The salary numbers are done in constant peso terms, in other words, already corrected for the collapse in the peso.
We are never going to be able to go in and root out local elites without an occupation army (which I do not recommend). The only thing that we can do is offer alternate jobs that allow people outside the elites to engage in capital formation and create alternate power bases to raise a new generation of elites that can knock off the old, established, corrupt ones. It's not a quick process and it's not particularly pretty to watch but it is the best we've got.
The numbers cited came from the UN which, last I heard, wasn't "corporate PR crap" but a decent baseline for international comparisons of economies. The salaries in the UN data were current pesos for both stats, not 1993 pesos, in other words honest numbers. It's pretty obvious that your source has an ax to grind and engages in a few exercises in hand waving to explain away good news like increased growth rates for Mexico. Give it a rest.
You just don't get it. You don't do this sort of thing as a govt. program, you merely have to take down the barriers that stop people from progressing. A lot of those barriers are domestic to the respective country so you end up with people heading for the exits or trying desperately to work for foreigners. As people accumulate wealth, they gain the power to erode their own internal barriers to capital formation and they exit the third world.
Lower tariffs, increase trade, give people an opportunity to compete and show what they're good at and you end up with rising wage standards and eventually labor shortages.
If those hundreds of millions of not only unemployed but highly educated, smart unemployed don't get jobs reasonably soon, they'll live in a world where oceans don't protect us anymore, where they can pull down those arrogant hogs who consume a hundred times more than they do and keep all the good jobs for themselves.
We need to spread the blessings of liberty as fast and as far as we can, provide opportunity and create stable middle classes in all these places so the hungry, envious masses of the third world see a way out of poverty (if not for themselves then for their children) and don't come to kill us.
Globalization is both right and practical because it's the best way we've found to spread the wealth to the 3rd world without having the majority ending up in Swiss bank accounts of corrupt governments.
Some of the savings in wages from outsourcing overseas are lost in lower productivity, distance foulups from miscommunication and dissimilar business cultures. As work goes out of country, wages lower and total worker cost equalizes. Yes, this means that there will be downward pressure on US wages but it's going to be incremental and will not cause a collapse because it's a gradual process.
What US workers have is a fairly benign govt that is stable, not seriously threatened with overthrow, and a entrepreneurial culture. Do you realize how hard it is to start a business in India? How many bribes you have to pay to keep your business open in Russia? How scary it is to face PRC missiles pointed at you in Taiwan? Local workers will always have a broad choice of labor opportunities.
Do you ever ask yourself why people voluntarily walk into sweat shops? If you did, perhaps you might figure out that these horrible jobs are the best that are available locally. By soaking up excess labor, local elites are no longer able to depress local wages as much as they used to and wages tend to rise over time. Your stats on Mexico are absolute bs. Here's better numbers that show that wages have risen between 1985 and 1999.
If you run the numbers, someone who lives modestly at only double the average income (1k per year), works 10 years in IT and invests at 10% their investment income equals their earned income at the end of 10 years and they retire with an investment income of over 220k and a nest egg of 2.4 million dollars. Staying in their IT job essentially doubles the income and the nest egg at retirement.
This isn't to say that they're going to do it but they can and a minority will leave a surprising amount of capital to the next generation.
The history of high capital concentration societies is one of envy and eventual revolution. Your scenario doesn't merely require heartless plutocrats but dumb heartless plutocrats who don't study history and don't care if they end up hanging from the lamp posts.
This is a dvd player. It does not alter the pits and islands on the DVD. If you take your DVD disk and put it in another player without this technology you get to see everything. No doubt, even with this player it offers a mode that plays the full disk.
In other words, it's not altering the disk at all, merely offering to play it in different versions.
If there were a dubbing or subtitling DVD player that gave minority language groups the ability to access your art by translating in real time, would you have similar objections? What do you have against the laplanders and the Xhosas?
I think they're up in arms over this in part because it would serve as a very good foundation to attack the regional encoding system.
"Your Honor, I can cut out a bit of dialog or a nude scene but I can't watch a japanese import disk because it's not region encoded for me? Give me a break!"
Control lets them maintain their current business model which is a vastly profitable one. If they lose control, their industry leaves the amber and the current players have to fight and struggle to maintain themselves in a new market over which they have little control. There would likely be blood on the floor and a lot of corporate restructuring.
Hollywood would love to see this go to court. They can out lawyer the DVD maker and just bury them in motions and paperwork, all while struggling mightily to maintain a temporary restraining order to buy time. If the company is unable to ship product, they become more vulnerable to bankruptcy or buy out offers with the technology being buried by the new Hollywood owners.
Congratulations, you have just outlawed parody and mockery. Why not catch a few episodes of Mystery Sciece Theater 3000. MST3k is a classic example of why people shouldn't have moral rights.
The entire technological trash heap we idly throw away in the 1st world is fully capable of adding lots of sinister oomph to an Iraq, N. Korea, or other totalitarian regime. The reason it's trash for us isn't because it's no longer useful. It's trash because it takes too many expensive geek hours to get useful work done on it. Drop the price of geeks 99% and all of a sudden the same stuff is quite effective.
In case nobody notices, most totalitarian/authoritarian regimes always seem to drive wages down the toilet so this situation comes up more often than you might think.
Perhaps you're monitoring to see whether your commercial actually airs on the 10-20 channels you bought for your ad campaign. Maybe you work for a non-profit media watchdog group that monitors bias. Maybe you just want to beat the smug smile off the face of your neighbors who claim techno superiority with their Tivo.
There, three reasons, at least one of which will appeal to most people.
I don't mind a taller breathable atmosphere (will this ease the plight of those who go to high altitudes?) but skin cancer is no joke. I wonder if anybody's run the numbers on how much extra ozone is required to statistically eliminate one skin cancer case? Furthermore, how much would it cost to launch ozone generators (solar/fuel cell powered) into the stratosphere to just replenish the stuff.
Now there would be a worthy effort for a green group to take up. Too bad the mostly seem to be to busy protesting to actually solve problems.
What's wrong with just organizing chambers of commerce to do this? They are almost always pillars of the community, well trusted by all, and know pretty much every business in their area already.
Unfortunately, for countries in the 3rd or even 2nd world, this would end up being just one more excuse to shake down a business or force them to take on a dumb cousin as an employee.
Not all governments are trustworthy and sometimes companies are online in an effort to evade their local rapacious government.
Think chamber of commerce running this instead of Joe GNU. They already charge money for membership, know who their members are (and thus are superior to Verisign in most cases), and are generally trustworthy members of their community.
Every town, county and state has a chamber of commerce. Let them offer certs to their members as a perk of membership. If you're running a business, it's worth joining the chamber most of the time anyway and it's cheaper than an SSL cert in most cases.
As a bonus, since they're in this to get membership fees and they already know who their members are, the actual work of verification drops.
Segways are keyed to max out at 8mph for sidewalk use. That's a 7 minute mile and they won't exceed it even on a downhill because the electric motor turns into a generator and slows the thing down. And what current transportation technology that is around does that?
Banning something until it's been shown safe is a recipe for stagnation and retrogression. It takes a certain amount of societal progress just to stay in place, generation to generation because populations grow, resources become exhausted, etc. There are lots of societies run on the 'everything is not permitted unless it is specifically allowed' principle. They're all horrible places.
I recall that for a time the city of Hamburg had a 5mph speed limit on horse traffic and a 3mph limit for cars. A local car manufacturer offered the mayor a ride to show off a new model. While driving, a horse driven wagon passed them and made a rude gesture/word combination and passed (by prearrangement with the car mogul). The mayor wanted to chase down the wagon but the car man reminded the mayor of the differential speed limit. The speed limit was shortly thereafter equalized.
Then again, the key for sidewalk use drops it down to 8 mph which is in the 7 minute mile range. That's reasonable jogging speed and you hit 8 only if you're maxing the thing out.
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The salary numbers are done in constant peso terms, in other words, already corrected for the collapse in the peso.
We are never going to be able to go in and root out local elites without an occupation army (which I do not recommend). The only thing that we can do is offer alternate jobs that allow people outside the elites to engage in capital formation and create alternate power bases to raise a new generation of elites that can knock off the old, established, corrupt ones. It's not a quick process and it's not particularly pretty to watch but it is the best we've got.
The numbers cited came from the UN which, last I heard, wasn't "corporate PR crap" but a decent baseline for international comparisons of economies. The salaries in the UN data were current pesos for both stats, not 1993 pesos, in other words honest numbers. It's pretty obvious that your source has an ax to grind and engages in a few exercises in hand waving to explain away good news like increased growth rates for Mexico. Give it a rest.
You just don't get it. You don't do this sort of thing as a govt. program, you merely have to take down the barriers that stop people from progressing. A lot of those barriers are domestic to the respective country so you end up with people heading for the exits or trying desperately to work for foreigners. As people accumulate wealth, they gain the power to erode their own internal barriers to capital formation and they exit the third world.
Lower tariffs, increase trade, give people an opportunity to compete and show what they're good at and you end up with rising wage standards and eventually labor shortages.
If those hundreds of millions of not only unemployed but highly educated, smart unemployed don't get jobs reasonably soon, they'll live in a world where oceans don't protect us anymore, where they can pull down those arrogant hogs who consume a hundred times more than they do and keep all the good jobs for themselves.
We need to spread the blessings of liberty as fast and as far as we can, provide opportunity and create stable middle classes in all these places so the hungry, envious masses of the third world see a way out of poverty (if not for themselves then for their children) and don't come to kill us.
Globalization is both right and practical because it's the best way we've found to spread the wealth to the 3rd world without having the majority ending up in Swiss bank accounts of corrupt governments.
Some of the savings in wages from outsourcing overseas are lost in lower productivity, distance foulups from miscommunication and dissimilar business cultures. As work goes out of country, wages lower and total worker cost equalizes. Yes, this means that there will be downward pressure on US wages but it's going to be incremental and will not cause a collapse because it's a gradual process.
What US workers have is a fairly benign govt that is stable, not seriously threatened with overthrow, and a entrepreneurial culture. Do you realize how hard it is to start a business in India? How many bribes you have to pay to keep your business open in Russia? How scary it is to face PRC missiles pointed at you in Taiwan? Local workers will always have a broad choice of labor opportunities.
Do you ever ask yourself why people voluntarily walk into sweat shops? If you did, perhaps you might figure out that these horrible jobs are the best that are available locally. By soaking up excess labor, local elites are no longer able to depress local wages as much as they used to and wages tend to rise over time. Your stats on Mexico are absolute bs. Here's better numbers that show that wages have risen between 1985 and 1999.
If you run the numbers, someone who lives modestly at only double the average income (1k per year), works 10 years in IT and invests at 10% their investment income equals their earned income at the end of 10 years and they retire with an investment income of over 220k and a nest egg of 2.4 million dollars. Staying in their IT job essentially doubles the income and the nest egg at retirement.
This isn't to say that they're going to do it but they can and a minority will leave a surprising amount of capital to the next generation.
The history of high capital concentration societies is one of envy and eventual revolution. Your scenario doesn't merely require heartless plutocrats but dumb heartless plutocrats who don't study history and don't care if they end up hanging from the lamp posts.
I find that unlikely.
This is a dvd player. It does not alter the pits and islands on the DVD. If you take your DVD disk and put it in another player without this technology you get to see everything. No doubt, even with this player it offers a mode that plays the full disk.
In other words, it's not altering the disk at all, merely offering to play it in different versions.
If there were a dubbing or subtitling DVD player that gave minority language groups the ability to access your art by translating in real time, would you have similar objections? What do you have against the laplanders and the Xhosas?
I think they're up in arms over this in part because it would serve as a very good foundation to attack the regional encoding system.
"Your Honor, I can cut out a bit of dialog or a nude scene but I can't watch a japanese import disk because it's not region encoded for me? Give me a break!"
Control lets them maintain their current business model which is a vastly profitable one. If they lose control, their industry leaves the amber and the current players have to fight and struggle to maintain themselves in a new market over which they have little control. There would likely be blood on the floor and a lot of corporate restructuring.
Hollywood would love to see this go to court. They can out lawyer the DVD maker and just bury them in motions and paperwork, all while struggling mightily to maintain a temporary restraining order to buy time. If the company is unable to ship product, they become more vulnerable to bankruptcy or buy out offers with the technology being buried by the new Hollywood owners.
Congratulations, you have just outlawed parody and mockery. Why not catch a few episodes of Mystery Sciece Theater 3000. MST3k is a classic example of why people shouldn't have moral rights.
I can't believe nobody's recycled that joke yet on this thread...
The entire technological trash heap we idly throw away in the 1st world is fully capable of adding lots of sinister oomph to an Iraq, N. Korea, or other totalitarian regime. The reason it's trash for us isn't because it's no longer useful. It's trash because it takes too many expensive geek hours to get useful work done on it. Drop the price of geeks 99% and all of a sudden the same stuff is quite effective.
In case nobody notices, most totalitarian/authoritarian regimes always seem to drive wages down the toilet so this situation comes up more often than you might think.
Then again, if you were running Firewire, you can have 60+ devices on the chain. Splurge and spend the extra 30 bucks for an IEEE-1394 card.
Perhaps you're monitoring to see whether your commercial actually airs on the 10-20 channels you bought for your ad campaign. Maybe you work for a non-profit media watchdog group that monitors bias. Maybe you just want to beat the smug smile off the face of your neighbors who claim techno superiority with their Tivo.
There, three reasons, at least one of which will appeal to most people.
I don't mind a taller breathable atmosphere (will this ease the plight of those who go to high altitudes?) but skin cancer is no joke. I wonder if anybody's run the numbers on how much extra ozone is required to statistically eliminate one skin cancer case? Furthermore, how much would it cost to launch ozone generators (solar/fuel cell powered) into the stratosphere to just replenish the stuff.
Now there would be a worthy effort for a green group to take up. Too bad the mostly seem to be to busy protesting to actually solve problems.
What's wrong with just organizing chambers of commerce to do this? They are almost always pillars of the community, well trusted by all, and know pretty much every business in their area already.
Unfortunately, for countries in the 3rd or even 2nd world, this would end up being just one more excuse to shake down a business or force them to take on a dumb cousin as an employee.
Not all governments are trustworthy and sometimes companies are online in an effort to evade their local rapacious government.
Think chamber of commerce running this instead of Joe GNU. They already charge money for membership, know who their members are (and thus are superior to Verisign in most cases), and are generally trustworthy members of their community.
Every town, county and state has a chamber of commerce. Let them offer certs to their members as a perk of membership. If you're running a business, it's worth joining the chamber most of the time anyway and it's cheaper than an SSL cert in most cases.
As a bonus, since they're in this to get membership fees and they already know who their members are, the actual work of verification drops.
Segways are keyed to max out at 8mph for sidewalk use. That's a 7 minute mile and they won't exceed it even on a downhill because the electric motor turns into a generator and slows the thing down. And what current transportation technology that is around does that?
Banning something until it's been shown safe is a recipe for stagnation and retrogression. It takes a certain amount of societal progress just to stay in place, generation to generation because populations grow, resources become exhausted, etc. There are lots of societies run on the 'everything is not permitted unless it is specifically allowed' principle. They're all horrible places.
I recall that for a time the city of Hamburg had a 5mph speed limit on horse traffic and a 3mph limit for cars. A local car manufacturer offered the mayor a ride to show off a new model. While driving, a horse driven wagon passed them and made a rude gesture/word combination and passed (by prearrangement with the car mogul). The mayor wanted to chase down the wagon but the car man reminded the mayor of the differential speed limit. The speed limit was shortly thereafter equalized.
Every country has their crazy law stories
Then again, the key for sidewalk use drops it down to 8 mph which is in the 7 minute mile range. That's reasonable jogging speed and you hit 8 only if you're maxing the thing out.