> Prices may go up somewhat (or rather, stay up, since VISA's are the status quo), but not enough to totally negate > the pay benefits from preventing your field from being overun by inexpensive foreign workers. That's because the > programming costs of products are only a small component of the full costs of any product one buys, so the price > hikes would be negligible compared to the effect on individual programmer's salary.
What about the increases in the price of services and goods caused by the increases in wages of the people buying the products which are now more expensive because software is more expensive?
To step through it; programmer wages go up. Software becomes more expensive. Everything which uses software is more expensive. Everyone who *buys* products which use software has a wage increase to pay for the higher prices; everything THOSE people make becomes more expensive to pay for the higher prices.
So it's starting to get back to the programmers now - for the cars they buy, the coffee, the medical services; they'll all more expensive.
> Programmers have had their incomes plummet in recent years due to H-1b/L-1 expansion.
Is that true? I thought wages were generally rising due to shortage of staff?
> I have less objection to income that comes from immigration protection because it is broadly distributed.
No income "comes" from immigration protection. The wage increases caused by it are directly and exactly paid for in higher product prices. There is only a redistribution of wealth. (Well, where supply of labour is reducted, products and services cost more to make, so there is a reduction in real wealth, by the elevation in prices).
> If you're arguing that an increase in wages cancels itself > out due to increased prices, you're not living in reality.
A bold statement, sir...let us hope I don't prove you wrong, because the stronger the words, the harder they are to swallow!
So, let me consider this with an example.
Say we have a food product, Wurbles. They currently sell for 10 dollars a piece.
There's a 10% wage increase for all the people making Wurbles. There are 1000 people involved in making Wurbles. To pay for this, Wurbles now have to cost 11 dollars a piece.
The 1000 people making Wurbles are now 10% better off. Huzzah, they shout!
Everyone else, however, now pays more for Wurbles - and the amount they pay more exactly matches the total wage increases for the 1000 people making Wurbles.
Except...
All those people who buy Wurbles now pay more for food than they used to. As a result, they will need to be paid more to keep their living standards stable - they're not just going to accept that some of their pay has now in effect been taken by the Wurble producers. Why should they? Consequently, *THEIR* employers, who now have to increases wages, have to increase *THEIR* prices. These increases fall upon all sorts of people, all over the economy, since people who buy Wurbles have all sorts of jobs - programmers, bell-hops, cab-drivers, doctors, etc.
These price increases in their turn drive up wages - and this time, as you can imagine, by now it's affecting everyone.
In fact, what happens in an ideal economy, is that the cascade of price and wage increases exactly balances out so that *the Wurble producers are now paying 10% more for the things they buy*.
Of course, no economy is so ideal and in this micro-micro case, things wouldn't be so smoothly evened out.
But in reality, even with our real, non-ideal economy, this basic principle holds true, when you take into the account the whole of the economy, over a reasonable period of time.
So I therefore argue that an increase in wages cancels itself out in increased prices.
> Obviously, there's a lot of people who earn income from sources other than wages.
Well, income comes from wages, rent or profit. I don't know the proportions of these three as they exist in the economy for individual sources of income.
> Increasing wages just redistributes money from those folks to wage earners.
If your income is in the form of rent, and your Wurbles cost more, you'll charge more rent.
If your income is in the form of profit, and your Wurbles cost more, you'll increase what you charge, to make more profit.
I think that it is extremely difficult, even impossible, to predict what would happen if the labour market was fully competitive.
Considering your arguments, I could for example counter-argue along the lines of second and third world programmers, although cheaper, are considerably less skilled and, vitally, *culturally unsuited* to producing software. (A common theme I've come across with outsourcing software to India is that the Indian centers have a complete inability to *design* code. Giving them a job which involves design, rather than coding to an existing design, is usually a disaster).
However, I could almost say that anything you, I or anyone else might predict *will* be wrong; it's simply so complicated that only the lowest level of the underlying economic mechanics can be understood, which is to say, full competition would lead to the generation of the maximum possible amount of wealth for *all* of the people involved - which is to say, the 3 billion people on this planet who live on less than two dollars per day would do very well out of it indeed.
And, for those not moved by this, the fact that there would then be an additional three billion people with a growing and ultimately decent income would provide PLENTY of work for everyone. Everyone now is all excited about China - biggest market in the world, 300 million urban Chinese.
Well, there are also 1 billion rural Chinese, about another 700 million rural Indians and about another billion in Africa.
Imagine how the world economy would take off if those people had a half decent income and so started buying stuff.
The annual growth in GDP reflects the overall increase or decrease in wealth for the entire population.
If the growth rate is negative, the economy is contracting, and this means we are *ALL* growing poorer, year on year. Of course, the loss of wealth is unevenly distributed - but no matter how you look at it, it's bad news.
It's vital for our economic well-being that the economic growth rate remains positive (or at worst, neutral).
Keeping the growth rate positive *requires* the cheap production of services and goods; if the cost of doing business increases (which is to say, goods and services are becoming more and more expensive, because people are being paid more and more, because they are using the State to reduce competition for their jobs) there is a most significant contractory pressure exerted upon the economic growth rate.
However, getting back to something you said originally; good jobs or cheap trinkets.
What's a good job? one that pays well, or one that you enjoy doing, or both?
If it's being paid well: when goods and services are cheap, it doesn't matter you're being paid say 20,000 USD/year - because everything you buy is wonderfully cheap. You actual wealth is high.
If it's work you enjoy: why would the nature of jobs change, if competition is permitted? I don't see why it would.
So, I think the choice you present does not actually exist. There is no choice to be made. The nature of work won't change, but if competition is refused, people are poorer. The choice is actually; do we want to be poorer or richer? which isn't really a choice at all - except most people are unaware of the fact they're choosing to be poorer, by being in favour of immigration controls.
You say this, but you've not said *why*, for the point you make next I totally agree with - I think it valid. If you increase the supply of a given skill set, the average salary for that skill will decline (or rise less slowly, if the increase in supply means the total supply is still less than the demand).
So I don't see how you think this argument wrong.
> How about we let shareholders hire people from abroad for > management positions -- all the way to the top -- since > I'm sure they'll be able to find competent people that > would do the job for far less than a 7-figure salary.
Well, no comment on exactly what salary they would command, but *certainly*, increasing the competition for those positions would act to lower the average salary.
> Yep, I think we are restricting the supply of managers, > and CEOs, and that's why some are compensated with > millions of dollars. At the end, you and I pay for it.
Indeed we do. If CEOs were free, the running costs of a corporation would be significantly less and so their products would, overall and over the whole of the economy, cost less.
As it is, where immigration is restricted, pay packets right *now* are unnaturally elevated. Programmers and plenty of other occupations have become accustomed to being paid more for their skills than their skills properly command. All people object when their pay goes down, but it's difficult when their pay *should* in fact be lower than it is; people generally don't understand the effects of supply and demand, or do understand but act selfishly, happy for other people to subsidize their enlarged pay packets.
The problems of course is that although by this method people have more money in their pockets (higher nominal wealth) the costs of the goods and services they buy rises (lower actual wealth). E.g. earning 100,000 dollars a month isn't wealth if a loaf of bread costs 1,000 dollars.
If more and more classes of skill behave in their short term selfish interest, nominal wealth rises ever higher, but actual wealth falls ever lower; it rapidly becomes counterproductive and people end up poorer than they would have been had they embraced competition.
The key to real wealth is making the production of goods and services as low as possible (and also low taxation - it's so easy for the State to suck wealth out of the economy, undoing all the hard work people do to create wealth).
VISAs are essentially an import tariff on employees.
Remember the steel import tariff Bush imposed a year or two back? the steel manufacturers were overjoyed - and rightly so; since imported steel now cost 45% more, they could raise their prices to match, and they made plenty of money out of it.
Who suffered? well, *EVERYONE ELSE*. All the companies who use steel had to pay 45% more. All their products (cars, construction materials for houses, etc) went up in price to compensate for their costs. You and I subsidized the steel industry, by Bush's decree.
Back to VISAs.
If you have demand for a skill-set and a shortfall in supply, wages go up.
Just like steel prices going up, when wages go up, final product prices go up.
So if you restrict the supply of programmers, software prices go up to compensate.
Who benefits? American programmers. They have fatter pay packets (which they notice), but most things they buy will be more expensive (which they won't notice). (Things are more expensive since the part of their cost which covers the price of the software used to make them has gone up).
Unfortunately, the State is not independent of these corporations - their lobbies are effective and well funded. In other words, the mechanism which we, as individuals, have collectively agreeded to bring into existance (the State) is not functioning; it has been compromised by the entities it was created to constrain.
Well, I think it's clear from the repeated stories of millions of confidential files being lost that enough large organisations simply don't understand security enough to get it right.
However, we all carry on using their services because we're stuffed if we don't - if your university loses your details, what are you going to do? quit? if your morgage is with your bank and they lose your account information, are you going to change bank?
Because there is basically, when all is said and done, no *real* pain for organisations, for loosing information, there is no *real* need for them to understand security enough for these data losses to stop.
So suck it up!
Personally, I'm trying to get out from under. I gave up my mobile phone last week - I do not accept having my mobile phone calls logged for a year. I'm moving over to Tor, because I do not accept having my browsing logged for four days (current UK retention). I'm thinking about getting rid of the phone, too, and moving over purely to encrypted email which will be sent/receieved from my own home-run POP/SMTP server.
> I guess you're probably just a little ticked off that Milton "Free Market" Friedman died, so I'll cut you some > slack and not poke gaping holes through all the rest of your arguements.
You should be ashamed, to use the death of a man - and he died *today* - as a way of being rude to me - and, worse, doing that *because you disagree with my views*.
> You missing one very, very important point. There has been exactly NOTHING preventing any private company from > developing a space vehicle outside of the government funding system.
Say you're a small company entering the field of space travel. You want to hire staff...and you find NASA is competing with you. NASA - huge budget, presigious institutions, existing programs.
Say you're a small company and you want to buy some hardware - small numbers of various bits of kit. The manufacturers won't even TALK to you unless you're spending $1m/USD a shot, because they're all geared up to supply NASA with its big orders.
Say you're a small company and you might just be able to put together a service to get something into space. Who do you find competing with you...well that would be NASA, funded by the taxpayer.
> I can see myself donating to NASA, but unless I was given a form with a list of everything, I doubt I would > remember to do the same for the NOAA. One problem with the definition "what people truly want" is people > don't know what that is or what it takes to get there.
I don't see donation as a decent funding source, too few people would do it. So, considering your point here, I'd actually answer it in terms of private industry, and I would say companies spend the funding they have on what they know they need to do, to get whatever it is they want done.
> You don't make product flying a plane into a hurricane, but it still needs to be done.
But why *does* it need to be done?
As I understand it, planes fly into hurricanes so that the course of the hurricane can be more accurately plotted and also to help long term research into hurricane behaviour to improve course prediction.
This certainly is a useful thing to have done.
Question is, given that resources are finite, it is actually useful *enough* to spend money on? might there not be other things even more useful which we'd rather spend the money on?
Remember what I said in the previous post about donating money? well, consider - imagine not taxing the people who pay for this research and letting them do what they want with the money.
Some of those people may well have a lot of financial demands upon them (family, education, health care, food, heating, etc) and not much money. Are they going to want to spend 50 dollars a year on hurricane research? no. They wouldn't ever donate that money to NOAA, even though some of them will in fact be living on the Florida coastline and will be affected by those hurricanes. It's simply that the benefit they get from improved hurricane path prediction is so small, and their needs for health and food and warmth (well, air-con in Florida I guess;-) are so much more vital that they spend their money correctly and appropriately for themselves.
Now, getting back to your original comment.
"...which needs to be done".
Well, for those people who don't donate, it really *doesn't* need to be done. It would benefit them, but much less than other things which matter more.
Now at this point, I suspect many will still feel an instinctive "it needs to be done" response - and perhaps even think about all those people who aren't so badly off.
But the issue remains fundamentally the same. *We* feel it needs to be done, but we are imposing our choice on other people by using taxation to fund the flights. Maybe it isn't right for them - who are we to make that decision for them?
And if we are all left to make our own decisions, then everything that does exist will do so because people *genuinely, of their own free will, wish it to be so*, rather than having the choice imposed upon them through taxation.
> The problem with private industry is they end up needing results and showing profit. Thus long, difficult > projects > that don't show a good return will be scrapped. The government doesn't need to show results on a profit level, > which is why they fund things like this: to promote the wellbeing and advancement of the state in ways the > private sector would not.
However, the converse holds true, and I think is far, far more common, which is to say;
The problem with the State is that since it is taxplayer funded, it will continue to run bloated, pointless, pork-barrel projects indefinetely, unlike private industry, which, since the capital belongs to actual people, will bail out of an unprofitable project to find a better use for the money.
So a State run project might, for example, continue to blast money away on a technology or approach which just won't work, while a private project would back off and try to find a better, cheaper way to do the same job.
> Personally, I like my tax dollars going to NASA as opposed to the multitude of social programs run by the state.
Well, if you feel that your money should be spent on NASA, wouldn't it be better for you *not* to be taxed for that money, but for you to voluntarily contribute that money to NASA? especially since this would permit you to fund other organisations if they turned out to be better.
The fact is, if we were not taxed, we would NOT voluntarily contibute money to such projects. We'd keep the cash.
Such projects actually then happen because they can be profitable - which is to say, they produce something people actually WANT enough to spend their money on it. Profitability actually means making something *people truly want*, rather than what people SAY they want.
> The funny thing is, we learned a lot more from the little missions.
Like what? and what didn't we learn from the first half-dozen little missions which required the next twenty years worth of little missions to keep being done? when do we get to the point where we've learned enough from little missions and don't need them any more?
> Also, if you haven't noticed we basically stopped funding NASA to actually do > anything related to space, we fund them as an education center instead.
That seems plainly untrue, since NASA has a bunch of satellites up and runs the ISS.
It does make me think of a question though; why isn't NASA doing the things which actually MATTER in space? and when it comes down to it, that means an off-world colony and also ecomonic exploitation.
> None the less someone figured it out, and they solved the problem on the fly, after the thing was up there.
Anecdotal stories about NASA pulling its chestnuts out of a fire do not form a meaningful basis for any decisions or opinions. Such events are not representative and shed no light upon the larger economic situation and position of the agency with the economy. Moreover, I could equally well point out similar anecdotal stories where NASA's incompetence has killed people - the first Shuttle accident was largely contributed to by systematic mismanagement (RF's report) and the second might have been avoided if NASA managers had no refused to have the shuttle photoed for damage while in orbit.
> Seriously... I'd like to see you debug a hanging VxWorks system on another planet over a serial console with 45 > minute latency. That's AFTER they downloaded a program to another satalite to flash the system image in the 1 or > 2 minute window before the machine crashed again. This shit is HARD man. Hell, I bet you don't even know how to > build electronics that can take that kind of radiation, or that can overvolt a capacitor on the fly while a > satalite is outside our solarsystem hurtling towards the plasma barrier.
A couple of privately funded companies have in a few years learned enough to start getting sub-orbital. Why couldn't they continue learning and get orbital/planetry?
> NASA could probably do better than they do, they have much to much administration and governmental shit, but all > told they do a pretty damned good job.
I think they do a terrible, terrible job. They're terrible inefficient at converting money into space exploration.
> On one more final note, you are also neglecting something like 2/3 of space shuttle launches which all have > "secret" payloads.
Interesting! I had no idea it was such a high proportion. Do you have a source for this percentage?
> Who do you think fixes spy satalites?
I don't think they get fixed, I think they get replaced. It's cheaper and anyway, satellites aren't built to be repaired in-orbit, let alone by an engineer in a spacesuit!
> Compared to whom? Where are the moon landings accomplished by private enterprise?
They're present in the tax money taken from each and every one of us and given to State run enterprises to inefficiently and bureaucratically spend.
If you have a massive State run organisation dedicated to space travel, funded by the taxpayer, are YOU going to invest your companies money in space travel? or would you let the taxpayer pay the bill till nice cheap technology is *finally* invented and *then* get involved?
> Name one private enterprise with the assets to attempt a moon landing that isn't run by committee.
These companies don't exist in the first place *BECAUSE* NASA exists. It's like the National Health Service in the UK; the existance of State organisations in a field is like penicillin in a petri dish.
I wrote: > Skylab for a bit, then that came down and after thirty years, we > FINALLY have the ISS...and it's in low Earth orbit. What's the point, > exactly? it's a frickin' expensive way to get into space.
What do we get for having the ISS?
How does it help us establish an off-planet colony or resource exploitation?
Of course, it may help a little bit - general experience gained, etc - but that's like saying having a French newspaper delivered each day helps with learning French. Well, it does, a BIT, but if you want to learn French you spend money on French classes. If you want to found an off-planet colony you go and DO IT, you don't build a bloody low-orbit space station!
The argument given was Tim and the net, which was incorrect, so the statement currently stands unsupported.
Here's another good question; for the same money given to Darpa, would we have got much less/less/same/more/much more innovation from that money if it had been used by non-State entities? e.g. if we had not been taxed to fund Darpa and that money had therefore been available for people to use directly.
I'm not seriously looking for an answer for that question of course, it's impossible to easily answer, but it's important to realise that question *exists*.
You have *not* actually discussed the matter in hand, expressed anything which explains your point of view or thoughts, or provided *any* information for the basis upon which you (presumably?) disagree with my post.
In a word, you are insulting that which you disagree with.
I may be wrong, but I think people who behave in this way are doing so because they're insecure.
When someone doesn't know they're okay, that they're alright, there is a *need* for them to cling, limpet-like, to the conviction that they are RIGHT, that what they believe is THE correct belief, because it gives them some way of saying to themselves that they must be okay because they're right.
And when the person with this need is inconsiderate, then it's all too natural for any debate to immediately descend into insults, because it's not really about where the truth is, but about people trying to "prove" to others (and so to themselves) that actually, they're not the wothtless, pathethic thing they feel they are, deep down inside.
Science, or entertaining the public to keep the space budget healthy?
What happens when the public start to wonder why exactly we're sending men to the Moon and Mars and asteriods, just to have them come back again? what exactly did we get for it, except the bill? saying "it's for science" or "it's advancing towards men in space" is getting *old*. We don't have an off-planet base, we're not getting one in the next ten or twenty years.
When you consider that reality, statements like "for science" and "men in space" are ring hollow and people basically go "well, I can't see why we're doing this" and then your public support goes away.
And no bad thing if it did. NASA has been an unmitigated disaster for space travel and exploration. It's almost entirely prevented enterprise and investment into the field and substitued expensive, slow, bureaucratic, political-football State-run snails-pace development.
What have we got to show for the last thirty, fourty years of NASA?
We got men on the moon and then...
What?
One exploration satellite every year or two? Skylab for a bit, then that came down and after thirty years, we FINALLY have the ISS...and it's in low Earth orbit. What's the point, exactly? it's a frickin' expensive way to get into space.
Where's the innovation?
State run companies *DO NOT INNOVATE*.
And by God, if there's a field which needs innovation to get off the ground, it's space travel.
We need solutions to fundamental problems. You don't get that from a committee.
Percentages mean absolutely nothing if you don't know the sample upon which the percentage is based.
"30% of the Internet is porn".
Was the entire Internet checked? of course not. So what sample was taken? was it a list of random domains, or a list of random pages - which will produce quite different results. If it was random domains, which list was the sample taken from? was it from all sites, or just.com sites? how was the random number generated? presumably sites beginning with "s" (e.g. sex) will tend to be porn sites - was the generator biased in any way? if *pages* were chosen (unlikely, I guess, since it means indexing entire sites, and some porn sites will be pay access, so their pages will be hidden), was it a sample of pages from a sample of sites, or a full set of pages from a sample of sites?
Also, pointedly, what exactly *is* a site with porn? do we mean hardcore porn (peneratration) or do we include softcore porn (glamour)? shouldn't we differentiate between the two, and have two percentages?
So propositions like "the xxx is nn% yyy" are so trite that they are meaningless.
> So when I looked at some of the screenshots of EVE Online, I was blown away. > Are these in-game shots? If so, wow wow wow.
I played the EVE beta, and then the game proper, from day one, for about a year.
Made a couple of thousand dollars selling ISK on ebay, as well as enjoying the game immensely.
However, in the end I quit, because the game was progressively buggered up. The in-game economy, combat *and* travel were utterly borked by the decisions that had been taken. I was so disappointed, not only by what had been done but by the *blatant* stupidity of it, that playing was no longer any fun.
"All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men."
Slashdot Mirror
> Prices may go up somewhat (or rather, stay up, since VISA's are the status quo), but not enough to totally negate
> the pay benefits from preventing your field from being overun by inexpensive foreign workers. That's because the
> programming costs of products are only a small component of the full costs of any product one buys, so the price
> hikes would be negligible compared to the effect on individual programmer's salary.
What about the increases in the price of services and goods caused by the increases in wages of the people buying the products which are now more expensive because software is more expensive?
To step through it; programmer wages go up. Software becomes more expensive. Everything which uses software is more expensive. Everyone who *buys* products which use software has a wage increase to pay for the higher prices; everything THOSE people make becomes more expensive to pay for the higher prices.
So it's starting to get back to the programmers now - for the cars they buy, the coffee, the medical services; they'll all more expensive.
> Programmers have had their incomes plummet in recent years due to H-1b/L-1 expansion.
Is that true? I thought wages were generally rising due to shortage of staff?
> I have less objection to income that comes from immigration protection because it is broadly distributed.
No income "comes" from immigration protection. The wage increases caused by it are directly and exactly paid for in higher product prices. There is only a redistribution of wealth. (Well, where supply of labour is reducted, products and services cost more to make, so there is a reduction in real wealth, by the elevation in prices).
Best post I've seen in a month :-)
> If you're arguing that an increase in wages cancels itself
> out due to increased prices, you're not living in reality.
A bold statement, sir...let us hope I don't prove you wrong, because the stronger the words, the harder they are to swallow!
So, let me consider this with an example.
Say we have a food product, Wurbles. They currently sell for 10 dollars a piece.
There's a 10% wage increase for all the people making Wurbles. There are 1000 people involved in making Wurbles. To pay for this, Wurbles now have to cost 11 dollars a piece.
The 1000 people making Wurbles are now 10% better off. Huzzah, they shout!
Everyone else, however, now pays more for Wurbles - and the amount they pay more exactly matches the total wage increases for the 1000 people making Wurbles.
Except...
All those people who buy Wurbles now pay more for food than they used to. As a result, they will need to be paid more to keep their living standards stable - they're not just going to accept that some of their pay has now in effect been taken by the Wurble producers. Why should they? Consequently, *THEIR* employers, who now have to increases wages, have to increase *THEIR* prices. These increases fall upon all sorts of people, all over the economy, since people who buy Wurbles have all sorts of jobs - programmers, bell-hops, cab-drivers, doctors, etc.
These price increases in their turn drive up wages - and this time, as you can imagine, by now it's affecting everyone.
In fact, what happens in an ideal economy, is that the cascade of price and wage increases exactly balances out so that *the Wurble producers are now paying 10% more for the things they buy*.
Of course, no economy is so ideal and in this micro-micro case, things wouldn't be so smoothly evened out.
But in reality, even with our real, non-ideal economy, this basic principle holds true, when you take into the account the whole of the economy, over a reasonable period of time.
So I therefore argue that an increase in wages cancels itself out in increased prices.
> Obviously, there's a lot of people who earn income from sources other than wages.
Well, income comes from wages, rent or profit. I don't know the proportions of these three as they exist in the economy for individual sources of income.
> Increasing wages just redistributes money from those folks to wage earners.
If your income is in the form of rent, and your Wurbles cost more, you'll charge more rent.
If your income is in the form of profit, and your Wurbles cost more, you'll increase what you charge, to make more profit.
I think that it is extremely difficult, even impossible, to predict what would happen if the labour market was fully competitive.
Considering your arguments, I could for example counter-argue along the lines of second and third world programmers, although cheaper, are considerably less skilled and, vitally, *culturally unsuited* to producing software. (A common theme I've come across with outsourcing software to India is that the Indian centers have a complete inability to *design* code. Giving them a job which involves design, rather than coding to an existing design, is usually a disaster).
However, I could almost say that anything you, I or anyone else might predict *will* be wrong; it's simply so complicated that only the lowest level of the underlying economic mechanics can be understood, which is to say, full competition would lead to the generation of the maximum possible amount of wealth for *all* of the people involved - which is to say, the 3 billion people on this planet who live on less than two dollars per day would do very well out of it indeed.
And, for those not moved by this, the fact that there would then be an additional three billion people with a growing and ultimately decent income would provide PLENTY of work for everyone. Everyone now is all excited about China - biggest market in the world, 300 million urban Chinese.
Well, there are also 1 billion rural Chinese, about another 700 million rural Indians and about another billion in Africa.
Imagine how the world economy would take off if those people had a half decent income and so started buying stuff.
The choice is far more stark.
The annual growth in GDP reflects the overall increase or decrease in wealth for the entire population.
If the growth rate is negative, the economy is contracting, and this means we are *ALL* growing poorer, year on year. Of course, the loss of wealth is unevenly distributed - but no matter how you look at it, it's bad news.
It's vital for our economic well-being that the economic growth rate remains positive (or at worst, neutral).
Keeping the growth rate positive *requires* the cheap production of services and goods; if the cost of doing business increases (which is to say, goods and services are becoming more and more expensive, because people are being paid more and more, because they are using the State to reduce competition for their jobs) there is a most significant contractory pressure exerted upon the economic growth rate.
However, getting back to something you said originally; good jobs or cheap trinkets.
What's a good job? one that pays well, or one that you enjoy doing, or both?
If it's being paid well: when goods and services are cheap, it doesn't matter you're being paid say 20,000 USD/year - because everything you buy is wonderfully cheap. You actual wealth is high.
If it's work you enjoy: why would the nature of jobs change, if competition is permitted? I don't see why it would.
So, I think the choice you present does not actually exist. There is no choice to be made. The nature of work won't change, but if competition is refused, people are poorer. The choice is actually; do we want to be poorer or richer? which isn't really a choice at all - except most people are unaware of the fact they're choosing to be poorer, by being in favour of immigration controls.
> How deceptively oversimplified of an argument.
You say this, but you've not said *why*, for the point you make next I totally agree with - I think it valid. If you increase the supply of a given skill set, the average salary for that skill will decline (or rise less slowly, if the increase in supply means the total supply is still less than the demand).
So I don't see how you think this argument wrong.
> How about we let shareholders hire people from abroad for
> management positions -- all the way to the top -- since
> I'm sure they'll be able to find competent people that
> would do the job for far less than a 7-figure salary.
Well, no comment on exactly what salary they would command, but *certainly*, increasing the competition for those positions would act to lower the average salary.
> Yep, I think we are restricting the supply of managers,
> and CEOs, and that's why some are compensated with
> millions of dollars. At the end, you and I pay for it.
Indeed we do. If CEOs were free, the running costs of a corporation would be significantly less and so their products would, overall and over the whole of the economy, cost less.
As it is, where immigration is restricted, pay packets right *now* are unnaturally elevated. Programmers and plenty of other occupations have become accustomed to being paid more for their skills than their skills properly command. All people object when their pay goes down, but it's difficult when their pay *should* in fact be lower than it is; people generally don't understand the effects of supply and demand, or do understand but act selfishly, happy for other people to subsidize their enlarged pay packets.
The problems of course is that although by this method people have more money in their pockets (higher nominal wealth) the costs of the goods and services they buy rises (lower actual wealth). E.g. earning 100,000 dollars a month isn't wealth if a loaf of bread costs 1,000 dollars.
If more and more classes of skill behave in their short term selfish interest, nominal wealth rises ever higher, but actual wealth falls ever lower; it rapidly becomes counterproductive and people end up poorer than they would have been had they embraced competition.
The key to real wealth is making the production of goods and services as low as possible (and also low taxation - it's so easy for the State to suck wealth out of the economy, undoing all the hard work people do to create wealth).
VISAs are essentially an import tariff on employees.
Remember the steel import tariff Bush imposed a year or two back? the steel manufacturers were overjoyed - and rightly so; since imported steel now cost 45% more, they could raise their prices to match, and they made plenty of money out of it.
Who suffered? well, *EVERYONE ELSE*. All the companies who use steel had to pay 45% more. All their products (cars, construction materials for houses, etc) went up in price to compensate for their costs. You and I subsidized the steel industry, by Bush's decree.
Back to VISAs.
If you have demand for a skill-set and a shortfall in supply, wages go up.
Just like steel prices going up, when wages go up, final product prices go up.
So if you restrict the supply of programmers, software prices go up to compensate.
Who benefits? American programmers. They have fatter pay packets (which they notice), but most things they buy will be more expensive (which they won't notice). (Things are more expensive since the part of their cost which covers the price of the software used to make them has gone up).
So who pays? you and I, by Bush's decree.
After ten years of the Net, do they really not yet know that you don't center large amounts of text people are trying to read?
I totally agree.
Unfortunately, the State is not independent of these corporations - their lobbies are effective and well funded. In other words, the mechanism which we, as individuals, have collectively agreeded to bring into existance (the State) is not functioning; it has been compromised by the entities it was created to constrain.
Well, I think it's clear from the repeated stories of millions of confidential files being lost that enough large organisations simply don't understand security enough to get it right.
However, we all carry on using their services because we're stuffed if we don't - if your university loses your details, what are you going to do? quit? if your morgage is with your bank and they lose your account information, are you going to change bank?
Because there is basically, when all is said and done, no *real* pain for organisations, for loosing information, there is no *real* need for them to understand security enough for these data losses to stop.
So suck it up!
Personally, I'm trying to get out from under. I gave up my mobile phone last week - I do not accept having my mobile phone calls logged for a year. I'm moving over to Tor, because I do not accept having my browsing logged for four days (current UK retention). I'm thinking about getting rid of the phone, too, and moving over purely to encrypted email which will be sent/receieved from my own home-run POP/SMTP server.
> I guess you're probably just a little ticked off that Milton "Free Market" Friedman died, so I'll cut you some
> slack and not poke gaping holes through all the rest of your arguements.
You should be ashamed, to use the death of a man - and he died *today* - as a way of being rude to me - and, worse, doing that *because you disagree with my views*.
Disgusting.
> You missing one very, very important point. There has been exactly NOTHING preventing any private company from
> developing a space vehicle outside of the government funding system.
Say you're a small company entering the field of space travel. You want to hire staff...and you find NASA is competing with you. NASA - huge budget, presigious institutions, existing programs.
Say you're a small company and you want to buy some hardware - small numbers of various bits of kit. The manufacturers won't even TALK to you unless you're spending $1m/USD a shot, because they're all geared up to supply NASA with its big orders.
Say you're a small company and you might just be able to put together a service to get something into space. Who do you find competing with you...well that would be NASA, funded by the taxpayer.
> I can see myself donating to NASA, but unless I was given a form with a list of everything, I doubt I would
;-) are so much more vital that they spend their money correctly and appropriately for themselves.
> remember to do the same for the NOAA. One problem with the definition "what people truly want" is people
> don't know what that is or what it takes to get there.
I don't see donation as a decent funding source, too few people would do it. So, considering your point here, I'd actually answer it in terms of private industry, and I would say companies spend the funding they have on what they know they need to do, to get whatever it is they want done.
> You don't make product flying a plane into a hurricane, but it still needs to be done.
But why *does* it need to be done?
As I understand it, planes fly into hurricanes so that the course of the hurricane can be more accurately plotted and also to help long term research into hurricane behaviour to improve course prediction.
This certainly is a useful thing to have done.
Question is, given that resources are finite, it is actually useful *enough* to spend money on? might there not be other things even more useful which we'd rather spend the money on?
Remember what I said in the previous post about donating money? well, consider - imagine not taxing the people who pay for this research and letting them do what they want with the money.
Some of those people may well have a lot of financial demands upon them (family, education, health care, food, heating, etc) and not much money. Are they going to want to spend 50 dollars a year on hurricane research? no. They wouldn't ever donate that money to NOAA, even though some of them will in fact be living on the Florida coastline and will be affected by those hurricanes. It's simply that the benefit they get from improved hurricane path prediction is so small, and their needs for health and food and warmth (well, air-con in Florida I guess
Now, getting back to your original comment.
"...which needs to be done".
Well, for those people who don't donate, it really *doesn't* need to be done. It would benefit them, but much less than other things which matter more.
Now at this point, I suspect many will still feel an instinctive "it needs to be done" response - and perhaps even think about all those people who aren't so badly off.
But the issue remains fundamentally the same. *We* feel it needs to be done, but we are imposing our choice on other people by using taxation to fund the flights. Maybe it isn't right for them - who are we to make that decision for them?
And if we are all left to make our own decisions, then everything that does exist will do so because people *genuinely, of their own free will, wish it to be so*, rather than having the choice imposed upon them through taxation.
> The problem with private industry is they end up needing results and showing profit. Thus long, difficult
> projects
> that don't show a good return will be scrapped. The government doesn't need to show results on a profit level,
> which is why they fund things like this: to promote the wellbeing and advancement of the state in ways the
> private sector would not.
However, the converse holds true, and I think is far, far more common, which is to say;
The problem with the State is that since it is taxplayer funded, it will continue to run bloated, pointless, pork-barrel projects indefinetely, unlike private industry, which, since the capital belongs to actual people, will bail out of an unprofitable project to find a better use for the money.
So a State run project might, for example, continue to blast money away on a technology or approach which just won't work, while a private project would back off and try to find a better, cheaper way to do the same job.
> Personally, I like my tax dollars going to NASA as opposed to the multitude of social programs run by the state.
Well, if you feel that your money should be spent on NASA, wouldn't it be better for you *not* to be taxed for that money, but for you to voluntarily contribute that money to NASA? especially since this would permit you to fund other organisations if they turned out to be better.
The fact is, if we were not taxed, we would NOT voluntarily contibute money to such projects. We'd keep the cash.
Such projects actually then happen because they can be profitable - which is to say, they produce something people actually WANT enough to spend their money on it. Profitability actually means making something *people truly want*, rather than what people SAY they want.
> The funny thing is, we learned a lot more from the little missions.
Like what? and what didn't we learn from the first half-dozen little missions which required the next twenty years worth of little missions to keep being done? when do we get to the point where we've learned enough from little missions and don't need them any more?
> Also, if you haven't noticed we basically stopped funding NASA to actually do
> anything related to space, we fund them as an education center instead.
That seems plainly untrue, since NASA has a bunch of satellites up and runs the ISS.
It does make me think of a question though; why isn't NASA doing the things which actually MATTER in space? and when it comes down to it, that means an off-world colony and also ecomonic exploitation.
> None the less someone figured it out, and they solved the problem on the fly, after the thing was up there.
Anecdotal stories about NASA pulling its chestnuts out of a fire do not form a meaningful basis for any decisions or opinions. Such events are not representative and shed no light upon the larger economic situation and position of the agency with the economy. Moreover, I could equally well point out similar anecdotal stories where NASA's incompetence has killed people - the first Shuttle accident was largely contributed to by systematic mismanagement (RF's report) and the second might have been avoided if NASA managers had no refused to have the shuttle photoed for damage while in orbit.
> Seriously... I'd like to see you debug a hanging VxWorks system on another planet over a serial console with 45
> minute latency. That's AFTER they downloaded a program to another satalite to flash the system image in the 1 or
> 2 minute window before the machine crashed again. This shit is HARD man. Hell, I bet you don't even know how to
> build electronics that can take that kind of radiation, or that can overvolt a capacitor on the fly while a
> satalite is outside our solarsystem hurtling towards the plasma barrier.
A couple of privately funded companies have in a few years learned enough to start getting sub-orbital. Why couldn't they continue learning and get orbital/planetry?
> NASA could probably do better than they do, they have much to much administration and governmental shit, but all
> told they do a pretty damned good job.
I think they do a terrible, terrible job. They're terrible inefficient at converting money into space exploration.
> On one more final note, you are also neglecting something like 2/3 of space shuttle launches which all have
> "secret" payloads.
Interesting! I had no idea it was such a high proportion. Do you have a source for this percentage?
> Who do you think fixes spy satalites?
I don't think they get fixed, I think they get replaced. It's cheaper and anyway, satellites aren't built to be repaired in-orbit, let alone by an engineer in a spacesuit!
> Compared to whom? Where are the moon landings accomplished by private enterprise?
They're present in the tax money taken from each and every one of us and given to State run enterprises to inefficiently and bureaucratically spend.
If you have a massive State run organisation dedicated to space travel, funded by the taxpayer, are YOU going to invest your companies money in space travel? or would you let the taxpayer pay the bill till nice cheap technology is *finally* invented and *then* get involved?
> Name one private enterprise with the assets to attempt a moon landing that isn't run by committee.
These companies don't exist in the first place *BECAUSE* NASA exists. It's like the National Health Service in the UK; the existance of State organisations in a field is like penicillin in a petri dish.
I wrote:
> Skylab for a bit, then that came down and after thirty years, we
> FINALLY have the ISS...and it's in low Earth orbit. What's the point,
> exactly? it's a frickin' expensive way to get into space.
What do we get for having the ISS?
How does it help us establish an off-planet colony or resource exploitation?
Of course, it may help a little bit - general experience gained, etc - but that's like saying having a French newspaper delivered each day helps with learning French. Well, it does, a BIT, but if you want to learn French you spend money on French classes. If you want to found an off-planet colony you go and DO IT, you don't build a bloody low-orbit space station!
In what way is Darpa innovative?
The argument given was Tim and the net, which was incorrect, so the statement currently stands unsupported.
Here's another good question; for the same money given to Darpa, would we have got much less/less/same/more/much more innovation from that money if it had been used by non-State entities? e.g. if we had not been taxed to fund Darpa and that money had therefore been available for people to use directly.
I'm not seriously looking for an answer for that question of course, it's impossible to easily answer, but it's important to realise that question *exists*.
You have insulted me personally.
You have *not* actually discussed the matter in hand, expressed anything which explains your point of view or thoughts, or provided *any* information for the basis upon which you (presumably?) disagree with my post.
In a word, you are insulting that which you disagree with.
I may be wrong, but I think people who behave in this way are doing so because they're insecure.
When someone doesn't know they're okay, that they're alright, there is a *need* for them to cling, limpet-like, to the conviction that they are RIGHT, that what they believe is THE correct belief, because it gives them some way of saying to themselves that they must be okay because they're right.
And when the person with this need is inconsiderate, then it's all too natural for any debate to immediately descend into insults, because it's not really about where the truth is, but about people trying to "prove" to others (and so to themselves) that actually, they're not the wothtless, pathethic thing they feel they are, deep down inside.
Tim invented the Net in his spare time; not as part of his work for CERN.
What's the basis for NASA's planning, here?
Science, or entertaining the public to keep the space budget healthy?
What happens when the public start to wonder why exactly we're sending men to the Moon and Mars and asteriods, just to have them come back again? what exactly did we get for it, except the bill? saying "it's for science" or "it's advancing towards men in space" is getting *old*. We don't have an off-planet base, we're not getting one in the next ten or twenty years.
When you consider that reality, statements like "for science" and "men in space" are ring hollow and people basically go "well, I can't see why we're doing this" and then your public support goes away.
And no bad thing if it did. NASA has been an unmitigated disaster for space travel and exploration. It's almost entirely prevented enterprise and investment into the field and substitued expensive, slow, bureaucratic, political-football State-run snails-pace development.
What have we got to show for the last thirty, fourty years of NASA?
We got men on the moon and then...
What?
One exploration satellite every year or two? Skylab for a bit, then that came down and after thirty years, we FINALLY have the ISS...and it's in low Earth orbit. What's the point, exactly? it's a frickin' expensive way to get into space.
Where's the innovation?
State run companies *DO NOT INNOVATE*.
And by God, if there's a field which needs innovation to get off the ground, it's space travel.
We need solutions to fundamental problems. You don't get that from a committee.
Percentages mean absolutely nothing if you don't know the sample upon which the percentage is based.
.com sites? how was the random number generated? presumably sites beginning with "s" (e.g. sex) will tend to be porn sites - was the generator biased in any way? if *pages* were chosen (unlikely, I guess, since it means indexing entire sites, and some porn sites will be pay access, so their pages will be hidden), was it a sample of pages from a sample of sites, or a full set of pages from a sample of sites?
"30% of the Internet is porn".
Was the entire Internet checked? of course not. So what sample was taken? was it a list of random domains, or a list of random pages - which will produce quite different results. If it was random domains, which list was the sample taken from? was it from all sites, or just
Also, pointedly, what exactly *is* a site with porn? do we mean hardcore porn (peneratration) or do we include softcore porn (glamour)? shouldn't we differentiate between the two, and have two percentages?
So propositions like "the xxx is nn% yyy" are so trite that they are meaningless.
> So when I looked at some of the screenshots of EVE Online, I was blown away.
> Are these in-game shots? If so, wow wow wow.
I played the EVE beta, and then the game proper, from day one, for about a year.
Made a couple of thousand dollars selling ISK on ebay, as well as enjoying the game immensely.
However, in the end I quit, because the game was progressively buggered up. The in-game economy, combat *and* travel were utterly borked by the decisions that had been taken. I was so disappointed, not only by what had been done but by the *blatant* stupidity of it, that playing was no longer any fun.
Sold my character for 500 USD and that was that.
"All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency. Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men."
Thoreau, Civil Disobedience.