That doesn't hold water. Extrapolate to the extreme: what if the Chinese did subsidize everything and then cut the subsidy and take huge profits, not to mention strategic control of vital industries?
First off, they can't. They don't have enough tax capability to subsidize more then a very few industries. And whatever they don't subsidize and export, well, they have to buy from foreigners, and their very own policies will have made the foreigners better competitors in those fields which they chose to not subsidize.
Second, monopolies are overrated as damaging to the economy and consumers. What happens if any monopolist strangles competition that way? It's the same old story: the foreigners will quickly start producing the product themselves, probably in a different manner, and the subsidized industry will be locked in to the old way of making the product and fall on its face.
Rare earths is a fine example. Mines in the US at least, no doubt elsewhere, which had been closed because they couldn't compete, suddenly sprang back to life, the Chinese backed down, and now not only is the Chinese price still dropping, the US mines are still in operation. The Chinese wasted a lot of taxes to very little end, and the rest of the world got cheap resources for a while at their expense, and a lot of new mines opening up which will result in lower prices overall.
Look at how well the oil embargoes of the 1970s worked. They caused short term disruption, but inflation adjusted prices still haven't recovered.
There are all sorts of examples in all sorts of industries. Monopolies cause short term disruptions, but the backlash impoverishes the monopoly and enriches the world in the long term.
When society / the government insists that we have to pay more for something because we demand tat it be made here, we suffer in two ways: first and most obviously, in higher prices. Second, in rewarding inefficient producers who would be more useful in some other field where tey are more efficient than the subsidized foreigners.
Rewarding inefficiency while punishing consumers is the epitome of stupid economic thinking and the natural way for bureaucrats to think; they like to spout simple minded nonsense while distracting attention from logic because votes are easier to get that way.
I fail to understand the completely backward argument. What the heck is wrong with them taxing themselves to reduce our prices?
All I hear is "it puts our workers out of jobs!" which is EXACTLY the point of distributing manufacturing and other jobs around the world. If some region, whether it be a different country, state, or city, can produce something cheaper than most other regions, regardless of why, what is the point of the other regions insisting in producing it themselves? Better to put those inefficient factories and companies and workers on something else that they are better at.
Everyone should do what they ar ebets at, not what others are best at, because that leads to ridiculous things like subsidies (you have to make your inefficient products appear cheaper) and tariffs (you have to make the other efficient products look more expensive).
I would really like to know why so many people have such a knee jerk reaction as to think there is something wrong with letting foreigners tax themselves to make something cheaper for us, and why they think it good to raise prices for our consumers so our workers and factories and companies can continue to be inefficient in one area at the expense of not being more efficient than the foreigners at something we could be doing instead.
Factory jobs moved offshore because the union workers and retiree benefits were too expensive, not because the factories or workers were crap. You have a sorry opinion of American workers and factories if you think the workers wouldn't be hired and factories bought once bankruptcy cleared the baggage from years of mismanagement.
Factories and workers are expensive. Other manufacturers would snap them up in a heartbeat, at least some of them, since they wouldn't be liable for the union contracts or retiree benefits.
Microsoft has never innovated. Their biggest own-work was Clippy. They got where they were pre-Ballmer due to lockin and monopolistic practices. Gates bailed in time, Ballmer was left holding a banana which was starting to get past its sell-by date. Ballmer's biggest flaw was being too shortsighted to see what Gates saw and gladly taking over control of what he thought was an automatic money factory. Gates' biggest flaw was not caring about Microsoft any more and handing over control to an unimaginative fanboy who couldn't lead into the new reality.
That annoyed me no end, the idea that GM would vanish, all its factories would vanish, all the cars it made would vanish, and all the workers would be left empty handed. No one could understand that the world was buying a certain number of cars and would continue to do so after a GM bankruptcy, and GM would reorganize and keep on building cars. Even if GM itself shuttered and all its factories stopped cold, other car factories would pick up the slack and most of those ex-GM workers would get jobs in the expanding factories.
All we heard was lamentations of misery with no common sense in sight. Pretty disgusting.
Mice and other critters may well have evolved the same mutation many times, but it had no survival benefit without other mutations which only humans (or primates) had.
Human speech, for instance, requires physical changes to vocal cords and the throat, in addition to brain changes, or so I have read. Got to change them all to get actual speech.
If you’ve got a poorly made, ill-fitting shirt, you’re probably not going to be swayed into buying the piece just because it has 482 likes on Facebook. Similarly, if the item has only two likes, but makes you look like you’ve done nothing but get massaged on a beach in Bora Bora, you’re probably going to buy it regardless of its online popularity.
Something is probably not going to get liked much if it is poorly made. Something which makes people look great (whatever that is) probably will get liked more. Sure there will be outliers, both people and clothes, but the general case holds.
Instead of just laying on the snark, the idiot could have thought for a second and realized that the biggest flaw is switching clothes and hangars. Someone takes 3 shirts into a dressing rooms, tries them on, puts them back on the wrong hangars. Why didn't this idiot "reporter" stretch a few brain cells and think of that? Maybe the store has some way of preventing that. Maybe the loss prevention tags tell the hangar what the shirt id is, and swapping doesn't affect it. I'd like to know that.
Most cities have schools so crowded that requiring sex offenders to live more than 1000 feet away from schools means they have to live under freeways.
We're talking cities, that's where most people, especially most poor people, live. Like New York, Chicago... ride another couple of subway stops, transfer once extra on a bus.
If kids and parents aren't willing to do that, they aren't going to get any benefit from school even if it was right next door.
I have a Hall's safe (before they ughed out their web page with animation and moved the company) but they were local. The main thing is to look for the temperature rating of the inside, not the fire. I haven't looked for one in a while and have no other recommendation.
Make sure that safe is fire safe for electronics. Most fire safes brag about keeping the interior to 350F or so for a few hours. Solder flows just above that, so electronics aren't good in them. But some safes are better; you just have to be careful.
Another one. Who said anything about parents paying directly for schools? Why do you make that assumption?
Here's how you do it: keep schools exactly as they are now, but allow parents to register at any school they want, regardless of political boundaries. Doesn't have to even be in the same school district, or state, but other than Rhode Island, I doubt many parents are going to send their children that far away.
Take New York. I don't know much about the schools there other than the famous rubber rooms, but I bet there are good schools and bad schools. Parents will certainly form some opinions about teachers they like and don't like, ditto for schools. Make registration first come first served. Some poor people will register at the rich good schools, some rich people will be too late and have to register at poor bad schools.
No other changes. What's so hard to understand about that?
You make the same basic assumption about funding. If parents don't like the poor district schools and do like the rich district schools, they send their kids to the rich districts. What prevents that? Even if it's first come first served, some poor kids will get in and some rich kids will not.
If, instead, parents were given freedom of choice in schools and teachers, the good ones would be oversubscribed, the poor ones undersubscribed and laid off / fired, and quality would improve dramatically and quickly.
Could be. I rather suspect that the result would be that the rich would get nice schools, while the middle class and the poor would get worthless schools.
I said nothing at all about changing funding. Schools are supposed to have equalized funding, I believe per Supreme Court ruling.
If you want to read anything at all between my lines, try vouchers. But whether choice involves private schools too, or only public schools, *choice* is the key.
People have figured out by themselves that they want government.
No, look at all histories, it was always the elites who decided on how much control government should have over the masses. Really. Much of their arguments were that people themselves could not be trusted. Originally Senators were elected by state legislature, not popular vote, because they didn't trust people. Same reason for the idiotic Electoral College instead of popular vote. Same reason for a zillion choices on government. Study electoral history in Britain, France, all over. They do not trust the masses to make their own decisions.
Some things are natural for a central government, such as pollution which ignores political boundaries. Others, like schools, are just plain contempt for people making their own decisions.
Teacher unions and school boards have one thing in common: they both want to keep parents and students from having any say in how schools are run. Teachers themselves, mostly, care a lot about teaching. But their unions, not so much.
I see you had a grate education. You seem qualified for a great union management position.
Christ you are ignorant. You do need a nanny to tell you how to think, if you cannot see the difference between wanting to have some choice in what teachers your kids get vs robbing someone. There is not a single libertarian who thinks the right to be left alone supersedes other peoples' right to be left alone, that robbery and murder are somehow acceptable. You must be willfully ignorant, intentionally blind and deaf, if you really do believe that.
The problem is that people like you, who cannot tell the difference between thought control and mayhem and need a nanny state to guide your morals, think everybody else is just as helpless and want that same nanny state to tell everyone else how to behave too, but of course everyone must behave and think as you want them to do. No variety of thought is allowed.
That's one thing I've never understood about the libertarian philosophy of every man for himself
Possibly because that's not the libertarian philosophy. The libertarian philosophy is that statists need to go away, that people can figure things put by themselves, and this does not mean they want no interaction with others, it means they don't need or want a nanny state telling them how to behave with one-size-fits-all guidelines.
US schools are the classic example. Parents get no choice; schools are chosen based on where you live, and teachers are fixed in place by the unions and school boards. Because of this single central control, as with any bureaucracy, there is no feedback on how well things are doing. The government mandated universal tests are a joke and teachers cram test answers into kids and/or fudge the results instead of teaching the knowledge. Bad teachers can't be fired. Money is wasted.
If, instead, parents were given freedom of choice in schools and teachers, the good ones would be oversubscribed, the poor ones undersubscribed and laid off / fired, and quality would improve dramatically and quickly.
Of course some parents wouldn't care, and some would care about the "wrong" things, but parents who chose to teach creationism, fear of GM food, or the purity of global warming thought would find their kids losing faith in them once they hit the real world. In any case, the result wouldn't be any worse, and it would lose all the friction with government mandated unpopular one-size-fits-all choices.
Slashdot Mirror
Applying the summary judgement standard described above, the judgement of the superior court was reversed, the case was remanded back to the superior court with instructions to dismiss the plaintiff's claim with prejudice. Therefore, Doe was permitted to remain anonymous.
That doesn't hold water. Extrapolate to the extreme: what if the Chinese did subsidize everything and then cut the subsidy and take huge profits, not to mention strategic control of vital industries?
First off, they can't. They don't have enough tax capability to subsidize more then a very few industries. And whatever they don't subsidize and export, well, they have to buy from foreigners, and their very own policies will have made the foreigners better competitors in those fields which they chose to not subsidize.
Second, monopolies are overrated as damaging to the economy and consumers. What happens if any monopolist strangles competition that way? It's the same old story: the foreigners will quickly start producing the product themselves, probably in a different manner, and the subsidized industry will be locked in to the old way of making the product and fall on its face.
Rare earths is a fine example. Mines in the US at least, no doubt elsewhere, which had been closed because they couldn't compete, suddenly sprang back to life, the Chinese backed down, and now not only is the Chinese price still dropping, the US mines are still in operation. The Chinese wasted a lot of taxes to very little end, and the rest of the world got cheap resources for a while at their expense, and a lot of new mines opening up which will result in lower prices overall.
Look at how well the oil embargoes of the 1970s worked. They caused short term disruption, but inflation adjusted prices still haven't recovered.
There are all sorts of examples in all sorts of industries. Monopolies cause short term disruptions, but the backlash impoverishes the monopoly and enriches the world in the long term.
Try some actual, you know, *ideas* next time, some arguments.
When society / the government insists that we have to pay more for something because we demand tat it be made here, we suffer in two ways: first and most obviously, in higher prices. Second, in rewarding inefficient producers who would be more useful in some other field where tey are more efficient than the subsidized foreigners.
Rewarding inefficiency while punishing consumers is the epitome of stupid economic thinking and the natural way for bureaucrats to think; they like to spout simple minded nonsense while distracting attention from logic because votes are easier to get that way.
I fail to understand the completely backward argument. What the heck is wrong with them taxing themselves to reduce our prices?
All I hear is "it puts our workers out of jobs!" which is EXACTLY the point of distributing manufacturing and other jobs around the world. If some region, whether it be a different country, state, or city, can produce something cheaper than most other regions, regardless of why, what is the point of the other regions insisting in producing it themselves? Better to put those inefficient factories and companies and workers on something else that they are better at.
Everyone should do what they ar ebets at, not what others are best at, because that leads to ridiculous things like subsidies (you have to make your inefficient products appear cheaper) and tariffs (you have to make the other efficient products look more expensive).
I would really like to know why so many people have such a knee jerk reaction as to think there is something wrong with letting foreigners tax themselves to make something cheaper for us, and why they think it good to raise prices for our consumers so our workers and factories and companies can continue to be inefficient in one area at the expense of not being more efficient than the foreigners at something we could be doing instead.
Factory jobs moved offshore because the union workers and retiree benefits were too expensive, not because the factories or workers were crap. You have a sorry opinion of American workers and factories if you think the workers wouldn't be hired and factories bought once bankruptcy cleared the baggage from years of mismanagement.
Factories and workers are expensive. Other manufacturers would snap them up in a heartbeat, at least some of them, since they wouldn't be liable for the union contracts or retiree benefits.
Instead of moderating it as flamebait (the coward's way), why don't you list some Microsoft innovations other than Clippy?
We all know the answer -- anonymous moderating is easier than writing fiction.
Microsoft has never innovated. Their biggest own-work was Clippy. They got where they were pre-Ballmer due to lockin and monopolistic practices. Gates bailed in time, Ballmer was left holding a banana which was starting to get past its sell-by date. Ballmer's biggest flaw was being too shortsighted to see what Gates saw and gladly taking over control of what he thought was an automatic money factory. Gates' biggest flaw was not caring about Microsoft any more and handing over control to an unimaginative fanboy who couldn't lead into the new reality.
That annoyed me no end, the idea that GM would vanish, all its factories would vanish, all the cars it made would vanish, and all the workers would be left empty handed. No one could understand that the world was buying a certain number of cars and would continue to do so after a GM bankruptcy, and GM would reorganize and keep on building cars. Even if GM itself shuttered and all its factories stopped cold, other car factories would pick up the slack and most of those ex-GM workers would get jobs in the expanding factories.
All we heard was lamentations of misery with no common sense in sight. Pretty disgusting.
Mice and other critters may well have evolved the same mutation many times, but it had no survival benefit without other mutations which only humans (or primates) had.
Human speech, for instance, requires physical changes to vocal cords and the throat, in addition to brain changes, or so I have read. Got to change them all to get actual speech.
If you’ve got a poorly made, ill-fitting shirt, you’re probably not going to be swayed into buying the piece just because it has 482 likes on Facebook. Similarly, if the item has only two likes, but makes you look like you’ve done nothing but get massaged on a beach in Bora Bora, you’re probably going to buy it regardless of its online popularity.
Something is probably not going to get liked much if it is poorly made. Something which makes people look great (whatever that is) probably will get liked more. Sure there will be outliers, both people and clothes, but the general case holds.
Instead of just laying on the snark, the idiot could have thought for a second and realized that the biggest flaw is switching clothes and hangars. Someone takes 3 shirts into a dressing rooms, tries them on, puts them back on the wrong hangars. Why didn't this idiot "reporter" stretch a few brain cells and think of that? Maybe the store has some way of preventing that. Maybe the loss prevention tags tell the hangar what the shirt id is, and swapping doesn't affect it. I'd like to know that.
Far-away schools?!? All over the world?!?
Most cities have schools so crowded that requiring sex offenders to live more than 1000 feet away from schools means they have to live under freeways.
We're talking cities, that's where most people, especially most poor people, live. Like New York, Chicago ... ride another couple of subway stops, transfer once extra on a bus.
If kids and parents aren't willing to do that, they aren't going to get any benefit from school even if it was right next door.
Google doesn't think so; they don't include linux in their list of clients. They think there is some difference.
I have a Hall's safe (before they ughed out their web page with animation and moved the company) but they were local. The main thing is to look for the temperature rating of the inside, not the fire. I haven't looked for one in a while and have no other recommendation.
Dropbox has one, Google Drive doesn't. That's a killer for me.
Make sure that safe is fire safe for electronics. Most fire safes brag about keeping the interior to 350F or so for a few hours. Solder flows just above that, so electronics aren't good in them. But some safes are better; you just have to be careful.
Another one. Who said anything about parents paying directly for schools? Why do you make that assumption?
Here's how you do it: keep schools exactly as they are now, but allow parents to register at any school they want, regardless of political boundaries. Doesn't have to even be in the same school district, or state, but other than Rhode Island, I doubt many parents are going to send their children that far away.
Take New York. I don't know much about the schools there other than the famous rubber rooms, but I bet there are good schools and bad schools. Parents will certainly form some opinions about teachers they like and don't like, ditto for schools. Make registration first come first served. Some poor people will register at the rich good schools, some rich people will be too late and have to register at poor bad schools.
No other changes. What's so hard to understand about that?
You make the same basic assumption about funding. If parents don't like the poor district schools and do like the rich district schools, they send their kids to the rich districts. What prevents that? Even if it's first come first served, some poor kids will get in and some rich kids will not.
If, instead, parents were given freedom of choice in schools and teachers, the good ones would be oversubscribed, the poor ones undersubscribed and laid off / fired, and quality would improve dramatically and quickly.
Could be. I rather suspect that the result would be that the rich would get nice schools, while the middle class and the poor would get worthless schools.
I said nothing at all about changing funding. Schools are supposed to have equalized funding, I believe per Supreme Court ruling.
If you want to read anything at all between my lines, try vouchers. But whether choice involves private schools too, or only public schools, *choice* is the key.
People have figured out by themselves that they want government.
No, look at all histories, it was always the elites who decided on how much control government should have over the masses. Really. Much of their arguments were that people themselves could not be trusted. Originally Senators were elected by state legislature, not popular vote, because they didn't trust people. Same reason for the idiotic Electoral College instead of popular vote. Same reason for a zillion choices on government. Study electoral history in Britain, France, all over. They do not trust the masses to make their own decisions.
Some things are natural for a central government, such as pollution which ignores political boundaries. Others, like schools, are just plain contempt for people making their own decisions.
Teacher unions and school boards have one thing in common: they both want to keep parents and students from having any say in how schools are run. Teachers themselves, mostly, care a lot about teaching. But their unions, not so much.
I see you had a grate education. You seem qualified for a great union management position.
Christ you are ignorant. You do need a nanny to tell you how to think, if you cannot see the difference between wanting to have some choice in what teachers your kids get vs robbing someone. There is not a single libertarian who thinks the right to be left alone supersedes other peoples' right to be left alone, that robbery and murder are somehow acceptable. You must be willfully ignorant, intentionally blind and deaf, if you really do believe that.
The problem is that people like you, who cannot tell the difference between thought control and mayhem and need a nanny state to guide your morals, think everybody else is just as helpless and want that same nanny state to tell everyone else how to behave too, but of course everyone must behave and think as you want them to do. No variety of thought is allowed.
That's one thing I've never understood about the libertarian philosophy of every man for himself
Possibly because that's not the libertarian philosophy. The libertarian philosophy is that statists need to go away, that people can figure things put by themselves, and this does not mean they want no interaction with others, it means they don't need or want a nanny state telling them how to behave with one-size-fits-all guidelines.
US schools are the classic example. Parents get no choice; schools are chosen based on where you live, and teachers are fixed in place by the unions and school boards. Because of this single central control, as with any bureaucracy, there is no feedback on how well things are doing. The government mandated universal tests are a joke and teachers cram test answers into kids and/or fudge the results instead of teaching the knowledge. Bad teachers can't be fired. Money is wasted.
If, instead, parents were given freedom of choice in schools and teachers, the good ones would be oversubscribed, the poor ones undersubscribed and laid off / fired, and quality would improve dramatically and quickly.
Of course some parents wouldn't care, and some would care about the "wrong" things, but parents who chose to teach creationism, fear of GM food, or the purity of global warming thought would find their kids losing faith in them once they hit the real world. In any case, the result wouldn't be any worse, and it would lose all the friction with government mandated unpopular one-size-fits-all choices.
Uh-uh. If the carriers were able to build excess capacity in the first place, it's cheap enough to do so that competitors can jump in.