"If we can't do this anymore, what can we do? We are doomed!"
I remind you: it all makes sense in hindsight, and it wasnt obvious in the past that there would be an IT boom. Just like right now, you can't accurately predict the next thing people will move to. In fact: if you could, then the market would already be 80% of the way to being saturated already.
Don't complain you can't see the next big thing... because you never can. If you can see it, well... then it isnt the next big thing.
You are quite correct. This is the reason I don't advocate economists telling us what "the next big thing" is -- it's a prediction of the future. And we all know how accurate predictions of the future turn out to be...:) (in fact, in that email to my econ. prof, I mentioned this, and he agreed wholeheartedly)
That is also the reason why I think Lou Dobbs is asking that question in vain and, quite possibly, to mislead people...
Free market economys are meant to be challenging. Its never easy. There is no easy street. Stop looking for that street, because you are just going to get frustrated.
That is certainly true. But that is also the standard capitalism advocate's cop-out. I know, because I've said the same thing before, and I still say them. I want to move beyond mere rhetoric and understand free markets better than that -- and I believe most of the people whose jobs have been offshored want that as well, being that they tend to be reasonably-intelligent college-educated people.
That's why you need to be careful how you wave the banner of "free markets." The United States is not, and has never been a true free market. The closest we've ever been to the free-market ideal was during the 1800s, when regulations were few and innovation was widespread. But even then, we had very steep tariffs in order to protect the emerging industries we were growing domestically. Economics debate is a subject which must be kept in a historical context (e.g. largely-socialist and communist nations are proven failures - look at China, Russia, and N. Korea, whereas free-market capitalism has invariably been the long-run health of the nation -- look at Chile, the U.S., and Hong Kong, and to a lesser-degree, the mixed-economy European nations)...
Today, we have a market-oriented mixed economy. Milton Friedman himself says we have a 50% socialist economy because of how much we pay in taxes (we pay approximately 50% of our incomes in taxes, and because socialism is defined as state ownership of a nation's output, and because in economics the output of a nation = the income of the nation, Friedman is, as usual, dead-on).
Regulations utterly ABOUND in the U.S.. Ever look at the banking industry? They are among the most-heavily regulated industries in the U.S., but they are by no means the only ones. Consider government safety regulations on automobiles. Consider OSHA laws. Consider laws against drugs, which lead to our long-failed War on Drugs. Consider the FDA, which prevents new drugs from getting to market as quickly as they otherwise could, and which also prevents the importation of drugs from Canada and other nations. Consider President Bush's steel tariffs. Consider Social(ist) Security, for which "The Greatest Generation" is going to rob my generation (generation X/Y) blind. Consider Medicare. And don't forget about that massive military beast we keep feeding. And so on...
You're probably a Bush II Republican, so you believe we have a free-market economy, like most Republicans. Compared to almost every other nation on Earth (Singapore and Hong Kong being the best contenders, though with China's influence, HK's free-market status is slowly declining), you are right, we do.
But don't kid yourself -- the United States is nowhere *near* the ideals of a "free mar
Question 1: Retrain in what? Will the new jobs created by trading our jobs with India be created here?
During the 1980s, blue-collar manufacturing workers whose jobs were offshored were told to retrain in some other area, particularly knowledge jobs. Some did, most others moved into other blue-collar jobs such as construction, automobile repair, and other such jobs which aren't so easily offshorable.
Today, the message from economists and CEOs is the same: retrain in some other field. We know that jobs in programming, software-engineering, and most other fields of engineering (electrical, mechanical, chemical, etc.) are being offshored.
So what exactly does one retrain in? Let's look at the options:
* Biotech -- is there any reason that new biotech jobs can't be created overseas instead? * Nanotech -- is there any reason that new nanotech jobs can't be created overseas instead? * Medicine -- oooh, wait, radiology is already being offshored, and so are surgical jobs
Note that those are all technology-oriented jobs which do not require one's presence. What technology-oriented jobs require one's presence then?
* Auto mechanic -- for the few geeks who can tolerate working outdoors, with their hands, getting dirty, etc. * IT technician -- the basically blue-collar guys who schlep computers around, run cables, and replace bad hardware * Nuclear engineer -- because It Is Stupid to not have people on-site to prevent a nuclear plant from going boom in the event of an emergency
So, can the hundreds of thousands of software geeks who have had their jobs offshored retrain to be auto mechanics? Even if they wanted to, I doubt they could, and as cars become increasingly-reliable, demand for those jobs will decrease. IT technicians? We have a glut of them as it is. Nuclear engineers? This nation is too scared of nuclear power (thanks to Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island) for there to be much of a market for nuclear power.
So, what do we do? Just what jobs are there beyond "knowledge" jobs? If you assume that international trade (and preferably free trade) is a good thing -- as I do, due to comparative advantage -- then you must admit that many of these jobs can go overseas now thanks to the Internet's ability to send data worldwide at dirt-cheap prices.
Now, the standard economist's response to that is that "new jobs will be created as a result of trade." On the face of things, this is true.
But return to the fact that the Internet makes all jobs which deal primarily with information (instead of people) offshorable. Given that fact, what reason is there that the new jobs -- which WILL be created, just as economists tell you -- won't be created overseas, but will be created here in America? Again, is there any reason the new jobs -- which we can reasonably expect to see in biotech and nanotech -- won't simply skip the step of being created in America and instead get created in India first?
I wrote an email to one of my economics professors asking that question (and many others) recently. His response? "Gee, you know that's what interests me about economics so much - why do these things happen?" But he never really answered the question.
If a college professor in Econ. doesn't know the answer, who does?
Question 2: Education.
Often the advice to unemployed IT geeks is to retrain. Retraining requires education. Education requires years of time and money.
Simple question: Where does an unemployed IT geek *get* that money to retrain with, given the rapidly-rising costs of a college education?
Moreover, how can America -- which largely does not subsidize post-secondary education -- compete with foreign nations which do subsidize post-secondary education?
there is no reason that we should just blindly accept that unrestricted trade is a good thing.
Blindly accept free trade? No, of course not, that *would* be stupid. But you've obviously never taken an economics course on international trade (I have).
Go take one. Perhaps you are like me and won't be a true believer until you learn the actual math behind free trade.
Pay particular attention "comparative advantage" - the nation which produces good/service X at the best value will do so more than other nations, and those other nations will trade for that good/service. After all, why should a good/service be produced somewhere where it is not being produced at its greatest efficiency?
Ask yourself why it is that virtually *ALL* economists -- liberal and conservative -- agree that free trade *IS* a good thing for a nation? In fact, it is one of the few things that economists almost universally agree upon. From liberal economists like the Depression-era hero John Maynard Keynes and almost universally-denounced Paul Krugman, to conservative economists like the godlike Milton Friedman and the nearly-psychotic market-cultist Murray Rothbard, one thing they all agree on is that free trade is beneficial to the nations which participate in it.
Especially when the same people who are assuring us of this "fact" (e.g., economists) have argued for years that the stock market is "efficient".
In the short term, the stock market may not necessarily be "efficient" (that is a term you need to define more-precisely however). But in the long-term, all markets are efficient because they tend towards an equilibrium of supply and demand.
Thus, in the long-run, the stock market *is* efficient. People buy/sell stocks in companies in which they can meet their investment goals (i.e. slow growth and stability for retirement savings, fast growth and high-risk for people who are willing to take personal-finance risks).
The companies that were way overvalued during the dotcom boom? That's looking at the short-term view. Ask yourself where those companies are *now*. Well, where are they?
In the dustbin of history and on thousands of bankruptcy papers across the nation, that's where. The falling-out of the dotcom craze was the result of the free-market sorting out the worthless companies from those with value. Where's the pet food sales online? The market saw that it was a dumb idea, and the company met its demise as a result.
Hint: anybody who plays market games for short-run gains is ususally either an idiot or they know something most people don't. As with ANY trend, the only sane way to understand the various markets out there is by looking at them from the perspective of history; from the long-term POV. Seeing that MSFT went up 10% in one day is meaningless unless it happens several days in a row, and even then it will wind up being no more than a statistical blip in the company's overall price history, because eventually their share price will be seen as overvalued and will drop as a result.
Again, markets tend towards equilibrium, both in theory and in practice.
Did Bill Clinton act in the public's interest when he was with Monica in the White House? How about FDR (he may actually have intended to work in the public's interest, but he turned the nation into a leviathan state in doing so)? Was Richard Nixon thinking with the public's interest in mind? Is President Bush acting in the public interest? Wait, you probably think so...
Is John Ashcroft working solely for the public interest, or is he working *also* to further his own religious beliefs?
You fail to understand the concepts of individual liberty (from the government and from other individuals) and limited government on which the U.S. was founded. Recall that the U.S. was founded because the government of England was too oppressive and too powerful. Your advocacy of increased government power to fight terrorism (or whatever the current boogyman is) -- rather than reducing our international tendency to occupy foreign nations and piss people off -- is helping turn the U.S. into a modern version of England, circa 1700: an empire with a hand in every corner of the world.
So far as the ACLU is concerned, they are hardly perfect in defending the Constitutional rights of people (particularly w.r.t. the 2nd Amendment), but they defend those rights because the alternative -- totalitarian fascist states like Russia, North Korea, China, and the former Iraq -- are far worse. It's bedwetters like you who promote security instead of liberty because you irrationally overinflate the problem of terrorism (I say "irrationally" because in the last 10 years, approx. 3500 people have died in the U.S.'s 50 states due to terrorism. This year alone, 40,000 people will die in auto accidents, and 430,000 will die of smoking-related illnesses - Japan didn't even lose that many civilians when we nuked them during WWII (not immediately that is, though the long-term effects of radiation poisoning is another story)! But I don't see anti-liberty whiners like you worrying about those statistics which point to the fact that you're far-more likely to die of those causes than of terrorism).
Should international communications be monitored? Perhaps; I think a good argument can be made in favor of it, much as I dislike the idea. I just take serious issue with your blind trust in government to always do the right thing. That sort of trust is carried by historically-ignorant fools.
What, like when the government pays $1 for $300k worth of farm land? -- http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/art icles/2004/04/02/family_accuses_state_of_allowing_ unfair_auction_of_its_former_land/
Microsoft is the perfect example of how capitalism needs a tight rein for it to work to the benefit of people, not big corporations!
Since when should capitalism work solely for non-producers, i.e. consumers?
Capitalism is a 2-way street. The producers -- Microsoft -- must convince the consumers -- you and I -- to buy their products, otherwise, Microsoft goes bankrupt.
Clearly MS is not bankrupt, thus, they have convinced enough people to buy their products. People would not stick with MS's products if they didn't like the products.
And guess what? That is precisely where Apple's stuff, the OSS world, etc. come in. MS isn't doing what people want in those areas, and thus, MS is competing against them. MS is competing against Apple, which serves clueless newbie end-users, research houses who just *have* to have a cluster of dual-CPU G5's, and anti-establishmentarian artists who hate megacorps like MS. Linux & OSS fills the needs of not only penniless students (especially engineering and computer science students) and Microsoft-haters, but businesses looking to save money on software costs and improve the reliability of their computing infrastructure. Increasingly, Linux/OSS is coming to fill the needs of other people -- low income people in foreign nations and small governments as well...
MS, almost by definition, cannot compete against those groups (at least at the consumer level I described, though theoretically they could improve on their reliability) given those traits.
Thus, there *is* competition in the market, whether the capitalism-clueless nannies in the EU understand it or not, and I'm absolutely convinced that Linux and the rest of the OSS world is MS's greatest competition both now and increasingly-so as time goes on. With any luck, MS will (preferably sooner, rather than later) become a mere shadow of itself, beholden to the might of Tux & co..
But neither *you* nor the EU helped make Windows. So what right to the profits of Microsoft's do you have, whether via antitrust regulation (through a lawsuit which brings in revenue for the government via legislative fiat and market distortion) or any other means?
Advocating for antitrust regulation, like advocating income taxes, is, ultimately, advocating the theft of one person or business' work to give it to another. Isn't theft morally-wrong?
Perhaps not to the roughly 50% of Slashdot which has a liberal tendency...
I was a Transformers and Knight Rider fan as a kid back in the 80's, but watching the reruns of Miami Vice now on FX, I can't help but wish I'd watched the show back then.
Sonny and Tubbs had it all - guns, girls, fast cars and exciting jobs. What more is there to life?
Sadly, I never realized how much I liked the Miami Vice/Scarface culture of the 80's until I played GTA: Vice City...
If all the Miami Vice eps were put on DVDs, I would happily buy them all.
Actually, like other posters have said, karate wouldn't be a bad idea.
I used to study Tang Soo Do (like Tae Kwon Do, but with more hand techniques, making it more well-rounded) at various points throughout my life, totaling over 5 years. Although the instructor taught it mostly as a sport and a way for kids to improve themselves, I additionally learned it as a means of self-defense (which he emphasized, but not as much).
Although my high school really didn't have bullies beating up on the nerds/geeks much, elementary school and to a lesser extent, middle school did.
I still remember the day in 7th grade I got in a fight with the guy in a grade above me on my bus who lived just down the street. He was taller and bigger than I, and with a crowd of other neighborhood kids around, he had a lot of pride to lose.
Fight story summarized: he spent the next couple years living down the fact that he never knocked me down, but I did knock him down (the side kick to the balls can't have felt very good either!).
(later, the guy studied engineering as an undergrad. I wonder if he's reading this right now? If so, that was a fun fight wasn't it?)
I never had bullying problems after that, because I gained a reputation as "that nice nerdy guy who knows karate and can actually fight."
Besides that though, I also met some cool people at the time and had the opportunity to break multiple wooden boards, which is a real crowd-pleaser and self-esteem builder. It's always fun breaking 3 sets of boards held by other martial artists in the same series of techniques.:)
I would recommend doing more social activities too though. Even running track is more social than martial arts (but compared to sparring, it's nowhere near as competitive!), and us nerds/geeks can use all the socializing we can get. Chess club and computer club don't really count in this respect...
Slashdot Mirror
"If we can't do this anymore, what can we do? We are doomed!"
:) (in fact, in that email to my econ. prof, I mentioned this, and he agreed wholeheartedly)
I remind you: it all makes sense in hindsight, and it wasnt obvious in the past that there would be an IT boom. Just like right now, you can't accurately predict the next thing people will move to. In fact: if you could, then the market would already be 80% of the way to being saturated already.
Don't complain you can't see the next big thing... because you never can. If you can see it, well... then it isnt the next big thing.
You are quite correct. This is the reason I don't advocate economists telling us what "the next big thing" is -- it's a prediction of the future. And we all know how accurate predictions of the future turn out to be...
That is also the reason why I think Lou Dobbs is asking that question in vain and, quite possibly, to mislead people...
Free market economys are meant to be challenging. Its never easy. There is no easy street. Stop looking for that street, because you are just going to get frustrated.
That is certainly true. But that is also the standard capitalism advocate's cop-out. I know, because I've said the same thing before, and I still say them. I want to move beyond mere rhetoric and understand free markets better than that -- and I believe most of the people whose jobs have been offshored want that as well, being that they tend to be reasonably-intelligent college-educated people.
That's why you need to be careful how you wave the banner of "free markets." The United States is not, and has never been a true free market. The closest we've ever been to the free-market ideal was during the 1800s, when regulations were few and innovation was widespread. But even then, we had very steep tariffs in order to protect the emerging industries we were growing domestically. Economics debate is a subject which must be kept in a historical context (e.g. largely-socialist and communist nations are proven failures - look at China, Russia, and N. Korea, whereas free-market capitalism has invariably been the long-run health of the nation -- look at Chile, the U.S., and Hong Kong, and to a lesser-degree, the mixed-economy European nations)...
Today, we have a market-oriented mixed economy. Milton Friedman himself says we have a 50% socialist economy because of how much we pay in taxes (we pay approximately 50% of our incomes in taxes, and because socialism is defined as state ownership of a nation's output, and because in economics the output of a nation = the income of the nation, Friedman is, as usual, dead-on).
Regulations utterly ABOUND in the U.S.. Ever look at the banking industry? They are among the most-heavily regulated industries in the U.S., but they are by no means the only ones. Consider government safety regulations on automobiles. Consider OSHA laws. Consider laws against drugs, which lead to our long-failed War on Drugs. Consider the FDA, which prevents new drugs from getting to market as quickly as they otherwise could, and which also prevents the importation of drugs from Canada and other nations. Consider President Bush's steel tariffs. Consider Social(ist) Security, for which "The Greatest Generation" is going to rob my generation (generation X/Y) blind. Consider Medicare. And don't forget about that massive military beast we keep feeding. And so on...
You're probably a Bush II Republican, so you believe we have a free-market economy, like most Republicans. Compared to almost every other nation on Earth (Singapore and Hong Kong being the best contenders, though with China's influence, HK's free-market status is slowly declining), you are right, we do.
But don't kid yourself -- the United States is nowhere *near* the ideals of a "free mar
Question 1: Retrain in what? Will the new jobs created by trading our jobs with India be created here?
During the 1980s, blue-collar manufacturing workers whose jobs were offshored were told to retrain in some other area, particularly knowledge jobs. Some did, most others moved into other blue-collar jobs such as construction, automobile repair, and other such jobs which aren't so easily offshorable.
Today, the message from economists and CEOs is the same: retrain in some other field. We know that jobs in programming, software-engineering, and most other fields of engineering (electrical, mechanical, chemical, etc.) are being offshored.
So what exactly does one retrain in? Let's look at the options:
* Biotech -- is there any reason that new biotech jobs can't be created overseas instead?
* Nanotech -- is there any reason that new nanotech jobs can't be created overseas instead?
* Medicine -- oooh, wait, radiology is already being offshored, and so are surgical jobs
Note that those are all technology-oriented jobs which do not require one's presence. What technology-oriented jobs require one's presence then?
* Auto mechanic -- for the few geeks who can tolerate working outdoors, with their hands, getting dirty, etc.
* IT technician -- the basically blue-collar guys who schlep computers around, run cables, and replace bad hardware
* Nuclear engineer -- because It Is Stupid to not have people on-site to prevent a nuclear plant from going boom in the event of an emergency
So, can the hundreds of thousands of software geeks who have had their jobs offshored retrain to be auto mechanics? Even if they wanted to, I doubt they could, and as cars become increasingly-reliable, demand for those jobs will decrease. IT technicians? We have a glut of them as it is. Nuclear engineers? This nation is too scared of nuclear power (thanks to Chernobyl and Three-Mile Island) for there to be much of a market for nuclear power.
So, what do we do? Just what jobs are there beyond "knowledge" jobs? If you assume that international trade (and preferably free trade) is a good thing -- as I do, due to comparative advantage -- then you must admit that many of these jobs can go overseas now thanks to the Internet's ability to send data worldwide at dirt-cheap prices.
Now, the standard economist's response to that is that "new jobs will be created as a result of trade." On the face of things, this is true.
But return to the fact that the Internet makes all jobs which deal primarily with information (instead of people) offshorable. Given that fact, what reason is there that the new jobs -- which WILL be created, just as economists tell you -- won't be created overseas, but will be created here in America? Again, is there any reason the new jobs -- which we can reasonably expect to see in biotech and nanotech -- won't simply skip the step of being created in America and instead get created in India first?
I wrote an email to one of my economics professors asking that question (and many others) recently. His response? "Gee, you know that's what interests me about economics so much - why do these things happen?" But he never really answered the question.
If a college professor in Econ. doesn't know the answer, who does?
Question 2: Education.
Often the advice to unemployed IT geeks is to retrain. Retraining requires education. Education requires years of time and money.
Simple question: Where does an unemployed IT geek *get* that money to retrain with, given the rapidly-rising costs of a college education?
Moreover, how can America -- which largely does not subsidize post-secondary education -- compete with foreign nations which do subsidize post-secondary education?
So long as this educational barrier-
there is no reason that we should just blindly accept that unrestricted trade is a good thing.
Blindly accept free trade? No, of course not, that *would* be stupid. But you've obviously never taken an economics course on international trade (I have).
Go take one. Perhaps you are like me and won't be a true believer until you learn the actual math behind free trade.
Pay particular attention "comparative advantage" - the nation which produces good/service X at the best value will do so more than other nations, and those other nations will trade for that good/service. After all, why should a good/service be produced somewhere where it is not being produced at its greatest efficiency?
Ask yourself why it is that virtually *ALL* economists -- liberal and conservative -- agree that free trade *IS* a good thing for a nation? In fact, it is one of the few things that economists almost universally agree upon. From liberal economists like the Depression-era hero John Maynard Keynes and almost universally-denounced Paul Krugman, to conservative economists like the godlike Milton Friedman and the nearly-psychotic market-cultist Murray Rothbard, one thing they all agree on is that free trade is beneficial to the nations which participate in it.
Especially when the same people who are assuring us of this "fact" (e.g., economists) have argued for years that the stock market is "efficient".
In the short term, the stock market may not necessarily be "efficient" (that is a term you need to define more-precisely however). But in the long-term, all markets are efficient because they tend towards an equilibrium of supply and demand.
Thus, in the long-run, the stock market *is* efficient. People buy/sell stocks in companies in which they can meet their investment goals (i.e. slow growth and stability for retirement savings, fast growth and high-risk for people who are willing to take personal-finance risks).
The companies that were way overvalued during the dotcom boom? That's looking at the short-term view. Ask yourself where those companies are *now*. Well, where are they?
In the dustbin of history and on thousands of bankruptcy papers across the nation, that's where. The falling-out of the dotcom craze was the result of the free-market sorting out the worthless companies from those with value. Where's the pet food sales online? The market saw that it was a dumb idea, and the company met its demise as a result.
Hint: anybody who plays market games for short-run gains is ususally either an idiot or they know something most people don't. As with ANY trend, the only sane way to understand the various markets out there is by looking at them from the perspective of history; from the long-term POV. Seeing that MSFT went up 10% in one day is meaningless unless it happens several days in a row, and even then it will wind up being no more than a statistical blip in the company's overall price history, because eventually their share price will be seen as overvalued and will drop as a result.
Again, markets tend towards equilibrium, both in theory and in practice.
Did Bill Clinton act in the public's interest when he was with Monica in the White House? How about FDR (he may actually have intended to work in the public's interest, but he turned the nation into a leviathan state in doing so)? Was Richard Nixon thinking with the public's interest in mind? Is President Bush acting in the public interest? Wait, you probably think so...
Is John Ashcroft working solely for the public interest, or is he working *also* to further his own religious beliefs?
You fail to understand the concepts of individual liberty (from the government and from other individuals) and limited government on which the U.S. was founded. Recall that the U.S. was founded because the government of England was too oppressive and too powerful. Your advocacy of increased government power to fight terrorism (or whatever the current boogyman is) -- rather than reducing our international tendency to occupy foreign nations and piss people off -- is helping turn the U.S. into a modern version of England, circa 1700: an empire with a hand in every corner of the world.
So far as the ACLU is concerned, they are hardly perfect in defending the Constitutional rights of people (particularly w.r.t. the 2nd Amendment), but they defend those rights because the alternative -- totalitarian fascist states like Russia, North Korea, China, and the former Iraq -- are far worse. It's bedwetters like you who promote security instead of liberty because you irrationally overinflate the problem of terrorism (I say "irrationally" because in the last 10 years, approx. 3500 people have died in the U.S.'s 50 states due to terrorism. This year alone, 40,000 people will die in auto accidents, and 430,000 will die of smoking-related illnesses - Japan didn't even lose that many civilians when we nuked them during WWII (not immediately that is, though the long-term effects of radiation poisoning is another story)! But I don't see anti-liberty whiners like you worrying about those statistics which point to the fact that you're far-more likely to die of those causes than of terrorism).
Should international communications be monitored? Perhaps; I think a good argument can be made in favor of it, much as I dislike the idea. I just take serious issue with your blind trust in government to always do the right thing. That sort of trust is carried by historically-ignorant fools.
Yes, the Bureau of Labor Statistics considers military personnel unemployed (see "Industry Employment")
My intermediate macroeconomics book also says military personnel are excluded from unemployment figures.
What, like when the government pays $1 for $300k worth of farm land? -- http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/art icles/2004/04/02/family_accuses_state_of_allowing_ unfair_auction_of_its_former_land/
Microsoft is the perfect example of how capitalism needs a tight rein for it to work to the benefit of people, not big corporations!
Since when should capitalism work solely for non-producers, i.e. consumers?
Capitalism is a 2-way street. The producers -- Microsoft -- must convince the consumers -- you and I -- to buy their products, otherwise, Microsoft goes bankrupt.
Clearly MS is not bankrupt, thus, they have convinced enough people to buy their products. People would not stick with MS's products if they didn't like the products.
And guess what? That is precisely where Apple's stuff, the OSS world, etc. come in. MS isn't doing what people want in those areas, and thus, MS is competing against them. MS is competing against Apple, which serves clueless newbie end-users, research houses who just *have* to have a cluster of dual-CPU G5's, and anti-establishmentarian artists who hate megacorps like MS. Linux & OSS fills the needs of not only penniless students (especially engineering and computer science students) and Microsoft-haters, but businesses looking to save money on software costs and improve the reliability of their computing infrastructure. Increasingly, Linux/OSS is coming to fill the needs of other people -- low income people in foreign nations and small governments as well...
MS, almost by definition, cannot compete against those groups (at least at the consumer level I described, though theoretically they could improve on their reliability) given those traits.
Thus, there *is* competition in the market, whether the capitalism-clueless nannies in the EU understand it or not, and I'm absolutely convinced that Linux and the rest of the OSS world is MS's greatest competition both now and increasingly-so as time goes on. With any luck, MS will (preferably sooner, rather than later) become a mere shadow of itself, beholden to the might of Tux & co..
But neither *you* nor the EU helped make Windows. So what right to the profits of Microsoft's do you have, whether via antitrust regulation (through a lawsuit which brings in revenue for the government via legislative fiat and market distortion) or any other means?
Advocating for antitrust regulation, like advocating income taxes, is, ultimately, advocating the theft of one person or business' work to give it to another. Isn't theft morally-wrong?
Perhaps not to the roughly 50% of Slashdot which has a liberal tendency...
I was a Transformers and Knight Rider fan as a kid back in the 80's, but watching the reruns of Miami Vice now on FX, I can't help but wish I'd watched the show back then.
Sonny and Tubbs had it all - guns, girls, fast cars and exciting jobs. What more is there to life?
Sadly, I never realized how much I liked the Miami Vice/Scarface culture of the 80's until I played GTA: Vice City...
If all the Miami Vice eps were put on DVDs, I would happily buy them all.
Actually, like other posters have said, karate wouldn't be a bad idea.
:)
I used to study Tang Soo Do (like Tae Kwon Do, but with more hand techniques, making it more well-rounded) at various points throughout my life, totaling over 5 years. Although the instructor taught it mostly as a sport and a way for kids to improve themselves, I additionally learned it as a means of self-defense (which he emphasized, but not as much).
Although my high school really didn't have bullies beating up on the nerds/geeks much, elementary school and to a lesser extent, middle school did.
I still remember the day in 7th grade I got in a fight with the guy in a grade above me on my bus who lived just down the street. He was taller and bigger than I, and with a crowd of other neighborhood kids around, he had a lot of pride to lose.
Fight story summarized: he spent the next couple years living down the fact that he never knocked me down, but I did knock him down (the side kick to the balls can't have felt very good either!).
(later, the guy studied engineering as an undergrad. I wonder if he's reading this right now? If so, that was a fun fight wasn't it?)
I never had bullying problems after that, because I gained a reputation as "that nice nerdy guy who knows karate and can actually fight."
Besides that though, I also met some cool people at the time and had the opportunity to break multiple wooden boards, which is a real crowd-pleaser and self-esteem builder. It's always fun breaking 3 sets of boards held by other martial artists in the same series of techniques.
I would recommend doing more social activities too though. Even running track is more social than martial arts (but compared to sparring, it's nowhere near as competitive!), and us nerds/geeks can use all the socializing we can get. Chess club and computer club don't really count in this respect...
Support the future of battles against the RIAA -- take the RIAA money and send it to the EFF. :)