Terror sponsors came from Saudi, Egypt, Pakistan
on
KaZaa Suspends Downloads
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Afghanistan is just the fall guy, and a convenient site for a new oil pipeline. How many Afghanis were on the planes in 9/11?
It's a good thing that the Bush Gang have frozen many "suspect" international bank accounts... but they specifically excluded those with ties directly to Bush or his dodgy family oil company, Harken. That banks in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia are not being investigated, where most of the Al Qaeda funding must have come from, is ludicrous and abdurd and patently dishonest.
Matrix won lots of Oscars (Was Re:Whine anyone?)
on
I Want My MTV... PC?
·
· Score: 2
The Matrix would be a good example. No doubt that movie was a hit, but no nod from the academy.
Yet, you can kill that many people with anthrax by spraying it into the air with a leaf blower upwind from a small city. How about feeding a supply into the ventilation system of the next domed stadium hosting a playoff game? That's not "hundreds of thousands" but its a heluva lot worse than 5, which wasn't quite enough for the original poster.
And irradiating all that mail isn't going to stop your hypothetical stadium massacre. I don't see the connection.
I submitted the original story and I really think a lot of people are missing the point. It's about risk management.
I was not comparing people's lives to a camera smart card, I was trying to get people to think about the health consequences of low-wage, badly trained employees using particle beam weapons in confined spaces, and the dangers to mail recipients from irradiated letters and denatured packages leaking toxic gases.
The economic fallout is of course tremendous as well. Fundamentally, we are talking about a terror campaign that succeeded due to a classic media panic about a rare scare.
Perhaps we need to start irradiating all paper money at points-of-sale, to prevent them carrying pathogens? Yeah, that makes sense as well. Right.
If you read this you'll begin to think of the risks to poorly trained government employees through operating particle beam weapons in close confinement. Sometimes a kneww jerk reaction to a threat causes more problems than it solves.
Katz's Techno Fetishism
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Yeah, Techno fetishists everywhere are already creaming their pants over the demonstration of the new "doctrine" of remote warfare displayed by the US in the Afghan War.
It's certainly good for initial deployment and aerial interdiction and control, but remains untested for endgame positional tactics using soft assets.
But this development is nothing that Our Prophet Philip Dick did not foresee in such stories as Second Variety.
It reminds me of how Twain saw the devastating and immobilizing affect on warfare of machine guns and trench technology in the closing chapters of his 1889 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
Or HG Wells foreseeing aerial warfare and the bombardment of cities and civilian populations in The War in the Air.
But because war is politics by any means necessary, when one approach is blocked the street will find a way to express itself through another. If politicized groups and countries cannot hope to use conventional warfare, then they will move on to more promising avenues and asymmetrical opportunities. Things more horribly inventive than destroying buildings with sharp knives and opportunity.
And as so many here have pointed out, most of this is self-serving propgaanda. 30% of munitions dropped still fail to explode. And this article points out, the Rout of the Taliban was largely a social victory. Factions on the ground saw which way the wind was blowing, shaved their beards, and changed sides.
But most of the same local bosses are still running things... why else do you think so many high-profile "Taliban" are being let go. Why is it proving so difficult to arrest Omar, a practically dead, half-blind guy doing a Steve McQueen on a motorbike?
Remember, the Russians also "took" Afghanistan with virtually no resistance within a few months. But their mistake was to stay longer, and eventually the factions started uniting against them. That KC-130 that crashed, they are flying bricks. One hasn't crashed in error since the start of the 1970s. Odds are it was brought down by a shoulder-launched SAM at extremely close range.
And now the Marines are exiting and being replaced by the 101st, who'll be digging fortifying those bases that annoy the Russians so much. They are there for the long haul? I hope they have better luck than Reagan's Marines in Lebanon.
And why are Katz's articles so goddamn difficult to read? Does he go through a rewrite phase where he trys to find longer latinate words whenever possible, replacing anything short and punchy with polysyllabic monstrosities? A dose of Strunk and Whyte would go a long way there.
I assume this is a troll. But for appearance's sake...
Don't be so silly with labels. Communist? Realist. What we have right now is broken and needs fixing. The "free market" forces are in fact not free, they favour the incumbents.
Freedom is a tricky word. For you to be "free", others' freedoms have to be constrained. I think the freedom of ILECs to gouge consumers for their decaying copper lines needs to be rated against the freedom and wealth-generating opportunities that would emerge in a broadband economy. I'm for the latter.
I gave up submitting this broadband-related stories to Slashdot along the lines of Lessig's article when I realized that the prevailing ideological hegemony against government regulation was causing people to become blinkered.
We have all this dark fibre running between cities. We have all these consumers. We have intransigent telco ILECs and monopoly coax cable companies blocking consumer access to the dark fibre.
One way around this would be for regulatory agencies to step in, ala great public works projects of the past such as the Hoover Dam or universal dialtone access, and seize control of the last mile to mandate real broadband, fibre, connections between consumers. If this means appropriating incumbent's assets, then so be it. They have proved themselves to be a liability and are now impeding economic and social progress.
If the current state of lethargy is allowed to continue, then within a generation the global centres of broadband usage and economic development will not be within the US. They'll be in Canada, Singapore, Holland, Sweden, Korea, and so on.
[Tolkien] declared himself a monarchist and a Catholic; and no, it wasn't Eliot. In form, in content, in everything about it, The Lord of the Rings is the most anti-Modernist of novels. It is really very funny to think about how similar it is in so many ways to the works of the great Modernists.
Unlike Joyce, Lawrence and Pound, however, Tolkien was a writer with a block. He was over 60 by the time The Lord of the Rings was published, and the work he cared about most deeply, some of which is collected in The Silmarillion, did not appear in his lifetime.
This explains why a body of writing largely published in the second half of the 20th century turns out to be so strikingly first-half in its concerns. It's all there, the usual slurry of the 1920s and 1930s: the fear of the masses, the retreat into archaism, the confusion about race and phylogenesis and so on.
If the fiancee isn't kept entertained by the Gamecube games, we may pick up a PS2 and 6 or 7 games if the price drops My God man, don't use games to keep her entertained! Surely some more biological options could present themselves?
This one says:
For long sections
of the film, I didn't take any notes; it's hard to scribble when your
jaw is on the floor....
Visually, the film is astonishing-and nearly unique-because it deploys
so much cutting-edge special effects technology with so little fuss. It's
arguably the first film with hundreds of spectacularly busy, yet curiously matter-of-fact,
digital effects shots that somehow don't take you out of the movie.
According to this, BIFF was
originally created by Joe Talmadge , also the
author of the infamous and much-plagiarized "Flamer's Bible".
The BIFF filter he wrote was later passed to Richard Sexton [q.v.], who
posted BIFFisms much more widely
...
BIFF (not B1FF) was created by Joe Talmadge (of "Ten Rules for Flaming"
fame) of HP in 1988. Joe posted three postings by BIFF from his account,
and shortly after Richard Sexton began sending out BIFF@BIFF.NET postings
for about a year until he lost interest.
I can't find the original 1988 Talmadge postings on Google. I've tried various versions (and MISPELINGZ) of the BIFF addresses.
Physics is based on observation and on mathematics. And anyone without overweening ego issues can have the courage to admit that mathematics is particular and specific to our cognitive, embodied perception.
Platonic ideals are as likely as Great Sky Gods, or GUTs. There are no Natural Laws, but instead narrative descriptions of the world. These stories use metaphor and analogy, and their popularity waxes and wanes along with the lives and influence of their storytellers. Blend Kuhn (anti) and Kuhn (pro) and Foucault with a dash of Popper. And don't skimp on the hermeneutics.
When the crowd gets into the music, the HPDJ will sense that more people are on the dance floor and monitor how actively they are dancing. It will then gradually build up the tempo to whip the dancers into a brief frenzy, before calming things down for a chill-out period. This is nothing more or less than what those simple mindless trance DJs play to monged-out crowds everywhere.
This excellent Guardian article exposes leaked documents that demonstrate how a secretive "inner circle" of rich countries in the WTO draft key resolutions well in advance that safeguard their industries while planning to further impoverish the developing nations. Then they present these "decisions" at WTO conferences as fait accompli. They also secretly forward on sensitive research and policy documents to Western corporations, giving them decisive competitive advantages.
Globalization is neither natural or inevitable
on
Defining Globalism
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"Globalization" means that capital can move where it wants, but labour (ie, you and me) are constrained in where we can emigrate to in order to follow the money flow. Borders restrain and impede people searching for better standards of living while being deliberately porous for capitalists.
What exactly is "globalization" all about? The IMF/World Bank/WTO knowingly bribe local officials to sell off national assets cheaply, deliberately push people into the poverty trap to inflame "social unrest" so that Western companies can buy assets cheaply during the ensuing panic, and "condemns people to death".
But it's not just me saying that. Or those rather smelly anarcho-crusties swinging their dreads forlornly. It's all in the words of Joseph Stiglitz, current Economics Nobel winner and former chief economist boffin at the World Bank. He seems to have done a Vadar and come back from the Dark Side.
Just how badly has globalized moneterism failed to achieve universal prosperity for all?
In the United States, the median real wage is about the same today as it was 28 years ago.This means that the majority of the labor force has failed to share in the gains from economic growth over the last 28 years. That is drastically different from the previous 27 years, during which the typical wage increased by about 80% in real terms. Trade has doubled as a percentage of our economy since the early 1970s, and there is no doubt that globalization has played a significant role in the worsening distribution of income here.
Now, international trade per se is obviously not the issue here, it's international trade under the deliberately poverty-inducing stategies of the IMF-led cartel. International trade could be defined and regulated in such a way as to promote prosperity of ordinary people within economic areas:
Globalization is no more natural or inevitable than the construction of skyscrapers. The globalization we have seen in recent decades has been driven by a laborious process of rule making. It is the establishment and enforcement of these rules that allows Timberland shoes, for example, to make their product in China at wages of 22 cents an hour, and then sell it at the local suburban mall. Advances in transportation and communications did not determine this result. Our leaders have rewritten the rules of the game in a way that has driven down wages for the vast majority of American employees. One may agree or disagree with this policy, but it should be understood as a conscious political choice.
...
The same thing could have been done to the salaries of doctors, for example. With much less effort and expense than it has taken to negotiate investment and trade agreements like NAFTA and the WTO, we could license and regulate the training of doctors in foreign medical schools. By allowing these doctors to practice medicine in the United States, we could lower the salaries of doctors and greatly reduce health care costs, without any loss of quality. Interestingly, the savings to consumers from reducing American doctors' salaries to even those of Europe would be enormous: about $70 billion a year.
This is about a hundred times more than the gains from tariff reduction in our most comprehensive trade liberalization agreements, such as the one that established the WTO five years ago. Huge savings could also be achieved by introducing international competition to the practice of accountants, lawyers, economists, and other professionals. But it is unlikely to happen, because these professionals -- unlike the majority of the US labor force -- have enough political clout to protect themselves from international competition.
This Economist article is well-reasoned. But it ignores the underlying fact that globalization means the increasing freedom of movement of capital without complementing freedom of movement of labour, has led to a massive democratic imbalance in the world.
This is because Corporations have lobbyists and expense accounts whereas poor people can only throw rocks.
Corporations prosper while working people are denied freedome of migration and emigration and suffer and end up rotting in huge unemployed pockets of poverty. This is not right and leads to the kind of tensions that I see expressed as fundamentalism in Muslim countries and riots by rich Western kids in Genoa.
Apparently, "unbridled laissez-faire" has got us into this predicament. Maybe it's time to restructure international trade to prevent plunging so many countries into IMF misery?
This is not unprecedented. Before World War One the global economy was very tightly knited together. Unfortunately, this imperial, colonialist and racist system massively benefitted certain countries at the expense of others. What we call today's "laissez-faire" is in fact nothing of the kind but a complex regulatory system designed to perpetuate Western Hegemony.
I benefit greatly from this, getting to eat candies when I want and buy cheap shoes at Payless. But if I had to settle for less candies and knew this was in some way reducing the risk of a suicidal airliner dropping on my head then I'm all for it.
Maybe it's time for a Tobin Tax? Make all those currency speculators produce something worthwhile from their mindless machinations. Donate the proceeds to developing world educational programs....
For work like this, I like my QX3. Cheap and powerful.
There's a short review of its capabilities here, but this site has some amazing hacks that enable it to do darkfield, polarized, Rheinberg, or even simulated Hoffman modulation contrast viewing.
Right on. And I want them to spend mondo moola to somehow get the archives back to 1987, so I can read all my earliest drivel for free! (My current drivel features better punctuation).
Who started it? The Afghani people, the "Afghani" jihad warriors, the dispossessed Palestianians, the Israelis?
JimPooley made a valid point. For 20 years, Irish-American social and terrorist groups in the US funded a massive bombing campaign in Britain and Ireland that slaughtered thousands.
Over this time, scores of people -- some fundraisers, some terrorists -- found refuge in the US and despite British and Irish please, were not extradited. Sometimes for "lack of evidence", sometimes because of legal loopholes, sometimes because of sympathetic authorities.
Should Britain have started bombing the states where these people resided? Would Britain have been justified in killing innocent people to try to force the US government to change its policies?
The only way out of this honourably is using international law and international courts of justice. The South Africans waited generations for justice. The people in the Balkans have waited nearly a decade. But eventually, given enough concerted military and political pressure, war criminals can be brought to justice. But the US has always flouted international law, having been found guilty several times of war crimes itself.
Obviously, no. The Afghan situation is uncomfortably similar.
These are the people you're bombing.
I used GhostScript to extract the list of religions -- around 180 or so. So many choices! What if South Park was right and only the Mormons get to heaven?
If I use a program to extract copyrighted content from a non-US website document, does this contravene the DMCA?
One of his major theories was that complex organic matter drifted through and evolved in interstellar space. It's long been seen that organic matter could form huge clouds, but it was always an open question as to how it could possibly "evolve".
But the recent discovery of exotic forms of ice that possess many of the properties of liquid water rather than the usual, crystalline solid properties of earth-bound ice make this possible. Evolution happens *much* more slowly in interstellar space and within comet cores, but now the discovery of this new ice makes it probably, even likely, that exotic forms of space-bound life exist and thrive.
High-Density Amorphous Ice, the Frost on Interstellar Grains. Jenniskens, P.; Blake,D.F.; Wilson,M.A.; Pohorille,A. NASA/TM-95-207251. 21 January 1995.
Liquid Water in the domain of cubic ice Ic P.Jenniskens, S.Banham, D.F.Blake, and M.R.S.McCoustra, Journal of Chemical Physics 1997, 107 1232-1241
As a side note, he was originally a campaigner against the singularity theory of universal origins (which he derisively coined the "Big Bang Theory"). It was the "all or nothing" part of it that most offended him. And the insistence on bounded, finite time.
He was more all about a continuous and random creation of matter in what he termed "interstitial spaces".
Nowadays, the hottest theories of cosmology involve quantum foam expansion, oscillations, and string loops spitting off random particles. Kind of a weird synthesis of the two. I guess we're in the middle of a paradigm shift.
In another generation, the debate about Bing Bang versus Steady State will seem as quaint and alien as the argument over which theory could best explain diseases: Humoral, Miasmatic, Contagia, or Germ.
Slashdot Mirror
Afghanistan is just the fall guy, and a convenient site for a new oil pipeline. How many Afghanis were on the planes in 9/11?
It's a good thing that the Bush Gang have frozen many "suspect" international bank accounts... but they specifically excluded those with ties directly to Bush or his dodgy family oil company, Harken. That banks in Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia are not being investigated, where most of the Al Qaeda funding must have come from, is ludicrous and abdurd and patently dishonest.
The Matrix would be a good example. No doubt that movie was a hit, but no nod from the academy.
Ah the usual Slashdot flair for accuracy. The Matrix won four Oscars. No mean feat.
Yet, you can kill that many people with anthrax by spraying it into the air with a leaf blower upwind from a small city. How about feeding a supply into the ventilation system of the next domed stadium hosting a playoff game? That's not "hundreds of thousands" but its a heluva lot worse than 5, which wasn't quite enough for the original poster.
And irradiating all that mail isn't going to stop your hypothetical stadium massacre. I don't see the connection.
I submitted the original story and I really think a lot of people are missing the point. It's about risk management.
I was not comparing people's lives to a camera smart card, I was trying to get people to think about the health consequences of low-wage, badly trained employees using particle beam weapons in confined spaces, and the dangers to mail recipients from irradiated letters and denatured packages leaking toxic gases.
The economic fallout is of course tremendous as well. Fundamentally, we are talking about a terror campaign that succeeded due to a classic media panic about a rare scare.
Perhaps we need to start irradiating all paper money at points-of-sale, to prevent them carrying pathogens? Yeah, that makes sense as well. Right.
If you read this you'll begin to think of the risks to poorly trained government employees through operating particle beam weapons in close confinement. Sometimes a kneww jerk reaction to a threat causes more problems than it solves.
Yeah, Techno fetishists everywhere are already creaming their pants over the demonstration of the new "doctrine" of remote warfare displayed by the US in the Afghan War.
It's certainly good for initial deployment and aerial interdiction and control, but remains untested for endgame positional tactics using soft assets.
But this development is nothing that Our Prophet Philip Dick did not foresee in such stories as Second Variety .
It reminds me of how Twain saw the devastating and immobilizing affect on warfare of machine guns and trench technology in the closing chapters of his 1889 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court .
Or HG Wells foreseeing aerial warfare and the bombardment of cities and civilian populations in The War in the Air .
But because war is politics by any means necessary, when one approach is blocked the street will find a way to express itself through another. If politicized groups and countries cannot hope to use conventional warfare, then they will move on to more promising avenues and asymmetrical opportunities. Things more horribly inventive than destroying buildings with sharp knives and opportunity.
And as so many here have pointed out, most of this is self-serving propgaanda. 30% of munitions dropped still fail to explode. And this article points out, the Rout of the Taliban was largely a social victory. Factions on the ground saw which way the wind was blowing, shaved their beards, and changed sides.
But most of the same local bosses are still running things... why else do you think so many high-profile "Taliban" are being let go. Why is it proving so difficult to arrest Omar, a practically dead, half-blind guy doing a Steve McQueen on a motorbike?
Meanwhile, Blair ran a victory lap in Kabul. Right.
Remember, the Russians also "took" Afghanistan with virtually no resistance within a few months. But their mistake was to stay longer, and eventually the factions started uniting against them. That KC-130 that crashed, they are flying bricks. One hasn't crashed in error since the start of the 1970s. Odds are it was brought down by a shoulder-launched SAM at extremely close range.
And now the Marines are exiting and being replaced by the 101st, who'll be digging fortifying those bases that annoy the Russians so much. They are there for the long haul? I hope they have better luck than Reagan's Marines in Lebanon.
And why are Katz's articles so goddamn difficult to read? Does he go through a rewrite phase where he trys to find longer latinate words whenever possible, replacing anything short and punchy with polysyllabic monstrosities? A dose of Strunk and Whyte would go a long way there.
I want these. I already have the Gnomes of Zurich and the Shriners. Soon my hierachy will be complete, oh yes.
I assume this is a troll. But for appearance's sake...
Don't be so silly with labels. Communist? Realist. What we have right now is broken and needs fixing. The "free market" forces are in fact not free, they favour the incumbents.
Freedom is a tricky word. For you to be "free", others' freedoms have to be constrained. I think the freedom of ILECs to gouge consumers for their decaying copper lines needs to be rated against the freedom and wealth-generating opportunities that would emerge in a broadband economy. I'm for the latter.
I gave up submitting this broadband-related stories to Slashdot along the lines of Lessig's article when I realized that the prevailing ideological hegemony against government regulation was causing people to become blinkered.
We have all this dark fibre running between cities. We have all these consumers. We have intransigent telco ILECs and monopoly coax cable companies blocking consumer access to the dark fibre.
One way around this would be for regulatory agencies to step in, ala great public works projects of the past such as the Hoover Dam or universal dialtone access, and seize control of the last mile to mandate real broadband, fibre, connections between consumers. If this means appropriating incumbent's assets, then so be it. They have proved themselves to be a liability and are now impeding economic and social progress.
If the current state of lethargy is allowed to continue, then within a generation the global centres of broadband usage and economic development will not be within the US. They'll be in Canada, Singapore, Holland, Sweden, Korea, and so on.
Yeah, the Reg had it back in September. They are so far ahead it hurts.
Reasons for Liking Tolkien
[Tolkien] declared himself a monarchist and a Catholic; and no, it wasn't Eliot. In form, in content, in everything about it, The Lord of the Rings is the most anti-Modernist of novels. It is really very funny to think about how similar it is in so many ways to the works of the great Modernists.
Unlike Joyce, Lawrence and Pound, however, Tolkien was a writer with a block. He was over 60 by the time The Lord of the Rings was published, and the work he cared about most deeply, some of which is collected in The Silmarillion, did not appear in his lifetime.
This explains why a body of writing largely published in the second half of the 20th century turns out to be so strikingly first-half in its concerns. It's all there, the usual slurry of the 1920s and 1930s: the fear of the masses, the retreat into archaism, the confusion about race and phylogenesis and so on.
If the fiancee isn't kept entertained by the Gamecube games, we may pick up a PS2 and 6 or 7 games if the price drops
My God man, don't use games to keep her entertained! Surely some more biological options could present themselves?
This one says:
For long sections of the film, I didn't take any notes; it's hard to scribble when your jaw is on the floor.
Beaten by 1988-09-23.
There are always bigger fish.
Who can find the oldest extant BIFF posting?
I have this one from 1989.
But this one in late 1988 refers to BIFF.
According to this, BIFF was originally created by Joe Talmadge , also the author of the infamous and much-plagiarized "Flamer's Bible". The BIFF filter he wrote was later passed to Richard Sexton [q.v.], who posted BIFFisms much more widely
BIFF (not B1FF) was created by Joe Talmadge (of "Ten Rules for Flaming" fame) of HP in 1988. Joe posted three postings by BIFF from his account, and shortly after Richard Sexton began sending out BIFF@BIFF.NET postings for about a year until he lost interest.
I can't find the original 1988 Talmadge postings on Google. I've tried various versions (and MISPELINGZ) of the BIFF addresses.
Nowhere to hide.
My God, it's full of posts!
They have me back to 1988. Thankfully, pre-1988 don't seem to have propagated to whatever unholy archive these came from.
Physics is based on observation and on mathematics. And anyone without overweening ego issues can have the courage to admit that mathematics is particular and specific to our cognitive, embodied perception.
Platonic ideals are as likely as Great Sky Gods, or GUTs. There are no Natural Laws, but instead narrative descriptions of the world. These stories use metaphor and analogy, and their popularity waxes and wanes along with the lives and influence of their storytellers. Blend Kuhn (anti) and Kuhn (pro) and Foucault with a dash of Popper. And don't skimp on the hermeneutics.
Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being
When the crowd gets into the music, the HPDJ will sense that more people are on the dance floor and monitor how actively they are dancing. It will then gradually build up the tempo to whip the dancers into a brief frenzy, before calming things down for a chill-out period.
This is nothing more or less than what those simple mindless trance DJs play to monged-out crowds everywhere.
This excellent Guardian article exposes leaked documents that demonstrate how a secretive "inner circle" of rich countries in the WTO draft key resolutions well in advance that safeguard their industries while planning to further impoverish the developing nations. Then they present these "decisions" at WTO conferences as fait accompli.
They also secretly forward on sensitive research and policy documents to Western corporations, giving them decisive competitive advantages.
"Globalization" means that capital can move where it wants, but labour (ie, you and me) are constrained in where we can emigrate to in order to follow the money flow. Borders restrain and impede people searching for better standards of living while being deliberately porous for capitalists.
What exactly is "globalization" all about? The IMF/World Bank/WTO knowingly bribe local officials to sell off national assets cheaply, deliberately push people into the poverty trap to inflame "social unrest" so that Western companies can buy assets cheaply during the ensuing panic, and "condemns people to death".
But it's not just me saying that. Or those rather smelly anarcho-crusties swinging their dreads forlornly. It's all in the words of Joseph Stiglitz, current Economics Nobel winner and former chief economist boffin at the World Bank. He seems to have done a Vadar and come back from the Dark Side.
Just how badly has globalized moneterism failed to achieve universal prosperity for all?
In the United States, the median real wage is about the same today as it was 28 years ago.This means that the majority of the labor force has failed to share in the gains from economic growth over the last 28 years. That is drastically different from the previous 27 years, during which the typical wage increased by about 80% in real terms. Trade has doubled as a percentage of our economy since the early 1970s, and there is no doubt that globalization has played a significant role in the worsening distribution of income here.
Now, international trade per se is obviously not the issue here, it's international trade under the deliberately poverty-inducing stategies of the IMF-led cartel. International trade could be defined and regulated in such a way as to promote prosperity of ordinary people within economic areas:
Globalization is no more natural or inevitable than the construction of skyscrapers. The globalization we have seen in recent decades has been driven by a laborious process of rule making. It is the establishment and enforcement of these rules that allows Timberland shoes, for example, to make their product in China at wages of 22 cents an hour, and then sell it at the local suburban mall. Advances in transportation and communications did not determine this result. Our leaders have rewritten the rules of the game in a way that has driven down wages for the vast majority of American employees. One may agree or disagree with this policy, but it should be understood as a conscious political choice.
...
The same thing could have been done to the salaries of doctors, for example. With much less effort and expense than it has taken to negotiate investment and trade agreements like NAFTA and the WTO, we could license and regulate the training of doctors in foreign medical schools. By allowing these doctors to practice medicine in the United States, we could lower the salaries of doctors and greatly reduce health care costs, without any loss of quality. Interestingly, the savings to consumers from reducing American doctors' salaries to even those of Europe would be enormous: about $70 billion a year.
This is about a hundred times more than the gains from tariff reduction in our most comprehensive trade liberalization agreements, such as the one that established the WTO five years ago. Huge savings could also be achieved by introducing international competition to the practice of accountants, lawyers, economists, and other professionals. But it is unlikely to happen, because these professionals -- unlike the majority of the US labor force -- have enough political clout to protect themselves from international competition.
This Economist article is well-reasoned. But it ignores the underlying fact that globalization means the increasing freedom of movement of capital without complementing freedom of movement of labour, has led to a massive democratic imbalance in the world.
This is because Corporations have lobbyists and expense accounts whereas poor people can only throw rocks.
Corporations prosper while working people are denied freedome of migration and emigration and suffer and end up rotting in huge unemployed pockets of poverty. This is not right and leads to the kind of tensions that I see expressed as fundamentalism in Muslim countries and riots by rich Western kids in Genoa.
Apparently, "unbridled laissez-faire" has got us into this predicament. Maybe it's time to restructure international trade to prevent plunging so many countries into IMF misery?
This is not unprecedented. Before World War One the global economy was very tightly knited together. Unfortunately, this imperial, colonialist and racist system massively benefitted certain countries at the expense of others. What we call today's "laissez-faire" is in fact nothing of the kind but a complex regulatory system designed to perpetuate Western Hegemony.
I benefit greatly from this, getting to eat candies when I want and buy cheap shoes at Payless. But if I had to settle for less candies and knew this was in some way reducing the risk of a suicidal airliner dropping on my head then I'm all for it.
Maybe it's time for a Tobin Tax? Make all those currency speculators produce something worthwhile from their mindless machinations. Donate the proceeds to developing world educational programs....
For work like this, I like my QX3. Cheap and powerful.
There's a short review of its capabilities here, but this site has some amazing hacks that enable it to do darkfield, polarized, Rheinberg, or even simulated Hoffman modulation contrast viewing.
Right on. And I want them to spend mondo moola to somehow get the archives back to 1987, so I can read all my earliest drivel for free! (My current drivel features better punctuation).
Who started it? The Afghani people, the "Afghani" jihad warriors, the dispossessed Palestianians, the Israelis? JimPooley made a valid point. For 20 years, Irish-American social and terrorist groups in the US funded a massive bombing campaign in Britain and Ireland that slaughtered thousands. Over this time, scores of people -- some fundraisers, some terrorists -- found refuge in the US and despite British and Irish please, were not extradited. Sometimes for "lack of evidence", sometimes because of legal loopholes, sometimes because of sympathetic authorities. Should Britain have started bombing the states where these people resided? Would Britain have been justified in killing innocent people to try to force the US government to change its policies? The only way out of this honourably is using international law and international courts of justice. The South Africans waited generations for justice. The people in the Balkans have waited nearly a decade. But eventually, given enough concerted military and political pressure, war criminals can be brought to justice. But the US has always flouted international law, having been found guilty several times of war crimes itself. Obviously, no. The Afghan situation is uncomfortably similar. These are the people you're bombing.
I used GhostScript to extract the list of religions -- around 180 or so. So many choices! What if South Park was right and only the Mormons get to heaven? If I use a program to extract copyrighted content from a non-US website document, does this contravene the DMCA?
One of his major theories was that complex organic matter drifted through and evolved in interstellar space. It's long been seen that organic matter could form huge clouds, but it was always an open question as to how it could possibly "evolve".
But the recent discovery of exotic forms of ice that possess many of the properties of liquid water rather than the usual, crystalline solid properties of earth-bound ice make this possible. Evolution happens *much* more slowly in interstellar space and within comet cores, but now the discovery of this new ice makes it probably, even likely, that exotic forms of space-bound life exist and thrive.
http://ccf.arc.nasa.gov/dx/archives/planets/comets /comets3.html
http://www-space.arc.nasa.gov/~leonid/ice/strong.h tml
High-density amorphous ice,the frost on interstellar grains. Jenniskens, P.; Blake, D.F.; Wilson, M.A.; Pohorille, A. Astrophysical Journal vol.455, no.1, pt.1 p.389-401. Dec.
High-Density Amorphous Ice, the Frost on Interstellar Grains. Jenniskens, P.; Blake,D.F.; Wilson,M.A.; Pohorille,A. NASA/TM-95-207251. 21 January 1995.
Liquid Water in the domain of cubic ice Ic P.Jenniskens, S.Banham, D.F.Blake, and M.R.S.McCoustra, Journal of Chemical Physics 1997, 107 1232-1241
As a side note, he was originally a campaigner against the singularity theory of universal origins (which he derisively coined the "Big Bang Theory"). It was the "all or nothing" part of it that most offended him. And the insistence on bounded, finite time.
He was more all about a continuous and random creation of matter in what he termed "interstitial spaces".
Nowadays, the hottest theories of cosmology involve quantum foam expansion, oscillations, and string loops spitting off random particles. Kind of a weird synthesis of the two. I guess we're in the middle of a paradigm shift.
In another generation, the debate about Bing Bang versus Steady State will seem as quaint and alien as the argument over which theory could best explain diseases: Humoral, Miasmatic, Contagia, or Germ.