget (and note we've already cut out superfluities like sweets and coffee).
Now throw in that that amount of money was also supposed to cover your clothing. Assume you have really durable clothes and spend only a negligible $60/year on them (you know, couple pairs of pants etc). You still need to wash them, at $8 every three weeks. That takes $17/mo out of your food budget.
Oh right, and you need to get to this job of yours. The cheapest option for New York is public transit, and the cheapest option there is a $70/mo subway card.
Maybe $36/year on cleaning supplies.
Now our food budget is down to $200/mo (again, for one person -- these ancillaries go up if you assume a child.)
Hope you're healthy as a horse, because you probably don't have health insurance, and even if you do it won't cover any intense treatments. (I'm just not going to touch the doctor issue.) And odds are you do not have dental coverage (I don't) -- well, assuming that you're like me and have friends who are dentists who give you a discount, but that for some reason you have only one dental checkup/cleaning a year, that's still $300, assuming no cavities (hardly likely). Not that you could afford to have them filled if you had them. And that cleaning by itself cuts your monthly food budget to $2100/12 = $175/mo, or about $2/meal.
Look, you see the way this is going, I'll spare you the list of all the expenses that are necessary to a reasonably healthy existence -- there are probably more. We've got a poorly fed aching-toothed threadbare family, for which one accident means bankruptcy. They've certainly not spent themselves into poverty through extravagant living.
Anyway, these figures are for one of the most expensive cities in the country. I think it's a fair summary of the problems of the urban poor, though. I don't know if any of it applies to the rural poor as well. But please, before you decide that poverty is all the fault of the poor, at least think about the challenges they face.
News report from New York:
You would be hard-pressed to rent a two-bedroom apartment in this city for less than $1000 (house in the suburbs? yeah whatever, I wouldn't even be able to consider it until I hit around $65k/yr). You have at least 20% taxes, probably more like 30%. So your $1600/mo becomes $280/mo after those two items -- not much for two people to eat, have clothes, pay for electricity and water, obtain transit, even buy cleaning supplies. Geez, I spend more than $300/mo on food as one person, you try feeding a growing kid on it.
And before you give me the "people managed to do it for centuries" argument, keep in mind that for most of those centuries you had six or seven people living in one 80-sq-ft room working 80 hour weeks with ubiquitous child labor. Get a clue.
It doesn't even have to be a "capitalism versus !capitalism" debate. The fact of the matter is, even standard economic theory indicates that money spent on services and luxury goods have a detrimental effect on the economy by decreasing the total output and the amount of capital available for reinvestment/growth. When lawyers (service providers, not producers) get ahold of a large chunk of cash and then use it to buy luxuries (and don't support the development of core economic industries), the total supply of value shrinks. A summer home is fine if you rent it to others; it's crap if it just stays unused most of the time -- value set aside that's not going to be used by anyone.
Yeah, I can't think of a reason either. Which is why I as an environmentalist don't want to destroy industrialized society. I only want to sacrifice a little economic efficiency for the sake of long-term viability. And it's why I don't go making up evils as my dissenter's motivations when there are other, more rational explanations.
You can mention the words "Tunguska-type body" for no other reason than that it's an isolated incident. It happened ONCE in our recorded history.
If the odds of a large meteorite strike happening sometime soon are so great, why has there not been one single incident in recorded human history of a city getting struck by meteorites? The fact that we've gone a long time without a hit does not make one any more likely in the future. CF the gambler's fallacy.
and what do we have to say for it? "Well, I may be dead, but at least my race made it to the finish line, we were the last species around when life was still possible?"
So what?
YOU have a life. YOU as an individual. Live that life as best you can and benefit those living around you the most you can. Don't worry about the endgame because in the endgame everything is dead. At which point there's not even a human memory around to think about the glories of our race for surviving so many close scrapes, just to die out anyway.
Thanks... but yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if you later on found something that doesn't seem to make sense, I've been having a zombie-brained sleep-deprived week myself.
So the service sector really isn't me underproducing - it is the marketization of part of the previously hidden economy of home chores.
Good point, and an example of why it's hard to make universal statements. Food services and childcare are especially tough with this, because they're necessary tasks, and people may be paying for them because they're so busy producing elsewhere. But on the whole I feel like an extremely service-oriented economy will be trouble, if for no other reason than that it's a less capital-driven sector so you can't improve its output with investment in plant, R&D, etc. to the same extent. Well, once you've bought your computers.
I guess we'll find out in twenty years or so...!
Sounds like a great service for Mr. Orlando Soto, no?
You can. (I do it.) You can do it quite nicely actually if you're not too picky about housing.
Most people would have trouble with the midtown apartment on that money though.
This assertion fails because of the market-dominating power of our largest multinationals. Example: Dell Computer. Outsources call centers to India; even tries (with varying success rates) to deceive the customer as to the call center's location. Is this necessarily reflected in the price of their PCs? No, I can find a deal with equivalent or better hardware for several hundred dollars less elsewhere; but the smaller shop is unable to leverage a brand name and exert influence over its suppliers the way Dell can, so the price of Dell's goods remains inflated.
The benefit of increased economic efficiency to the American economy is dependent upon the repatriation of corporate profits into the American workforce. Widespread unemployment and underemployment means that this is happening at a vastly decreased rate. Meanwhile, the investment money of the large corporations is going overseas, destroying the long-term growth potential of the American economy. Meanwhile, we are ourselves the beneficiaries of the market inefficiency -- it is those unnecessarily-high paychecks given to us workers that permit us to enjoy our standard of living, and while the world system will see a net gain from increased efficiencies, the American people (and the tech, law, medical, and other knowledge sectors most especially) will see a net loss as inefficiencies in our favor are removed.
Note that I'm not arguing for protectionism here. I agree that globalization is inevitable and we'll have to find some other way to deal with it. But note that our most essential manufacturing industries do not face this logic (steel tariffs anybody?). Also, I believe that our government could avoid being globalization-cheerleaders in a lot of ways by imposing taxes on goods that are produced without adhering to American standards of labor decency; we could lessen the inequalities in tax burdens between hiring American and overseas workers; we could find other ways to make investment within our borders more profitable than investment abroad.
Something else you're overlooking is (as someone else pointed out in this thread) the tendency of departing manufacturing and knowledge-product manufacturing work to leave a vacuum that is filled with an expanding services sector. That's all fine and good in terms of people having jobs, but the problem is that money spent on service sector goods is by definition money thrown down a toilet in terms of corporate reinvestment. Service sector spending is purchasing leisure, thereby decreasing the total output of the economy and acting as a drag on the reinvestment of profits (the people who sit around in newfound idleness are subsequently underproducing). This is the worst & most disingenuous part about terming fast food jobs "manufacturing" jobs -- the hamburger will get made if someone needs to eat, whether it's an engineer flipping the burger or just a tired prole cooking at home. However, if the engineer were engineering instead, the GDP would rise by that additional contribution.
The economy of the US churns out fewer jobs PER MONTH than the estimated population growth.
The census estimates indicate an estimated total growth of about 26,000,000 people between 2000 and 2010, which (assuming a linear progression, which might actually be reasonable seeing that our primary driving force behind population growth is immigration these days) amounts to 223,000 new persons per month. Per the Bureau of Labor Statistics there were net 21,000 jobs added to reported payroll in Feb. (latest statistics) which is seen by most as a "recovering" figure compared to, oh, the previous eight to eighteen months.
Not to mention that changes in those reporting rules now mean that a "McDonalds Certified Culinary Engineer" is now considered an equivalent "job" to one in the skilled manufacturing sector.
I'm glad you feel very sanguine about the situation, however. Keep up the cheerleading.