NIMBY NIMBY NIMBY!!! The wind turbine doesn't have to cause that much noise for neighbors to get upset. If a few neighbors complain, that is all it usually takes to get the municipality to shut you down.
What happens a few years from now, when some new dramatic improvement in turbine design happens? Or 100% efficent solar panels are invented? Or heck, maybe they even invent portable fusion reactors, who knows what is coming in the future?
If you are amortizing the cost of a windmill over 20 years, this IS a concern. 20 years is a lot of time for technology to significantly improve. Think of how much cars have changed, let alone technology like computers and information networks. Alternative energy sources are a hot thing to invest in lately, and I have a feeling there will be some serious improvements real soon. Maybe if you could amortize the cost in 5 years, it would be a reasonable risk. But 20 years? I can't see how it would be a good idea.
What is this "you" bullshit? If you live in Europe, Canada, or Japan, then it should clearly be "we", as virtually all industrialized nations subsidize agriculture. In fact, Europe is even worse than the U.S. in that regard (and all you need to do is look at an angry french farmer protest to know why). When the U.S. offered to cut it's own subsidizes to match European subsidy cuts, Europe refused to even discuss the offer. (and many called the American offer disgenuous, because the U.S. offering to cut subsidies if Europe does is like the U.S. offering to cut subsidies if Eurpeans grow wings and fly... fat chance!).
The U.S. imports more than it exports in DOLLAR VALUES... this has no correlation to the amount of natural resources being used. If the U.S. trades 10 bushels of corn meal for 1 bottle of chilean wine, and the wine is more valuable than the corn, then the U.S. is importing more than it is exporting, even though it would be exporting more resources than it is importing.
Given the unnaturally high value of the dollar (it being the reserve currency for the world, and the currency of exchange for the oil trade), any sort of trade that the U.S. makes regardless of the actually resources exchanged, will most likely be an imbalance in dollar exchange, simply based on parity of the currency.
We are not running out of natural resources. We are running out of oil, but there are plenty of other sources of energy that can be used to replace it. If we used cheaper forms of energy like nuclear, or eventually fusion power, we could use verticle hydroponic indoor farming to get farm output at 10X or 100X current farm outputs per acre. Metals are very easy to recycle. Wood is a biodegradable renewable resource.
People have been screaming about Malthiusian doomday scenarious since the early 1800s, and standard of living continues to rise and rise, WITH population growth, in most places on the planet. The Malthiusians usually fail to account for changes in technology, new sources of food and energy, changes in lifestyle and culture.
That isn't to say we won't destroy the earth, but if I was a gambling man, I would say that the earth will most likely be destroyed by someone with some grand plan to "save" it, than by humans just doing what they do naturally.
This system is definitly messed up. I have been experimenting, and a slight difference in answers can have radically different results at the end. I tried to find out their system for calculating this, and it is nowhere on their site. I would be VERY skeptical of the whole myfootprint.org.
For some strange reason, Sony has a fanatical brand loyalty around their video game systems, who will purchase whatever they make, no-matter what. While I won't be purchasing one, I would say there are a lot of people who wouldn't consider anything else.
The trouble is that the Nobel Peace Prize has no correlation to who actually has brought about peace. It is more of an international popularity contest. Even the science and economics prizes are very non-objective, but at least they have some objective criteria and are selected by a panel of distinguished people in those fields. Winning a Peace Prize is like becoming the world Homecoming Queen.
You realize that the GOP election strategy is to harp on a few social wedge issues, like "intelligent design" or "gay marrage", in order to boost their approval with the Christian Right... but then to pretty much ignore this issues when elections are over with? You are confusing political rhetoric with some sort of real scientific agenda, of which the Bush Administration has none.
But if you purchase a lovely T-shirt from the caymen islands for $1000 on your credit card, you get online gambling credits free with your purchase!
Seriously, the law won't actually do anything to stop gambling, but it will acomplish two very important things:
1. You can know that your elected representatives are "doing something" about gambling! It is very, very, very important that your elected officials are seen as "doing something" about a "problem".
2. The laws are probably written loosly and vaugly enough to allow the government to arbitrarily punish any credit card company they want. This is good for politicians, as credit card companies have a lot of money to give to political campaigns in exchange for protection.
While there has been a lot of hysteria about myspace and IMing and stuff, and I suppose a parent should be aware of the technology... the effort and resources about this kind of stuff seems misplaced.
I mean, why worry about the 1 in a million (if that) chance that your kid will be taken advantage of by someone on the internet, when there is a pretty significant chance of teen pregnancy (most likely by someone at school), half the kids will experiment with recreational drugs, and the most deadly thing they will have to worry about is drunk driving? If there are things you are going to put significant time and effort and worry about, why not choose something that is more likely than being struck by lightening?
Sure, "online predators" are the biggest boogyman since Al Qaeda... but it is important to remember that the chance of anything serious happening to your child are virtually nill. Most of the fear is manufactured in order to have an excuse for the government to regulate the Internet.
Now you are jumping from labor to housing. Housing is a whole other problem.
The housing bubble was caused by the fed setting insanely low interest rates, which allowed people to take out huge morgages (and also encourages speculation... people buying houses just to turn them over). High housing costs are usually the product of economic booms, or an artificial abundance of money (in this case, easy credit). In the U.S., there is no shortage of land, no shortage of lumber, no shortage of skilled workers to build more houses. And the average American is not without blame for feeding the housing craze.
Even housing costs are exasurated. I know a lot of places in Detroit, for example, which you can rent for dirt cheap (and which are actually decent places to live, with friendly neighbors, and not at all the ghetto wasteland you would imagine). And it isn't just the U.S. which is expensive (Rents and property prices are insane here in Toronto Canada too... and you don't even want to think about what my Brother in Law in Tokyo pays in rent!:) )
I can tell you what happened with labor unions... At one time, labor unions were pro-buisness (hard to fathom, but it was true). Labor unions knew that more factories = more jobs, and if companies went out of buisness that workers were the worst hit. Unfortunatly, there was a massive expansion of government, whose workers are virtually all unionized. Government workers are under a different set of economic circumstances, because they don't work for a company that can go out of buisness. Government workers can demand all sorts of demands that would break the backs of non-government employers. Also, unions for government employees tend to support socialist programs and regulations that would hurt American buisness, because for them it means more emloyment. Even unions for non-government employees are still part of the AFL-CIO, and so are pushed into supporting economic policies that benifit government workers at the cost of non-government workers.
I agree, we need labor unions to return to the U.S., but there needs to be a strict seperation from government worker labor unions, and free market labor unions (or to ban labor unions for government employees).
Regardless, I am not worried about jobs leaving the country. With the principle of comparitive advantage, we wouldn't LOSE jobs to other countries, even if they could do everything cheaper, so long as it was easy enough for new players to make new products and services on the market. There is SOMETHING in the U.S. which is detering the development of new buisnesses at the same rate that buisnesses move overseas. Whatever it is that is stopping economic development in the U.S. would continue to be a problem, even if the U.S. isolated itself.
1 in 6 Americans who no health insurance whatsoever, i.e. they'd be better off living in Cuba or Venezuela where at least could get decent health care.
People in the U.S. with no insurance for the most part get better care in the U.S. than in Canada, let alone in Cuba or Venezuala. The insurance thing is propoganda, as it is illegal to deny medical care in the U.S. based on ability to pay. The U.S. government spends more on health care per capita than every other country but Switzerland. Free health care in the U.S. is even given to illegal immigrants, which is definitly not the case in Canada, let alone Cuba or Venezuala.
When was the last time you saw an American product at Wal Mart?
I have never been to a Walmart... But I have been to a Sears, Target and other similiar discount stores similiar to Walmart. They sold lawn mowers made in the U.S., exercise equipment made in the U.S., CDs, DVDs, and video games were all manufactured in the U.S.... Tires manufactured in the U.S.. Most of the tools were manufactured in the U.S.. Light bulbs were manufactured in the U.S.. Virtually all heavy appliances were manufactured in the U.S.. furniture was manufactured in the U.S. About half of the light appliances (mixers, blenders, and such). Virtually ALL food products, cleaning products, and consumables were made in the U.S. There was absolutly no shortage of American made goods. I didn't count or make an official survey, but I would say about half the products were made in the U.S.
The things manufactured outside of the U.S. were all things where labor costs are near the marginal value of the product. For example, if the $100 dollar cheapie DVD player from Walmart was manufactued with U.S. labor, it would be a $1000 DVD player... no one is going to buy that DVD player for a $1000 (normal people can't afford that, and rich people want a fancy DVD player so they wouldn't pay that), so the DVD player didn't steal any jobs from the U.S..
Keep shilling for pure evil some us know better and aren't buying the shit you people spew anymore.
Keep shilling for pure evil? Have you ever been to one of the socialist utopias you advocate? Have you ever even traveled outside the U.S. or Western Europe? Have you ever lived outside the U.S.? Do you have any idea the tens and possibly hundreds of people killed in socialist regimes (the purges of Stalin, cultural revolution of Mao, Pol Pot, etc.)? Have you seen the dire poverty that most people in the world live in and how happy they would be to make as much as someone in the U.S. working at Walmart? Have you ever actually recieved government provided health care? Shop at a government run monopoly store, then talk to me about Walmart! See how wealthy China is becoming today, and compare that to socialist china of the 1960s (when people were actually starving to death because of lack of food, and were working 80 hours a week in forced "industrial armies", when they weren't being outright mass murdered by the socialist government), and then give me rediculous speeches about "pure evil" and worker exploitation.
Save me your propoganda. The U.S. is one of the richest and most comfortable places to live... and our standard of living has only started to decline since we have moved away from having a reasonably free market to having more of a command economy and authoritarian government.
Your comparision is not good, as there are plenty of people who want to ban guns AND videogames. For many people, your gun analogy means "video games are like guns... guns should be banned... therefore video games should be banned".
If you want to make a funny comparison, for some easy slashdot karma, you should have compared video games to toilet paper or food and water - items also used by terrorists during training yet are for the most part harmless. Gun evoke hysteria with many in the slashdot crowd.
I have learned that the preperation and consumption of food based nourishment is an essential part of terrorist training! I pray the government will legislate against food ASAP! If you aren't against food, you are for terrorism!
So, very soon in California, it will both be illegal to retain data on search engine queries in order to protect people's privacy, and at the same time search engines will be legally required to retain data on searches for ciminal investigations! Brilliant!
Rubbish. An organisation can use your personal information within the bounds set by applicable laws.
Since when did the government start legislating WHAT WE ARE ALLOWED TO DO, instead of what we ARE NOT ALLOWED TO DO? The last time I checked, in a free society, we do whatever we want by default, unless the government explicitly and specificly bans a certain behavior.
Perhaps I am misinterpreting what you are saying (in which case I apologize), but it sounds like you are saying that an organization can only use personal information in ways SPECIFICLY ALLOWED by government. As in, we may only act in ways specificly pre-approved by government. While it may be true that government nowadays does consider everything that isn't specificly and explicitly approved by the state as being criminal, that is not a free society.
I have no problem with "globalism" PROVIDED that the country getting the jobs has the same level of regulations and protections that we have (or higher).
Problem solved then. India has a socialist government, far more to the left of the United States. They have all sorts of worker protection laws, child labor laws, and all sorts of government social welfare programs. On paper, they have more worker protection and enviornmental protection, than the U.S.. There is no end to the progressive style policies India is willing to write down on peices of paper, and then have those pieces of paper signed by important people.
Oh, wait... I forgot... regulations don't raise the standard of living, if the capital doesn't already exist to provide that standard of living. But wait, anti-globalists want to prevent capital from moving from the first world to the third world until the standard of living in the third world is like the first! Ahhh... can't handle the contradiction... Maybe if I protest real loud, and vandalize a starbucks, I can drown out my self-contradiction.
We should be bringing everyone else UP to our standards rather than racing to the lowest level out there. But we are racing to the bottom. That is the problem.
Are you joking??? Racing to the bottom??? Standards of living are rising in China and India... in the case of China, they have the fastest rising standard of living in history! It is the U.S., and places like Germany and France, where the standard of living is stagnating!
If corporations are only concerned with paying the lowest wages possible, and have the ultimate power to demand it... then why do most people in the U.S. make more than minimum wage? 96% of Americans make MORE than minimum wage. Why? If the only thing keeping us from being ultra-exploited by the evil corporations is the benevolent and glorious state, then shouldn't virtually all Americans be making minimum wage?
The trouble with your theory is that the U.S. is also losing jobs to countries like Canada, who have a higher minimum wage, and enviornmental laws stricter than the most lax U.S. states (although less strict enviornmental laws than places like California).
Also, the trouble with your theory is that the standard of living in China (which is one of the places that people want to point out has "bad" enviornmental and labor laws), is skyrocketing. They are probably seeing the fastest rising standard of living ever in history. It will probably be less than 10 years before the urban chinese have a higher standard of living than North America or Western Europe.
I think before you can understand why the U.S. is "losing" jobs, you have to understand certain things, such as that enviornmental and labor laws are not designed to protect the enviornment or labor. You have to understand that the U.S. is probably less free-market capitalist than many so-called "socialist" countries like Sweden, and has a higher real tax rate (GDP consumed by the state) than most industrialized countries. There is a whole mythology that colors their understanding of issues like this.
Slashdot Mirror
NIMBY NIMBY NIMBY!!! The wind turbine doesn't have to cause that much noise for neighbors to get upset. If a few neighbors complain, that is all it usually takes to get the municipality to shut you down.
What happens a few years from now, when some new dramatic improvement in turbine design happens? Or 100% efficent solar panels are invented? Or heck, maybe they even invent portable fusion reactors, who knows what is coming in the future?
If you are amortizing the cost of a windmill over 20 years, this IS a concern. 20 years is a lot of time for technology to significantly improve. Think of how much cars have changed, let alone technology like computers and information networks. Alternative energy sources are a hot thing to invest in lately, and I have a feeling there will be some serious improvements real soon. Maybe if you could amortize the cost in 5 years, it would be a reasonable risk. But 20 years? I can't see how it would be a good idea.
What is this "you" bullshit? If you live in Europe, Canada, or Japan, then it should clearly be "we", as virtually all industrialized nations subsidize agriculture. In fact, Europe is even worse than the U.S. in that regard (and all you need to do is look at an angry french farmer protest to know why). When the U.S. offered to cut it's own subsidizes to match European subsidy cuts, Europe refused to even discuss the offer. (and many called the American offer disgenuous, because the U.S. offering to cut subsidies if Europe does is like the U.S. offering to cut subsidies if Eurpeans grow wings and fly... fat chance!).
The U.S. imports more than it exports in DOLLAR VALUES... this has no correlation to the amount of natural resources being used. If the U.S. trades 10 bushels of corn meal for 1 bottle of chilean wine, and the wine is more valuable than the corn, then the U.S. is importing more than it is exporting, even though it would be exporting more resources than it is importing.
Given the unnaturally high value of the dollar (it being the reserve currency for the world, and the currency of exchange for the oil trade), any sort of trade that the U.S. makes regardless of the actually resources exchanged, will most likely be an imbalance in dollar exchange, simply based on parity of the currency.
We are not running out of natural resources. We are running out of oil, but there are plenty of other sources of energy that can be used to replace it. If we used cheaper forms of energy like nuclear, or eventually fusion power, we could use verticle hydroponic indoor farming to get farm output at 10X or 100X current farm outputs per acre. Metals are very easy to recycle. Wood is a biodegradable renewable resource.
People have been screaming about Malthiusian doomday scenarious since the early 1800s, and standard of living continues to rise and rise, WITH population growth, in most places on the planet. The Malthiusians usually fail to account for changes in technology, new sources of food and energy, changes in lifestyle and culture.
That isn't to say we won't destroy the earth, but if I was a gambling man, I would say that the earth will most likely be destroyed by someone with some grand plan to "save" it, than by humans just doing what they do naturally.
Trade deficite is measured in dollars, not in energy content of goods.
Except why aren't people moving from Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Caucases at the same rate that Mexicans are moving to the U.S.?
This system is definitly messed up. I have been experimenting, and a slight difference in answers can have radically different results at the end. I tried to find out their system for calculating this, and it is nowhere on their site. I would be VERY skeptical of the whole myfootprint.org.
For some strange reason, Sony has a fanatical brand loyalty around their video game systems, who will purchase whatever they make, no-matter what. While I won't be purchasing one, I would say there are a lot of people who wouldn't consider anything else.
GTA exclusivity is what sold PS2s. Not RPGs. Sony really really messed up big time when they lost GTA exclusivity!
The trouble is that the Nobel Peace Prize has no correlation to who actually has brought about peace. It is more of an international popularity contest. Even the science and economics prizes are very non-objective, but at least they have some objective criteria and are selected by a panel of distinguished people in those fields. Winning a Peace Prize is like becoming the world Homecoming Queen.
Americans have won more Nobel Peace Prizes than any other nation.
You realize that the GOP election strategy is to harp on a few social wedge issues, like "intelligent design" or "gay marrage", in order to boost their approval with the Christian Right... but then to pretty much ignore this issues when elections are over with? You are confusing political rhetoric with some sort of real scientific agenda, of which the Bush Administration has none.
But if you purchase a lovely T-shirt from the caymen islands for $1000 on your credit card, you get online gambling credits free with your purchase!
Seriously, the law won't actually do anything to stop gambling, but it will acomplish two very important things:
1. You can know that your elected representatives are "doing something" about gambling! It is very, very, very important that your elected officials are seen as "doing something" about a "problem".
2. The laws are probably written loosly and vaugly enough to allow the government to arbitrarily punish any credit card company they want. This is good for politicians, as credit card companies have a lot of money to give to political campaigns in exchange for protection.
While there has been a lot of hysteria about myspace and IMing and stuff, and I suppose a parent should be aware of the technology... the effort and resources about this kind of stuff seems misplaced.
I mean, why worry about the 1 in a million (if that) chance that your kid will be taken advantage of by someone on the internet, when there is a pretty significant chance of teen pregnancy (most likely by someone at school), half the kids will experiment with recreational drugs, and the most deadly thing they will have to worry about is drunk driving? If there are things you are going to put significant time and effort and worry about, why not choose something that is more likely than being struck by lightening?
Sure, "online predators" are the biggest boogyman since Al Qaeda... but it is important to remember that the chance of anything serious happening to your child are virtually nill. Most of the fear is manufactured in order to have an excuse for the government to regulate the Internet.
Now you are jumping from labor to housing. Housing is a whole other problem.
:) )
The housing bubble was caused by the fed setting insanely low interest rates, which allowed people to take out huge morgages (and also encourages speculation... people buying houses just to turn them over). High housing costs are usually the product of economic booms, or an artificial abundance of money (in this case, easy credit). In the U.S., there is no shortage of land, no shortage of lumber, no shortage of skilled workers to build more houses. And the average American is not without blame for feeding the housing craze.
Even housing costs are exasurated. I know a lot of places in Detroit, for example, which you can rent for dirt cheap (and which are actually decent places to live, with friendly neighbors, and not at all the ghetto wasteland you would imagine). And it isn't just the U.S. which is expensive (Rents and property prices are insane here in Toronto Canada too... and you don't even want to think about what my Brother in Law in Tokyo pays in rent!
I can tell you what happened with labor unions... At one time, labor unions were pro-buisness (hard to fathom, but it was true). Labor unions knew that more factories = more jobs, and if companies went out of buisness that workers were the worst hit. Unfortunatly, there was a massive expansion of government, whose workers are virtually all unionized. Government workers are under a different set of economic circumstances, because they don't work for a company that can go out of buisness. Government workers can demand all sorts of demands that would break the backs of non-government employers. Also, unions for government employees tend to support socialist programs and regulations that would hurt American buisness, because for them it means more emloyment. Even unions for non-government employees are still part of the AFL-CIO, and so are pushed into supporting economic policies that benifit government workers at the cost of non-government workers.
I agree, we need labor unions to return to the U.S., but there needs to be a strict seperation from government worker labor unions, and free market labor unions (or to ban labor unions for government employees).
Regardless, I am not worried about jobs leaving the country. With the principle of comparitive advantage, we wouldn't LOSE jobs to other countries, even if they could do everything cheaper, so long as it was easy enough for new players to make new products and services on the market. There is SOMETHING in the U.S. which is detering the development of new buisnesses at the same rate that buisnesses move overseas. Whatever it is that is stopping economic development in the U.S. would continue to be a problem, even if the U.S. isolated itself.
1 in 6 Americans who no health insurance whatsoever, i.e. they'd be better off living in Cuba or Venezuela where at least could get decent health care.
... Tires manufactured in the U.S.. Most of the tools were manufactured in the U.S.. Light bulbs were manufactured in the U.S.. Virtually all heavy appliances were manufactured in the U.S.. furniture was manufactured in the U.S. About half of the light appliances (mixers, blenders, and such). Virtually ALL food products, cleaning products, and consumables were made in the U.S. There was absolutly no shortage of American made goods. I didn't count or make an official survey, but I would say about half the products were made in the U.S.
People in the U.S. with no insurance for the most part get better care in the U.S. than in Canada, let alone in Cuba or Venezuala. The insurance thing is propoganda, as it is illegal to deny medical care in the U.S. based on ability to pay. The U.S. government spends more on health care per capita than every other country but Switzerland. Free health care in the U.S. is even given to illegal immigrants, which is definitly not the case in Canada, let alone Cuba or Venezuala.
When was the last time you saw an American product at Wal Mart?
I have never been to a Walmart... But I have been to a Sears, Target and other similiar discount stores similiar to Walmart. They sold lawn mowers made in the U.S., exercise equipment made in the U.S., CDs, DVDs, and video games were all manufactured in the U.S.
The things manufactured outside of the U.S. were all things where labor costs are near the marginal value of the product. For example, if the $100 dollar cheapie DVD player from Walmart was manufactued with U.S. labor, it would be a $1000 DVD player... no one is going to buy that DVD player for a $1000 (normal people can't afford that, and rich people want a fancy DVD player so they wouldn't pay that), so the DVD player didn't steal any jobs from the U.S..
Keep shilling for pure evil some us know better and aren't buying the shit you people spew anymore.
Keep shilling for pure evil? Have you ever been to one of the socialist utopias you advocate? Have you ever even traveled outside the U.S. or Western Europe? Have you ever lived outside the U.S.? Do you have any idea the tens and possibly hundreds of people killed in socialist regimes (the purges of Stalin, cultural revolution of Mao, Pol Pot, etc.)? Have you seen the dire poverty that most people in the world live in and how happy they would be to make as much as someone in the U.S. working at Walmart? Have you ever actually recieved government provided health care? Shop at a government run monopoly store, then talk to me about Walmart! See how wealthy China is becoming today, and compare that to socialist china of the 1960s (when people were actually starving to death because of lack of food, and were working 80 hours a week in forced "industrial armies", when they weren't being outright mass murdered by the socialist government), and then give me rediculous speeches about "pure evil" and worker exploitation.
Save me your propoganda. The U.S. is one of the richest and most comfortable places to live... and our standard of living has only started to decline since we have moved away from having a reasonably free market to having more of a command economy and authoritarian government.
Your comparision is not good, as there are plenty of people who want to ban guns AND videogames. For many people, your gun analogy means "video games are like guns... guns should be banned... therefore video games should be banned".
If you want to make a funny comparison, for some easy slashdot karma, you should have compared video games to toilet paper or food and water - items also used by terrorists during training yet are for the most part harmless. Gun evoke hysteria with many in the slashdot crowd.
I have learned that the preperation and consumption of food based nourishment is an essential part of terrorist training!
I pray the government will legislate against food ASAP! If you aren't against food, you are for terrorism!
So, very soon in California, it will both be illegal to retain data on search engine queries in order to protect people's privacy, and at the same time search engines will be legally required to retain data on searches for ciminal investigations! Brilliant!
Rubbish. An organisation can use your personal information within the bounds set by applicable laws.
Since when did the government start legislating WHAT WE ARE ALLOWED TO DO, instead of what we ARE NOT ALLOWED TO DO? The last time I checked, in a free society, we do whatever we want by default, unless the government explicitly and specificly bans a certain behavior.
Perhaps I am misinterpreting what you are saying (in which case I apologize), but it sounds like you are saying that an organization can only use personal information in ways SPECIFICLY ALLOWED by government. As in, we may only act in ways specificly pre-approved by government. While it may be true that government nowadays does consider everything that isn't specificly and explicitly approved by the state as being criminal, that is not a free society.
You mean set up shop Somalia... Afghanistan is an American puppet nation, so I am not sure it is the place to go to escape U.S. regulations.
I have no problem with "globalism" PROVIDED that the country getting the jobs has the same level of regulations and protections that we have (or higher).
Problem solved then. India has a socialist government, far more to the left of the United States. They have all sorts of worker protection laws, child labor laws, and all sorts of government social welfare programs. On paper, they have more worker protection and enviornmental protection, than the U.S.. There is no end to the progressive style policies India is willing to write down on peices of paper, and then have those pieces of paper signed by important people.
Oh, wait... I forgot... regulations don't raise the standard of living, if the capital doesn't already exist to provide that standard of living. But wait, anti-globalists want to prevent capital from moving from the first world to the third world until the standard of living in the third world is like the first! Ahhh... can't handle the contradiction... Maybe if I protest real loud, and vandalize a starbucks, I can drown out my self-contradiction.
We should be bringing everyone else UP to our standards rather than racing to the lowest level out there. But we are racing to the bottom. That is the problem.
Are you joking??? Racing to the bottom??? Standards of living are rising in China and India... in the case of China, they have the fastest rising standard of living in history! It is the U.S., and places like Germany and France, where the standard of living is stagnating!
If corporations are only concerned with paying the lowest wages possible, and have the ultimate power to demand it... then why do most people in the U.S. make more than minimum wage? 96% of Americans make MORE than minimum wage. Why? If the only thing keeping us from being ultra-exploited by the evil corporations is the benevolent and glorious state, then shouldn't virtually all Americans be making minimum wage?
The trouble with your theory is that the U.S. is also losing jobs to countries like Canada, who have a higher minimum wage, and enviornmental laws stricter than the most lax U.S. states (although less strict enviornmental laws than places like California).
Also, the trouble with your theory is that the standard of living in China (which is one of the places that people want to point out has "bad" enviornmental and labor laws), is skyrocketing. They are probably seeing the fastest rising standard of living ever in history. It will probably be less than 10 years before the urban chinese have a higher standard of living than North America or Western Europe.
I think before you can understand why the U.S. is "losing" jobs, you have to understand certain things, such as that enviornmental and labor laws are not designed to protect the enviornment or labor. You have to understand that the U.S. is probably less free-market capitalist than many so-called "socialist" countries like Sweden, and has a higher real tax rate (GDP consumed by the state) than most industrialized countries. There is a whole mythology that colors their understanding of issues like this.