Why are MS's policies and strategies always based around "enemy lists" rather than actual products or services?
Maybe you should be asking why, of all the things that Bill Gates says in various interviews and public forums, the only ones that most slashdot readers pay attention to are his answers to reporters' questions about his company's rivals.
I've heard plenty of his comments about product changes, general technologies, and even cultural issues... but you'd have to go digging for more widely-published quotes along those lines. The "enemy" stuff shows up here on slashdot because Bill's the guy that so many hipper-than-thou nerds love to hate (in between Xbox sessions). Pretending that all he talks about is destroying enemies makes it easier to hate him, that's all.
That said, 11 BILLION dollars? That's more than the GDP some nations.... it's not only improbable that they'll collect, but what is the real point of asessing such a sum?
Are we really so jaded (yes, we probably are) that 280 million pieces of spam doesn't sound serious? He was also poisoning the well by using CIS's domain on bogus return addresses. The point is, he embarked on a deliberate, plainly evil, sustained, and long-term campaign of fraud aimed at millions of people and without regard to the damage done to at least one important business. His penalty, for seeking to abuse other people's money, is that from now on, he doesn't get to keep any that he makes. His only hope is to be a good bartender or day laborer and to work for cash - and to never buy anything expensive that can be seized. He has been sentenced to a daily reckoning with with reality - something he spent considerable effort trying to distort, to his advantage. Not only is he saddled with this for the rest of his life, but other individuals and entities that do the same are aware that this is a potential risk. Even overseas groups are going to find the need to be a little circumspect about travel to and financial dealings with the US and her legally reciprocal allies. This type of consequence for this type of fraud is just in its infancy, I hope.
You know, my household pretty much fits your description, yet I do not seem to have your anger and resentment towards folks making lower income.
You're misreading my comment, and not seeing the context. I responded to the guy that said that better off people "have" the money that is actually the money of poor people. My take on it is that money (which merely represents value) is made through productivity, and that suggesting that you or me have a dollar because we took it from a poor person is nonsense. I'm all for opportunities, and cannot think of a single wiser investment of tax dollars than education. But simple redistribution of wealth to make for an imaginary theft from poor people is just Marxist claptrap and needs to be noted as such.
Well, no, but that's OK - you definitely see things from a different perspective.
you post within 2 paragraphs i know its you
Well, then, at least I'm consistent, I guess. A lot of people seem to find my comments at least interesting enough to stir up some conversation, and plenty actually agree with me on a topic here and there. I'm definitely not a typical slashdot user, philosophically, that's for sure. But if a few people stop and re-evaluate a couple things based on hearing a different observation than what they'd normally get from the/. echo-chamber, then I've accomplished something.
for every baby boomer retiring in the US, there's a little more than one grandchild entering the workforce and looking to get their foot in the door
Actually, that's not true. Actual US citizens are reproducing too slowly to replace the working US population. Immigration is the only thing propping up the work force, but much of that doesn't include skilled labor. Right now, systems like Social Security are using a dozen or so working people for every retiree getting entitlements, but in a dozen or two years, it will be more like two people supporting each retiree. That's bad.
The point is that there absolutely will be the need for more skilled people, and the ability (need, really) to pay them. We're in an info/service economy now, and that's only going to be more true in the future.
you call these jobs "entry level" but what are they "entry" to?
Entry into exhibiting a work ethic, reliability, and a willingness to learn things. Just because you're paying the rent on your first shared apartment while holding down a crappy retail job doesn't mean that you can't pick up a book or take advantage of all sorts of other inexpensive training opportunities. Companies do now (and are going to do much more in the future) offer training to get people up from the entry ranks into their more demanding jobs. Just the other day I talked to a guy running a lawn service company (he has a fleet of about 20 trucks and does both residential and commercial work). He's willing to train his entry level grunts, if they exhibit a willingness to stick to it, to work up into sales and even into chemical handling supervisory/management jobs (guys that have worked with him for a while are making better than $25 an hour). He's desperate enough to start all of that for some employees by paying for remedial English classes at the local community college if that needs to be part of the recipe. You get the idea.
A long time friend of mine came here from Venezuela - she was dirt poor, with Mom and Dad cleaning hotel rooms for a living. She got a gig at McDonalds while working her way through classes. She showed enough promise to get a student loan, went to pharmacology school, got a degree, and then struck a deal with the Navy to earn a doctorate. She decided to stick with the Navy for a while, and is now a running a clinic at Bethesda Naval Medical. Next stop for her is work training people in emergency pharmacology in the private sector (disaster response, that sort of thing). So, she started with nothing, a language barrier - the works. How can that be any harder than being born in the US, speaking the language?
Yes, every place in the country is different, and not everyone's family is willing to encourage their kid to step up like that. But entry level still works to keep some cash flowing while actually working to do something a bit loftier and more rewarding.
The solution is not just making poverty unattractive, it's making productive and non-poverty existence both attractive and plausible.
I'm not talking about making poverty unattractive. I'm talking about making the cultural inertia that gets in the way of embracing education less attractive. Plenty of people became literate, critical thinkers decades and decades ago - long before public education spent anything like the time, money or personnel resources per student that even mediocre schools do today. Why? Because there was social pressure to become functional and a direct recognition that those who could engage in the luxury of spending time reading books and academically interacting with teachers and other students would get ahead (and not dig ditches, work a farm, or live on an assembly line for a living).
It is now, in many circles, definitively uncool to pursue workable communication skills or intellectual polish in any form. That needs to change.
mr scented cone, who must have a pretty sweet job to be posting all day
Oh, come on. I'm on call 7 days a week, and put in about 70 hours a week. I've had about a week and half actually "off" in the last 5 years. And, um.... haven't posted since last year. Heh. Which you should know, since you're stalking me. Or are secretly amused by contrarians, it's hard to tell.
It's interesting, though, that you should point out status anxiety, relative to a discussion about tax-based redistribution of wealth. I note that the person with the most status anxiety here is the guy to whom I first responded, who seems very anxious about status, indeed. Not anxious enough to propose any solution other than re-arranging other people's bank accounts, though, as opposed to, say, addressing the actual issues that keep people working in starter jobs their entire lives (mostly, demographics with an active disdain for education).
I'll just take this one point and make a point of my own using your screwed up, baseless logic
Ah. So, where is your whitheringly sharp analysis of the comment to which I was responding? Do you feel as though your personal finances include money that really belongs to a poor person? That specific notion - that any prosperity produced by one person is prosperity taken from someone else, is the very definition of "screwed up, baseless logic." We are not all eating from one, limited dish, here. Productivity is at the heart of our economy. The creation of a standard of living, not the divvying up of one that already exists. Some context here, please.
A little context, please. You DID read the comment I was responding to, right? Do you feel that you're living on someone else's money? I don't either, and hence my comment.
I still pay less than 20%, and I'm in the top 20% of wage earners.
I'm curious what state you live in. My tax load is more like 32% (we have very high personal income taxes in my state, and my local county adds another 50% of the state rate onto the pile, and then there's everything else). And since my wife and I are definitely not in the top 20% of earning households (she's a starving artist), I'd say that no, you're not feeling too much progressive tax pain, compared to me. Lucky you.
As a top wage earner, I can say that the top wage earners do not see any additional negative impact on their finances due to the progressive taxation.
And of course, that's not what I was saying. I was responding to the GP, who indicated that life's not fair because people like you and me are marginalizing poor people, and are currently in receipt of "their" money, which we have somehow appropriated, robber barons that we are (how was your last "$10M birthday party?"). You referred to my comment as "utter crap," but I'm really not sure you're seeing the context of my response.
But hey, let's say that the job market magically expands for a couple of hundred million engineers, designers, doctors, lawyers, programmers and so on, and everyone gets a nice job paying a sufficient salary to make sure they can afford some kind of personal housing, as well as food and some spending money, who the hell is going to flip you a $3 burger?
There's a reason that's an "entry level job." Or, it should be. I'm not upper-middle class, just plain old middle. But I also did my time, as a young guy, doing menial labor for low wages. There are lots of people who aren't ready, yet, for professional employment. There always will be. It's assuming that those are jobs to keep for life that is one of our biggest problems. In some families, that's just taken as a fact of life, and higher aspirations are actually shot down out of some strange sense of, I don't know, fear? But entry level jobs are just that: a place to start. You shouldn't aspire to stay in one (unless you like a monkish existence), and you sure as hell shouldn't launch a big family when that's all you have to work with, financially. But people in their late teens and early twenties are usually too muddle-headed to really have their entire career already dialed in - and that makes the physical challenges and intellectual ease of starter jobs a pretty good recipe. It was for me, anyway. Now I stare at a screen all day and push bits around, something my younger self would have had a hard time imagining doing - but then, when I was 18, I'd have had a hard time imagining how I would actally go about owning a decent vehicle, affording some personal pursuits, and eating non-Velveeta cheese (with $10 wine!).
you just want a reason to tell the people whose lives you're marginalizing that it's their fault you have their money.
Let's see. Say you have a married couple - perhaps two people who both work as professionals in IT or some other area that they had to go to school to tackle. Between them, they make $250k a year before taxes, working probably 70-80 hours a week each at least. Unlike the low-income people you're talking about (who pay NO taxes), these two people have a very large chunk of their income harvested from them. Do you really think that those people (who, if they live in the sort of large urban area that can pay them that sort of living, probably also have a $2800 monthly mortgage on a 40-year-old two bedroom townhouse) are taking poor people's money? Do you really think that they "have" the money that an 18 year old flipping burgers should have instead? How much should a burger cost, in order to pay... what, $20,000 more?... to each burger-flipper? And do you really think that someone who designs hospital buildings, researches gene therapies, leads an engineering consulting team, or creates art desired by a large following should pay $10 for a $3 burger for that purpose? And would you, what, use the federal government to make sure that no other burger joint gets to offer a slightly cheaper burger lest we disrupt the artificial cash flow to the burger flipping strata of society? Or how about we tax the professionals a lot, and don't tax the burger flippers at all? Oh, right, we already do that. And how did we manage, despite painful blows to the country's economy (oil delivery shocks from Katrina, etc) have more economic growth and lower unemployment than, say, more socialist-minded places like France or Germany? By reducing the tax burden on the people that take their money and invest it the businesses that hire people and grow the economy.
Just admit it. You think that anyone with enough drive and capacity to produce enough income to live in an OK townhouse and own two cars that they have to drive an hour and half each day to the job where they work 70 hours should be forced to support other people who don't. But people like that aren't "born into money," they produce something of value and thus make the money. You act like there's some pie of fixed size out there, and that the minute one person earns a dollar more than he did the day before, some other person is thus going to have to go without that same dollar. What a load of decades-old socialist mumbo-jumbo crap. The economies that are framed around that perception fail miserably (and usually violently).
Among the many people I know who are arguably upper-middle-class (I'm not one of them), none of them were "born wealthy." But they, and people like them, pay the lion's share of the taxes in this country, including property taxes. The lower middle class pays very little, and the poor people pay no income taxes... in fact, they get tax credits along with a zillion other entitlements funded mostly by hardworking professionals and their families. That you have to resort to embarassingly ridiculous citations of essentially fictional $10M birthday parties (those just happen all the time, I know) in your attempt to make upper middle class people feel like they're not paying enough taxes is just an indication of how wrong you know you are.
The solution to poverty isn't penalizing productive people even more, it's in making a future of poverty unattractive enough to kids (and their parents) to make them want to actually bother to complete a solid high school and at least a real vocational education. Taking newly created income from someone who just earned it and handing it over to someone who didn't does not change the cultural ruts that keep some families explaining to their kids that sticking with entry level jobs is not a career strategy.
this is an organization of supposed straight-laced agents whose job is to snoop on people to make sure that they're in line with the law
No, you're thinking of the FBI. The NSA's job is to monitor communications to/from and between foreign entities that might expose potential threats to US security. Sure, some people physically sitting in the US may be party to those foreign communications, but the NSA is definitely not a domestic law enforcement agency.
but they can't be bothered to keep themselves in compliance with the law
I think we can pretty much guarantee that whatever contractor or team at the NSA's public relations office responsible for their public-facing web site has little (and probably nothing) to do with their actual operational mission. They, like all security agencies, are highly compartmentalized.
they can't just ignore it while they go about their business of monitoring other peoples' compliance with the laws
Well, they certainly shouldn't ignore the government's own rules about persistent cookies (silly as that is), but it's not like you're talking about traffic cops who don't put change in the parking meter. NSA spooks and analysts (and the thousands of IT people who make that agency work) probably don't give the operations of their public web site much thought at all. Can you imagine the hits they get from all the idiots of the world? The people they're really concerned about are smarter than to leave a trail from their PR site all the way back to some hotel room in Karachi.
My question is why this exoskeleton? Why not some vehicle that can resist a blast from a roadside bomb?
If the military's research into new technologies for various applications had to stop because something else was also (or more) pressing, nothing would ever get done. Things like the internet we're using right now, GPS, and countless other defense initiatives overlapped in R&D and always will. Personally, I think exo-skeletons like this are most likely to be used, along with more armor, when a medic or other rescue guy needs to hop out of an armored vehicle and assist in moving a wounded 250-pound Marine into the shelter of the vehicle. Tasks like that are exactly hand-in-hand with other work done on bomb/mine-resistent personnel carriers and transport vehicles. A rescue squad is going to be a lot more likely to step out into sniper fire if they can handle their own substantial armor and carry a large, gear-laden soldier 50 yards into the clear. Also, this is how you get geeks to enlist.
Poor choice of (important) word on my part. Yes, the number of hops stays the same. Well, sort of. When I recently paid my local cable ISP to get the saucier 10MB service from them, the number of hops from home to my datacenter went down by 3, and I wound up on a different class C block. Go figure, since you know the physical layer didn't change much at all until it was farther up into their guts, but there you have it.
But web-based apps, even those that are just tossing around small snippets of text to render pull-down lists or pop-up windows, still feel faster over a faster pipe. I have personal experience with this in a lot of venues. Even essentially identical machines getting faster access to the same pipe through different-speed (but same number of hops) segments of a local network connected to the internet can see tangibly different performance. Of course that can come from collisions and all sorts of other variables, but when the same http request is over and done with a hair faster, and a given page load involves a couple dozen of them... it all adds up (um, or down, when the data rate is faster). This really starts to show up in collaborative intranet-type stuff where things like Excel sheets are being opened up. You can really feel another MB/sec when there are some even modest files involved.
Especially when the bandwidth is good both directions, fairly complex AJAX-type apps (say, OWA) that involve lots of little GETs and POSTs with the server can feel much more snappy and desktop-ish when the latency is reduced by even a few milliseconds here and there. Presuming you've got a fairly responsive server on the other end, and a decent browser running on a quick client box, the difference between running such an app over, say DSL vs. the fatter high-end cable pipes is readily noticeable.
As more businesses turn to hosted accounting and productivity apps, that's really going to start to count.
Other countries recognize intellectual property rights? What does that mean? Intellectual property is NOT a natural right and has never been considered as such by law.
Careful how vigorously you pursue the success of only "natural" systems. I was watching a perfectly natural Red Shouldered Hawk eat a very natural Mourning Dove outside my window this morning. All laws, treaties, trade agreements, and systems that allow people to produce things with their brains without simply being ripped off are: artificial. Just like currency, constitutions, graduate degrees, and calendars. We produce cultural frameworks (like ownership of your work) because it's civilizing, and improves the standard of living, and encourages a marketplace full of ever more creativity. That's artificial, but so are antibiotics, refridgeration, and the underwear you have on.
...and then finds out he can't because some US company has locked him out of the market with a patent.
OK, I get it. You don't want anyone else to be the first guy to think of something, or find a more efficient way to do it. Hey, I'd prefer that every industrial genius, bio-sciences rock star, designer of whatever is each year's new iPod, etc., lived in the US and made this economy that much stronger. But that's not going to happen. That guy might live in Russia, and you don't want his government to feel any pressure to engage in multi-lateral treaties and trade agreements that actually call for the same protection of that Russian designers's work that Steve Jobs gets for an iPod, or that Honda gets for the code that makes some new hybrid run smarter than Toyota's. I don't know why you don't want that for the poor Russian engineering student that you think should get free copies of Lord Of The Rings, but that's your tune. At least whistle it out loud and admit it... maybe even try to justify it. But carping pointlessly that everything that ever can be dreamt up, patented, and put to work by someone has already been done, and thus the Russians should be on permanent entertainment life support to make them feel better about what you seem to think is their intellectual inferiority... well, fine. But please be a little more honest about it, at least. Admit that it's not just movies we're talking about, here, but some patronizing sense on your part that less-developed economies speaking other languages will never produce anything you might want, so you're going to get a warm fuzzy feeling by not minding if people there rip off what hundreds of people at, say, Pixar just spent several years and millions of dollars producing.
I certainly don't care if some poor Russian who only makes $100 a month buys a movie he would otherwise be unable to see for a buck.
Do you care if some poor Russian who only makes a $100 a month will ever benefit from an economy as productive as ours? Say he decides to start making his living writing software, or developing specialized business processes that can make him and his company more prosperous, raising the Russian standard of living. Do you think it will help him or hurt him if the prevailing economic framework in his country is built around him having no recourse when someone decides to rip him off? Don't you understand that it's a two way street? You're suggesting that the poor Russian guy will never have what it takes to work with systems, processes, creative material - his brain - and thrive the way that the rest of the western world does, so you're willing to throw that poor dumb guy a bone in the form of cheap, ripped off western entertainment?
What if he's the guy that dreams up an important process that would make other people want to invest in him and his partners? If you don't think that the Russian government should enforce the rule of law that would make such investments worth considering, then you don't think that him or his country should be anything but a bunch of cheaply entertained peasants. Right now, the only entrepeneurs thriving in Russia are fake ones: the Russian mafia. They are parasites, not creators, and they don't have a vested interest in anyone (Russian citizens, programmers in India, screenwriters in California, novelists in Romania, or Korean elevator control chip programmers) being able to make a living from the work of their own minds. Not putting diplomatic/trade pressure on their system means thinking it should stay that way. Incredibly short sighted.
So..
Bad govt + Money == Good
Good govt - Money == Bad
Is this it?
No, that's not it.
Liberty + Rule Of Law + Market Economics == Good
Communist Baggage + Pirate Mentality + Too Much Vodka == Bad
If the Russian government won't recognize and grapple with the huge, nearly China-like, economy-wide house of cards that is their disregard for intellectual property rights, it's sure as hell a good sign that we don't want to recognize them as economic peers.
I feel like quoting the last lines of your national anthem, since must have forgotten
Let's see... "the land of the free, and the home of the brave" that you'd be thinking of right? That's not been forgotten. Freedom includes freedom from being another economy's entertainment, software, and industrial process slaves. Brave means having the backbone to be so rude (in traditional diplomatic terms) to actually call international piracy what it is, and make rational trade negotiations based on fact, not Global Whining about how we're mean when we object to having our work ripped off.
Nah, it's nearly Europe-wide. And it's not "politicians," it's the large numbers of European voters that want it this way. The old cultures on that continent have become so geriatric and fearful of their own shadows that they'd rather criminalize unpleasant-sounding (or, in this case, simply less-popular) opinions than stand up and simply be persuasive about the counter position, or admit when they're being wrong-headed. It's cowardice.
That's where the RIAA has such a big advantage. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, for instance, concerts put on by acts not signed to an RIAA label are usually held in an area that serves so many alcoholic drinks that by law, minors can't get in the door. How can independent bands promote their recordings to high school students and college underclassmen?
Um... spend money to book facilities where they don't serve alcohol? Or, work with a business partner to help promote their music... you know, like a record label? It's almost as if those people do it professionally or something! If you want big exposure, you usually pay the price of having another party involved - someone who knows advertising (and can buy it at good rates), etc. Or, you can do all of that yourself, and have almost no time to make new music. People who want to thrive, financially, in that world, realize that there's a reason every area of activity is specialized. Concert and recording promotion is one of those specialties.
FYI, the money (radio, tv,...) is already collected by the SACEM and then sent to the corresponding foreign organization and dispatched to the foreign artists. There is no change at this level.
That's my point! The only way they'll know who to pay is if they track the file sharing. Only the French would consider the enormous new bureaucracy for that to be somehow serving the world's artists better than people just paying the artists for music in the first place. Not to mention we're right back to gigantic government lists of who uses what audio files. Or (my guess) no one is thinking about this, and it's "screw the foreign musicians twice" - once by assumging that all artists are equal, and second by keeping those taxes in-house.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are MS's policies and strategies always based around "enemy lists" rather than actual products or services?
Maybe you should be asking why, of all the things that Bill Gates says in various interviews and public forums, the only ones that most slashdot readers pay attention to are his answers to reporters' questions about his company's rivals.
I've heard plenty of his comments about product changes, general technologies, and even cultural issues... but you'd have to go digging for more widely-published quotes along those lines. The "enemy" stuff shows up here on slashdot because Bill's the guy that so many hipper-than-thou nerds love to hate (in between Xbox sessions). Pretending that all he talks about is destroying enemies makes it easier to hate him, that's all.
That said, 11 BILLION dollars? That's more than the GDP some nations.... it's not only improbable that they'll collect, but what is the real point of asessing such a sum?
Are we really so jaded (yes, we probably are) that 280 million pieces of spam doesn't sound serious? He was also poisoning the well by using CIS's domain on bogus return addresses. The point is, he embarked on a deliberate, plainly evil, sustained, and long-term campaign of fraud aimed at millions of people and without regard to the damage done to at least one important business. His penalty, for seeking to abuse other people's money, is that from now on, he doesn't get to keep any that he makes. His only hope is to be a good bartender or day laborer and to work for cash - and to never buy anything expensive that can be seized. He has been sentenced to a daily reckoning with with reality - something he spent considerable effort trying to distort, to his advantage. Not only is he saddled with this for the rest of his life, but other individuals and entities that do the same are aware that this is a potential risk. Even overseas groups are going to find the need to be a little circumspect about travel to and financial dealings with the US and her legally reciprocal allies. This type of consequence for this type of fraud is just in its infancy, I hope.
You know, my household pretty much fits your description, yet I do not seem to have your anger and resentment towards folks making lower income.
You're misreading my comment, and not seeing the context. I responded to the guy that said that better off people "have" the money that is actually the money of poor people. My take on it is that money (which merely represents value) is made through productivity, and that suggesting that you or me have a dollar because we took it from a poor person is nonsense. I'm all for opportunities, and cannot think of a single wiser investment of tax dollars than education. But simple redistribution of wealth to make for an imaginary theft from poor people is just Marxist claptrap and needs to be noted as such.
this is really mild stalking come on
/. echo-chamber, then I've accomplished something.
I was joking, relax.
your just wrong most of the time
Well, no, but that's OK - you definitely see things from a different perspective.
you post within 2 paragraphs i know its you
Well, then, at least I'm consistent, I guess. A lot of people seem to find my comments at least interesting enough to stir up some conversation, and plenty actually agree with me on a topic here and there. I'm definitely not a typical slashdot user, philosophically, that's for sure. But if a few people stop and re-evaluate a couple things based on hearing a different observation than what they'd normally get from the
for every baby boomer retiring in the US, there's a little more than one grandchild entering the workforce and looking to get their foot in the door
Actually, that's not true. Actual US citizens are reproducing too slowly to replace the working US population. Immigration is the only thing propping up the work force, but much of that doesn't include skilled labor. Right now, systems like Social Security are using a dozen or so working people for every retiree getting entitlements, but in a dozen or two years, it will be more like two people supporting each retiree. That's bad.
The point is that there absolutely will be the need for more skilled people, and the ability (need, really) to pay them. We're in an info/service economy now, and that's only going to be more true in the future.
you call these jobs "entry level" but what are they "entry" to?
Entry into exhibiting a work ethic, reliability, and a willingness to learn things. Just because you're paying the rent on your first shared apartment while holding down a crappy retail job doesn't mean that you can't pick up a book or take advantage of all sorts of other inexpensive training opportunities. Companies do now (and are going to do much more in the future) offer training to get people up from the entry ranks into their more demanding jobs. Just the other day I talked to a guy running a lawn service company (he has a fleet of about 20 trucks and does both residential and commercial work). He's willing to train his entry level grunts, if they exhibit a willingness to stick to it, to work up into sales and even into chemical handling supervisory/management jobs (guys that have worked with him for a while are making better than $25 an hour). He's desperate enough to start all of that for some employees by paying for remedial English classes at the local community college if that needs to be part of the recipe. You get the idea.
A long time friend of mine came here from Venezuela - she was dirt poor, with Mom and Dad cleaning hotel rooms for a living. She got a gig at McDonalds while working her way through classes. She showed enough promise to get a student loan, went to pharmacology school, got a degree, and then struck a deal with the Navy to earn a doctorate. She decided to stick with the Navy for a while, and is now a running a clinic at Bethesda Naval Medical. Next stop for her is work training people in emergency pharmacology in the private sector (disaster response, that sort of thing). So, she started with nothing, a language barrier - the works. How can that be any harder than being born in the US, speaking the language?
Yes, every place in the country is different, and not everyone's family is willing to encourage their kid to step up like that. But entry level still works to keep some cash flowing while actually working to do something a bit loftier and more rewarding.
The solution is not just making poverty unattractive, it's making productive and non-poverty existence both attractive and plausible.
I'm not talking about making poverty unattractive. I'm talking about making the cultural inertia that gets in the way of embracing education less attractive. Plenty of people became literate, critical thinkers decades and decades ago - long before public education spent anything like the time, money or personnel resources per student that even mediocre schools do today. Why? Because there was social pressure to become functional and a direct recognition that those who could engage in the luxury of spending time reading books and academically interacting with teachers and other students would get ahead (and not dig ditches, work a farm, or live on an assembly line for a living).
It is now, in many circles, definitively uncool to pursue workable communication skills or intellectual polish in any form. That needs to change.
mr scented cone, who must have a pretty sweet job to be posting all day
Oh, come on. I'm on call 7 days a week, and put in about 70 hours a week. I've had about a week and half actually "off" in the last 5 years. And, um.... haven't posted since last year. Heh. Which you should know, since you're stalking me. Or are secretly amused by contrarians, it's hard to tell.
It's interesting, though, that you should point out status anxiety, relative to a discussion about tax-based redistribution of wealth. I note that the person with the most status anxiety here is the guy to whom I first responded, who seems very anxious about status, indeed. Not anxious enough to propose any solution other than re-arranging other people's bank accounts, though, as opposed to, say, addressing the actual issues that keep people working in starter jobs their entire lives (mostly, demographics with an active disdain for education).
I'll just take this one point and make a point of my own using your screwed up, baseless logic
Ah. So, where is your whitheringly sharp analysis of the comment to which I was responding? Do you feel as though your personal finances include money that really belongs to a poor person? That specific notion - that any prosperity produced by one person is prosperity taken from someone else, is the very definition of "screwed up, baseless logic." We are not all eating from one, limited dish, here. Productivity is at the heart of our economy. The creation of a standard of living, not the divvying up of one that already exists. Some context here, please.
A little context, please. You DID read the comment I was responding to, right? Do you feel that you're living on someone else's money? I don't either, and hence my comment.
I still pay less than 20%, and I'm in the top 20% of wage earners.
I'm curious what state you live in. My tax load is more like 32% (we have very high personal income taxes in my state, and my local county adds another 50% of the state rate onto the pile, and then there's everything else). And since my wife and I are definitely not in the top 20% of earning households (she's a starving artist), I'd say that no, you're not feeling too much progressive tax pain, compared to me. Lucky you.
As a top wage earner, I can say that the top wage earners do not see any additional negative impact on their finances due to the progressive taxation.
And of course, that's not what I was saying. I was responding to the GP, who indicated that life's not fair because people like you and me are marginalizing poor people, and are currently in receipt of "their" money, which we have somehow appropriated, robber barons that we are (how was your last "$10M birthday party?"). You referred to my comment as "utter crap," but I'm really not sure you're seeing the context of my response.
But hey, let's say that the job market magically expands for a couple of hundred million engineers, designers, doctors, lawyers, programmers and so on, and everyone gets a nice job paying a sufficient salary to make sure they can afford some kind of personal housing, as well as food and some spending money, who the hell is going to flip you a $3 burger?
There's a reason that's an "entry level job." Or, it should be. I'm not upper-middle class, just plain old middle. But I also did my time, as a young guy, doing menial labor for low wages. There are lots of people who aren't ready, yet, for professional employment. There always will be. It's assuming that those are jobs to keep for life that is one of our biggest problems. In some families, that's just taken as a fact of life, and higher aspirations are actually shot down out of some strange sense of, I don't know, fear? But entry level jobs are just that: a place to start. You shouldn't aspire to stay in one (unless you like a monkish existence), and you sure as hell shouldn't launch a big family when that's all you have to work with, financially. But people in their late teens and early twenties are usually too muddle-headed to really have their entire career already dialed in - and that makes the physical challenges and intellectual ease of starter jobs a pretty good recipe. It was for me, anyway. Now I stare at a screen all day and push bits around, something my younger self would have had a hard time imagining doing - but then, when I was 18, I'd have had a hard time imagining how I would actally go about owning a decent vehicle, affording some personal pursuits, and eating non-Velveeta cheese (with $10 wine!).
you just want a reason to tell the people whose lives you're marginalizing that it's their fault you have their money.
Let's see. Say you have a married couple - perhaps two people who both work as professionals in IT or some other area that they had to go to school to tackle. Between them, they make $250k a year before taxes, working probably 70-80 hours a week each at least. Unlike the low-income people you're talking about (who pay NO taxes), these two people have a very large chunk of their income harvested from them. Do you really think that those people (who, if they live in the sort of large urban area that can pay them that sort of living, probably also have a $2800 monthly mortgage on a 40-year-old two bedroom townhouse) are taking poor people's money? Do you really think that they "have" the money that an 18 year old flipping burgers should have instead? How much should a burger cost, in order to pay... what, $20,000 more?... to each burger-flipper? And do you really think that someone who designs hospital buildings, researches gene therapies, leads an engineering consulting team, or creates art desired by a large following should pay $10 for a $3 burger for that purpose? And would you, what, use the federal government to make sure that no other burger joint gets to offer a slightly cheaper burger lest we disrupt the artificial cash flow to the burger flipping strata of society? Or how about we tax the professionals a lot, and don't tax the burger flippers at all? Oh, right, we already do that. And how did we manage, despite painful blows to the country's economy (oil delivery shocks from Katrina, etc) have more economic growth and lower unemployment than, say, more socialist-minded places like France or Germany? By reducing the tax burden on the people that take their money and invest it the businesses that hire people and grow the economy.
Just admit it. You think that anyone with enough drive and capacity to produce enough income to live in an OK townhouse and own two cars that they have to drive an hour and half each day to the job where they work 70 hours should be forced to support other people who don't. But people like that aren't "born into money," they produce something of value and thus make the money. You act like there's some pie of fixed size out there, and that the minute one person earns a dollar more than he did the day before, some other person is thus going to have to go without that same dollar. What a load of decades-old socialist mumbo-jumbo crap. The economies that are framed around that perception fail miserably (and usually violently).
Among the many people I know who are arguably upper-middle-class (I'm not one of them), none of them were "born wealthy." But they, and people like them, pay the lion's share of the taxes in this country, including property taxes. The lower middle class pays very little, and the poor people pay no income taxes... in fact, they get tax credits along with a zillion other entitlements funded mostly by hardworking professionals and their families. That you have to resort to embarassingly ridiculous citations of essentially fictional $10M birthday parties (those just happen all the time, I know) in your attempt to make upper middle class people feel like they're not paying enough taxes is just an indication of how wrong you know you are.
The solution to poverty isn't penalizing productive people even more, it's in making a future of poverty unattractive enough to kids (and their parents) to make them want to actually bother to complete a solid high school and at least a real vocational education. Taking newly created income from someone who just earned it and handing it over to someone who didn't does not change the cultural ruts that keep some families explaining to their kids that sticking with entry level jobs is not a career strategy.
You know what I'm talking about.
this is an organization of supposed straight-laced agents whose job is to snoop on people to make sure that they're in line with the law
No, you're thinking of the FBI. The NSA's job is to monitor communications to/from and between foreign entities that might expose potential threats to US security. Sure, some people physically sitting in the US may be party to those foreign communications, but the NSA is definitely not a domestic law enforcement agency.
but they can't be bothered to keep themselves in compliance with the law
I think we can pretty much guarantee that whatever contractor or team at the NSA's public relations office responsible for their public-facing web site has little (and probably nothing) to do with their actual operational mission. They, like all security agencies, are highly compartmentalized.
they can't just ignore it while they go about their business of monitoring other peoples' compliance with the laws
Well, they certainly shouldn't ignore the government's own rules about persistent cookies (silly as that is), but it's not like you're talking about traffic cops who don't put change in the parking meter. NSA spooks and analysts (and the thousands of IT people who make that agency work) probably don't give the operations of their public web site much thought at all. Can you imagine the hits they get from all the idiots of the world? The people they're really concerned about are smarter than to leave a trail from their PR site all the way back to some hotel room in Karachi.
My question is why this exoskeleton? Why not some vehicle that can resist a blast from a roadside bomb?
If the military's research into new technologies for various applications had to stop because something else was also (or more) pressing, nothing would ever get done. Things like the internet we're using right now, GPS, and countless other defense initiatives overlapped in R&D and always will. Personally, I think exo-skeletons like this are most likely to be used, along with more armor, when a medic or other rescue guy needs to hop out of an armored vehicle and assist in moving a wounded 250-pound Marine into the shelter of the vehicle. Tasks like that are exactly hand-in-hand with other work done on bomb/mine-resistent personnel carriers and transport vehicles. A rescue squad is going to be a lot more likely to step out into sniper fire if they can handle their own substantial armor and carry a large, gear-laden soldier 50 yards into the clear. Also, this is how you get geeks to enlist.
Poor choice of (important) word on my part. Yes, the number of hops stays the same. Well, sort of. When I recently paid my local cable ISP to get the saucier 10MB service from them, the number of hops from home to my datacenter went down by 3, and I wound up on a different class C block. Go figure, since you know the physical layer didn't change much at all until it was farther up into their guts, but there you have it.
But web-based apps, even those that are just tossing around small snippets of text to render pull-down lists or pop-up windows, still feel faster over a faster pipe. I have personal experience with this in a lot of venues. Even essentially identical machines getting faster access to the same pipe through different-speed (but same number of hops) segments of a local network connected to the internet can see tangibly different performance. Of course that can come from collisions and all sorts of other variables, but when the same http request is over and done with a hair faster, and a given page load involves a couple dozen of them... it all adds up (um, or down, when the data rate is faster). This really starts to show up in collaborative intranet-type stuff where things like Excel sheets are being opened up. You can really feel another MB/sec when there are some even modest files involved.
Especially when the bandwidth is good both directions, fairly complex AJAX-type apps (say, OWA) that involve lots of little GETs and POSTs with the server can feel much more snappy and desktop-ish when the latency is reduced by even a few milliseconds here and there. Presuming you've got a fairly responsive server on the other end, and a decent browser running on a quick client box, the difference between running such an app over, say DSL vs. the fatter high-end cable pipes is readily noticeable.
As more businesses turn to hosted accounting and productivity apps, that's really going to start to count.
Other countries recognize intellectual property rights? What does that mean? Intellectual property is NOT a natural right and has never been considered as such by law.
Careful how vigorously you pursue the success of only "natural" systems. I was watching a perfectly natural Red Shouldered Hawk eat a very natural Mourning Dove outside my window this morning. All laws, treaties, trade agreements, and systems that allow people to produce things with their brains without simply being ripped off are: artificial. Just like currency, constitutions, graduate degrees, and calendars. We produce cultural frameworks (like ownership of your work) because it's civilizing, and improves the standard of living, and encourages a marketplace full of ever more creativity. That's artificial, but so are antibiotics, refridgeration, and the underwear you have on.
...and then finds out he can't because some US company has locked him out of the market with a patent.
OK, I get it. You don't want anyone else to be the first guy to think of something, or find a more efficient way to do it. Hey, I'd prefer that every industrial genius, bio-sciences rock star, designer of whatever is each year's new iPod, etc., lived in the US and made this economy that much stronger. But that's not going to happen. That guy might live in Russia, and you don't want his government to feel any pressure to engage in multi-lateral treaties and trade agreements that actually call for the same protection of that Russian designers's work that Steve Jobs gets for an iPod, or that Honda gets for the code that makes some new hybrid run smarter than Toyota's. I don't know why you don't want that for the poor Russian engineering student that you think should get free copies of Lord Of The Rings, but that's your tune. At least whistle it out loud and admit it... maybe even try to justify it. But carping pointlessly that everything that ever can be dreamt up, patented, and put to work by someone has already been done, and thus the Russians should be on permanent entertainment life support to make them feel better about what you seem to think is their intellectual inferiority... well, fine. But please be a little more honest about it, at least. Admit that it's not just movies we're talking about, here, but some patronizing sense on your part that less-developed economies speaking other languages will never produce anything you might want, so you're going to get a warm fuzzy feeling by not minding if people there rip off what hundreds of people at, say, Pixar just spent several years and millions of dollars producing.
I certainly don't care if some poor Russian who only makes $100 a month buys a movie he would otherwise be unable to see for a buck.
Do you care if some poor Russian who only makes a $100 a month will ever benefit from an economy as productive as ours? Say he decides to start making his living writing software, or developing specialized business processes that can make him and his company more prosperous, raising the Russian standard of living. Do you think it will help him or hurt him if the prevailing economic framework in his country is built around him having no recourse when someone decides to rip him off? Don't you understand that it's a two way street? You're suggesting that the poor Russian guy will never have what it takes to work with systems, processes, creative material - his brain - and thrive the way that the rest of the western world does, so you're willing to throw that poor dumb guy a bone in the form of cheap, ripped off western entertainment?
What if he's the guy that dreams up an important process that would make other people want to invest in him and his partners? If you don't think that the Russian government should enforce the rule of law that would make such investments worth considering, then you don't think that him or his country should be anything but a bunch of cheaply entertained peasants. Right now, the only entrepeneurs thriving in Russia are fake ones: the Russian mafia. They are parasites, not creators, and they don't have a vested interest in anyone (Russian citizens, programmers in India, screenwriters in California, novelists in Romania, or Korean elevator control chip programmers) being able to make a living from the work of their own minds. Not putting diplomatic/trade pressure on their system means thinking it should stay that way. Incredibly short sighted.
So, you'd have no problem ripping off the work of a bunch of Indian programmers?
So..
Bad govt + Money == Good
Good govt - Money == Bad
Is this it?
No, that's not it.
Liberty + Rule Of Law + Market Economics == Good
Communist Baggage + Pirate Mentality + Too Much Vodka == Bad
If the Russian government won't recognize and grapple with the huge, nearly China-like, economy-wide house of cards that is their disregard for intellectual property rights, it's sure as hell a good sign that we don't want to recognize them as economic peers.
I feel like quoting the last lines of your national anthem, since must have forgotten
Let's see... "the land of the free, and the home of the brave" that you'd be thinking of right? That's not been forgotten. Freedom includes freedom from being another economy's entertainment, software, and industrial process slaves. Brave means having the backbone to be so rude (in traditional diplomatic terms) to actually call international piracy what it is, and make rational trade negotiations based on fact, not Global Whining about how we're mean when we object to having our work ripped off.
Nah, it's nearly Europe-wide. And it's not "politicians," it's the large numbers of European voters that want it this way. The old cultures on that continent have become so geriatric and fearful of their own shadows that they'd rather criminalize unpleasant-sounding (or, in this case, simply less-popular) opinions than stand up and simply be persuasive about the counter position, or admit when they're being wrong-headed. It's cowardice.
Your little green footballs are showing.
Honestly, I have no idea what you're talking about.
That's where the RIAA has such a big advantage. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, for instance, concerts put on by acts not signed to an RIAA label are usually held in an area that serves so many alcoholic drinks that by law, minors can't get in the door. How can independent bands promote their recordings to high school students and college underclassmen?
Um... spend money to book facilities where they don't serve alcohol? Or, work with a business partner to help promote their music... you know, like a record label? It's almost as if those people do it professionally or something! If you want big exposure, you usually pay the price of having another party involved - someone who knows advertising (and can buy it at good rates), etc. Or, you can do all of that yourself, and have almost no time to make new music. People who want to thrive, financially, in that world, realize that there's a reason every area of activity is specialized. Concert and recording promotion is one of those specialties.
FYI, the money (radio, tv, ...) is already collected by the SACEM and then sent to the corresponding foreign organization and dispatched to the foreign artists. There is no change at this level.
That's my point! The only way they'll know who to pay is if they track the file sharing. Only the French would consider the enormous new bureaucracy for that to be somehow serving the world's artists better than people just paying the artists for music in the first place. Not to mention we're right back to gigantic government lists of who uses what audio files. Or (my guess) no one is thinking about this, and it's "screw the foreign musicians twice" - once by assumging that all artists are equal, and second by keeping those taxes in-house.