Heh. You are funny. There are like a total of 21 B-2's and they take forever to get to a target. The U.S. is still mostly depending on around 336 Trident missiles launched from submarines and 500 relatively ancient Minuteman III's launched from silo's.
The delivery vehicles are being constantly upgraded, and they are still easy to test so they are not nearly the longevity problem the warheads are.
This is a pretty disturbing development in a lot of ways, especially since fairly recently the Bush administration was planning to develop new classes of nuclear weapons, especially bunker busters for use on bunkers and cave complexes, and they were seriously talking about using them in conventional conflicts, though Congress put their foot down in favor of this instead.
1. Each State Party undertakes not to carry out any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion, and to prohibit and prevent any such nuclear explosion at any place under its jurisdiction or control.
2. Each State Party undertakes, furthermore, to refrain from causing, encouraging, or in any way participating in the carrying out of any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion.
This leaves one to wonder how the U.S. is going to deploy new warheads without tearing up this treaty it signed. You can go quite a ways with computer simulations but I can't really see the U.S. relying on a new warhead design that hasn't actually been test fired.
This new deployment also runs counter to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which states the nuclear states are to "undertake effective measures in the direction of nuclear disarmament", "facilitate the cessation of manufacture of nuclear weapons", and "the elimination from national arsenals of nuclear weapons". The U.S. really is a major hypocrite when it tries to enforce this treaty on Iran and Iraq since it ignores most of the parts referring to the obligations of the nuclear powers that signed it. In my book either the U.S. withdraws from it or adheres to it. Demanding states like Iran adhere to it in every detail while the U.S. ignores its obligations does in fact make it a pretty hollow treaty.
For example the U.S. absolutely isn't supposed to transfer fissile material to states which haven't signed the treaty, and especially not to states which have nuclear weapons. The U.S. did exactly that recently when it signed a deal to sell fissile material to India for commerical purposes which probably frees up their existing stockpiles for weapons production.
The U.S. has also for years placed B61 tactical nukes within easy reach of NATO partners, Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey. It hadn't actually given them to them but had given them all the expertise necessary to deliver them and would transfer them to these countries in the event of a World War. It may not be a violation in fact but is one in spirit.
The treaty also echoes the U.N. charter and states:
"states must refrain from in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State"
The U.S. most definitely violated this when it invaded Iraq without a U.N. mandate, and when it threatens to do the same to Iran. This is why Kofi Annan referred to Iraq as an "illegal" war.
Well its also extremely badly targeted as in most people don't want to see most of the ads they are bombarded with. Google's ad model is better because it targets the interests of the person looking at them. Internet video could likewise target their audience much better than broadcast can. I for example never buy prescription drugs unless a doctor makes me. I have ZERO desire to be bombarded with drug company ads and in fact find it offensive to sell serious prescription drugs with serious side effect potential like soap, to create demand for them where there is often not need.
Not sure ads are really the only revenue model for Internet video. Google and others are charging a dollar or two to get video on demand, in many cases without ads. I've switched over to watching the Charlie Rose show exclusively through Google video, though granted when its free the day following its first airing on PBS. Charlie Rose is the best show around for intelligent talk. RocketBoom is also doing pretty well though I haven't watched it long enough to be sure its any good. Its kind of an exercise in an attractive blond talking head offering an alternative to conventional news broadcasts.
Relatively affluent people will in fact probably pay small amounts to get shows they like, easily, that they can watch when they want, where they want(on handhelds on a subway or in a carpool) and free of the curse of ads, or at least get targeted ads.
If you can reach a point where a large number of viewers can pay a small amount of money to support content that is interesting to them you could break down the horrors of network programming and TV being dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. TechTV is the best example I can think of programming most geeks loved but wasn't commercially viable in the broadcast model. It might be viable if a half million geeks were willing to pay a buck or two a week to support some of its better shows like Leo Laporte's.
"Good luck paying for all your high-speed bandwidth and priority handling"
Cringely had kind of interesting take on some of this last Friday. He was giving a talk to all the PBS affiliates and he proposed they each put a video server in their local telephone and cable office and target their local markets with video on demand that is cached closer to the viewer. His contention is there is a lot more bandwidth available between the phone and cable company office and homes, than there is between the phone and cable office and the Internet. In this caching model you would only go out over the Internet once to cache the video someone wants. Subsequent viewers would get it faster and without creating the bandwidth crunch on the wider Internet. Its kind of an Akamai caching scheme but geared towards video and much more local.
The biggest flaw in Cringely's pitch was his naivete that the PBS affiliates could just go talk to some guy in the local phone or cable office and drop a non profit video server there. Needless to say the big telephone and cable companies aren't going to just adopt non profit PBS video server, they are going to want their cut, but the idea is still a good one if you could work out a business model the broadband providers would like. It would be a lot better solution than tiering the internet, since the video bandwidth crunch is the rationale companies like BellSouth are proposing for destroying net neutrality.
I recall another Cringely article a while back about a guy who was making a business out of video servers for big apartment complexes I think where he would for example cache every copy of Star Trek on a local server so it was always available to the tenants. I think there is some way to do this which is or at least was legal. At the rate disk capacity is growing you really can cache a lot of video in a local server, maybe we will reach a point you cache more and faster than quality new content is being created that is worth caching.
I stand corrected. Bronfman diversified away from Seagram's and alcohol and it appears the Seagram's assets were scattered through Vivendi, Pernod Ricard, Pepsi, or who knows who. Bronfman was head of Vivendi Universal for a while after the merger and then bought Warner when he cashed out.
His family was one of Canada's richest, Jewish, and started moving to New York with Jr.s birth there. I guess you could say Warner is an American company.
"In fact, what I have seen is that good negotiators get good reward for their work. People with unique skills do not."
I think you missed the key word in my statement, I said "and". A good negotiator with nothing to bring to the table is probably going to fail, unless they are a REALLY good negotiator or the guy on the other side of the table isn't. A person with valuable skills or assets isn't going anywhere if they can't negotiate and cut favorable deals for themselves.
In the case of your study guides, the problem is you are at the mercy of your publisher and distributor, since they are the one with the most power at the table, you just have some good content. They are going to inevitably take a big cut because they know you are at their mercy, unless they really want your content and you are negotiating with more than one published or at least convince them you are.
Your other option is you self publish there is a steep hill to climb trying to publish to paper and distribute yourself. As I recall a teenager who wrote a fantasy novel did it and was very successful at it though, His family worked really hard driving bookstore to bookstore handing out copies, until word if mouth marketing kicked in. You could, of course self publish in the Internet, which would be perfect except 99% of your student customers wouldn't pay you for it, copy protection being a problem with online text.
"No. GM and Ford are tanking, ironically, mostly because the prices for used autos are diving."
If that were the case all car companies would be tanking, Toyota isn't. GM and Ford have a huge pension and health care burden with the UAW that their competitors don't, they also have very expensive labor on a global scale, and even versus non union car makers in the U.S., many foreign owned. They inevitably charge more for the same class car, or build inferior cars.
"...in prayer God told me.."
I hate to break it to you but the only way you are going to run a successful business relying on prayer is if you are an evangelist/conman bilking people using prayer as your tool.
"A company's neglect of these workers will and should be repaid with the failure of the company."
It would be nice if the world worked that way but it seldom does. Some companies can be very successful paying their employees well if they have a high margin, highly differentiated, business. Some companies can be very successful paying their employees nothing, usually because they are in a highly competitive undifferentiated market where price and margin is everything.
I'm not saying I like the world we live in, I'm just be a realist. Thinking or "praying" its going to change overnight is not very realistic. There are a lot of rich and powerful entities that like the world the way it is and will and have successfully resisted changing it.
"The only members of the CRIA are the American record labels."
Uh... the big four recording companies which control more than two thirds of the recording business, which are probably the ones that count here, aren't really "American". Some 2004 market share I could find:
"Universal maintains its position as the world's biggest recording company, with a 25.5% share of the world market. Sony BMG is next with a 21.5% share followed by EMI at 13.4% and Warner at 11.3%. The independent sector holds steady with a 28.4% global share."
Universal Music Group, while American in origin, is owned by Vivendi, which is a French company. Sony BMG is owned by... uh... Sony which is a Japanese company and BMG is Bertelsmann a German company. EMI is a British company based in London. Last I remember Time Warner sold Warner Music Group to Edgar Bronfman, principal in Seagrams. Seagrams is based in Montreal, though I think Bronfman lives in New York, and a lot of Warner Music is in the U.S. so its kind of a Canadian-American company.
So nice try, trying to ascribe RIAA/CRIA insanity solely to America isn't really accurate. You should probably just refer to them as multinationals, the root of most evil in the world. Greed is pretty much an international disease, the U.S. just has a particularly virulent dose.
"What about Eastern Europe or the Ukraine or Russia?.. China's Universities?!"
Well a problem there is China is most definitely one of the world's leading police states and Russia is returning to being one under Putin. Rather than being Communist police states, they are more Fascist police states which does mean there is some Capitalism and money to be made as long as the state lets you. The Ukraine's government is still very much in flux and isn't very stable, it was a police state, had a revolution, the new government had issues too, and could go back to the old one.
Not having read the article but I would guess Graham likes U.S. universities that aren't in police states or states in turmoil. States in turmoil or police states are bad places to start a business. In China in particular I'm sure you can get a great education unless it involves Democracy, a free press, or a business education about actual free enterprise (since Chinese business practices aren't really free since the state and party interferes in pretty much everything). Not sure you could get a good education as a free thinker and innovator in a state where everything is censored and you can't express any idea some snitch might rat you out for. I imagine you can get an excellent education in technical fields since they are less prone to controversy that would be a problem in a police state.
Of course as the U.S. drifts towards a Christian fundamentalist, militaristic, anti-science, police state this competitive advantage is eroding and predictably so its the U.S. economic and technological leadership(excepting of course weapons development).
"I've been through undergrad and grad schools in the US and I have to say that there were more than a few courses where I didn't learn anything."
I imagine it depends on which schools you went to. The engines of U.S. excellence tend to be Stanford, MIT, CalTech, Cornell and a few others. Many U.S. universities are more focused on the excellence of their football and basketball teams than the education the provide, many are degree mills, many are just trying to be profitable since they are more businesses than schools.
Not sure that the courses you sit through are even the important part. Stanford and MIT excel at getting a lot of bright young people together, they met, they brainstorm, they come up with the next big thing, start on it in a dorm room or corner of a lab and as soon as it looks viable they ditch the university in favor of a startup (reference Google). Regimented course are important for communicating a basic foundation in a field, they don't teach innovation.
"That means she has a negative networth well into the billions.:-)"
Excepting of course that her severance package was worth $42 million which makes her worth a hell of a lot more than you or me.
I see in the Wikipedia article on her that a couple of big institutional investors have filed a civil suit against HP because her golden parachute exceeded HP's cap on executive compensation.
She is also raking it in from serving on a bunch of boards including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing which is a lead foundry for ATI and Nvidia. TSMC's stock went down when they announced Carly was joining their board, coincidence, I think not....
She is also on boards for MIT and London Business School. You are left wondering if she is really that exceptional intellectually, or is it her exceptional ability to impress and BS people, or is it just a form of reverse discrimination where companies are looking for a high profile woman so their boards aren't all white men.
Carly had reached the point that she was a perpetual distraction, everyone was talking about her more than HP, so I would be inclined to say HP is doing better because she is gone. She was a one women wrecking crew for morale at HP, and her blatant elitism is offensive to most. In particular employees hated her when she was laying them off but buying Gulfstreams, having HP pay to move her yacht from East to West coast, and on perpetual company funded jet setting trips with celebrities mostly to build her political career. She acted more like a Duchess than a business person.
Her most famous quote "There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore. We all have to compete for jobs.", while probably true is a purely stupid thing for a CEO of an American company, with American workers, dependent on sales to a lot of American geeks to say out loud.
A social networking site that would be more valuable for this, something like LinkedIn. A professional networking site is probably more accurate and revealing.
The kind of obvious down side is I REALLY doubt Al Qaeda terrorists are spending much time on MySpace or LinkedIn or linking to all their cell members there.
If the NSA is really doing this it indicates that they are turning into the next generation KGB, or maybe J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon, and are just spying on everyone with no pretense of confining their scrutiny to enemies of the state. If someone in the DOD, CIA or White House wants to know everything about someone they will just send an email to the NSA and get a big electronic folder on you,
The first obvious problem is politicians wont be able to avoid the temptation to get all the dirt on their political opponents and their families at which point this brand of spying turns anti democratic since it will be used to smear opponents and rig elections. Its especially good for incumbents to abuse to hold power. Maybe the politician is clean but his son Billy said he smoked mara-ja-whana on MySpace, so he is going down. How can he run America if he can't raise his children... gasp.
It will also quickly be turned to spying on dissidents and anti war types, or actually probably already is. At that point it is used to suppress dissent by punishing those who dissent, and intimidating in advance anyone who wants to dissent because they are afraid of consequences of going against an all knowing, all seeing police state. Eliminating dissent is very desirable in a Fascist state. Everything works so much more smoothly if everyone goes along with everything the government does. For example, its hard to fight a good, long perpetual war if the public starts opposing it (reference Vietnam and now Iraq). You can rule the world if you have a huge, powerful, well equipped military, and can effectively control the way your people think (reference Germany 1939). You especially need to indoctrinate your people on the importance of military service and having your young people volunteer to patrol the streets and highways of Iraq. Now military service is important when you are being attacked, but not so important when you are the one doing the attacking.
You really need to get everyones income tax records included in this. I wager they probably already are but I think its still against the law. Of course when has something being against the law stopped the White House and the Republicans. George W. can just sign an executive order(a.k.a. dictate) and claim Congress authorized it with the insane bill they passed after 9/11 vaguely authorizing him to do do anything necessary to wage the "War on Terror". Apparently that bill, for all practical purposes, gave George W. dictatorial powers at least by his interpretation. Now if if could just get rid of that pesky two term limit and continue to rig elections he would be set. Republican Congressmen tried to sneak a paragraph in to a bill a year or two ago that would giving select Congressmen access to everyone's IRS records. Someone caught it at the last minute but this is a real indicator that some people in our government are angling for a police state.
IBM: "We won't let you keep using the names and trademarks we made famous if you do not support Linux."
I really doubt Lenovo would have been stupid enough to sign a deal with IBM that let IBM unilaterally take back its brands and trademarks. When it comes to blackmail its almost 100% the Chinese who are blackmailing the Western companies and not the other way around as in, "if you want access to our markets you do what we say". In IBM's case it was "if you want access to our markets you are going to sell your flagship consumer brand to a Chinese company" and IBM did what they were told (though they probably wanted to ditch their PC division anyway since its a saturated market).
Actually when China's head of state visited the U.S. a few weeks back the first person he visited was Bill Gates and not George W. They cut a deal where China was going to work harder to stop Windows piracy and Microsoft was going to invest a billion or two more in China.
I wager Lenovo's announcement dropping Linux might have been due to government pressure to only sell Windows on their machines to keep Uncle Bill happy. You see Uncle Bill is of the opinion that any PC that ships without Windows and without paying the Windows tax is probably going to have Linux wiped off the disk when it gets home, and pirated Windows installed, therefor in his view Linux PC's equal Windows piracy.
I'm not sure China has a real preference in the OS wars beyond the fact that they don't want to pay royalties to a Western company like Microsoft for the privilege of running one. It cuts in to the hundreds of billions in trade surplus with the West, and we cant have that. So the Chinese government pushes Linux because its free but they will push Windows as long as Uncle Bill sends them billions in investment to make up for it. Its a win-win for Uncle Bill since he gets more Windows tax money, snuffs out some Linux competition, and then he just send the Windows tax money back to China and gets a stake in Chinese hardware and software companies for it. China gets an industry heavyweight investing in the China instead of the U.S. and the money Uncle Bill sends to them cancels out the Windows tax they send to him.
The Cadillac Escalade was the most desirable vehicle for car thieves in the U.S. last year. It is a very luxurious SUV with a starting price around $60K. I imagine the reliability is not so great since it isn't a Toyota but Cadillac does do luxury interiors pretty well and always has.
"too often overvalue their own power, and undervalue their employees' efforts, time, and even lives."
My standard answer is that if you are going to make your way in life being an employee of someone else you need to realize that you in fact have very little power or value.
What you make tends to be a function of what you bring to the table that has value. If you have unique skills that are in high demand, and you are a good negotiator then you can probably ask for and get a good reward for your work.
If you have no unique skills and you are doing a job that any number of other people can do as well or better then chances are you wont be valued by your employer and your pay will suck. That is life. Unions or government shouldn't try to make you valuable than you really are. Unions tend to try to alter reality by making everyone in a union shop of equal value. This is good for the useless deadbeats with no skills since they get paid the same as high value, hard working workers. Its kind of bad for the people are working hard and carrying the deadbeats though. Its also bad for the employer since they have to pay a lot for employees who aren't worth it, which is why GM and Ford are tanking.
Another key point is that if you don't like how your employer treats you then you are free to find another one or better go in to business for yourself. You will discover that it is in fact really hard to make a successful business from scratch, and its very risky. Its especially hard to make a successful business that employs a lot of people.
People who risk their own assets, and make a business succeed do in fact deserve a lot for their efforts, because they probably gambled big and worked very hard.
On the other hand rock star execs, like Carly Fiorina, who hire in to already built companies, don't risk their assets at all, and run companies in to the ground or just keep them going don't deserve anything like the compensation they are getting. All they often bring to the table is their high capacity to BS people.
You might reply at this point its not practical for most people to start their own business. True. But this gets back to the fact if you have no marketable skills and no capital or assets, you actually aren't of much value in this world.
In free markets unfortunately you are worth what you are worth, and you do have some control over that.
I think you got your rants confused with Nike or someother company than Google. All Google did was try to provide their search and other internet services in China and ran in to the fact that China places some draconian restrictions on them. After living with them for a while they did the right thing in their view and are pulling out.
STOP BITCHING WHEN THEY DID THE RIGHT THING.
"A company that supports censorship in other nations, while enjoying freedom in it's own is totally unacceptable."
Hate to break it to you but nearly every country censors, the only issue is the degree and what. China is certainly on the high end of the scale. You can for example not say a LOT of words or show a lot of things on American media without getting fined or eventually driven off the air. The fines are in the process of being increased from something like $30K to $300K per incident. Pornography is heavily censored in many countries and standards vary widely. Are you saying a company that aids in censorship of pornography or obscene words from children is doing something morally and ethically reprehensible or are they being ethically responsible? Some European countries have some truly draconian censorship of anything relating to Fascism and Nazism. By your standard any company condoning this is detestable.
"A company that exploits forced prison labor camps in China"
You did know U.S. companies use U.S. prison labor didn't you? Microsoft used to or probably still does package some of its products using prison labor at the Twin Rivers Correctional Facility in Washington. Couple this with the fact the U.S. has one of the highest per capita prison populations in the world and your holier than thou pitch doesn't fly.
"Contracting with company to produce your product that pays young men and women an amount of money that is not very much, even in their poor country"
So you are proposing it would be be better if those men and women have no work at all? Sure it would be nice if they got a living wage but what that is tends to vary with each person's opinion and government mandated minimum wages have problems in their own right. If you put a minimum wage in one place and some other place doesn't then unfortunately, in a globalized world, a lot of jobs will migrate to where that cheapest labor is. It is an unfortunate fact of life when you live under Capitalism and in a semi free world.
Yes low wages jobs suck but it kind of follows that if those people are working there of their own volition those jobs are probably better than the other jobs available to them. Its kind of easy to rant sitting in some affluent country without appreciating that if you got your wish and those jobs disappeared then those people would be worse off than they are now.
"A company is not an soulless entity that has no responsibility to humanity."
Actually yes it is whether you like it or not. If the executives and board decide its in their interest andtheir shareholders interest to behave ethically and morally then great... unless of course they do something stupid in the process and tank the company wiping out the shareholders investment and the employees jobs.
If the executive and board opt to behave in a manner you don't consider ethical then its your prerogative to not buy their products or start a crusade against them or get a law passed against whatever they are doing.
It isn't your right or prerogative to demand that everyone adhere to your ethical standards. Companies really only need to operate within the laws in the countries where they operate. If a country doesn't have a minimum wage and its employees are starving that is probably ultimately an issue for the country to solve through its governmental process.
Cut the guy some slack. They went along with China's malevolent policies because Chinese is the largest potential Internet market on the planet and China is one of the fastest growing economies on the planet. There was overwhelming business pressure to cave to them, and be evil, because if they didn't their competitors(Yahoo and Microsoft) still would because they make no bones about being evil if its profitable. As a publicly traded company it is EXPECTED or maybe DEMANDED by Wall Street that they cave to any demands from China just to get in the game there.
Google will do some pretty serious harm to their business if they pull out of China on ethical grounds and Wall Street may punish them for it. Wall Street makes publicly traded companies evil by design, because Wall Street's only priority is profit, ethics only come in to play if bad etics hurt profitability which is pretty rarely. I'll be impressed if Google manages to avoid turning evil now that they are publicly traded, and keep their stock up at the same time.
It will be truly amazing and pretty much unprecedented if they pull out of China and abandon all this revenue to their competitors. Yahoo and Microsoft will keep getting revenue from there, and will get more with Google out of the way. Yahoo has been ratting out Chinese dissidents who are probably in jail now.
If Google pulls out of China it means they are doing something pretty much no other Western company has done. When it comes to China Western companies are a herd of lemmings being led over a cliff. They are selling their souls to the devil just to gain access to China's markets, or in other words they are agreeing to litany of blackmail and extortion demands from China's government to get in the game there. IBM abandoned their PC division to Lenovo as their price of admission to China's markets, though there is a chance they wanted to get rid of it anyway. One Western company after another is transferring capital, intellectual property, jobs and R&D to China to garner short term profits, at a likely price that China will eventually use those same assets to bury those same Western companies in the long run. The massive transfer of assets from the U.S. to China has already pretty much buried the U.S. economy since the U.S. simply can't survive for very long running a half trillion dollar trade deficit(and growing). Multinationals can sell the U.S. down the river like this and still make out like bandits in the short run but eventually the Chinese are going to start cutting those same U.S. multinationals down to size too.
I think the only "new" part is Microsoft is selling a subscription service now to protect your PC against this kind of thing:)
If you want to deal with spyware you need to prevent it from getting on your PC in the first place which is why you need some kind of security softare probably with regular updates so it can deal with new threats.
This is another in a long line of pretty lame/. submissions. The submitter was counting on getting it accepted and winning acclaim from the/. community by bashing Microsoft and Ballmer... and it worked. It is an unfortunate fact that it IS pretty much impossible for anyone to confidently "repair" a PC that has been infected with large volume of spyware for a long time, and which wasn't getting security patches. Its relatively difficult to reliably figure out what parts of the system have been tampered with. You are better of backing up all your files, wiping the disk, reinstalling and using a scanner to weed out spyware and virii amongst your files before you reinstall them.
Allchin is repeating his story because he is now marketing a product to prevent you from getting infected with the spyware in the first place. It is a great product for him to market since it entails an annual subscription and Microsoft really wants some steady subscription revenue. Its also great for Microsoft because its another instance where they are going to use their monopoly power to destroy companies(Symantec, McAfee, etc) that built businesses providing this service when Microsoft failed to deal with the problem years ago. Microsoft is going to transfer some of the billions consumers currently spend on Symantec and McAfee in to their coffers and it should cause a nice little bump in their revenue unless their service completely sucks. And of course Symantec and McAfee are now competitors instead of partners, which is tough for them,
Actually I think the problem at Intel was they innovated too much and in the wrong direction. They poured billions in to Itanium and its horrible for any volume market, its really only good in the tiny supercomputing niche. They really took their eye of the commodity market, where their profits come from, fiddling with that monster.
They also innovated too much on Pentium 4 and it ended up with an excessively complex, hot expensive processor that didn't perform well, and its not good for most things people need CPU's for today.
AMD focused on adding 64 bit support, without breaking IA32 support like Itanium did, and building fast, simple, cheap CPU's and thats what people want. A number of AMD's generations of are incremental improvements and refinements of a fairly old design and not really that innovative aside from the x86_64 instruction set.
I think Intel's problem in recent years, like the last 10 years on Itanium, was just bad strategic direction and the blame falls ultimately on their chief executive during that period, though he no doubt received some bad advice from the people under him.
Its not like Intel's huge missteps permanently damaged them though. The beauty of being a monopoly is you can completely screw the pooch and still make money hand over fist for a long time.
In reading the reviews it kind of sounds good until this part:
" We need shorter work weeks, stronger labor unions, worker-owned or directed firms, less debt and more respect for the environment."
Shorter work weeks would nice if it worked but in a globalized world its kind of a strategy for failure. Like it or not there are countries where people work a lot more than Americans, and pretty much everyone works more than Western Europeans. You simply wont compete with 30 hour weeks unless you actually pay people for 30 hours work and you are proposing cutting their annual incomes by a quarter which I don't think was the idea.
I'd like to believe labor unions would make things better, but at least in the U.S., they started out good and then turned in to a force as malignant as corporations if not more so. First off they were taken over by power hungry corrupt people just like corporations and governments. You see union heads have power so they got corrupted just like all the other power centers. Even worse many unions fell under the control of organized crime. Second of all the have created environments where workers don't have to work. They can hide behind a blizzard of union rules that completely obstruct companies from getting the job done, managers managing or turning a profit. One of the strongest unions America has left is the United Auto Workers, and the fact that Ford and GM are at the mercy of their unions is insuring they are going to land in bankruptcy. They simply can't compete against Asian competitors who are operating without unions. Third unions suffer blatant cronyism, where you have to know the right people to get in to the union and then get a job, resulting in hiring of incompetent people with connections over the best qualified.
Now maybe if you could unionize the entire planet so it was a level playing field it might work, but unilateral unionization of only American workers would just accelerate off shoring and the collapse of the U.S. economy.
Less debt is unarguably good.
Can't say if worker owned and directed firms would be good or bad. I'm guessing it would vary wildly from situation to situation. In some cases workers would be highly motivated by it and produce great results. In others worker would twist in to getting the most benefits for the least work, and would do strategically stupid things because it was in their self interest. Some executives do the same thing. My take is throwing this out like its the be all and end all solution is wrong, sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn't.
A law or constitutional amendment eliminating deficit spending, would be a big help. The current system simply has to much free money for politicians to spend on pork and doing favors for lobbyists. If there were less money available to spend in Washington, and a mandate for greater fiscal discipline, there would be less corruption. The incentive to corrupt politicans would fade if there was no free money to be had. Follow that by cutting taxes until it hurts. It would be some serious pain but this country really needs to stop relying on government spending. The only value in deficit spending is its a tool to stimulate the economy during downturns but its been so abused under Reagan and Bush especially the benefits don't justify the danger any more. As we approach $9 trillion in debt just servicing the debt is becoming a crushing burden.
I would be OK without outlawing paid lobbyists all together. They really aren't useful in crafting legislation in the public interest, since they cater to special interests. If an individual wants to lobby Congress go for it, just don't do it for pay from someone else. Really don't let lobbyists anywhere near the Capital when important legislation is up for a vote.
I think corporations really should be completely cut out of government and elections, and to be fair unions too. We really should have a government of the people, as in individuals, and not of corporations and unions. There should public funding of elections or a hard cap on all campaign contributions of like a thousand dollars and only from individuals so no one gets special treatment because they have money to burn. A corporations sole motivation in approaching politicians is to do things to improve their profitability and government really should be doing its best to neither impede nor enhance corprate bottom lines. If our country is based on free markets it would be nice if they were really free instead of politicians constantly picking winners and losers. Government should regulate corporations to prevent corruption and abuse, and maintain some basic order, but otherwise not subsidize or hinder them. Government dependence on contractors is still a huge intractable problem that drives corruption. Replacing them with civil servants isn't a good solution either.
Its a much harder problem to get people to step up for public service, if you rob them of the huge payoffs when they return to the private sector. You run the risk you will only have rich people take the jobs, people who don't need the money. Some of our greatest public servants have been the rich but it would be nice to have ordinary people serve in Congress. I'd almost say we should term limit the hell out of people in Congress, like 1-3 terms for the House and 1 term in the Senate, maybe 1 term for President, get rid of professional politicians, and figure out a way to really get ordinary people in there, who aren't making a career out of it. Ideally you would want them to spend most of their time repealing old, bad laws and refraining from writing new ones, unless absolutely necessary. Our politicians write way more laws than they should and inject far to much special interest crap in to them. Laws should be simple, stay on topic and be done only when really necessary. You do need to maintain a corp of civil servants who are experienced in day to day operation of the government, in economics, defense and foreign affairs. It is near to impossible to get the best people to step up to do this if they don't have a huge payoff down the road some place.
"some corporations create depressed opportunities for women and minorities"
Actually in America its as common if not more so for women and minorities to get preferential treatment to the detriment of both the corporation and other workers. Many companies will hire women and minorities over more qualified applicants. Incompetent or rogue employees routinely level discrimination charges to prevent being held to account for unacceptable performance, seen it with my own eyes numerous times. One lady I used to work for was promoted not for ability but merely because the company wanted to fire a rogue woman employee who would level discrimination accusations everytime they attempted it. They promoted a women to be her boss simply because she could fire her and get away with it.
When it comes to winning government contracts it is common practice to fabricate women or minority ownership because it gives the company a massive inside track on winning contracts.
"Corporations' refusal to consider the morality of their behavior is part of why they are so hated now."
And that hatred counts for next to nothing since people still buy their products because they are all operating at pretty much the same level. Most people still shop at Walmart, though everyone says they hate them, because their prices are better and only idealists with money to burn will pay more for the same product on "moral" grounds.
You can run an extremely "moral" company but if you have amoral competitors chances are high they will bury you because they will underprice you. Being moral is a good thing for a corpration since it helps their brand and makes consumers feel good about them, but if its taken to the point it makes the company uncompetitive, consumers will still abandon them.
Whether you like it or not you are for the most part living under Capitalism and free markets and morals aren't at the top of the priority scheme. Not saying its right, I'm just being a realist and you aren't. If you want to try Socialism and have the government regulate corprate morality, go for it, as in move a place like France, and you will discover its bad too. France has gone to great lengths to protect their workers from malignant corporations. The end result is they now have a workers who are impossible to fire even when they deserve it, In such a system workers have no motivation to work because nothing can be done about it if they don't. They are completely uncompetitive in a global market and their economy is tanking as a result, and they have very high unemployment because businesses don't want to risk locating there and if they do they have a good chance of failing.
A key reason that the U.S. has such a staggering trade deficit is due to the "morale" constraints businesses in the U.S. have so they are no longer competitive on a global stage. Environmental regulation, work place safety rules, relatively high wages and very expensive health insurance make American products completely uncompetitive against foreign rivals. Companies are offshoring at such a furious pace precisely to escape all the "moral" constraints on doing business in the U.S. The only way to prevent it is massive protectionism which probably will fail or you compell the rest of the world to adopt your morality which is nearly impossible to do.
I forgot to add that during the California electricity crisis a few years back the Bush administration and FARC refused to investigate charge of price fixing and gouging. They more or less said it was free markets at work, and to use your term "exogenous" forces at work. It was also California's fault for bad power generation policy.
Well since then it came to light that energy traders at Enron, Dynegy and number of other electricity providers were in fact colluding to inflate the price and to create artificial shortages. I think its a bit naive to pretend that free markets are in fact always free. They are unfortunately a system that is a product of man and as a result susceptible to one of the most fundamental tendencies of men, greed.
"gets screamed each time the gas price rises due to exogenous factors"
Well I think its safe to say that oil prices are more than a little vulnerable to manipulation. Now its nearly impossible to tell who is doing all the manipulating, but I would guess big oil companies and OPEC governments certainly have a part. OPEC is after all a cartel which is designed to collude to set production and manipulate prices though they are often not very good at it any more.
Whomever the mysterious oil "traders" are who drive the prices on commodity markets are probably most to blame. These are probably middlemen who are buying and selling oil futures and delight in pocketing a quick $1-10 dollars a barrel, for doing nothing, other than gambling with large sums of money. Everytime there is some bad news in an oil producting country, often news that had no real impact on oil supplies, they exploit it to push prices up and profit. It just happens that OPEC and Exxon Mobile make out like bandits when a barrel of oil goes for $70 too. It doesn't cost anything close to that to actually produce so more than half of that is pure profit. There is unfortunately very little real competition in the "free market" for oil thanks to OPEC, oil company consolidation and commodity markets. Thanks to consolidation Exxon Mobile now closely resembles Standard Oil. A key factor Exxon Mobile does play in gas prices is they do control refining and since refining was deregulated under Reagan the oil companies have colluded to keep refining capacity on a razors edge. Excess refining capacity eats in to their profits. Insufficient refining capacity is a convenient tool to keep supplies short which makes it easy for them to drive up prices. Commodity markets are probably the most malignant part of the system but they are not one you can easily fix.
"Plenty of democrats are paid by corporations."
If you want to fix the blame for the problem in our political system everyone should stop trying to fix it on Democrats or Republicans. The current cancer can mostly be traced to lobbyists who are corrupting both parties and the whole system, and the politicians they buy from both parties. Most of the lobbyists do in fact work for corporations though some for work for Unions and other special interest groups too.
The single biggest source of corruption is the revolving door in government and the military, and Mike McCurray, lobbyist is a product of that system. You see people who work for the government and military don't get paid well so they don't take political appointments or spend years kissing ass for the pay. They do however take these jobs so they can spend their careers doing favors for lobbyists, again mostly corporate lobbyists but not always, and then when they retire they get gigantic payoffs where they land multimillion dollar executive positions and "consulting" jobs for those same special interests, or they become lobbyists themselves and charge their clients huge sums for their political connections and "access".
You see that is the problem with Mike McCurray here, and Arie Fleischer and just about every other political appointee and politician turned lobbyist. McCurray doesn't actually care what the best public policy is on these issues. They are paid large sums to take the position of their benefactors, usually corprate, and then use their skills, personal influence and knowledge of the system to corrupt it to get the outcome they seek, an outcome which usually runs counter to the public interest as it does in this case.
Medicare D, the prescription drug benefit, was the most expensive and vivid example of this corruption yet witnessed in America. The Medicare administrator was negotiating a high paying job with people who reaped a windfall from this bill, at the same time he was outright lying about the total cost of the bill to make sure it would pass to please his future employers, so it will cost taxpayer hundreds of billions more than was claimed when it was passed. The Congressman
"I believe that the people whose lives are on the line to defend the US are entitled to a high priority in the job market"
Not sure what you just said. You are saying that companies should hire American veterans, like those serving in Iraq, ahead of everyone else? I'm assuming you are proposing Apple do this even if those people aren't even remotely qualified, though it sounds like the people they hired in India weren't qualified either. I think companies should hire people who have experience in the field and proved ability first, as in they should hire the most qualified applicants. The BIG problem with many companies outsourcing to India is they are getting a bunch of warm bodies that work cheap, but have no experience, knowledge or aptitude for the job and that often leads to a disaster. Hiring vets the same way would be just as bad.
By the way the soldiers fighting in Iraq aren't "defending America" in any way shape or form. The war in Iraq had nothing to do with "defending America". At this point its probably increased the danger to America, and made America less safe, because its made most of the world really hate America, incidents like Abu Graib and Haditha in particular. In Iraq we took a country that in fact had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or 9/11 and turned it in to an Al Qaeda recruiting poster.
"there is a moral right"
There is no such right, never has been, never will be. Hiring is economics. If you make stupid hiring decisions based on "moral" grounds and you tank your company your board should fire you because you are an idiot. Hiring decisions should be based on the ability of the workers to do the work that needs to be done, and yes how much it will cost to hire them. Despite the recent corprate delusion to the country, there are many instances where hiring more expensive workers is the right choice, especially when they have more experience or ability in the field so you get better work, versus hiring a bunch of cheap offshore workers who have no clue what they are doing and it will take them a long time and a lot of training to learn. If the off shore workers are as qualified, can do the work, the company can handle the logisitcs and are cheaper they should get the job.
"If the rest of the World wants a first-rate country - they can follow our lead - create a rule of law - not a theocracy - for example, hold corruption accountable"
OK now you are either trolling or you are scary or naive. There are certainly countries worse than the U.S. in these areas but the U.S., especially lately, isn't so great you should be bragging about it like this.
The Bush administration in particular has been decimating the rule of law in the country. The sterling example on Slashdot this weekend was state secrets privilege. This is a magic wand the Bush administration waves to make the rule of law disappear, for example it allows them to arrest and torture innocent people without being held to account, as they did to Khalid El-Masri. In the case of Jose Padilla George W. sought to prove that he can arrest and detain any U.S. citizen he feels like without charges, without access to a lawyer or the courts. The Supreme Court finally just said maybe he can't but they've taken their sweet time about it and he is still in jail without a day in court, and George W. packed the court with Alito since then. This is not the kind of thing you do in countries which have a "rule of law".
"not a theocracy"
The U.S. is most definitely closer to a theocracy now than it has been any time in my lifetime. Is it the Taliban, Iran or the theocracy we are helping build in Iraq, no, but the Bush administration has shredded the separation of church and state which used to make us a model of religious freedom and
I think a more likely possibility relates to the fact that when the Chinese head of state visited the U.S. a few weeks ago the first person he met was Bill Gates and not George W. Bush. As best I recall they struck a deal where Microsoft was going to invest a billion or maybe it was billions of dollars in China in R&D, hardware companies, etc. The Chinese, as their part of the deal, were supposed to combat software piracy as best I recall.
From the viewpoint of Bill Gates I suspect "combating software piracy" could easily translate in to all big Chinese PC manufacturers will start paying the Microsoft tax, and pay for a copy of Windows on every computer they ship. If all PC manufactures pay the tax I think that equates to piracy problem solved as far as Gates is concerned.
Also from the perspective of Bill Gates I think if a computer is shipped without Windows, with Linux instead, it is really a form of piracy, because its a given the customer will format the hard drive as soon as they get home and install a pirated version of Windows, because NO ONE would actually run Linux on the computer, they were just trying to save a few bucks and screw Microsoft out of their monopoly money.
Slashdot Mirror
"still b-2 stealth bombers"
Heh. You are funny. There are like a total of 21 B-2's and they take forever to get to a target. The U.S. is still mostly depending on around 336 Trident missiles launched from submarines and 500 relatively ancient Minuteman III's launched from silo's.
The delivery vehicles are being constantly upgraded, and they are still easy to test so they are not nearly the longevity problem the warheads are.
This is a pretty disturbing development in a lot of ways, especially since fairly recently the Bush administration was planning to develop new classes of nuclear weapons, especially bunker busters for use on bunkers and cave complexes, and they were seriously talking about using them in conventional conflicts, though Congress put their foot down in favor of this instead.
The U.S. also isn't supposed to test new warheads under the comprehensive test ban treaty:
1. Each State Party undertakes not to carry out any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion, and to prohibit and prevent any such nuclear explosion at any place under its jurisdiction or control.
2. Each State Party undertakes, furthermore, to refrain from causing, encouraging, or in any way participating in the carrying out of any nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion.
This leaves one to wonder how the U.S. is going to deploy new warheads without tearing up this treaty it signed. You can go quite a ways with computer simulations but I can't really see the U.S. relying on a new warhead design that hasn't actually been test fired.
This new deployment also runs counter to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which states the nuclear states are to "undertake effective measures in the direction of nuclear disarmament", "facilitate the cessation of manufacture of nuclear weapons", and "the elimination from national arsenals of nuclear weapons". The U.S. really is a major hypocrite when it tries to enforce this treaty on Iran and Iraq since it ignores most of the parts referring to the obligations of the nuclear powers that signed it. In my book either the U.S. withdraws from it or adheres to it. Demanding states like Iran adhere to it in every detail while the U.S. ignores its obligations does in fact make it a pretty hollow treaty.
For example the U.S. absolutely isn't supposed to transfer fissile material to states which haven't signed the treaty, and especially not to states which have nuclear weapons. The U.S. did exactly that recently when it signed a deal to sell fissile material to India for commerical purposes which probably frees up their existing stockpiles for weapons production.
The U.S. has also for years placed B61 tactical nukes within easy reach of NATO partners, Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey. It hadn't actually given them to them but had given them all the expertise necessary to deliver them and would transfer them to these countries in the event of a World War. It may not be a violation in fact but is one in spirit.
The treaty also echoes the U.N. charter and states:
"states must refrain from in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State"
The U.S. most definitely violated this when it invaded Iraq without a U.N. mandate, and when it threatens to do the same to Iran. This is why Kofi Annan referred to Iraq as an "illegal" war.
" and that's where the big ad money is"
Well its also extremely badly targeted as in most people don't want to see most of the ads they are bombarded with. Google's ad model is better because it targets the interests of the person looking at them. Internet video could likewise target their audience much better than broadcast can. I for example never buy prescription drugs unless a doctor makes me. I have ZERO desire to be bombarded with drug company ads and in fact find it offensive to sell serious prescription drugs with serious side effect potential like soap, to create demand for them where there is often not need.
Not sure ads are really the only revenue model for Internet video. Google and others are charging a dollar or two to get video on demand, in many cases without ads. I've switched over to watching the Charlie Rose show exclusively through Google video, though granted when its free the day following its first airing on PBS. Charlie Rose is the best show around for intelligent talk. RocketBoom is also doing pretty well though I haven't watched it long enough to be sure its any good. Its kind of an exercise in an attractive blond talking head offering an alternative to conventional news broadcasts.
Relatively affluent people will in fact probably pay small amounts to get shows they like, easily, that they can watch when they want, where they want(on handhelds on a subway or in a carpool) and free of the curse of ads, or at least get targeted ads.
If you can reach a point where a large number of viewers can pay a small amount of money to support content that is interesting to them you could break down the horrors of network programming and TV being dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. TechTV is the best example I can think of programming most geeks loved but wasn't commercially viable in the broadcast model. It might be viable if a half million geeks were willing to pay a buck or two a week to support some of its better shows like Leo Laporte's.
"Good luck paying for all your high-speed bandwidth and priority handling"
Cringely had kind of interesting take on some of this last Friday. He was giving a talk to all the PBS affiliates and he proposed they each put a video server in their local telephone and cable office and target their local markets with video on demand that is cached closer to the viewer. His contention is there is a lot more bandwidth available between the phone and cable company office and homes, than there is between the phone and cable office and the Internet. In this caching model you would only go out over the Internet once to cache the video someone wants. Subsequent viewers would get it faster and without creating the bandwidth crunch on the wider Internet. Its kind of an Akamai caching scheme but geared towards video and much more local.
The biggest flaw in Cringely's pitch was his naivete that the PBS affiliates could just go talk to some guy in the local phone or cable office and drop a non profit video server there. Needless to say the big telephone and cable companies aren't going to just adopt non profit PBS video server, they are going to want their cut, but the idea is still a good one if you could work out a business model the broadband providers would like. It would be a lot better solution than tiering the internet, since the video bandwidth crunch is the rationale companies like BellSouth are proposing for destroying net neutrality.
I recall another Cringely article a while back about a guy who was making a business out of video servers for big apartment complexes I think where he would for example cache every copy of Star Trek on a local server so it was always available to the tenants. I think there is some way to do this which is or at least was legal. At the rate disk capacity is growing you really can cache a lot of video in a local server, maybe we will reach a point you cache more and faster than quality new content is being created that is worth caching.
I stand corrected. Bronfman diversified away from Seagram's and alcohol and it appears the Seagram's assets were scattered through Vivendi, Pernod Ricard, Pepsi, or who knows who. Bronfman was head of Vivendi Universal for a while after the merger and then bought Warner when he cashed out.
His family was one of Canada's richest, Jewish, and started moving to New York with Jr.s birth there. I guess you could say Warner is an American company.
"In fact, what I have seen is that good negotiators get good reward for their work. People with unique skills do not."
I think you missed the key word in my statement, I said "and". A good negotiator with nothing to bring to the table is probably going to fail, unless they are a REALLY good negotiator or the guy on the other side of the table isn't. A person with valuable skills or assets isn't going anywhere if they can't negotiate and cut favorable deals for themselves.
In the case of your study guides, the problem is you are at the mercy of your publisher and distributor, since they are the one with the most power at the table, you just have some good content. They are going to inevitably take a big cut because they know you are at their mercy, unless they really want your content and you are negotiating with more than one published or at least convince them you are.
Your other option is you self publish there is a steep hill to climb trying to publish to paper and distribute yourself. As I recall a teenager who wrote a fantasy novel did it and was very successful at it though, His family worked really hard driving bookstore to bookstore handing out copies, until word if mouth marketing kicked in. You could, of course self publish in the Internet, which would be perfect except 99% of your student customers wouldn't pay you for it, copy protection being a problem with online text.
"No. GM and Ford are tanking, ironically, mostly because the prices for used autos are diving."
If that were the case all car companies would be tanking, Toyota isn't. GM and Ford have a huge pension and health care burden with the UAW that their competitors don't, they also have very expensive labor on a global scale, and even versus non union car makers in the U.S., many foreign owned. They inevitably charge more for the same class car, or build inferior cars.
"...in prayer God told me.."
I hate to break it to you but the only way you are going to run a successful business relying on prayer is if you are an evangelist/conman bilking people using prayer as your tool.
"A company's neglect of these workers will and should be repaid with the failure of the company."
It would be nice if the world worked that way but it seldom does. Some companies can be very successful paying their employees well if they have a high margin, highly differentiated, business. Some companies can be very successful paying their employees nothing, usually because they are in a highly competitive undifferentiated market where price and margin is everything.
I'm not saying I like the world we live in, I'm just be a realist. Thinking or "praying" its going to change overnight is not very realistic. There are a lot of rich and powerful entities that like the world the way it is and will and have successfully resisted changing it.
"The only members of the CRIA are the American record labels."
... the big four recording companies which control more than two thirds of the recording business, which are probably the ones that count here, aren't really "American". Some 2004 market share I could find:
... uh ... Sony which is a Japanese company and BMG is Bertelsmann a German company.
Uh
"Universal maintains its position as the world's biggest recording company, with a 25.5% share of the world market. Sony BMG is next with a 21.5% share followed by EMI at 13.4% and Warner at 11.3%. The independent sector holds steady with a 28.4% global share."
Universal Music Group, while American in origin, is owned by Vivendi, which is a French company.
Sony BMG is owned by
EMI is a British company based in London.
Last I remember Time Warner sold Warner Music Group to Edgar Bronfman, principal in Seagrams. Seagrams is based in Montreal, though I think Bronfman lives in New York, and a lot of Warner Music is in the U.S. so its kind of a Canadian-American company.
So nice try, trying to ascribe RIAA/CRIA insanity solely to America isn't really accurate. You should probably just refer to them as multinationals, the root of most evil in the world. Greed is pretty much an international disease, the U.S. just has a particularly virulent dose.
"What about Eastern Europe or the Ukraine or Russia? .. China's Universities?!"
Well a problem there is China is most definitely one of the world's leading police states and Russia is returning to being one under Putin. Rather than being Communist police states, they are more Fascist police states which does mean there is some Capitalism and money to be made as long as the state lets you. The Ukraine's government is still very much in flux and isn't very stable, it was a police state, had a revolution, the new government had issues too, and could go back to the old one.
Not having read the article but I would guess Graham likes U.S. universities that aren't in police states or states in turmoil. States in turmoil or police states are bad places to start a business. In China in particular I'm sure you can get a great education unless it involves Democracy, a free press, or a business education about actual free enterprise (since Chinese business practices aren't really free since the state and party interferes in pretty much everything). Not sure you could get a good education as a free thinker and innovator in a state where everything is censored and you can't express any idea some snitch might rat you out for. I imagine you can get an excellent education in technical fields since they are less prone to controversy that would be a problem in a police state.
Of course as the U.S. drifts towards a Christian fundamentalist, militaristic, anti-science, police state this competitive advantage is eroding and predictably so its the U.S. economic and technological leadership(excepting of course weapons development).
"I've been through undergrad and grad schools in the US and I have to say that there were more than a few courses where I didn't learn anything."
I imagine it depends on which schools you went to. The engines of U.S. excellence tend to be Stanford, MIT, CalTech, Cornell and a few others. Many U.S. universities are more focused on the excellence of their football and basketball teams than the education the provide, many are degree mills, many are just trying to be profitable since they are more businesses than schools.
Not sure that the courses you sit through are even the important part. Stanford and MIT excel at getting a lot of bright young people together, they met, they brainstorm, they come up with the next big thing, start on it in a dorm room or corner of a lab and as soon as it looks viable they ditch the university in favor of a startup (reference Google). Regimented course are important for communicating a basic foundation in a field, they don't teach innovation.
"HP's stock price went up %7 when she was fired!"
:-)"
Its doubled since the was ousted!
"That means she has a negative networth well into the billions.
Excepting of course that her severance package was worth $42 million which makes her worth a hell of a lot more than you or me.
I see in the Wikipedia article on her that a couple of big institutional investors have filed a civil suit against HP because her golden parachute exceeded HP's cap on executive compensation.
She is also raking it in from serving on a bunch of boards including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing which is a lead foundry for ATI and Nvidia. TSMC's stock went down when they announced Carly was joining their board, coincidence, I think not....
She is also on boards for MIT and London Business School. You are left wondering if she is really that exceptional intellectually, or is it her exceptional ability to impress and BS people, or is it just a form of reverse discrimination where companies are looking for a high profile woman so their boards aren't all white men.
No :)
Carly had reached the point that she was a perpetual distraction, everyone was talking about her more than HP, so I would be inclined to say HP is doing better because she is gone. She was a one women wrecking crew for morale at HP, and her blatant elitism is offensive to most. In particular employees hated her when she was laying them off but buying Gulfstreams, having HP pay to move her yacht from East to West coast, and on perpetual company funded jet setting trips with celebrities mostly to build her political career. She acted more like a Duchess than a business person.
Her most famous quote "There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore. We all have to compete for jobs.", while probably true is a purely stupid thing for a CEO of an American company, with American workers, dependent on sales to a lot of American geeks to say out loud.
A social networking site that would be more valuable for this, something like LinkedIn. A professional networking site is probably more accurate and revealing.
... gasp.
The kind of obvious down side is I REALLY doubt Al Qaeda terrorists are spending much time on MySpace or LinkedIn or linking to all their cell members there.
If the NSA is really doing this it indicates that they are turning into the next generation KGB, or maybe J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon, and are just spying on everyone with no pretense of confining their scrutiny to enemies of the state. If someone in the DOD, CIA or White House wants to know everything about someone they will just send an email to the NSA and get a big electronic folder on you,
The first obvious problem is politicians wont be able to avoid the temptation to get all the dirt on their political opponents and their families at which point this brand of spying turns anti democratic since it will be used to smear opponents and rig elections. Its especially good for incumbents to abuse to hold power. Maybe the politician is clean but his son Billy said he smoked mara-ja-whana on MySpace, so he is going down. How can he run America if he can't raise his children
It will also quickly be turned to spying on dissidents and anti war types, or actually probably already is. At that point it is used to suppress dissent by punishing those who dissent, and intimidating in advance anyone who wants to dissent because they are afraid of consequences of going against an all knowing, all seeing police state. Eliminating dissent is very desirable in a Fascist state. Everything works so much more smoothly if everyone goes along with everything the government does. For example, its hard to fight a good, long perpetual war if the public starts opposing it (reference Vietnam and now Iraq). You can rule the world if you have a huge, powerful, well equipped military, and can effectively control the way your people think (reference Germany 1939). You especially need to indoctrinate your people on the importance of military service and having your young people volunteer to patrol the streets and highways of Iraq. Now military service is important when you are being attacked, but not so important when you are the one doing the attacking.
You really need to get everyones income tax records included in this. I wager they probably already are but I think its still against the law. Of course when has something being against the law stopped the White House and the Republicans. George W. can just sign an executive order(a.k.a. dictate) and claim Congress authorized it with the insane bill they passed after 9/11 vaguely authorizing him to do do anything necessary to wage the "War on Terror". Apparently that bill, for all practical purposes, gave George W. dictatorial powers at least by his interpretation. Now if if could just get rid of that pesky two term limit and continue to rig elections he would be set. Republican Congressmen tried to sneak a paragraph in to a bill a year or two ago that would giving select Congressmen access to everyone's IRS records. Someone caught it at the last minute but this is a real indicator that some people in our government are angling for a police state.
IBM: "We won't let you keep using the names and trademarks we made famous if you do not support Linux."
I really doubt Lenovo would have been stupid enough to sign a deal with IBM that let IBM unilaterally take back its brands and trademarks. When it comes to blackmail its almost 100% the Chinese who are blackmailing the Western companies and not the other way around as in, "if you want access to our markets you do what we say". In IBM's case it was "if you want access to our markets you are going to sell your flagship consumer brand to a Chinese company" and IBM did what they were told (though they probably wanted to ditch their PC division anyway since its a saturated market).
Actually when China's head of state visited the U.S. a few weeks back the first person he visited was Bill Gates and not George W. They cut a deal where China was going to work harder to stop Windows piracy and Microsoft was going to invest a billion or two more in China.
I wager Lenovo's announcement dropping Linux might have been due to government pressure to only sell Windows on their machines to keep Uncle Bill happy. You see Uncle Bill is of the opinion that any PC that ships without Windows and without paying the Windows tax is probably going to have Linux wiped off the disk when it gets home, and pirated Windows installed, therefor in his view Linux PC's equal Windows piracy.
I'm not sure China has a real preference in the OS wars beyond the fact that they don't want to pay royalties to a Western company like Microsoft for the privilege of running one. It cuts in to the hundreds of billions in trade surplus with the West, and we cant have that. So the Chinese government pushes Linux because its free but they will push Windows as long as Uncle Bill sends them billions in investment to make up for it. Its a win-win for Uncle Bill since he gets more Windows tax money, snuffs out some Linux competition, and then he just send the Windows tax money back to China and gets a stake in Chinese hardware and software companies for it. China gets an industry heavyweight investing in the China instead of the U.S. and the money Uncle Bill sends to them cancels out the Windows tax they send to him.
The Cadillac Escalade was the most desirable vehicle for car thieves in the U.S. last year. It is a very luxurious SUV with a starting price around $60K. I imagine the reliability is not so great since it isn't a Toyota but Cadillac does do luxury interiors pretty well and always has.
"too often overvalue their own power, and undervalue their employees' efforts, time, and even lives."
My standard answer is that if you are going to make your way in life being an employee of someone else you need to realize that you in fact have very little power or value.
What you make tends to be a function of what you bring to the table that has value. If you have unique skills that are in high demand, and you are a good negotiator then you can probably ask for and get a good reward for your work.
If you have no unique skills and you are doing a job that any number of other people can do as well or better then chances are you wont be valued by your employer and your pay will suck. That is life. Unions or government shouldn't try to make you valuable than you really are. Unions tend to try to alter reality by making everyone in a union shop of equal value. This is good for the useless deadbeats with no skills since they get paid the same as high value, hard working workers. Its kind of bad for the people are working hard and carrying the deadbeats though. Its also bad for the employer since they have to pay a lot for employees who aren't worth it, which is why GM and Ford are tanking.
Another key point is that if you don't like how your employer treats you then you are free to find another one or better go in to business for yourself. You will discover that it is in fact really hard to make a successful business from scratch, and its very risky. Its especially hard to make a successful business that employs a lot of people.
People who risk their own assets, and make a business succeed do in fact deserve a lot for their efforts, because they probably gambled big and worked very hard.
On the other hand rock star execs, like Carly Fiorina, who hire in to already built companies, don't risk their assets at all, and run companies in to the ground or just keep them going don't deserve anything like the compensation they are getting. All they often bring to the table is their high capacity to BS people.
You might reply at this point its not practical for most people to start their own business. True. But this gets back to the fact if you have no marketable skills and no capital or assets, you actually aren't of much value in this world.
In free markets unfortunately you are worth what you are worth, and you do have some control over that.
I think you got your rants confused with Nike or someother company than Google. All Google did was try to provide their search and other internet services in China and ran in to the fact that China places some draconian restrictions on them. After living with them for a while they did the right thing in their view and are pulling out.
... unless of course they do something stupid in the process and tank the company wiping out the shareholders investment and the employees jobs.
STOP BITCHING WHEN THEY DID THE RIGHT THING.
"A company that supports censorship in other nations, while enjoying freedom in it's own is totally unacceptable."
Hate to break it to you but nearly every country censors, the only issue is the degree and what. China is certainly on the high end of the scale. You can for example not say a LOT of words or show a lot of things on American media without getting fined or eventually driven off the air. The fines are in the process of being increased from something like $30K to $300K per incident. Pornography is heavily censored in many countries and standards vary widely. Are you saying a company that aids in censorship of pornography or obscene words from children is doing something morally and ethically reprehensible or are they being ethically responsible? Some European countries have some truly draconian censorship of anything relating to Fascism and Nazism. By your standard any company condoning this is detestable.
"A company that exploits forced prison labor camps in China"
You did know U.S. companies use U.S. prison labor didn't you? Microsoft used to or probably still does package some of its products using prison labor at the Twin Rivers Correctional Facility in Washington. Couple this with the fact the U.S. has one of the highest per capita prison populations in the world and your holier than thou pitch doesn't fly.
"Contracting with company to produce your product that pays young men and women an amount of money that is not very much, even in their poor country"
So you are proposing it would be be better if those men and women have no work at all? Sure it would be nice if they got a living wage but what that is tends to vary with each person's opinion and government mandated minimum wages have problems in their own right. If you put a minimum wage in one place and some other place doesn't then unfortunately, in a globalized world, a lot of jobs will migrate to where that cheapest labor is. It is an unfortunate fact of life when you live under Capitalism and in a semi free world.
Yes low wages jobs suck but it kind of follows that if those people are working there of their own volition those jobs are probably better than the other jobs available to them. Its kind of easy to rant sitting in some affluent country without appreciating that if you got your wish and those jobs disappeared then those people would be worse off than they are now.
"A company is not an soulless entity that has no responsibility to humanity."
Actually yes it is whether you like it or not. If the executives and board decide its in their interest andtheir shareholders interest to behave ethically and morally then great
If the executive and board opt to behave in a manner you don't consider ethical then its your prerogative to not buy their products or start a crusade against them or get a law passed against whatever they are doing.
It isn't your right or prerogative to demand that everyone adhere to your ethical standards. Companies really only need to operate within the laws in the countries where they operate. If a country doesn't have a minimum wage and its employees are starving that is probably ultimately an issue for the country to solve through its governmental process.
Cut the guy some slack. They went along with China's malevolent policies because Chinese is the largest potential Internet market on the planet and China is one of the fastest growing economies on the planet. There was overwhelming business pressure to cave to them, and be evil, because if they didn't their competitors(Yahoo and Microsoft) still would because they make no bones about being evil if its profitable. As a publicly traded company it is EXPECTED or maybe DEMANDED by Wall Street that they cave to any demands from China just to get in the game there.
Google will do some pretty serious harm to their business if they pull out of China on ethical grounds and Wall Street may punish them for it. Wall Street makes publicly traded companies evil by design, because Wall Street's only priority is profit, ethics only come in to play if bad etics hurt profitability which is pretty rarely. I'll be impressed if Google manages to avoid turning evil now that they are publicly traded, and keep their stock up at the same time.
It will be truly amazing and pretty much unprecedented if they pull out of China and abandon all this revenue to their competitors. Yahoo and Microsoft will keep getting revenue from there, and will get more with Google out of the way. Yahoo has been ratting out Chinese dissidents who are probably in jail now.
If Google pulls out of China it means they are doing something pretty much no other Western company has done. When it comes to China Western companies are a herd of lemmings being led over a cliff. They are selling their souls to the devil just to gain access to China's markets, or in other words they are agreeing to litany of blackmail and extortion demands from China's government to get in the game there. IBM abandoned their PC division to Lenovo as their price of admission to China's markets, though there is a chance they wanted to get rid of it anyway. One Western company after another is transferring capital, intellectual property, jobs and R&D to China to garner short term profits, at a likely price that China will eventually use those same assets to bury those same Western companies in the long run. The massive transfer of assets from the U.S. to China has already pretty much buried the U.S. economy since the U.S. simply can't survive for very long running a half trillion dollar trade deficit(and growing). Multinationals can sell the U.S. down the river like this and still make out like bandits in the short run but eventually the Chinese are going to start cutting those same U.S. multinationals down to size too.
I think the only "new" part is Microsoft is selling a subscription service now to protect your PC against this kind of thing :)
/. submissions. The submitter was counting on getting it accepted and winning acclaim from the /. community by bashing Microsoft and Ballmer ... and it worked. It is an unfortunate fact that it IS pretty much impossible for anyone to confidently "repair" a PC that has been infected with large volume of spyware for a long time, and which wasn't getting security patches. Its relatively difficult to reliably figure out what parts of the system have been tampered with. You are better of backing up all your files, wiping the disk, reinstalling and using a scanner to weed out spyware and virii amongst your files before you reinstall them.
If you want to deal with spyware you need to prevent it from getting on your PC in the first place which is why you need some kind of security softare probably with regular updates so it can deal with new threats.
This is another in a long line of pretty lame
Allchin is repeating his story because he is now marketing a product to prevent you from getting infected with the spyware in the first place. It is a great product for him to market since it entails an annual subscription and Microsoft really wants some steady subscription revenue. Its also great for Microsoft because its another instance where they are going to use their monopoly power to destroy companies(Symantec, McAfee, etc) that built businesses providing this service when Microsoft failed to deal with the problem years ago. Microsoft is going to transfer some of the billions consumers currently spend on Symantec and McAfee in to their coffers and it should cause a nice little bump in their revenue unless their service completely sucks. And of course Symantec and McAfee are now competitors instead of partners, which is tough for them,
" They stop innovating."
Actually I think the problem at Intel was they innovated too much and in the wrong direction. They poured billions in to Itanium and its horrible for any volume market, its really only good in the tiny supercomputing niche. They really took their eye of the commodity market, where their profits come from, fiddling with that monster.
They also innovated too much on Pentium 4 and it ended up with an excessively complex, hot expensive processor that didn't perform well, and its not good for most things people need CPU's for today.
AMD focused on adding 64 bit support, without breaking IA32 support like Itanium did, and building fast, simple, cheap CPU's and thats what people want. A number of AMD's generations of are incremental improvements and refinements of a fairly old design and not really that innovative aside from the x86_64 instruction set.
I think Intel's problem in recent years, like the last 10 years on Itanium, was just bad strategic direction and the blame falls ultimately on their chief executive during that period, though he no doubt received some bad advice from the people under him.
Its not like Intel's huge missteps permanently damaged them though. The beauty of being a monopoly is you can completely screw the pooch and still make money hand over fist for a long time.
In reading the reviews it kind of sounds good until this part:
" We need shorter work weeks, stronger labor unions, worker-owned or directed firms, less debt and more respect for the environment."
Shorter work weeks would nice if it worked but in a globalized world its kind of a strategy for failure. Like it or not there are countries where people work a lot more than Americans, and pretty much everyone works more than Western Europeans. You simply wont compete with 30 hour weeks unless you actually pay people for 30 hours work and you are proposing cutting their annual incomes by a quarter which I don't think was the idea.
I'd like to believe labor unions would make things better, but at least in the U.S., they started out good and then turned in to a force as malignant as corporations if not more so. First off they were taken over by power hungry corrupt people just like corporations and governments. You see union heads have power so they got corrupted just like all the other power centers. Even worse many unions fell under the control of organized crime. Second of all the have created environments where workers don't have to work. They can hide behind a blizzard of union rules that completely obstruct companies from getting the job done, managers managing or turning a profit. One of the strongest unions America has left is the United Auto Workers, and the fact that Ford and GM are at the mercy of their unions is insuring they are going to land in bankruptcy. They simply can't compete against Asian competitors who are operating without unions. Third unions suffer blatant cronyism, where you have to know the right people to get in to the union and then get a job, resulting in hiring of incompetent people with connections over the best qualified.
Now maybe if you could unionize the entire planet so it was a level playing field it might work, but unilateral unionization of only American workers would just accelerate off shoring and the collapse of the U.S. economy.
Less debt is unarguably good.
Can't say if worker owned and directed firms would be good or bad. I'm guessing it would vary wildly from situation to situation. In some cases workers would be highly motivated by it and produce great results. In others worker would twist in to getting the most benefits for the least work, and would do strategically stupid things because it was in their self interest. Some executives do the same thing. My take is throwing this out like its the be all and end all solution is wrong, sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn't.
A law or constitutional amendment eliminating deficit spending, would be a big help. The current system simply has to much free money for politicians to spend on pork and doing favors for lobbyists. If there were less money available to spend in Washington, and a mandate for greater fiscal discipline, there would be less corruption. The incentive to corrupt politicans would fade if there was no free money to be had. Follow that by cutting taxes until it hurts. It would be some serious pain but this country really needs to stop relying on government spending. The only value in deficit spending is its a tool to stimulate the economy during downturns but its been so abused under Reagan and Bush especially the benefits don't justify the danger any more. As we approach $9 trillion in debt just servicing the debt is becoming a crushing burden.
I would be OK without outlawing paid lobbyists all together. They really aren't useful in crafting legislation in the public interest, since they cater to special interests. If an individual wants to lobby Congress go for it, just don't do it for pay from someone else. Really don't let lobbyists anywhere near the Capital when important legislation is up for a vote.
I think corporations really should be completely cut out of government and elections, and to be fair unions too. We really should have a government of the people, as in individuals, and not of corporations and unions. There should public funding of elections or a hard cap on all campaign contributions of like a thousand dollars and only from individuals so no one gets special treatment because they have money to burn. A corporations sole motivation in approaching politicians is to do things to improve their profitability and government really should be doing its best to neither impede nor enhance corprate bottom lines. If our country is based on free markets it would be nice if they were really free instead of politicians constantly picking winners and losers. Government should regulate corporations to prevent corruption and abuse, and maintain some basic order, but otherwise not subsidize or hinder them. Government dependence on contractors is still a huge intractable problem that drives corruption. Replacing them with civil servants isn't a good solution either.
Its a much harder problem to get people to step up for public service, if you rob them of the huge payoffs when they return to the private sector. You run the risk you will only have rich people take the jobs, people who don't need the money. Some of our greatest public servants have been the rich but it would be nice to have ordinary people serve in Congress. I'd almost say we should term limit the hell out of people in Congress, like 1-3 terms for the House and 1 term in the Senate, maybe 1 term for President, get rid of professional politicians, and figure out a way to really get ordinary people in there, who aren't making a career out of it. Ideally you would want them to spend most of their time repealing old, bad laws and refraining from writing new ones, unless absolutely necessary. Our politicians write way more laws than they should and inject far to much special interest crap in to them. Laws should be simple, stay on topic and be done only when really necessary. You do need to maintain a corp of civil servants who are experienced in day to day operation of the government, in economics, defense and foreign affairs. It is near to impossible to get the best people to step up to do this if they don't have a huge payoff down the road some place.
"some corporations create depressed opportunities for women and minorities"
Actually in America its as common if not more so for women and minorities to get preferential treatment to the detriment of both the corporation and other workers. Many companies will hire women and minorities over more qualified applicants. Incompetent or rogue employees routinely level discrimination charges to prevent being held to account for unacceptable performance, seen it with my own eyes numerous times. One lady I used to work for was promoted not for ability but merely because the company wanted to fire a rogue woman employee who would level discrimination accusations everytime they attempted it. They promoted a women to be her boss simply because she could fire her and get away with it.
When it comes to winning government contracts it is common practice to fabricate women or minority ownership because it gives the company a massive inside track on winning contracts.
"Corporations' refusal to consider the morality of their behavior is part of why they are so hated now."
And that hatred counts for next to nothing since people still buy their products because they are all operating at pretty much the same level. Most people still shop at Walmart, though everyone says they hate them, because their prices are better and only idealists with money to burn will pay more for the same product on "moral" grounds.
You can run an extremely "moral" company but if you have amoral competitors chances are high they will bury you because they will underprice you. Being moral is a good thing for a corpration since it helps their brand and makes consumers feel good about them, but if its taken to the point it makes the company uncompetitive, consumers will still abandon them.
Whether you like it or not you are for the most part living under Capitalism and free markets and morals aren't at the top of the priority scheme. Not saying its right, I'm just being a realist and you aren't. If you want to try Socialism and have the government regulate corprate morality, go for it, as in move a place like France, and you will discover its bad too. France has gone to great lengths to protect their workers from malignant corporations. The end result is they now have a workers who are impossible to fire even when they deserve it, In such a system workers have no motivation to work because nothing can be done about it if they don't. They are completely uncompetitive in a global market and their economy is tanking as a result, and they have very high unemployment because businesses don't want to risk locating there and if they do they have a good chance of failing.
A key reason that the U.S. has such a staggering trade deficit is due to the "morale" constraints businesses in the U.S. have so they are no longer competitive on a global stage. Environmental regulation, work place safety rules, relatively high wages and very expensive health insurance make American products completely uncompetitive against foreign rivals. Companies are offshoring at such a furious pace precisely to escape all the "moral" constraints on doing business in the U.S. The only way to prevent it is massive protectionism which probably will fail or you compell the rest of the world to adopt your morality which is nearly impossible to do.
I forgot to add that during the California electricity crisis a few years back the Bush administration and FARC refused to investigate charge of price fixing and gouging. They more or less said it was free markets at work, and to use your term "exogenous" forces at work. It was also California's fault for bad power generation policy.
Well since then it came to light that energy traders at Enron, Dynegy and number of other electricity providers were in fact colluding to inflate the price and to create artificial shortages. I think its a bit naive to pretend that free markets are in fact always free. They are unfortunately a system that is a product of man and as a result susceptible to one of the most fundamental tendencies of men, greed.
"gets screamed each time the gas price rises due to exogenous factors"
Well I think its safe to say that oil prices are more than a little vulnerable to manipulation. Now its nearly impossible to tell who is doing all the manipulating, but I would guess big oil companies and OPEC governments certainly have a part. OPEC is after all a cartel which is designed to collude to set production and manipulate prices though they are often not very good at it any more.
Whomever the mysterious oil "traders" are who drive the prices on commodity markets are probably most to blame. These are probably middlemen who are buying and selling oil futures and delight in pocketing a quick $1-10 dollars a barrel, for doing nothing, other than gambling with large sums of money. Everytime there is some bad news in an oil producting country, often news that had no real impact on oil supplies, they exploit it to push prices up and profit. It just happens that OPEC and Exxon Mobile make out like bandits when a barrel of oil goes for $70 too. It doesn't cost anything close to that to actually produce so more than half of that is pure profit. There is unfortunately very little real competition in the "free market" for oil thanks to OPEC, oil company consolidation and commodity markets. Thanks to consolidation Exxon Mobile now closely resembles Standard Oil. A key factor Exxon Mobile does play in gas prices is they do control refining and since refining was deregulated under Reagan the oil companies have colluded to keep refining capacity on a razors edge. Excess refining capacity eats in to their profits. Insufficient refining capacity is a convenient tool to keep supplies short which makes it easy for them to drive up prices. Commodity markets are probably the most malignant part of the system but they are not one you can easily fix.
"Plenty of democrats are paid by corporations."
If you want to fix the blame for the problem in our political system everyone should stop trying to fix it on Democrats or Republicans. The current cancer can mostly be traced to lobbyists who are corrupting both parties and the whole system, and the politicians they buy from both parties. Most of the lobbyists do in fact work for corporations though some for work for Unions and other special interest groups too.
The single biggest source of corruption is the revolving door in government and the military, and Mike McCurray, lobbyist is a product of that system. You see people who work for the government and military don't get paid well so they don't take political appointments or spend years kissing ass for the pay. They do however take these jobs so they can spend their careers doing favors for lobbyists, again mostly corporate lobbyists but not always, and then when they retire they get gigantic payoffs where they land multimillion dollar executive positions and "consulting" jobs for those same special interests, or they become lobbyists themselves and charge their clients huge sums for their political connections and "access".
You see that is the problem with Mike McCurray here, and Arie Fleischer and just about every other political appointee and politician turned lobbyist. McCurray doesn't actually care what the best public policy is on these issues. They are paid large sums to take the position of their benefactors, usually corprate, and then use their skills, personal influence and knowledge of the system to corrupt it to get the outcome they seek, an outcome which usually runs counter to the public interest as it does in this case.
Medicare D, the prescription drug benefit, was the most expensive and vivid example of this corruption yet witnessed in America. The Medicare administrator was negotiating a high paying job with people who reaped a windfall from this bill, at the same time he was outright lying about the total cost of the bill to make sure it would pass to please his future employers, so it will cost taxpayer hundreds of billions more than was claimed when it was passed. The Congressman
Yawn......Stretch......Snore
This was a troll right?
Well if not.....
"I believe that the people whose lives are on the line to defend the US are entitled to a high priority in the job market"
Not sure what you just said. You are saying that companies should hire American veterans, like those serving in Iraq, ahead of everyone else? I'm assuming you are proposing Apple do this even if those people aren't even remotely qualified, though it sounds like the people they hired in India weren't qualified either. I think companies should hire people who have experience in the field and proved ability first, as in they should hire the most qualified applicants. The BIG problem with many companies outsourcing to India is they are getting a bunch of warm bodies that work cheap, but have no experience, knowledge or aptitude for the job and that often leads to a disaster. Hiring vets the same way would be just as bad.
By the way the soldiers fighting in Iraq aren't "defending America" in any way shape or form. The war in Iraq had nothing to do with "defending America". At this point its probably increased the danger to America, and made America less safe, because its made most of the world really hate America, incidents like Abu Graib and Haditha in particular. In Iraq we took a country that in fact had nothing to do with Al Qaeda or 9/11 and turned it in to an Al Qaeda recruiting poster.
"there is a moral right"
There is no such right, never has been, never will be. Hiring is economics. If you make stupid hiring decisions based on "moral" grounds and you tank your company your board should fire you because you are an idiot. Hiring decisions should be based on the ability of the workers to do the work that needs to be done, and yes how much it will cost to hire them. Despite the recent corprate delusion to the country, there are many instances where hiring more expensive workers is the right choice, especially when they have more experience or ability in the field so you get better work, versus hiring a bunch of cheap offshore workers who have no clue what they are doing and it will take them a long time and a lot of training to learn. If the off shore workers are as qualified, can do the work, the company can handle the logisitcs and are cheaper they should get the job.
"If the rest of the World wants a first-rate country - they can follow our lead - create a rule of law - not a theocracy - for example, hold corruption accountable"
OK now you are either trolling or you are scary or naive. There are certainly countries worse than the U.S. in these areas but the U.S., especially lately, isn't so great you should be bragging about it like this.
The Bush administration in particular has been decimating the rule of law in the country. The sterling example on Slashdot this weekend was state secrets privilege. This is a magic wand the Bush administration waves to make the rule of law disappear, for example it allows them to arrest and torture innocent people without being held to account, as they did to Khalid El-Masri. In the case of Jose Padilla George W. sought to prove that he can arrest and detain any U.S. citizen he feels like without charges, without access to a lawyer or the courts. The Supreme Court finally just said maybe he can't but they've taken their sweet time about it and he is still in jail without a day in court, and George W. packed the court with Alito since then. This is not the kind of thing you do in countries which have a "rule of law".
"not a theocracy"
The U.S. is most definitely closer to a theocracy now than it has been any time in my lifetime. Is it the Taliban, Iran or the theocracy we are helping build in Iraq, no, but the Bush administration has shredded the separation of church and state which used to make us a model of religious freedom and
I think a more likely possibility relates to the fact that when the Chinese head of state visited the U.S. a few weeks ago the first person he met was Bill Gates and not George W. Bush. As best I recall they struck a deal where Microsoft was going to invest a billion or maybe it was billions of dollars in China in R&D, hardware companies, etc. The Chinese, as their part of the deal, were supposed to combat software piracy as best I recall.
From the viewpoint of Bill Gates I suspect "combating software piracy" could easily translate in to all big Chinese PC manufacturers will start paying the Microsoft tax, and pay for a copy of Windows on every computer they ship. If all PC manufactures pay the tax I think that equates to piracy problem solved as far as Gates is concerned.
Also from the perspective of Bill Gates I think if a computer is shipped without Windows, with Linux instead, it is really a form of piracy, because its a given the customer will format the hard drive as soon as they get home and install a pirated version of Windows, because NO ONE would actually run Linux on the computer, they were just trying to save a few bucks and screw Microsoft out of their monopoly money.