Incidentally, I find it hard to object to offshoring on grounds of human equality but cheap labor, in and of itself, is not necessarily a good thing because it discourages companies from producing goods using labor efficient methods (automation).
Yes, but the proper way to increase the value of labor, is to increase the demand for labor... not by limiting the supply.
By the logic you are using, we would make gasoline engines more efficient by burning 50% oil before it reaches the market. Well, yes, our gasoline engines would certainly be much more efficient if we limited the supply of gasoline by burning 50% of oil for no reason, but it doesn't make our overall use of oil more efficient - overall use would be far more wasteful. You are making the mistake of looking at the micro, and ignoring the macro.
Likewise, you aren't making the labor in China any more valuable by limiting trade to China. Any benifits of automatition made domesticly would result in extreme innefficent use of labor in China. In the long run it would hurt both the U.S. and China.
Your price is highly skewed because you assumed 100% of the cost of the DVD player is manufacturing labor
I was using highly skewed numbers as a concession. My arguement gets stronger if the manufacturing cost isn't 100% labor, because that means the amount of jobs being "saved" by banning foreign DVD players are very small. (And, of couse, the DVD player manufactured in the U.S. is still going to be vastly more expensive because of enviornmental law complience, medical insurance costs, liability costs, real estate costs, more expensive bribes, etc.).
But why don't we take your protectionist logic further. If we are "losing" jobs to foriegn companies, than what about the people losing jobs in California, or New York, or Detroit, when companies outsource to West Virginia, or Arkansa, or Tennesse (where labor costs are cheaper, envournmental laws are laxer, taxes are less etc.)? Shouldn't we restrict trade between states as well? If international free trade is so terrible, and Americans are losing jobs and Chinese people are being exploited, and if restricting free trade helps the situation - Well, then clearly restricting trade even father between states would help our economy, right?
A handful of global bankers make the most money off of this system by taking as much money as they can from everyone else,
Money is simply a device used to exchange goods and services. If global bankers were making "as much money as they can from everyone else", it would be as useless as Monopoly money. Money is valuable so long as money is changing hands. It is not being horded in the basement vaults of rich people, like some sort of Scrooge McDuck comic.
American wealth is exported
What wealth is being exported? What are you talking about? Are you saying that the U.S. is exporting dollars? Dollars are not wealth, and if other countries aquire too many dollars the value of dollars goes down. Are you saying that the U.S. is exporting it's natural resources? Um, no, we actually import far more natural resources than we export! Are you saying we are exporting too much goods and services? No way, the U.S. imports more than it exports there, too? Do you even know what you are trying to say?
Actually, Carmack was dissing Windows Vista... So if you are coming up with "Microsoft bought out Carmack" conspiracy theories, they don't make much sense.
Except the architecture of the PS2 wasn't fundamentally different, it was just poorly documented. The Cell architecture requires you to learn a whole new paradym, and is totally undocumented, creating a double whammie!
There's absolutely NOTHING new in Paypal doing this. They aren't regulated, so they can do what the hell they want to in effect. and you can notice this.
Of course, it is the fact that they ARE NOT regulated that makes Paypal so useful.
You want a regulated version of Paypal? They have them. They are called BANKS!!! You want to accept small payments on your website in a way regulated by the government? Sure! It is called getting a buisness licence, then getting a bank account for that buisness, then getting a merchant account for credit cards for that buisness, and then an online processor to go through the merchant bank etc. Expect to pay several thousands of dollars in order to do it properly, and expect it to take several months.
Have you ever tried to get a bank account in order to collect charitable donations? Besides actually having to make a physical trip to the bank, expect having to fill out a bunch of forms, answering a bunch of questions, and putting yourself on an IRS watchlist for extra scrunity. That of course won't let you collect money via credit card or micro payment online (that will require several thousand dollars, getting a merchant account, getting a processor, etc, like mentioned above). People will have to mail checks... which will take several weeks to arrive in the mail, then several weeks to clear... and if you want to do everything by the books, you are going to have to document all the money and where it came from.
Thank god there is no regulation with Paypal (and other paypal like services), because that regulation would destroy the usefulness and flexibility of the service. People are using Paypal because it is unregulated. Unfortunatly, there are trade offs to using an unregulated system... you trade the security in exchange for flexibility and low-cost. Now, if you want to boycott Paypal, that is fine, I 100% support you on that (especially now that there are alternative services, like Google Payments). However, please please please don't regulate services like this, and thus turn them into banks.
Sony's decision to use asymetic processors, and NOT PROVIDE ENOUGH DEVELOPER SUPPORT was a bad decision. If the technology could be used easily, it is some pretty cool stuff!
While there are indeed alarmist/ignorant/self-serving 'environmentalists', as there are boobs and headline-graspers in every part of human endeavor, there are also arrogant self-righteous techno-weenies with equally poor understanding of the topics on which they opine. As much as you look down on those you deem ignorant, those who are informed can look down on your ignorance, which to a self-aware person would suggest an attitude-check would be in order. (Frankly you come off not much different then the stereotyped asshats you rail against.)
You are ignoring the fact, that out of the people who are telling us "We must stop fossil fuels now, or it will destroy our planet", virtually all of them are dead set against the cheapest and easiest way to replace fossil fuels - Nuclear Power. It is not a stereotype at all - Just go to the Greenpeace website, or the Sierra Club website, or the Green Party, and you will see that amoung organized enviornmentalist, opposition to nuclear power is universal. It isn't just a handful of people who are on the loonie fringe of the enviornmental movement who are against nuclear power.
Yes, but the absolutely daft US regulations forbid extracting plutonium from spent fuel. After all, it might make it easier for terrists to get holda some and make a nukular bomb.
To be fair, this is not a modern policy. This was made policy by Jimmy Carter, and it was well acknowledged that he was doing it with a wink and nod to the anti-nuclear-energy lobby.
Lock-in is the inevitable result of a monopoly. And I am not talking about Microsoft's monopoly either, although that is part of it.
When you have a vast, overwelming quasi-nationalized top-down educational beurocracy, with and almost total monopoly of education - the inevitable result is exploitive locked-in contracts with huge companies like Microsoft. Instead of Microsoft having to win over tens of thousands of individual schools, Microsoft only has to win over a few people at the top of the beurocracy. Bribing and misleading tens of thousands of IT people, all across the country would be prohibitivly difficult and expensive, where as bribing and misleading a few high officials costs virtually nothing when you are talking the huge potential profits.
Big government contracts, and big government policies, are naturally prone to extreme amounts of corruption and exploitation, because the stakes are so high and because authority are so centralized. You have to fight Microsoft on the level of the federal government, which is going to be impossible for your average parent. An average parent can walk over and talk to the head IT guy at the local school, or make an appoitment with the local municipal superintendant or mayor - But the average person can't fly off to meet with the head of the Ministry of Education, or the Prime Minister.
Don't blame Microsoft for this problem - they are simply exploiting the natural flaws in the educational leviatian. If they were gone, another company would simply find another way to exploit the system.
Take a DVD player. You can purchase a cheap DVD player for about $40. Now, the plastic and metal in the DVD is not very valuable, pretty much you are paying for the labor and logistics in manufacturing the DVD player.
Now, the DVD player is made in China, and lets say the labor to make the DVD player cost about 1/20th of what it costs in the U.S. (it is probably actually cheaper than that). That means, that the same DVD player would cost at least $800 if made in the U.S. (in reality, it would cost much more... I am not including the differences in enviornmental regulation, defending frivolous lawsuits, medical insurance, taxes, etc. all of which would be much higher in the U.S.).
Right now, when a DVD player cost $40, it means that DVD players are cheap and ubiquitous. The store is making money selling the DVD player and the DVDs you will buy to put into the player (all that is money made in the local economy). Movie companies are spending hundreds of millions on movies, expecting to recover that money in part on DVD sales - and most U.S. movies (and virtually all DVD manufacturing) happen IN the United States, creating tens of thousands of jobs.
Now, lets say we ban foreign manufactured media playing devices from being sold in the U.S., and now *CHEAP* DVD players are $800 (of course, assuming the same escilation of pricing, you would expect a good quality one to be around $8000). You have made DVD players into a luxury good, outside the realm of afordability to a good chunck of Americans. Not only are stores selling less DVD players and DVDs, but Hollywood cuts back on movie production because they can no longer recoup so much back from DVD sales (people without DVD players, don't buy or rent DVDs).
Now, if you look at the jobs that would be added to the U.S. by manufacturing DVD players locally, and how many jobs would be lost because fewer people could afford DVD players, it is easy to see you aren't creating any jobs locally by requiring that DVD players be made in the U.S. In fact, most likely you would end up losing a whole lot of jobs in the U.S..
If a company outsources IT, that can give free up money that it might use to make more TV commercials (which create jobs in the U.S.). Or it could free money to allow it to expand its retail outlets (creating jobs in construction and for the people working at the outlets in the U.S.). It could also allow the company to lower the price of its goods, meaning more people in the U.S. could afford the products being sold.
People are also ignoring the fact that as people overseas get more jobs and more money, they now have more money to purchase OUR goods and services. China, India, and elsewhere are now customers for many American products, unlike say Cuba, or Iran, or some other country that is economicly isolated from the United States because of artificial trade barriers.
And given that there is no law stopping anyone from using any unit of measure they want, I don't think it is as simple as "the U.S. should switch to metric". A lot of things are already done in metric, and the things that aren't are things where it would be cost prohibitive to re-tool machines, or things where the consumer might get confused (imagine the lawsuits when consumers think they are getting a great deal on gasoline, only to find out they were paying by the litre!).
Pretty funny, 3 comments ago on a seperate threas you said "Achievements are too tough to get for most players" , I'm summarizing your statement. So basically you are a Sony fanboy, or you can't finish GoW on hardcore difficulty, or playing online you get your butt kicked ? Pick one.
Or maybe Gears of War just wasn't much fun. I much prefer to play Rainbow 6: Vegas.
You seem to be getting a bit over emotional and sensitive about something as trivial as videogames. I must be a Sony fanboy if I don't like a 360 game I purchased? You are insulting my video game abilities, as if I would find that some sort of insult? Dude, lighten up! Gears of War just wasn't the fantastic game it was hyped up to be, and people would be better off spending their money on a different game... don't freak out like I just told you there was no Santa Claus.
The trouble is, as soon as scientists find a method to collect stem cells that is palitable to the religious right (they are worried that stem cells from aborted fetuses are going to be a commodity, and therefore encourage abortions)... Then you are going to have the left wing greens, the same people who protest GM foods and oppose nearly all biotechnology, trying to stop it. Right now the greens have been silent on the technology, mostly because the right wing has been so adamantly against it... but as soon as the position stops being associated with christians and the anti-abortion movement, the left will jump on the issue.
Rest assured, no matter what... if it is benificial and can save lives, some powerful political group is going to oppose the technology.
Despite the update - Gears of War and the Multiplayer especially are not very good. Not terrible, mind you, but not nearly deserving of all the hype and buzz the game had.
A couple molded plastic and fiberglass parts, A few car batteries, and some cheap electric motors, and you have yourself a pretty decent electric commuter car. Image a lightweight bike chassis with electric engine. This is just a step up from the golf carts and electric warehouse vehicles that we use now.
The hard part is making an electric car that can meet all the road safety requirements we now have. You can strap your kid to the back of your bike, jump on the road, and there are absolutly no rules regarding safety... but give something a motor and protection from the rain, and suddenly it would bloody murder to let someone drive something that isn't as safe as an SUV in a collision.
The fact is, adding another Federal Law for schools to be in compliance with uses up vast amount of resources. It is one thing if the school IT guy blocks myspace on the school network... it is another thing for it to be a federal law, with greatly adds to the responsiblities, oversight, and beurocratic aparatus involved in implementing it.
How is exercising editorial oversite a "free speech issue" again? If the New York Times refuses to print a picture of my naked ass on the front page, is that also a "free speech issue".
I am sure the guys who created the Columbine game wouldn't mind if someone put a billboard advertisment on their front lawn... after all, we don't want there to be a free speech issue.
Except that a lot of the achievments are too difficult for a player to achieve, or too tedius to attempt.
For example, a lot of the acheivements involve playing the game at all skill levels... some involve beating the game using a single weapon. The average player isn't going to get 50 achievments on a game, they are going to get closer to 20.
You forfeited the debate with the phrase "...sticking the gun to their head and telling them they are not allowed to purchase goods from people with different skin colors and religions." Which is an outrageous statement on all levels.
It is outragous, but absolutly true... the two are not mutually exclusive. It sounds unbelivable to you, because you have been conditioned to accept the nationalist brainwashing that is used to keep people hating each other, suspicious of each other, and isolated from each other because they live on opposite sides of an imaginary line.
When you want to restrict trade between two countries, you are restricting two (or more) brothers/sisters of the human race from engaging in a consentual economic relationship. When your nationalist leaders make conditions on other countries in exchange for the privledge of trade (even when the conditions seem superficially benevolent), you are engaging in economic imperialism, because you are using nationalist power to force a condition on a sovereign country and its people.
When you get over the ethnic, class, religious, and social bigotry that is a natural outcome of nationalism, and when you begin to see people in foriegn country as your brothers and not your enemy, then you will see that the only moral condition is to unconditionally allow free trade from all people in all countries.
You cannot claim you are helping the middle class and working class, when you want to use the government to fight a war on the purchasing decisions of the working class and middle class. If free trade was a bad deal for the average Joe in America, the average Joe would simply choose not to engage in free trade and there would be no need to restrict trade. If you need to force the working class and middle class not to do something with the threat of state sponsered violence (that is how the regulations you love so much are enforced, after all), then clearly you must be forcing them to do something against their own best interests. You don't have to put a gun to someone's head if you are trying to get them to do something in their own self-interest, you only put the gun to their head when something is clearly NOT in their own self interest.
Americans can get any self loading rifle, from.17HMR to.50BMG, any automatic rifle made before 1984, and any pistol they like. This includes M1A rifles, semi-auto AK47 and M16 based rifles, which is plenty for a revolution. I don't know what you're on about.
Really? Explain to me how you would purchase those things in New York City? Or Washington DC? Or in California? Or any of the other urban areas and high population areas where 90% of the population live?
I can purchase any automatic rifle made before 1984 (and imported before 1984)? Oh, OK, so basicly existing weapons are grandfathered in and no new weapons are allowed to be manufactured - meaning that the supply of automatic weapons continues to diminish as more are siezed by government agents, more wear out and are no longer safe to operate, and the rest are gobbled up by wealthy collectors? And that we are not allowed to use any of the technological advances that happened since 1984?
We can own semi-auto AK47s? Yeah great - because the AK47 totally sucks as a rifle and is only really useful when it can shoot a lot of bullets! Lets just ask the insurgents in Iraq what they would think of a semi-auto AK47?
I can own any pistol I want? Thats funny, I remember that the city I lived in when I was looking to buy a pistol required that people register the gun... and the office was open for 30 minutes, every two weeks, with a maximum of 1 person on duty (unless they were on break), where you have 20-30 pages of paper work to be filled out. That of course is a lot better than New York, or Washington DC, or the other cities were pistols are outright illegal.
Oh, and then are 2nd Amendment rights are surely protected, when the National Guard is sent into New Orleans to go door to door to confiscate all guns. So we clearly are not allowed to have any gun, legal and licenced or not, if the government decides it is a "National Emergency".
Lay off it... Right now, it is easy enough for a tiny minority of gun collectors and ethusiests to get infantry style weapons (better to let a tiny minority have a few guns while you erode gun rights everywhere else lest the collectors actually put up a fight against gun control)... but your average American is lucky if he has the option to buy a hunting rifle or shotgun, let lone military grade weapons. Compare that to Switzerland where every adult male is given a Stgw 90 when they turn 20!
What country do you live in that doesn't have private schools ?
What country do you live in where the money that parents pay for public schools, are refunded to let the parents pay for private schools? If you are forced to pay for a public education, even if you choose to go to a private school, it makes it cost prohibitive to all the but wealthy who can afford to pay for an education twice. In nearly all countries, you are required to purchase an education from the government, no matter if you decide to use it or not.
So, OK, so rich people are allowed to enjoy the privledge of private education while poor kids are forced into a predatory exploitive monopoly system at a point of a gun... and we call that "progressive"?
How about we pass a law requiring that all people are required to purchase Windows from Microsoft for $299 BY LAW. Now, if all people were forced to purchase Windows or they get thrown in jail, how exactly would Microsoft have an incentive to produce a good product?
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But at least the products of the UK system can spell :-)
Well, I am not sure about that, but the contracts with Microsoft mean that they all can use the spell-check in Microsoft Word.
Incidentally, I find it hard to object to offshoring on grounds of human equality but cheap labor, in and of itself, is not necessarily a good thing because it discourages companies from producing goods using labor efficient methods (automation).
Yes, but the proper way to increase the value of labor, is to increase the demand for labor... not by limiting the supply.
By the logic you are using, we would make gasoline engines more efficient by burning 50% oil before it reaches the market. Well, yes, our gasoline engines would certainly be much more efficient if we limited the supply of gasoline by burning 50% of oil for no reason, but it doesn't make our overall use of oil more efficient - overall use would be far more wasteful. You are making the mistake of looking at the micro, and ignoring the macro.
Likewise, you aren't making the labor in China any more valuable by limiting trade to China. Any benifits of automatition made domesticly would result in extreme innefficent use of labor in China. In the long run it would hurt both the U.S. and China.
Your price is highly skewed because you assumed 100% of the cost of the DVD player is manufacturing labor
I was using highly skewed numbers as a concession. My arguement gets stronger if the manufacturing cost isn't 100% labor, because that means the amount of jobs being "saved" by banning foreign DVD players are very small. (And, of couse, the DVD player manufactured in the U.S. is still going to be vastly more expensive because of enviornmental law complience, medical insurance costs, liability costs, real estate costs, more expensive bribes, etc.).
But why don't we take your protectionist logic further. If we are "losing" jobs to foriegn companies, than what about the people losing jobs in California, or New York, or Detroit, when companies outsource to West Virginia, or Arkansa, or Tennesse (where labor costs are cheaper, envournmental laws are laxer, taxes are less etc.)? Shouldn't we restrict trade between states as well? If international free trade is so terrible, and Americans are losing jobs and Chinese people are being exploited, and if restricting free trade helps the situation - Well, then clearly restricting trade even father between states would help our economy, right?
A handful of global bankers make the most money off of this system by taking as much money as they can from everyone else,
Money is simply a device used to exchange goods and services. If global bankers were making "as much money as they can from everyone else", it would be as useless as Monopoly money. Money is valuable so long as money is changing hands. It is not being horded in the basement vaults of rich people, like some sort of Scrooge McDuck comic.
American wealth is exported
What wealth is being exported? What are you talking about? Are you saying that the U.S. is exporting dollars? Dollars are not wealth, and if other countries aquire too many dollars the value of dollars goes down. Are you saying that the U.S. is exporting it's natural resources? Um, no, we actually import far more natural resources than we export! Are you saying we are exporting too much goods and services? No way, the U.S. imports more than it exports there, too? Do you even know what you are trying to say?
Your comparing potential Hollywood labor to potential manufacturing labor?!
Please. A drop in the bucket.
I am comparing Hollywood labor to DVD manufacturing labor, without a doubt! Way more labor goes into making movies, than in manufacturing DVD players.
Actually, Carmack was dissing Windows Vista... So if you are coming up with "Microsoft bought out Carmack" conspiracy theories, they don't make much sense.
Except the architecture of the PS2 wasn't fundamentally different, it was just poorly documented. The Cell architecture requires you to learn a whole new paradym, and is totally undocumented, creating a double whammie!
There's absolutely NOTHING new in Paypal doing this. They aren't regulated, so they can do what the hell they want to in effect. and you can notice this.
Of course, it is the fact that they ARE NOT regulated that makes Paypal so useful.
You want a regulated version of Paypal? They have them. They are called BANKS!!! You want to accept small payments on your website in a way regulated by the government? Sure! It is called getting a buisness licence, then getting a bank account for that buisness, then getting a merchant account for credit cards for that buisness, and then an online processor to go through the merchant bank etc. Expect to pay several thousands of dollars in order to do it properly, and expect it to take several months.
Have you ever tried to get a bank account in order to collect charitable donations? Besides actually having to make a physical trip to the bank, expect having to fill out a bunch of forms, answering a bunch of questions, and putting yourself on an IRS watchlist for extra scrunity. That of course won't let you collect money via credit card or micro payment online (that will require several thousand dollars, getting a merchant account, getting a processor, etc, like mentioned above). People will have to mail checks... which will take several weeks to arrive in the mail, then several weeks to clear... and if you want to do everything by the books, you are going to have to document all the money and where it came from.
Thank god there is no regulation with Paypal (and other paypal like services), because that regulation would destroy the usefulness and flexibility of the service. People are using Paypal because it is unregulated. Unfortunatly, there are trade offs to using an unregulated system... you trade the security in exchange for flexibility and low-cost. Now, if you want to boycott Paypal, that is fine, I 100% support you on that (especially now that there are alternative services, like Google Payments). However, please please please don't regulate services like this, and thus turn them into banks.
Sony's decision to use asymetic processors, and NOT PROVIDE ENOUGH DEVELOPER SUPPORT was a bad decision. If the technology could be used easily, it is some pretty cool stuff!
While there are indeed alarmist/ignorant/self-serving 'environmentalists', as there are boobs and headline-graspers in every part of human endeavor, there are also arrogant self-righteous techno-weenies with equally poor understanding of the topics on which they opine. As much as you look down on those you deem ignorant, those who are informed can look down on your ignorance, which to a self-aware person would suggest an attitude-check would be in order. (Frankly you come off not much different then the stereotyped asshats you rail against.)
You are ignoring the fact, that out of the people who are telling us "We must stop fossil fuels now, or it will destroy our planet", virtually all of them are dead set against the cheapest and easiest way to replace fossil fuels - Nuclear Power. It is not a stereotype at all - Just go to the Greenpeace website, or the Sierra Club website, or the Green Party, and you will see that amoung organized enviornmentalist, opposition to nuclear power is universal. It isn't just a handful of people who are on the loonie fringe of the enviornmental movement who are against nuclear power.
Yes, but the absolutely daft US regulations forbid extracting plutonium from spent fuel. After all, it might make it easier for terrists to get holda some and make a nukular bomb.
To be fair, this is not a modern policy. This was made policy by Jimmy Carter, and it was well acknowledged that he was doing it with a wink and nod to the anti-nuclear-energy lobby.
Lock-in is the inevitable result of a monopoly. And I am not talking about Microsoft's monopoly either, although that is part of it.
When you have a vast, overwelming quasi-nationalized top-down educational beurocracy, with and almost total monopoly of education - the inevitable result is exploitive locked-in contracts with huge companies like Microsoft. Instead of Microsoft having to win over tens of thousands of individual schools, Microsoft only has to win over a few people at the top of the beurocracy. Bribing and misleading tens of thousands of IT people, all across the country would be prohibitivly difficult and expensive, where as bribing and misleading a few high officials costs virtually nothing when you are talking the huge potential profits.
Big government contracts, and big government policies, are naturally prone to extreme amounts of corruption and exploitation, because the stakes are so high and because authority are so centralized. You have to fight Microsoft on the level of the federal government, which is going to be impossible for your average parent. An average parent can walk over and talk to the head IT guy at the local school, or make an appoitment with the local municipal superintendant or mayor - But the average person can't fly off to meet with the head of the Ministry of Education, or the Prime Minister.
Don't blame Microsoft for this problem - they are simply exploiting the natural flaws in the educational leviatian. If they were gone, another company would simply find another way to exploit the system.
Take a DVD player. You can purchase a cheap DVD player for about $40. Now, the plastic and metal in the DVD is not very valuable, pretty much you are paying for the labor and logistics in manufacturing the DVD player.
Now, the DVD player is made in China, and lets say the labor to make the DVD player cost about 1/20th of what it costs in the U.S. (it is probably actually cheaper than that). That means, that the same DVD player would cost at least $800 if made in the U.S. (in reality, it would cost much more... I am not including the differences in enviornmental regulation, defending frivolous lawsuits, medical insurance, taxes, etc. all of which would be much higher in the U.S.).
Right now, when a DVD player cost $40, it means that DVD players are cheap and ubiquitous. The store is making money selling the DVD player and the DVDs you will buy to put into the player (all that is money made in the local economy). Movie companies are spending hundreds of millions on movies, expecting to recover that money in part on DVD sales - and most U.S. movies (and virtually all DVD manufacturing) happen IN the United States, creating tens of thousands of jobs.
Now, lets say we ban foreign manufactured media playing devices from being sold in the U.S., and now *CHEAP* DVD players are $800 (of course, assuming the same escilation of pricing, you would expect a good quality one to be around $8000). You have made DVD players into a luxury good, outside the realm of afordability to a good chunck of Americans. Not only are stores selling less DVD players and DVDs, but Hollywood cuts back on movie production because they can no longer recoup so much back from DVD sales (people without DVD players, don't buy or rent DVDs).
Now, if you look at the jobs that would be added to the U.S. by manufacturing DVD players locally, and how many jobs would be lost because fewer people could afford DVD players, it is easy to see you aren't creating any jobs locally by requiring that DVD players be made in the U.S. In fact, most likely you would end up losing a whole lot of jobs in the U.S..
If a company outsources IT, that can give free up money that it might use to make more TV commercials (which create jobs in the U.S.). Or it could free money to allow it to expand its retail outlets (creating jobs in construction and for the people working at the outlets in the U.S.). It could also allow the company to lower the price of its goods, meaning more people in the U.S. could afford the products being sold.
People are also ignoring the fact that as people overseas get more jobs and more money, they now have more money to purchase OUR goods and services. China, India, and elsewhere are now customers for many American products, unlike say Cuba, or Iran, or some other country that is economicly isolated from the United States because of artificial trade barriers.
The U.S. is officially metric actually.
And given that there is no law stopping anyone from using any unit of measure they want, I don't think it is as simple as "the U.S. should switch to metric". A lot of things are already done in metric, and the things that aren't are things where it would be cost prohibitive to re-tool machines, or things where the consumer might get confused (imagine the lawsuits when consumers think they are getting a great deal on gasoline, only to find out they were paying by the litre!).
Pretty funny, 3 comments ago on a seperate threas you said "Achievements are too tough to get for most players" , I'm summarizing your statement. So basically you are a Sony fanboy, or you can't finish GoW on hardcore difficulty, or playing online you get your butt kicked ? Pick one.
Or maybe Gears of War just wasn't much fun. I much prefer to play Rainbow 6: Vegas.
You seem to be getting a bit over emotional and sensitive about something as trivial as videogames. I must be a Sony fanboy if I don't like a 360 game I purchased? You are insulting my video game abilities, as if I would find that some sort of insult? Dude, lighten up! Gears of War just wasn't the fantastic game it was hyped up to be, and people would be better off spending their money on a different game... don't freak out like I just told you there was no Santa Claus.
The trouble is, as soon as scientists find a method to collect stem cells that is palitable to the religious right (they are worried that stem cells from aborted fetuses are going to be a commodity, and therefore encourage abortions)... Then you are going to have the left wing greens, the same people who protest GM foods and oppose nearly all biotechnology, trying to stop it. Right now the greens have been silent on the technology, mostly because the right wing has been so adamantly against it... but as soon as the position stops being associated with christians and the anti-abortion movement, the left will jump on the issue.
Rest assured, no matter what... if it is benificial and can save lives, some powerful political group is going to oppose the technology.
Despite the update - Gears of War and the Multiplayer especially are not very good. Not terrible, mind you, but not nearly deserving of all the hype and buzz the game had.
Making electric cars are easy:
A couple molded plastic and fiberglass parts, A few car batteries, and some cheap electric motors, and you have yourself a pretty decent electric commuter car. Image a lightweight bike chassis with electric engine. This is just a step up from the golf carts and electric warehouse vehicles that we use now.
The hard part is making an electric car that can meet all the road safety requirements we now have. You can strap your kid to the back of your bike, jump on the road, and there are absolutly no rules regarding safety... but give something a motor and protection from the rain, and suddenly it would bloody murder to let someone drive something that isn't as safe as an SUV in a collision.
The fact is, adding another Federal Law for schools to be in compliance with uses up vast amount of resources. It is one thing if the school IT guy blocks myspace on the school network... it is another thing for it to be a federal law, with greatly adds to the responsiblities, oversight, and beurocratic aparatus involved in implementing it.
How is exercising editorial oversite a "free speech issue" again? If the New York Times refuses to print a picture of my naked ass on the front page, is that also a "free speech issue".
I am sure the guys who created the Columbine game wouldn't mind if someone put a billboard advertisment on their front lawn... after all, we don't want there to be a free speech issue.
Except that a lot of the achievments are too difficult for a player to achieve, or too tedius to attempt.
For example, a lot of the acheivements involve playing the game at all skill levels... some involve beating the game using a single weapon. The average player isn't going to get 50 achievments on a game, they are going to get closer to 20.
Everything else you said is too stupid to warrant a response.
No, you are just too stupid to think of a response.
You forfeited the debate with the phrase "...sticking the gun to their head and telling them they are not allowed to purchase goods from people with different skin colors and religions." Which is an outrageous statement on all levels.
It is outragous, but absolutly true... the two are not mutually exclusive. It sounds unbelivable to you, because you have been conditioned to accept the nationalist brainwashing that is used to keep people hating each other, suspicious of each other, and isolated from each other because they live on opposite sides of an imaginary line.
When you want to restrict trade between two countries, you are restricting two (or more) brothers/sisters of the human race from engaging in a consentual economic relationship. When your nationalist leaders make conditions on other countries in exchange for the privledge of trade (even when the conditions seem superficially benevolent), you are engaging in economic imperialism, because you are using nationalist power to force a condition on a sovereign country and its people.
When you get over the ethnic, class, religious, and social bigotry that is a natural outcome of nationalism, and when you begin to see people in foriegn country as your brothers and not your enemy, then you will see that the only moral condition is to unconditionally allow free trade from all people in all countries.
You cannot claim you are helping the middle class and working class, when you want to use the government to fight a war on the purchasing decisions of the working class and middle class. If free trade was a bad deal for the average Joe in America, the average Joe would simply choose not to engage in free trade and there would be no need to restrict trade. If you need to force the working class and middle class not to do something with the threat of state sponsered violence (that is how the regulations you love so much are enforced, after all), then clearly you must be forcing them to do something against their own best interests. You don't have to put a gun to someone's head if you are trying to get them to do something in their own self-interest, you only put the gun to their head when something is clearly NOT in their own self interest.
Americans can get any self loading rifle, from .17HMR to .50BMG, any automatic rifle made before 1984, and any pistol they like. This includes M1A rifles, semi-auto AK47 and M16 based rifles, which is plenty for a revolution. I don't know what you're on about.
Really? Explain to me how you would purchase those things in New York City? Or Washington DC? Or in California? Or any of the other urban areas and high population areas where 90% of the population live?
Why does the 50bmgstore.com have a FAQ on "50 caliber" ban? Aren't they legal?
http://www.50bmgstore.com/50bmgfaqs.htm
I can purchase any automatic rifle made before 1984 (and imported before 1984)? Oh, OK, so basicly existing weapons are grandfathered in and no new weapons are allowed to be manufactured - meaning that the supply of automatic weapons continues to diminish as more are siezed by government agents, more wear out and are no longer safe to operate, and the rest are gobbled up by wealthy collectors? And that we are not allowed to use any of the technological advances that happened since 1984?
We can own semi-auto AK47s? Yeah great - because the AK47 totally sucks as a rifle and is only really useful when it can shoot a lot of bullets! Lets just ask the insurgents in Iraq what they would think of a semi-auto AK47?
I can own any pistol I want? Thats funny, I remember that the city I lived in when I was looking to buy a pistol required that people register the gun... and the office was open for 30 minutes, every two weeks, with a maximum of 1 person on duty (unless they were on break), where you have 20-30 pages of paper work to be filled out. That of course is a lot better than New York, or Washington DC, or the other cities were pistols are outright illegal.
Oh, and then are 2nd Amendment rights are surely protected, when the National Guard is sent into New Orleans to go door to door to confiscate all guns. So we clearly are not allowed to have any gun, legal and licenced or not, if the government decides it is a "National Emergency".
Lay off it... Right now, it is easy enough for a tiny minority of gun collectors and ethusiests to get infantry style weapons (better to let a tiny minority have a few guns while you erode gun rights everywhere else lest the collectors actually put up a fight against gun control)... but your average American is lucky if he has the option to buy a hunting rifle or shotgun, let lone military grade weapons. Compare that to Switzerland where every adult male is given a Stgw 90 when they turn 20!
What country do you live in that doesn't have private schools ?
What country do you live in where the money that parents pay for public schools, are refunded to let the parents pay for private schools? If you are forced to pay for a public education, even if you choose to go to a private school, it makes it cost prohibitive to all the but wealthy who can afford to pay for an education twice. In nearly all countries, you are required to purchase an education from the government, no matter if you decide to use it or not.
So, OK, so rich people are allowed to enjoy the privledge of private education while poor kids are forced into a predatory exploitive monopoly system at a point of a gun... and we call that "progressive"?
How about we pass a law requiring that all people are required to purchase Windows from Microsoft for $299 BY LAW. Now, if all people were forced to purchase Windows or they get thrown in jail, how exactly would Microsoft have an incentive to produce a good product?