My cognitive dissonance went the other way... in teh X-Files movie when scenes that were supposed to be in Dallas had desert with mountains in the background.
Dallas is in the middle of a grassy plain - no deserts within 300 miles and no mountains within 600. Obviously those scenes were shot in L.A.
Your municipality provides water, sewage treatment, and whatever other services it provides because there used to be a natural monopoly on those services. Which is to say that only one company or entity can sling telephone lines, water pipes, etc. in one place.
Natural monopolies eventually disappear. Nowadays there is obviously no natural monopoly on telephone service. Yet, curiously, the Baby Bells are still around and still trying to get VOIP to be regulated like they are. The old natural monopoly rules never really go away, they just get used as a club to crush competition. And this is as true for municipal agencies fighting for budgets as it is for corporations fighting for business.
There are only a few places where a natural monopoly for broadband even exists, and those rural areas are the only places that should even be thinking about this, though of course they aren't the only ones by a long shot. But everywhere this happens, the natural monopoly will eventually be gone. Sooner or later, you're left with a broadband company, inefficient due to lack of scale, with the customer service of the DMV. It can survive because it has subsidized its services with the money of taxpayers that don't use them and thereby strangled all private competition. And by conniving to use regulation to make its subsidy, and its jobs, permanent regardless of technological advancement.
Trust me. I've seen it with the local city-run power monopoly. Prices are remarkably low - and the property taxes that really pay for the power are remarkably high.
Sounds ideal to me. I wonder why the people of Eastern Europe didn't think so?
They retired it because USA PATRIOT allows them to just collect it the good old fashioned way...no encryption, no court order
That is not only factually incorrect, but you would know it was factually incorrect if you'd read the article on the Patriot Act linked in the parent.
The Patriot Act doesn't allow the government to do anything without a court order that required a court order before. Nothing. Zilch. Bupkis. Your comment is a compendium of urban legend, FUD, and paranoia. Thank you for it - I was entertained to see how fast the Slashbots modded it up.
There are areas where the government can do at least a semicompetent job of providing services. This is especially true of items that everybody has to have no matter how low the qaulity is, such as education (including libraries) and policing.
There are also areas where the government cannot do a semicompent job of providing services. One of these is technology - ask anyone who had to wait several months to get a phone under a communist government.
You think municipal broadband is cute and wonderful until the municipality has driven out all private industry with its subsidies- and then decides it's more important to fund a new sewage project or a new football stadium than its telecom monopoly, and suddenly you can't get service or, if you do, it takes six months, costs a fortune, and uses outdated equipment. In other words, the same 'public' quality as 'public toilets'.
If free trade were absolute and everywhere, resources would be evenly distributed, leaving us all with, in the words of Neal Stephenson, "a Pakistani bricklayer's idea of prosperity."
Neal Stephenson is not an economist, and that was one of the dumber lines in Snow Crash.
Look, it works like this. Free trade causes your salary to fall 50%. The prices you pay for goods fall 60%. You have gotten a 10% real raise.
A Pakistani bricklayer's idea of prosperity is, ultimately, an American's idea of prosperity. Yes, scarce resources are going to be distributed more evenly, but that accelerates the process of thinking about how to replace those resources - something only Westerners and East Asians have thus far had the need or resources to think about. I don't think the entire world being reasonably prosperous and well educated as we address those issues can be considered a bad thing.
The real problem with the above argument is that this is the first time this happens to educated, white collar professionals.
Well, yes. This is the first time it's been possible for this to happen to educated, white collar professionals. Service industries couldn't migrate before telecommuting. So what?
These people have been through at least four years of college, have spent fortunes educating themselves on their chosen career (in this case, programming), and it's not as easy as you're making it sound for anyone in this position to re-train.
You think it's easy for anyone, any time to retrain? These are the best and brightest members of society - it's easier for them to retrain than for any other group in the history of free trade.
What this leads to is the ultimate destruction of the middle class. America will be 1% extremely rich with all power, and the rest will be just really, really poor.
This is such a tired, old, BULLSHIT argument that's been around for ages! Falling prices and gains in real wages because of more cheaply produced goods are going to eliminate the middle class! Yeah, that'll happen any day now.
Of course, you might argue that with free trade ultimately, this will work itself out as Indians get richer and it won't make economic sense anymore to send jobs to India as nobody there will work for peanuts anymore.
I did argue that.
But guess what.. that just means the jobs will be moved to another country, even poorer than India!
Correct! But by then the Indians will be richer and buying more American goods!
The world will never be perfect. It's not some economic model.
The world will never be perfect, but it can be made a lot worse. Cutting off free trade drives up prices more than national income, period. People like you want to fuck consumers in order to save employees. Sadly, they're the same people. We had to destroy the vilalge in order to save it.
As for economics, the models aren't perfect - but they're better than the alternative, which appears to be mindless protectionist malice.
We're talking about just the tech sector, and a single job type within that.
Actually, we're talking about all tech and call center jobs. And yes, you can expect certain sectors to be wiped out.
Everyone losing in an economic sense is called "depression."
Everyone is not losing. 100,000 Americans are losing their jobs, many others are getting new jobs from insourcing, and everyone is paying lower prices for goods produced by both the outsourcers and insourcers, and every other firm they supply. It's just about the opposite of a depression.
We're talking about just the tech sector, and a single job type within that.
Actually, we're talking about all tech and call center jobs. And yes, you can expect certain sectors to be wiped out.
Everyone losing in an economic sense is called "depression."
Everyone is not losing. 100,000 Americans are losing their jobs, many others are getting new jobs from insourcing, and everyone is paying lower prices for goods produced by both the outsourcers and insourcers, and every other firm they supply. It's just about the opposite of a depression.
This is true, and I would not advocate instant free trade as a one-size-fits-all solution for every country. But as Jagdish Bhagawati points out, the number of jobs involved here is about 100,000 per year, minus a large number of jobs being insourced. Those numbers simply aren't significant to an economy the size of America's.
As for "everyone could lose," that is only true in a non-economic (i.e., environmental) sense. But this isn't the kind of economic expansion that dumps a lot of smoke in the air. And truth is, even if it were, the world's poor aren't going to tolerate being poor forever in order to help keep greenhouse emissions down. The best thing we can do for them is get them to a post-industrial economy like ours while skipping the rape-the-earth part if possible. This is exactly that kind of progress for India.
In the long run, I just don't see any way I can be competitive with offshoring.
Why do you think you'll have to be?
Yep, more and more programming jobs will be outsourced to India. And as Indians become more and more technically competent, do you suppose they might get bored selling their skills to Americans at a cut rate and decide to, you know, do something with those skills?
In a very few years they won't be able to meet their own demand for code, much less ours. And that's a very good thing. A rich India is a vast export market. The fact that it will soon be bigger than China, and English-speaking as well, just gives Americans a leg up. You're thinking in the wrong direction.
I'm going to use small words here, because it astonishes me that more of the Slashdot crowd does not get this. Labor is just like anything else, a commodity.
Division of labor is the very foundation of modern economics. What happens with free trade is that people do the jobs they're good at, other people do the jobs they're good at, and they trade.
When labor goes to India, that means Indians get richer and start buying goods. Some of those goods will be produced in America. As another example, since NAFTA passed Mexico is now outsourcing labor to China and (gasp...) South Texas because skilled Mexicans have gotten too rich to be hired for such jobs.
Economics is not a zero sum game and there is no giant sucking sound that can take all of our jobs and leave us unable to buy stuff. Just ask the people along the "American Autobahn" in the South who work in any of the many high-paying jobs that have been insourced to this country. If free trade were absolute and everywhere, we'd all be much richer - and the best educated and most productive of us, i.e. Westerners, would be richest.
Conversely, a simple thought experiment will tell you the ultimate booster to employment - ban all trade! Everyone would have to make his own clothes, catch his own food -100% employment all the time! Utopia! Sadly, most people would starve and the rest would be unable to maintain any standard of living, but, whatever yo.
Yes, this sucks for the workers who are displaced. The invention of the car sucked for buggy whip manufacteres too. I'm all for assisting these people with reeducation, but I'm not for holding everyone's standard of living back so we can save a few jobs.
Here's what we (or rather, I) know and don't know about this.
We know that the Earth is trending warmer, empirically.
We know that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing, and that CO2 is a greehouse gas.
We don't know how significant the amounts involved are. You can make anything look impressive by plotting it ona graph with a small enough scale. What I want to know is how much CO2 we can dump in the atmosphere before the temperature goes up a degree.
We don't know whether there's anything we can do about it, or whether it's already too late.
We don't know how much warming may be due to non-greenhouse factors such as orbital fluctuations or whatever it is.
We don't know what the cost/benefit structure looks like. If we're only going to lose New Orleans and Holland and everybody else is safe, and we'd have to go back to living in caves to prevent the climate change, then it's time to move those folks to high ground.
I, for one, am open to persuasion on these issues, but I want solid answers (some of these may already be answered, but I'll admit to not having done the research). If the solution is "let's go back to living in caves now and see what happens," I'm out. If it's a matter of pursuing some reasonable alternative energy policies that we should be pursuing anyway to ease our dependence on foreign oil, I'm in. If it's Kyoto, which appears to have a huge cost for a relatively small reduction in human CO2 even in the unlikely event that everyone hits their targets, and which exempts huge stretches of the polluting world, I'm extremely sceptical.
If all these answers are known, and the result is that we have to dismantle the industrial economy to survive on this planet, I'm still out. Once we do that, there's no going back and no long-term possibility of survival when the planet's resources are exhausted. Technology is our long-term hope, period. Time to move to Mars instead.
States *always* recognize marriages granted by other states.
Which does not mean that states are *required* to recognize marriages granted by other states. States are required to recognize one another's judicial proceedings (ironically including divorces) but not one another's licenses (fishing, driver's, concealed handgun, marriage).
Most states recognize each other's marriages as a courtesy; but if a state has a public policy against something (first cousins marrying, or homosexual marriage) they can and do refuse. This has been well established in federal court. Loving v. Virginia created a narrow exception that requires states to recognize other states interracial marriages, and only those. Last I checked, homosexuality wasn't a race, so this is going back to the Supreme Court. Where I hope the gay couples win, but it's far from guaranteed.
They propose a combination of juries being volunteer and having the ability to override existing law.
Too late. Juries have been able to override the law since before the dawn of the Republic; it's an English Common Law tradition. Justice Samuel Chase was impeached at the end of the 18th century because while he was presiding individually over a circuit court (justices did that then); he neglected to instruct a jury that they had the duty to judge the law as well as the facts.
That duty still exists, though modern judges would prefer you didn't know it or use it if you're on a jury.
Slashdot Mirror
Dallas is in the middle of a grassy plain - no deserts within 300 miles and no mountains within 600. Obviously those scenes were shot in L.A.
Natural monopolies eventually disappear. Nowadays there is obviously no natural monopoly on telephone service. Yet, curiously, the Baby Bells are still around and still trying to get VOIP to be regulated like they are. The old natural monopoly rules never really go away, they just get used as a club to crush competition. And this is as true for municipal agencies fighting for budgets as it is for corporations fighting for business.
There are only a few places where a natural monopoly for broadband even exists, and those rural areas are the only places that should even be thinking about this, though of course they aren't the only ones by a long shot. But everywhere this happens, the natural monopoly will eventually be gone. Sooner or later, you're left with a broadband company, inefficient due to lack of scale, with the customer service of the DMV. It can survive because it has subsidized its services with the money of taxpayers that don't use them and thereby strangled all private competition. And by conniving to use regulation to make its subsidy, and its jobs, permanent regardless of technological advancement.
Trust me. I've seen it with the local city-run power monopoly. Prices are remarkably low - and the property taxes that really pay for the power are remarkably high.
Sounds ideal to me. I wonder why the people of Eastern Europe didn't think so?
They retired it because USA PATRIOT allows them to just collect it the good old fashioned way...no encryption, no court order
That is not only factually incorrect, but you would know it was factually incorrect if you'd read the article on the Patriot Act linked in the parent.
The Patriot Act doesn't allow the government to do anything without a court order that required a court order before. Nothing. Zilch. Bupkis. Your comment is a compendium of urban legend, FUD, and paranoia. Thank you for it - I was entertained to see how fast the Slashbots modded it up.
There are areas where the government can do at least a semicompetent job of providing services. This is especially true of items that everybody has to have no matter how low the qaulity is, such as education (including libraries) and policing. There are also areas where the government cannot do a semicompent job of providing services. One of these is technology - ask anyone who had to wait several months to get a phone under a communist government. You think municipal broadband is cute and wonderful until the municipality has driven out all private industry with its subsidies- and then decides it's more important to fund a new sewage project or a new football stadium than its telecom monopoly, and suddenly you can't get service or, if you do, it takes six months, costs a fortune, and uses outdated equipment. In other words, the same 'public' quality as 'public toilets'.
Neal Stephenson is not an economist, and that was one of the dumber lines in Snow Crash.
Look, it works like this. Free trade causes your salary to fall 50%. The prices you pay for goods fall 60%. You have gotten a 10% real raise.
A Pakistani bricklayer's idea of prosperity is, ultimately, an American's idea of prosperity. Yes, scarce resources are going to be distributed more evenly, but that accelerates the process of thinking about how to replace those resources - something only Westerners and East Asians have thus far had the need or resources to think about. I don't think the entire world being reasonably prosperous and well educated as we address those issues can be considered a bad thing.
Well, yes. This is the first time it's been possible for this to happen to educated, white collar professionals. Service industries couldn't migrate before telecommuting. So what?
These people have been through at least four years of college, have spent fortunes educating themselves on their chosen career (in this case, programming), and it's not as easy as you're making it sound for anyone in this position to re-train.
You think it's easy for anyone, any time to retrain? These are the best and brightest members of society - it's easier for them to retrain than for any other group in the history of free trade.
What this leads to is the ultimate destruction of the middle class. America will be 1% extremely rich with all power, and the rest will be just really, really poor.
This is such a tired, old, BULLSHIT argument that's been around for ages! Falling prices and gains in real wages because of more cheaply produced goods are going to eliminate the middle class! Yeah, that'll happen any day now.
Of course, you might argue that with free trade ultimately, this will work itself out as Indians get richer and it won't make economic sense anymore to send jobs to India as nobody there will work for peanuts anymore.
I did argue that.
But guess what.. that just means the jobs will be moved to another country, even poorer than India!
Correct! But by then the Indians will be richer and buying more American goods!
The world will never be perfect. It's not some economic model.
The world will never be perfect, but it can be made a lot worse. Cutting off free trade drives up prices more than national income, period. People like you want to fuck consumers in order to save employees. Sadly, they're the same people. We had to destroy the vilalge in order to save it.
As for economics, the models aren't perfect - but they're better than the alternative, which appears to be mindless protectionist malice.
We're talking about just the tech sector, and a single job type within that.
Actually, we're talking about all tech and call center jobs. And yes, you can expect certain sectors to be wiped out.
Everyone losing in an economic sense is called "depression."
Everyone is not losing. 100,000 Americans are losing their jobs, many others are getting new jobs from insourcing, and everyone is paying lower prices for goods produced by both the outsourcers and insourcers, and every other firm they supply. It's just about the opposite of a depression.
We're talking about just the tech sector, and a single job type within that. Actually, we're talking about all tech and call center jobs. And yes, you can expect certain sectors to be wiped out. Everyone losing in an economic sense is called "depression." Everyone is not losing. 100,000 Americans are losing their jobs, many others are getting new jobs from insourcing, and everyone is paying lower prices for goods produced by both the outsourcers and insourcers, and every other firm they supply. It's just about the opposite of a depression.
As for "everyone could lose," that is only true in a non-economic (i.e., environmental) sense. But this isn't the kind of economic expansion that dumps a lot of smoke in the air. And truth is, even if it were, the world's poor aren't going to tolerate being poor forever in order to help keep greenhouse emissions down. The best thing we can do for them is get them to a post-industrial economy like ours while skipping the rape-the-earth part if possible. This is exactly that kind of progress for India.
Why do you think you'll have to be?
Yep, more and more programming jobs will be outsourced to India. And as Indians become more and more technically competent, do you suppose they might get bored selling their skills to Americans at a cut rate and decide to, you know, do something with those skills?
In a very few years they won't be able to meet their own demand for code, much less ours. And that's a very good thing. A rich India is a vast export market. The fact that it will soon be bigger than China, and English-speaking as well, just gives Americans a leg up. You're thinking in the wrong direction.Division of labor is the very foundation of modern economics. What happens with free trade is that people do the jobs they're good at, other people do the jobs they're good at, and they trade.
When labor goes to India, that means Indians get richer and start buying goods. Some of those goods will be produced in America. As another example, since NAFTA passed Mexico is now outsourcing labor to China and (gasp...) South Texas because skilled Mexicans have gotten too rich to be hired for such jobs.
Economics is not a zero sum game and there is no giant sucking sound that can take all of our jobs and leave us unable to buy stuff. Just ask the people along the "American Autobahn" in the South who work in any of the many high-paying jobs that have been insourced to this country. If free trade were absolute and everywhere, we'd all be much richer - and the best educated and most productive of us, i.e. Westerners, would be richest.
Conversely, a simple thought experiment will tell you the ultimate booster to employment - ban all trade! Everyone would have to make his own clothes, catch his own food -100% employment all the time! Utopia! Sadly, most people would starve and the rest would be unable to maintain any standard of living, but, whatever yo.
Yes, this sucks for the workers who are displaced. The invention of the car sucked for buggy whip manufacteres too. I'm all for assisting these people with reeducation, but I'm not for holding everyone's standard of living back so we can save a few jobs.
Here's what we (or rather, I) know and don't know about this. We know that the Earth is trending warmer, empirically. We know that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing, and that CO2 is a greehouse gas. We don't know how significant the amounts involved are. You can make anything look impressive by plotting it ona graph with a small enough scale. What I want to know is how much CO2 we can dump in the atmosphere before the temperature goes up a degree. We don't know whether there's anything we can do about it, or whether it's already too late. We don't know how much warming may be due to non-greenhouse factors such as orbital fluctuations or whatever it is. We don't know what the cost/benefit structure looks like. If we're only going to lose New Orleans and Holland and everybody else is safe, and we'd have to go back to living in caves to prevent the climate change, then it's time to move those folks to high ground. I, for one, am open to persuasion on these issues, but I want solid answers (some of these may already be answered, but I'll admit to not having done the research). If the solution is "let's go back to living in caves now and see what happens," I'm out. If it's a matter of pursuing some reasonable alternative energy policies that we should be pursuing anyway to ease our dependence on foreign oil, I'm in. If it's Kyoto, which appears to have a huge cost for a relatively small reduction in human CO2 even in the unlikely event that everyone hits their targets, and which exempts huge stretches of the polluting world, I'm extremely sceptical. If all these answers are known, and the result is that we have to dismantle the industrial economy to survive on this planet, I'm still out. Once we do that, there's no going back and no long-term possibility of survival when the planet's resources are exhausted. Technology is our long-term hope, period. Time to move to Mars instead.
States *always* recognize marriages granted by other states. Which does not mean that states are *required* to recognize marriages granted by other states. States are required to recognize one another's judicial proceedings (ironically including divorces) but not one another's licenses (fishing, driver's, concealed handgun, marriage). Most states recognize each other's marriages as a courtesy; but if a state has a public policy against something (first cousins marrying, or homosexual marriage) they can and do refuse. This has been well established in federal court. Loving v. Virginia created a narrow exception that requires states to recognize other states interracial marriages, and only those. Last I checked, homosexuality wasn't a race, so this is going back to the Supreme Court. Where I hope the gay couples win, but it's far from guaranteed.
They propose a combination of juries being volunteer and having the ability to override existing law. Too late. Juries have been able to override the law since before the dawn of the Republic; it's an English Common Law tradition. Justice Samuel Chase was impeached at the end of the 18th century because while he was presiding individually over a circuit court (justices did that then); he neglected to instruct a jury that they had the duty to judge the law as well as the facts. That duty still exists, though modern judges would prefer you didn't know it or use it if you're on a jury.