What's sad is how that act can terrify others around you. I carried out the similar but actually real behaviour of cutting the stupid labels attached to the leads of some new keyboards at a place I worked - I refuse to believe that any of us need to be instructed by it to read the three paragraphs of safety information on the bottom of the keyboard. One of my staff was horrified and thought that it might be breaking the rules.
I tell you this: A society that is afraid to cut labels off keyboards is fucked. Oh, and good luck to the Danish guy. I bet he's not afraid to tear labels off things.
It's certainly not every page as an image. It looks to have been put together very carefully. That said, it's over 400 pages of A4 sized book with lots of colourful artwork - there's no way you can compare that to a text-only novel like Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I don't know if you'd be able to run the PDF on your eBook reader or not, but your eBook reader isn't really designed for this sort of book. it's designed for text that you'll read through at a steady pace, not an illustrated rule book that you'll need to flip back and forth on. The PDF manages to come in at just under 40MB.
All that said, it's released under a Creative Commons licence. If someone wants to create an eBook reader version stripped of images and much of the layout, they're legally okay to do so. As to asking me all these questions, why don't you download it and have a look. It's free and it's out there and it's actually very, very good.;)
Incorrect. You can buy the PDF, and presumably receive any updates, but you can actually download it legally for free. A friend of mine is running it and sent me a copy (I'd normally decline a copy but this one's legal). And it actually does have a ridiculously fun setting even if you just want to read it. Good luck to the company.
You've just given me an idea which is obvious in retrospect. If they can culture "cow" meat this way, and it's ethical, then next up is "human meat". They could even shape it to be the right shapes and proportions. Hell, there are already people perfecting skin grown from scratch. We just need bone and, if you're willing to tolerate the eyes being glass, you could have a whole fake person ready to eat.
Granted. But I'm basically saying that if you don't have a solid case, posting the sort of things on his blog that he has done would be a very stupid mistake. And his career inclines me to think that he's not likely to make such a mistake. Ergo, he means it and will be tearing them a new one. I did look for information from Fusion Garage on this but they have nothing on there yet (fair enough, it's very soon to have responded and they may not publicly anyway). But in the absence of counter-evidence, it does look as though Fusion Garage have shot themselves in the foot quite badly. Maybe they just took his input for granted and weren't thinking much about the share in the IP he had. Maybe they thought he'd lie down without a fight. Either way, looks like a big mistake.
Look at all the bullshit flying out of the rumor machine about genetically modified foods. How long before in-vitro meat also is a shadow government and/or evil corporation conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids?
GMO crops have a number of problems, not least of which is that companies own the rights to them and engineer varieties that don't produce viable seed so that farmers using them have to re-buy seed stock every year. And they subsidy the seeds initially to get farmers moved on to them. The end game is that the food supply becomes monopolised. I shouldn't have to explain all this. Artificial meat will in all likelihood also be encumbered by patents, at least for a while. But it's not going to become an integral part of the food supply so it wont matter. It will (probably) be fine.
You've answered your own question. Just ensure that the artificial meat is more expensive and it will become the prime good and normal meat can be the cheap alternative for those that can't afford it. And eventually it will replace natural meat.;)
And maybe there's a big market for this with certain religious groups. If the pork doesn't come from a pig, is it kosher, for example?
The implications for space travel are cool. The very long term implications for the meat industry are interesting. But the implications for those living with hunger are minimal. It's almost certainly still going to be more efficient to just live off grains, pulses et al. There might be some possibility that this stuff can be grown somewhat efficiently by feeding it with off low-cost nutrients that aren't fit for human consumption... but it will be a long time before that becomes cost effective and the supporting costs for growing this stuff (vats, heating, pumps, antibiotics or whatever else is required to keep growing meat without a supporting immune system healthy and pure) will also offset its cost effectiveness against vegetarian food sources.
It's not impossible, but we already have means to turn low-quality nutrients (from a human point of view) into a nutritious textured product, and it's called Quorn
I don't pretend to speak for all vegetarians, but speaking personally, I think this has potential to be a great thing in replacing natural meat in people's diets. But I've no desire to eat it myself. Aside from general *yuck*, I'm quite happy with a healthy vegetarian diet and I know a lot of other vegetarians are also. We don't need to punish our colons by giving that up. But for those that might otherwise eat natural meat, this is probably a good thing. It is certainly interesting. I'm disappointed at the lack of pictures, but I guess they know it wouldn't help future marketing to have some Dr. Who alien slopping around in a tank.;)
Arrington is a Stanford educated lawyer with former clients such as Pixar and Apple. If he's making claims like this in his blog, they're not going to be spurious. He'll know what he's doing.
Yes, I read the article, and they had two hand-built versions of this thing, that sometimes ran for up to an hour before crashing.
Also, they invented a time machine, because somehow these setbacks went backwards in time and prevented them from holding the pre-launch part scheduled for November 20th.
I'm not sure where anyone gets "days from launch" from that, and I'm not sure why the Slashdot editors felt that including it in their "summary" would increase revenue.
You're a moron. The article doesn't say that it ran "up to an hour before crashing", it said "it ran for several hours without crashing" which he said was good enough for demos. Fair enough. I don't know where the Hell you got the part about having two hand-built versions of the thing and there's nothing like that in the article. As regards the time machine... The possibility that he is narrating events that happened a couple of weeks ago rather than today seems to be beyond your comprehension. The official launch was set for the 20th. The fatal email came through a few days before that. Wisely, Arrington did not post the story until he'd pursued things privately first, hence the news breaks today. Wow - did you fail to comprehend the article!
Sometimes it's worth taking some pain yourself in order to punish the other party. It may not be a good short-term strategy, but it can sure as Hell be a good long-term strategy. Feels good, too.
Love the sig. by the way. Come to think of it, nice nick, also.;)
True. But what will Slashdot do when the Chinese say: "it's not theft, it's infringement. If we took a car, you'd have lost a car, but if we copy something, you haven't lost anything. If what the US produces is good, people will give them money for it. If it's not good, we shouldn't have to pay for it."
Sorry. I just think the shock to Slashdot on that day will probably kill thousands of pro-piracy types.:)
The quote from Stephenson (and I'm sure he's delighted that he has reached surname-only status, joining the Einsteins, Witgensteins, Shakespeares, et. al), stands in contradiction to the point you're trying to make with it. He wasn't holding up these things as a future goal, he was saying that this was all that America was left with after (from memory) the Invisible Hand had smeared down the average wage to something a Pakistani brick-layer considered a decent sum.
The thing is, I agree with you - there is such a thing as, if not a post-industrial nation, at least a nation that has moved from making t-shirts and tables, to, I don't know, space elevator rope and anti-aging drugs or whatever. The thing is, that to move to this next stage, we require an educated workforce that has the opportunities to pursue these goals. And we don't have it because the benefits from off-shoring manufacturing aren't going to the people (either directly or indirectly), but to a wealthy elite that use it to mostly to increase their control and ownership.
And Stephenson may yet prove wrong about the Microcode if India has anything to say about it. You want the bright, glorious future? Do something about the wealth inequality. Poor people don't get to do the Phds they'll need to become the World's future scientific super-stars. At least not as often as we need.
And where do these numbers come from? Or did you just pull them out of your ass?
They are quite obviously illustrative to make the point of my question clearer and I'm sure you can grasp that concept. You asked "It wouldn't harm the poor more if they had to pay more?" I am highlighting the simplisticness of your question. Your argument is even more arbitrary than my numbers. You suppose that the purchasing power of the poor must rise but this is not the case. The wealthiest of the US, to whom these profits are returning need not, and in fact do not, translate that wealth into dollars to help shore up the US economy. Why would they - the dollar is collapsing. Instead they keep their wealth in safer currencies such as the Euro and in property. They don't pay much tax, either. All this is relevant because the notion that returned profits from offshoring increases the wealth of the country, is heavily undermined if that wealth gets put into the hands of a functionally transnational section of society (i.e. people who invest and purchase internationally, rather than strictly domestically).
Do you see what I did there? I understood your reply and made a logical explanation of the problems with it, rather than just make comments about you pulling things from your arse.:)
Even the low income can be investors, and as more investors have more money to invest they will which then will create new well paying jobs. I know all about that, my family was poor. My older sister and I went into the military before we went to college and my younger sister worked her way through college. My older sister is now a nurse and my younger sister got here Masters, is a Certified Public Accountant who runs her own business, and owns rental property. She owns the building my apartment is in, and plans to sell it to me. Me? Things didn't turn out so well for me. As a college student majoring in Computer Engineering I was hit one day riding my bike after classes. I now have a disability. But I am hoping to start my own part tyme business, in photography, now as well as finish my degree.
The low income can be investors, but it is logically flawed to say that this is a universal case. More frequently, people are living from month to month (sometimes week to week) trying to feed themselves and their families, pay for health care, keep a roof over their heads, etc. Unemployment in the USA recently hit 10%. What kind of a fool starts investing money in any serious way when they have no job? More to the point, you are now competing in an international market. Suppose you want to invest some money, perhaps by buying some shares in a profitable company. You get paid in dollars. Someone abroad gets paid in a stronger currency and also decides to buy shares in the company. You get less shares than the foreigner because the dollar is weak. You can apply this to companies, rental properties and all sorts of other things.
The dollar is not sustained by the wealthy of the USA. They can shift their money around wherever it best suits them. If they want to invest it into the Saudi oil companies, they can do that. The dollar is held up by the bulk of non-wealthy Americans and, your own determination not withstanding, many of these Americans have been sold out and had their ability to support the dollar through investment and purchasing severely curtailed.
Your line of reasoning proves insightful as you are translating the domestic/foreign labour argument into a classic labour/capital argument within the domestic market.
Yeah - it's a bad habit of mine.;)
(And thank you in turn for your posts. The debate is interesting to me and its nice to see civilised discussion on/., rather than partisan bashing ).
I am enjoying the way you are deconstructing people's definitions.:) But try mine: Wealth is something that has utility. Accordingly, what constitutes wealth can change according to our ability to utilise things. Your earlier example was questioning how perhaps Saudi Arabia could be wealthy by having oil, yet not be wealthy if it didn't sell it. Before we could drill and ship oil, Arabia was not wealthy. But now that we have that capacity the Saudis can add utility to the oil by drilling, and thus it becomes wealth. If nobody ever drills it, it cannot be considered wealth. Note utility does not require actual use, merely that it can be used. Thus I stated "if nobody ever drills it" rather than "nobody is drilling it". Delayed use is still utility.
It wouldn't harm the poor more if they had to pay more? Lower prices make thing more affordable.
Which is worse? Having a job that pays $1000 per month and having to spend $200 on groceries, or having a job that pays only $500 per month (or no job at all) and having to spend only $150 on groceries? Affordable is not merely a question of exchange rates between countries and their relative production costs of goods (such as food). The whole point of TFA was that things weren't that bad because some of the cost actually came back to the USA. Well what actually happens is that some of the cost comes back to a wealthy subset of the US population. Those who formerly had jobs in manufacturing are not recompensed for the loss by lower prices. The equation doesn't even come close to balancing.
That's not quite true. China has enormous defensive capacity - nobody's going to conquer it by conventional means. But wars are expensive and it doesn't have quite the stability and economy to go on wars of aggression. Certainly it can start throwing men at other countries Russian style if it wishes. But China doesn't have military parity with the USA. And that's leaving aside the nuclear power of the USA which would prevent China from engaging in any direct confrontation with the US. What China can do is get to the point where they can invade somewhere without the US being willing to harm itself by intervening. They occupy Tibet, but that's pretty meaningless in strategic terms as far as the USA is concerned. They share interests with Russia so I don't see the infringing in that direction any time soon and the countries that Russia is pissed off with in that region are still countries Russia regards as theirs to invade or not. Kazakstan is bloody massive (and rich). Countries like Kyrgyztan you have no reason to invade unless you need living space which the Chinese do not. There's Japan which is awesome, but the Japanese would fight like your worst nightmare and its real wealth is its industrial capacity and its educated, hard-working people. Both of which are not easily turned to your advantage through occupation. (One saboteur can cripple a high-tech factory for a long time). Also it has good relations with the US which would likely help out in the face of Chinese adventurism. Taiwan is the danger point. The mainland Chinese want it back and the US has historically protected it. The question is when China will feel that its economic power and military might has reached the point that it can attack Taiwan and the US will abandon it. I don't think the US would abandon Taiwan unless the US's economic situation got really, really bad (I mean much worse than it is now). And I think China knows that. (Also the mainland Chinese would lose their best TV if Taiwan went off the air;). Remember that China is a nuclear power and therefore an actual threat to the USA. If there were direct conflict between the two, then the US would like initiate an immediate nuclear strike on China's key military points. There's only one country in the world that's ever committed the crime of using a nuclear weapon on a country, and China knows which it is.
The only way to compete with cheap labor is to have...cheap labor.
Then don't. Who can be poorest is a terrible metric for the success of a society. Instead of competing with cheap labour, the US should try to find new challenges rather than assembling toys and TVs. The biggest growth industry in the USA right now should be education as the population, freed from having to do "cheap labour" jobs, begins to move into higher technology, research, space programs, dare I say, it arts. That's not happening. The benefit is felt only by a few owners who use the money to either live lives of excess or acquire ownership of even more of the wealth.
It's not even good for China if the US begins a "painful realignment." What the rest of the World needs is the US profitable, educated and leading the way into new frontiers. If all we get is a glacial drift of the world's manufacturing capacity from continent to continent, then what the Hell are we doing as a species?
Offshoring labour is a consequence of the different standards of living in China and the US. If the current trade situation does result in the enrichment of China then that barrier will disappear and suddenly American employees will become more attractive in the global manufacturing market.
This is true, but lacks important qualifiers such as time scales. But first, let's make clear that your above statement doesn't actually contradict what I was saying. If China is invested in by the US, then it doesn't matter to China whether the returns on that investment go into the hands of a wealthy few Americans or is more equitably spread out amongst the population of the USA. It only matters to China that there is investment. (At least in simplistic terms, I'll qualify this in a moment). However, it does matter to the people of the USA very much. That was my point and it stands in contradiction to what this article implies which is "off-shoring isn't the big blow to the US that we think it is because we get money back". If the money back goes into the wealthiest pockets, that's a lot of suffering to America's working class. Which brings us on to timescales. Increased poverty in the US leads to a destructive cycle of poorer education, reduced consumption (a bad thing under the current economic models, anyway), poor health, increased crime and political upset / disaffection. You are correct in stating that the most productive environment is modern industrial nations trading with each other. But without reinvestment of the profits in the USA (into education, R&D for new technologies, health care etc.), you're essentially just shuffling the manufacturing base around from continent to continent with only a slow improvement in the overall average. At least slow compared to what we'd see if the profit to the USA was distributed rather than shoved into a small number of pockets to be squandered or ploughed into owning even more of the wealth further widening the gap between the rich and poor.
The USA isn't even next in line. If China becomes rich and starts to off-shore its own manufacturing (and lets be clear here that this is something that would take a long time - more than a generation), then you have Africa, India and a few parts of South America all lined up to be the next source of cheap labour. If the US has become so poor that it can compete with Africa on poverty then the US has undergone a disaster. Yes, the US can have an educational advantage, but this can shift in a generation and the jobs we're talking about don't require a large educated work force.
What I am saying is that the people of the USA are being sold out by their own wealthy and whilst your counter that China growing richer is ultimately good for the USA is true, it neglects that you're looking multiple generations down the line and that by the time China is ready to start making money off the USA, the US may look very different to what you know today.
The more beneficial solution is not shifting the manufacturing base to China, allowing the living standards and purchasing power of the US people to plummet so that over a few decades, some of that manufacturing base can begin to shift back again. The more beneficial solution is for the gain from allowing China to take on the grunt work of the USA to be not only China getting richer, but the people of the US being freed up to plough the profits into their own country in the form of getting better educated and opening up new jobs that require that education now that the grunt labour is behing handled abroad.
That's not happening and the people of the US have a problem. A very big one.
- aren't we here at slashdot opposed to some/most copyrights/patents...
You obviously haven't noticed the large numbers of people arguing for copyright and against piracy when it comes up here. Or else you have decided that such posters are outsiders for some reason. Slashdot is not a community that is committed to abolishing copyright or Microsoft. It just has some very vocal proponents for both of these.
His post was in no way a "long pointless rant." It is accurate and factual. The only thing missing is a corrolary which would have answered your point. It is a bad thing for the developed country because the ownership of industry in in that country (the US) is not even close to equally distributed, but rather concentrated in the hands of a small and hideously wealthy minority. That means that when the manufacturing base is off-shored, this wealthy minority make even more money whilst the class of domestic people that had to work to receive a salary or wage are no longer needed and become poverty stricken. If wealth were more evenly distributed, then offshoring would be an overall good for the country. But in fact it merely increases the gap between rich and poor, pushing middle classes down into the poor and the poor trying to cling on best they can. This leads to a cycle of poor education, destruction of the country's own domestic industrial capacity (and IP capacity perhaps these days). That's the problem.
Slashdot Mirror
What's sad is how that act can terrify others around you. I carried out the similar but actually real behaviour of cutting the stupid labels attached to the leads of some new keyboards at a place I worked - I refuse to believe that any of us need to be instructed by it to read the three paragraphs of safety information on the bottom of the keyboard. One of my staff was horrified and thought that it might be breaking the rules.
I tell you this: A society that is afraid to cut labels off keyboards is fucked. Oh, and good luck to the Danish guy. I bet he's not afraid to tear labels off things.
It's certainly not every page as an image. It looks to have been put together very carefully. That said, it's over 400 pages of A4 sized book with lots of colourful artwork - there's no way you can compare that to a text-only novel like Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I don't know if you'd be able to run the PDF on your eBook reader or not, but your eBook reader isn't really designed for this sort of book. it's designed for text that you'll read through at a steady pace, not an illustrated rule book that you'll need to flip back and forth on. The PDF manages to come in at just under 40MB.
All that said, it's released under a Creative Commons licence. If someone wants to create an eBook reader version stripped of images and much of the layout, they're legally okay to do so. As to asking me all these questions, why don't you download it and have a look. It's free and it's out there and it's actually very, very good.
Incorrect. You can buy the PDF, and presumably receive any updates, but you can actually download it legally for free. A friend of mine is running it and sent me a copy (I'd normally decline a copy but this one's legal). And it actually does have a ridiculously fun setting even if you just want to read it. Good luck to the company.
No, I meant fatal. It killed the project. The wonderful thing about the English language is how poetic it can be. ;)
:)
But no offense taken - you're talking to someone who gets irritated when people say 'continuous' when they meant 'continual'.
You've just given me an idea which is obvious in retrospect. If they can culture "cow" meat this way, and it's ethical, then next up is "human meat". They could even shape it to be the right shapes and proportions. Hell, there are already people perfecting skin grown from scratch. We just need bone and, if you're willing to tolerate the eyes being glass, you could have a whole fake person ready to eat.
There's got to be a market for that. Somewhere.
I think I've just walked into an episode of Invader Zim.
Heh! The previews of Microsoft's Courier look fantastic. I think your principles re: "wrong company" are about to get tested.
Granted. But I'm basically saying that if you don't have a solid case, posting the sort of things on his blog that he has done would be a very stupid mistake. And his career inclines me to think that he's not likely to make such a mistake. Ergo, he means it and will be tearing them a new one. I did look for information from Fusion Garage on this but they have nothing on there yet (fair enough, it's very soon to have responded and they may not publicly anyway). But in the absence of counter-evidence, it does look as though Fusion Garage have shot themselves in the foot quite badly. Maybe they just took his input for granted and weren't thinking much about the share in the IP he had. Maybe they thought he'd lie down without a fight. Either way, looks like a big mistake.
GMO crops have a number of problems, not least of which is that companies own the rights to them and engineer varieties that don't produce viable seed so that farmers using them have to re-buy seed stock every year. And they subsidy the seeds initially to get farmers moved on to them. The end game is that the food supply becomes monopolised. I shouldn't have to explain all this. Artificial meat will in all likelihood also be encumbered by patents, at least for a while. But it's not going to become an integral part of the food supply so it wont matter. It will (probably) be fine.
;)
Albeit gross.
You've answered your own question. Just ensure that the artificial meat is more expensive and it will become the prime good and normal meat can be the cheap alternative for those that can't afford it. And eventually it will replace natural meat.
And maybe there's a big market for this with certain religious groups. If the pork doesn't come from a pig, is it kosher, for example?
The implications for space travel are cool. The very long term implications for the meat industry are interesting. But the implications for those living with hunger are minimal. It's almost certainly still going to be more efficient to just live off grains, pulses et al. There might be some possibility that this stuff can be grown somewhat efficiently by feeding it with off low-cost nutrients that aren't fit for human consumption... but it will be a long time before that becomes cost effective and the supporting costs for growing this stuff (vats, heating, pumps, antibiotics or whatever else is required to keep growing meat without a supporting immune system healthy and pure) will also offset its cost effectiveness against vegetarian food sources.
It's not impossible, but we already have means to turn low-quality nutrients (from a human point of view) into a nutritious textured product, and it's called Quorn
I don't pretend to speak for all vegetarians, but speaking personally, I think this has potential to be a great thing in replacing natural meat in people's diets. But I've no desire to eat it myself. Aside from general *yuck*, I'm quite happy with a healthy vegetarian diet and I know a lot of other vegetarians are also. We don't need to punish our colons by giving that up. But for those that might otherwise eat natural meat, this is probably a good thing. It is certainly interesting. I'm disappointed at the lack of pictures, but I guess they know it wouldn't help future marketing to have some Dr. Who alien slopping around in a tank.
Arrington is a Stanford educated lawyer with former clients such as Pixar and Apple. If he's making claims like this in his blog, they're not going to be spurious. He'll know what he's doing.
You're a moron. The article doesn't say that it ran "up to an hour before crashing", it said "it ran for several hours without crashing" which he said was good enough for demos. Fair enough. I don't know where the Hell you got the part about having two hand-built versions of the thing and there's nothing like that in the article. As regards the time machine... The possibility that he is narrating events that happened a couple of weeks ago rather than today seems to be beyond your comprehension. The official launch was set for the 20th. The fatal email came through a few days before that. Wisely, Arrington did not post the story until he'd pursued things privately first, hence the news breaks today. Wow - did you fail to comprehend the article!
Sometimes it's worth taking some pain yourself in order to punish the other party. It may not be a good short-term strategy, but it can sure as Hell be a good long-term strategy. Feels good, too.
Love the sig. by the way. Come to think of it, nice nick, also.
True. But what will Slashdot do when the Chinese say: "it's not theft, it's infringement. If we took a car, you'd have lost a car, but if we copy something, you haven't lost anything. If what the US produces is good, people will give them money for it. If it's not good, we shouldn't have to pay for it."
Sorry. I just think the shock to Slashdot on that day will probably kill thousands of pro-piracy types.
The quote from Stephenson (and I'm sure he's delighted that he has reached surname-only status, joining the Einsteins, Witgensteins, Shakespeares, et. al), stands in contradiction to the point you're trying to make with it. He wasn't holding up these things as a future goal, he was saying that this was all that America was left with after (from memory) the Invisible Hand had smeared down the average wage to something a Pakistani brick-layer considered a decent sum.
The thing is, I agree with you - there is such a thing as, if not a post-industrial nation, at least a nation that has moved from making t-shirts and tables, to, I don't know, space elevator rope and anti-aging drugs or whatever. The thing is, that to move to this next stage, we require an educated workforce that has the opportunities to pursue these goals. And we don't have it because the benefits from off-shoring manufacturing aren't going to the people (either directly or indirectly), but to a wealthy elite that use it to mostly to increase their control and ownership.
And Stephenson may yet prove wrong about the Microcode if India has anything to say about it. You want the bright, glorious future? Do something about the wealth inequality. Poor people don't get to do the Phds they'll need to become the World's future scientific super-stars. At least not as often as we need.
They are quite obviously illustrative to make the point of my question clearer and I'm sure you can grasp that concept. You asked "It wouldn't harm the poor more if they had to pay more?" I am highlighting the simplisticness of your question. Your argument is even more arbitrary than my numbers. You suppose that the purchasing power of the poor must rise but this is not the case. The wealthiest of the US, to whom these profits are returning need not, and in fact do not, translate that wealth into dollars to help shore up the US economy. Why would they - the dollar is collapsing. Instead they keep their wealth in safer currencies such as the Euro and in property. They don't pay much tax, either. All this is relevant because the notion that returned profits from offshoring increases the wealth of the country, is heavily undermined if that wealth gets put into the hands of a functionally transnational section of society (i.e. people who invest and purchase internationally, rather than strictly domestically).
:)
Do you see what I did there? I understood your reply and made a logical explanation of the problems with it, rather than just make comments about you pulling things from your arse.
The low income can be investors, but it is logically flawed to say that this is a universal case. More frequently, people are living from month to month (sometimes week to week) trying to feed themselves and their families, pay for health care, keep a roof over their heads, etc. Unemployment in the USA recently hit 10%. What kind of a fool starts investing money in any serious way when they have no job? More to the point, you are now competing in an international market. Suppose you want to invest some money, perhaps by buying some shares in a profitable company. You get paid in dollars. Someone abroad gets paid in a stronger currency and also decides to buy shares in the company. You get less shares than the foreigner because the dollar is weak. You can apply this to companies, rental properties and all sorts of other things.
The dollar is not sustained by the wealthy of the USA. They can shift their money around wherever it best suits them. If they want to invest it into the Saudi oil companies, they can do that. The dollar is held up by the bulk of non-wealthy Americans and, your own determination not withstanding, many of these Americans have been sold out and had their ability to support the dollar through investment and purchasing severely curtailed.
Yeah - it's a bad habit of mine. ;)
/., rather than partisan bashing ).
(And thank you in turn for your posts. The debate is interesting to me and its nice to see civilised discussion on
I am enjoying the way you are deconstructing people's definitions.
Which is worse? Having a job that pays $1000 per month and having to spend $200 on groceries, or having a job that pays only $500 per month (or no job at all) and having to spend only $150 on groceries? Affordable is not merely a question of exchange rates between countries and their relative production costs of goods (such as food). The whole point of TFA was that things weren't that bad because some of the cost actually came back to the USA. Well what actually happens is that some of the cost comes back to a wealthy subset of the US population. Those who formerly had jobs in manufacturing are not recompensed for the loss by lower prices. The equation doesn't even come close to balancing.
That's not quite true. China has enormous defensive capacity - nobody's going to conquer it by conventional means. But wars are expensive and it doesn't have quite the stability and economy to go on wars of aggression. Certainly it can start throwing men at other countries Russian style if it wishes. But China doesn't have military parity with the USA. And that's leaving aside the nuclear power of the USA which would prevent China from engaging in any direct confrontation with the US. What China can do is get to the point where they can invade somewhere without the US being willing to harm itself by intervening. They occupy Tibet, but that's pretty meaningless in strategic terms as far as the USA is concerned. They share interests with Russia so I don't see the infringing in that direction any time soon and the countries that Russia is pissed off with in that region are still countries Russia regards as theirs to invade or not. Kazakstan is bloody massive (and rich). Countries like Kyrgyztan you have no reason to invade unless you need living space which the Chinese do not. There's Japan which is awesome, but the Japanese would fight like your worst nightmare and its real wealth is its industrial capacity and its educated, hard-working people. Both of which are not easily turned to your advantage through occupation. (One saboteur can cripple a high-tech factory for a long time). Also it has good relations with the US which would likely help out in the face of Chinese adventurism. Taiwan is the danger point. The mainland Chinese want it back and the US has historically protected it. The question is when China will feel that its economic power and military might has reached the point that it can attack Taiwan and the US will abandon it. I don't think the US would abandon Taiwan unless the US's economic situation got really, really bad (I mean much worse than it is now). And I think China knows that. (Also the mainland Chinese would lose their best TV if Taiwan went off the air
Then don't. Who can be poorest is a terrible metric for the success of a society. Instead of competing with cheap labour, the US should try to find new challenges rather than assembling toys and TVs. The biggest growth industry in the USA right now should be education as the population, freed from having to do "cheap labour" jobs, begins to move into higher technology, research, space programs, dare I say, it arts. That's not happening. The benefit is felt only by a few owners who use the money to either live lives of excess or acquire ownership of even more of the wealth.
It's not even good for China if the US begins a "painful realignment." What the rest of the World needs is the US profitable, educated and leading the way into new frontiers. If all we get is a glacial drift of the world's manufacturing capacity from continent to continent, then what the Hell are we doing as a species?
This is true, but lacks important qualifiers such as time scales. But first, let's make clear that your above statement doesn't actually contradict what I was saying. If China is invested in by the US, then it doesn't matter to China whether the returns on that investment go into the hands of a wealthy few Americans or is more equitably spread out amongst the population of the USA. It only matters to China that there is investment. (At least in simplistic terms, I'll qualify this in a moment). However, it does matter to the people of the USA very much. That was my point and it stands in contradiction to what this article implies which is "off-shoring isn't the big blow to the US that we think it is because we get money back". If the money back goes into the wealthiest pockets, that's a lot of suffering to America's working class. Which brings us on to timescales. Increased poverty in the US leads to a destructive cycle of poorer education, reduced consumption (a bad thing under the current economic models, anyway), poor health, increased crime and political upset / disaffection. You are correct in stating that the most productive environment is modern industrial nations trading with each other. But without reinvestment of the profits in the USA (into education, R&D for new technologies, health care etc.), you're essentially just shuffling the manufacturing base around from continent to continent with only a slow improvement in the overall average. At least slow compared to what we'd see if the profit to the USA was distributed rather than shoved into a small number of pockets to be squandered or ploughed into owning even more of the wealth further widening the gap between the rich and poor.
The USA isn't even next in line. If China becomes rich and starts to off-shore its own manufacturing (and lets be clear here that this is something that would take a long time - more than a generation), then you have Africa, India and a few parts of South America all lined up to be the next source of cheap labour. If the US has become so poor that it can compete with Africa on poverty then the US has undergone a disaster. Yes, the US can have an educational advantage, but this can shift in a generation and the jobs we're talking about don't require a large educated work force.
What I am saying is that the people of the USA are being sold out by their own wealthy and whilst your counter that China growing richer is ultimately good for the USA is true, it neglects that you're looking multiple generations down the line and that by the time China is ready to start making money off the USA, the US may look very different to what you know today.
The more beneficial solution is not shifting the manufacturing base to China, allowing the living standards and purchasing power of the US people to plummet so that over a few decades, some of that manufacturing base can begin to shift back again. The more beneficial solution is for the gain from allowing China to take on the grunt work of the USA to be not only China getting richer, but the people of the US being freed up to plough the profits into their own country in the form of getting better educated and opening up new jobs that require that education now that the grunt labour is behing handled abroad.
That's not happening and the people of the US have a problem. A very big one.
You obviously haven't noticed the large numbers of people arguing for copyright and against piracy when it comes up here. Or else you have decided that such posters are outsiders for some reason. Slashdot is not a community that is committed to abolishing copyright or Microsoft. It just has some very vocal proponents for both of these.
His post was in no way a "long pointless rant." It is accurate and factual. The only thing missing is a corrolary which would have answered your point. It is a bad thing for the developed country because the ownership of industry in in that country (the US) is not even close to equally distributed, but rather concentrated in the hands of a small and hideously wealthy minority. That means that when the manufacturing base is off-shored, this wealthy minority make even more money whilst the class of domestic people that had to work to receive a salary or wage are no longer needed and become poverty stricken. If wealth were more evenly distributed, then offshoring would be an overall good for the country. But in fact it merely increases the gap between rich and poor, pushing middle classes down into the poor and the poor trying to cling on best they can. This leads to a cycle of poor education, destruction of the country's own domestic industrial capacity (and IP capacity perhaps these days). That's the problem.