You know, I agree with pretty much all of the things you say. Except that it doesn't contradict what I said: for the poorest sector of Venezuelan society, which is the majority of the country, Chavez was able to win their support by building public works (housing projects, neighborhood clinics) which improved the quality of life for them. Land reform is a reality: it also is a short-term fix that often makes things worse, as the beneficiaries of the land have little idea how to make it productive. It's also true that this is unsustainable, that the economy is collapsing, that ultimately he relies of demogoguery to maintain his political power. And that the ranks of the poor are growing.
As far as corruption goes, though, that's absolutely nothing new to that, and the justice system in Venezuela used to be worse. Chavez bought off some generals because he knows they could unseat him, too.
Obviously, that's the first temptation: to take that oil money and move it around to something productive. But the oil industry in Venezuela is already state-owned. While it is owned by the Venezuela state, it is managed more or less by the oil services industry, largely foreign, and the collusion of their interests with those of the managers of the state oil company have created much of the situation there. Leading to exactly what you would expect: a bureaucracy whose interests become parasitically attached to those of the oil economies, and a huge cash cow for corrupt leaders to skim off of. What Chavez is doing is little better: he's had a pretty effective anti-corruption campaign, but he's just taking the treasury and wasting it on often ineffective and unsustainable programs which do marginally improve the standards of living of the bulk in poverty, but don't create jobs or build the economy in any way (more or less hand-outs, but in a public works sense.)
What might have worked best? Perhaps breaking apart the oil industry and selling oil rights only to businesses run by Venezuelan nationals; perhaps a program of microloans to seed small and medium-sized business development. It's obvious that there's no easy and straightforward answer.
I don't think Hugo Chavez is a great leader. I don't think he has an effective economic policy, I think he's exploiting a bad situation in a way that will make it worse in the long run.
I do think that the situation was the making of the oil interests that's been running the country for much of the past 81 years that concentrated the wealth so deeply in the hands of a few, I think that Chavez's demagoguery is the results of decades of indifference to their well-being, I know that Chavez has managed to maintain support by making improvements in the society that benefit that base of support after years of neglect by previous administrations (in, unfortunately, an unsustainable way.) And even the wealthy, whose interests Chavez is really attacking
As far as the ad hominem you're citing, I just don't see it. The parent poster was citing his own family's situation in reference to the observations I was making. Since those observations were relevant to different strata of society, I was observing that he may not have been in the strata I was talking about. The poverty situation in Venezuela is such that, in 2001, 67% were what has been described as "extreme poverty" (according to the data of the Economic Research Department of the Bank of Venezuela) - without adequate income to pay for basic food needs. 85% of the population is beneath the general poverty line, with the difference between those two accounting for those who have only enough income to pay for food. It doesn't take a lot for them to feel that they've been recieving more services than before.
The middle class, which is neither in that 80+% nor necessarily the "rich" don't deserve what's going on, either: obviously, it's going to be that class that would stabilize and expand any growth. And at this point, even the middle class is going to feel pretty poor in comparison to how things were before. The original poster probably accurately describes himself as lower middle class in origins, which would put him a skosh above the poverty line - which puts him above 80% of the population. Nothing ad-hominem about it.
As you know, Venezuela's overall standard of living has been on steady decline since the mid-80's. That decline has continued under Chavez in toto, but he has spread the consequences of that decline upstream. If your family got hit that bad, though, then it may be because it's higher up the slope than you thought it was (did you go to college? Then you aren't in that 80% which was under the poverty line.) I wouldn't say that Venezuela is in better shape overall than it used to be, just that the misery is being spread around a bit. What is needed is an end to "curse of oil," with the effects that it has on currency in international markets, how it discourages other industries from developing, and is too easy to simply be taken out of country without leaving much behind.
My family is Peruvian, so I know plenty about hyperinflation and unemployment and what it's like: and how it hits the middle class. Peru has the same problem: a history of reliance on the export of raw materials for its economic backbone, and the consequent failure to create a strong, broad economic foundation in other sectors.
Before oil was discovered, Venezuela had a thriving middle class, the second highest standard of living in South America, and a fairly even distribution of wealth. After oil was discovered, and the economy taken over by foreign oil interests, 80 percent of its population fell into poverty, which is why Chavez keeps getting elected: he is the first leader since the oil boom who has improved the standard of living for the majority of people living there, expanding the public health infrastructure, starting housing projects, and engaging in land reform. He's been "undemocratic" as far as the sector of the population that has been benefitting from the oil boom is concerned, but even many of them realize that they are reaping what they have sown.
Consider an economic model of massively concentrated wealth based on control of a single natural resource, and the distorting effects on markets of land, labor, and goods created by a small cash-rich sector, and you'll understand what happened. More or less a classic race-to-the-bottom scenario.
Maybe. In some cases, they may well have been the "first one's there." I don't know who would have preceded the Basques, Celts, or Gauls in Western and Central Europe, or the original Andean people in South America (where they were performing mummification before the Egyptians were).
What is true of European colonialism in the 16th through 20th centuries, however, is the sheer extensiveness and ubiquity of the effects. No country really escaped it: the closest to avoiding it was Japan under the Tokugawa shogunate.
The same is true, of course, of England, and Spain, and Germany, and America (North and South). The Christian faith and the migrations of Roman, Germanic, and British people erased the cultural legacies of the peoples there.
Dictionaries are in the business of reportage. People are using the word "google" as a verb, and that's a fact. The dictionary is reporting this fact. Any objection to their reportage is a straightforward suppression of free speech.
Oakland, Berkeley, or Emeryville would have been perfect for Salon. And they'd probably admit as much now: hindsight is 20/20, of course. They *do* have to be in the Bay Area, but not in San Francisco - likewise, if they were in New York, they could thrive in Brooklyn - it's about right for the kind of business they were striving to collect.
You have to understand the logic behind the times - if they didn't get the downtown digs, they wouldn't have been considered an attractive possibility by investors or even possible purchasers; there was a natural competitive/inflationary pressure to go the SOMA/Downtown route. It was the wrong choice, as it turns out, but not a completely illogical one.
It's true: the single big Salon-killer is the rent. It's a single, tragic flaw that may bring it down, despite everything: for the amount they are paying in rent per year, they could have easily purchased a decent-sized building in the East Bay (which would have fit in with their corporate culture). It's a tragic flaw, because it's an artifact of its history: it signed that lease during the boom, and now is saddled with it like an albatross.
I'm not a libertarian, at least not when it comes to economics: I'm a mixed-economy neo-Keynesian pragmatist who favors a progressive tax structure and extensive public investment in infrastructure and education. I'm a civil libertarian, yes, but my general political-economics put me outside the libertarian camp.
But Reason is a good magazine, and its online version is even better. I find them to be more intellectually honest - by far - than the Cato Institute, they have a good sense of humor, excellent writers, and are generally fair-minded. And I'm not the only person who thinks so; a lot of people who don't subscribe to all of Reason's views still give it props as a source of writing, especially in the last year or so.
I know that it's a very difficult thing for the geek-horde to grasp, but there's a difference between the company and the platform. Apple can remain profitable, and in theory even abandon the Apple platform. It can become a profitable manufacturer of t-shirts and orange juice if it restructures its company enough - from the perspective of executive staff, a corporation is simply a financial instrument, and its products are just a means to an end.
For anyone who doesn't hold stock in Apple or get Apple paychecks, however, the more meaningful measure of success or failure is the success of the Apple platform: the number of developers writing software for it, the number of jobs which you mad-Mac-skills can get you, the number of applications and, yes, games which are Mac-compatible, the number of web-sites and video-clips and what not that you can view on your Mac. (In most of these cases, I would rate Apple's "success" as higher than that of Linux, incidentally.) And market share is far more important a component of *this* measure of success.
50 years of China's history is nothing, and the structure of Chinese politics and economics had stronger roots in the feudal tradition than in any kind of socialism that had been practiced to date. While the US government was strongly anti-communist, the tax rate of the wealthiest Americans was around 90 percent (lowered only by Kennedy), virtually everyone was the beneficiary of a number of programs meant to help the middle class (FMA, the GI bill), the greatest ongoing invocation of the doctrine of eminent domain was occuring under the rubric of the construction of the US highways, the difference in incomes between the richest and poorest was, generally, the smallest it had been for a while and would be for a while, and Eisenhower made his famous warning about the impending military-industrial complex.
That seeming would be wrong. The US was more "socialistic" during the 50's and 60's, and only a tiny drop of China's history could be called "traditionally" communist. China is China more because it's China than because it's Communist.
Business-sense is too complex, contextual, and culturally specific to link to genetics. There are certain types of cognitive fluency that you *can* link to genetics: resistence to distraction, low levels of social anxiety and fear of rejection, general energy and stamina, ability to maintain sophisticated mental models. But at the level of "analysis" we are talking about, looking for genetics is like trying to do literary criticism by discussing bookbinding techniques - it's just not a promising line of inquiry.
Hard work is an important element, and you can't just discount it out of hand.
Hard work can make a difference between levels of success. However, someone with knowledge and connections can put forth a mediocre effort (albeit backed by a good plan) and outperform someone who works much, much harder.
What is a choice, then? I know smart people who are "addicted" to EverQuest to the point that their work quality seriously suffers. Are they making a choice? If I go home early to watch TV or read a book, am I making a choice or just a slave to some electrochemical impulse in my brain?
A good working definition of addiction is in the displacement of normal-typical developmental goals. If taking a drug / gambling/drinking / playing a game displaces goals such as maintaining relationships / paying rent / caring for children / obtaining medical care, then there's a problem. I'm not going to profer a model for something that is still not understood, but I will suggest that different stimuli in different people can trigger such a displacement.
I think that there are models of choice that are compatible with determinist models of cognition (and I otherwise pass on any free will v. determinism argument - I'd rather discuss cognition and social behaviour than metaphysics), that given a fairly intact set of goal states, an agent is aware of any number of strategies for achieving them, and the process of determining one of them is not unduly constrained. Addiction distorts the goal-state values, and mentall illness in general constrains throughout the system.
That monopoly on wires is based on the fact of eminent domain, which allows utilities like the local bells to access public land to play every yard of cable up to your house.
When you are dealing with economies of infrastructre of this sort, where it is essentially impossible to create the economy without some kind of public power and regulation, the sort of easy Economy 101 Supply-and-Demand-for-Dummies classical economics that you're invoking are less than useless, they are misleading.
The thing is that "choices" is bandied about in this situation as a complete black-box, without asking how people make choices, how they percieve what those choices are, and when the understand what the consequences are. Largely, the "choice-making" facility that the poor and unfortunate are failing at are failures of education to begin with (both formal - understand just what is possible and what input creates what output - and informal - understanding social patterns and behaviour outside of one's own in-group).
It's why people from "better" backgrounds can recover from poverty quickly - why good business-people can create new businesses from catastrophes repeatedly - and why very hard working people who don't know how to work tactically can still die poor. Knowledge and social networks are what keeps one out of poverty, not hard work.
As an aside, drug addiction exists in that gray area between choice- and not-choice, since it can be thought of practically as a "disease of the choice-making mechanisms of the mind." When drug addiction is responsible for poverty, there's little chance of escaping the poverty without addressing the addiction; likewise for mental illness.
The 1st Amendment is pretty flimsy nowadays. The contexts under which speech can fail to be protected - from obscenity to trademark and copyright violations to "homeland security" - are multiplying, and there are far too many Americans who agree with the sentiment that perhaps there is too *much* freedom.
That may be so in the US, but in Japan the arcade market is still quite strong and profitable, and in much of the world "public" gaming is a bigger sector than stay-at-home gaming.
A lot of things are paid for with tax money, and then have added charges. State colleges, for example.
Even taxpayers who don't use freeways benefit from them, insofar as they make interstate transit and commerce much cheaper and faster than they would otherwise be. Tolls are frankly fairer than taxes, because they target just those people who are using an overburdened resource the most.
Interestingly enough, the US Interstate system was originally developed (by Eisenhower) in the interests of national defense, and building the interstate led to the greatest ongoing invocation of the federal right of eminent domain in the history of the US.
I started playing sports games recently (soccer and basketball) and found that it actually increased my appreciation for the subtleties of the games they simulated. I used to think basketball was just a game of sheer athleticism - that the fastest, tallest, and strongest would win, and that was that - but I began to appreciate how shot-opportunties were constructed by tactical play when I started playing NBA2K2 with a friend of mine, and how you consider the capacities of individual players as resources to optimize.
RTS is still my fave (and I think that the C&C franchise peaked at Red Alert 2 and jumped the shark with Renegade - I prefer the Total War series at this point), but as far as having a few friends over to gather around the Playstation, nothing beats FIFA Soccer 2003 (except maybe Konami's Winning Eleven!).
It was Tokyo. In the post-industrial future. I suspect that the sky would be a mixture of smog, "light pollution," and cloud cover.
Have you ever been to Tokyo? In 1984, when the book was written, it was immediately obvious that he was talking about an oppressive, unfocused grayness.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, my - the five-digit riff-raff crashed the party.
As far as corruption goes, though, that's absolutely nothing new to that, and the justice system in Venezuela used to be worse. Chavez bought off some generals because he knows they could unseat him, too.
What might have worked best? Perhaps breaking apart the oil industry and selling oil rights only to businesses run by Venezuelan nationals; perhaps a program of microloans to seed small and medium-sized business development. It's obvious that there's no easy and straightforward answer.
I do think that the situation was the making of the oil interests that's been running the country for much of the past 81 years that concentrated the wealth so deeply in the hands of a few, I think that Chavez's demagoguery is the results of decades of indifference to their well-being, I know that Chavez has managed to maintain support by making improvements in the society that benefit that base of support after years of neglect by previous administrations (in, unfortunately, an unsustainable way.) And even the wealthy, whose interests Chavez is really attacking
As far as the ad hominem you're citing, I just don't see it. The parent poster was citing his own family's situation in reference to the observations I was making. Since those observations were relevant to different strata of society, I was observing that he may not have been in the strata I was talking about. The poverty situation in Venezuela is such that, in 2001, 67% were what has been described as "extreme poverty" (according to the data of the Economic Research Department of the Bank of Venezuela) - without adequate income to pay for basic food needs. 85% of the population is beneath the general poverty line, with the difference between those two accounting for those who have only enough income to pay for food. It doesn't take a lot for them to feel that they've been recieving more services than before.
The middle class, which is neither in that 80+% nor necessarily the "rich" don't deserve what's going on, either: obviously, it's going to be that class that would stabilize and expand any growth. And at this point, even the middle class is going to feel pretty poor in comparison to how things were before. The original poster probably accurately describes himself as lower middle class in origins, which would put him a skosh above the poverty line - which puts him above 80% of the population. Nothing ad-hominem about it.
My family is Peruvian, so I know plenty about hyperinflation and unemployment and what it's like: and how it hits the middle class. Peru has the same problem: a history of reliance on the export of raw materials for its economic backbone, and the consequent failure to create a strong, broad economic foundation in other sectors.
Consider an economic model of massively concentrated wealth based on control of a single natural resource, and the distorting effects on markets of land, labor, and goods created by a small cash-rich sector, and you'll understand what happened. More or less a classic race-to-the-bottom scenario.
What is true of European colonialism in the 16th through 20th centuries, however, is the sheer extensiveness and ubiquity of the effects. No country really escaped it: the closest to avoiding it was Japan under the Tokugawa shogunate.
The same is true, of course, of England, and Spain, and Germany, and America (North and South). The Christian faith and the migrations of Roman, Germanic, and British people erased the cultural legacies of the peoples there.
Dictionaries are in the business of reportage. People are using the word "google" as a verb, and that's a fact. The dictionary is reporting this fact. Any objection to their reportage is a straightforward suppression of free speech.
You have to understand the logic behind the times - if they didn't get the downtown digs, they wouldn't have been considered an attractive possibility by investors or even possible purchasers; there was a natural competitive/inflationary pressure to go the SOMA/Downtown route. It was the wrong choice, as it turns out, but not a completely illogical one.
It's true: the single big Salon-killer is the rent. It's a single, tragic flaw that may bring it down, despite everything: for the amount they are paying in rent per year, they could have easily purchased a decent-sized building in the East Bay (which would have fit in with their corporate culture). It's a tragic flaw, because it's an artifact of its history: it signed that lease during the boom, and now is saddled with it like an albatross.
I've date women from Quebec, and I'm afraid I'm just going to have to disagree with you on that one.
But Reason is a good magazine, and its online version is even better. I find them to be more intellectually honest - by far - than the Cato Institute, they have a good sense of humor, excellent writers, and are generally fair-minded. And I'm not the only person who thinks so; a lot of people who don't subscribe to all of Reason's views still give it props as a source of writing, especially in the last year or so.
For anyone who doesn't hold stock in Apple or get Apple paychecks, however, the more meaningful measure of success or failure is the success of the Apple platform: the number of developers writing software for it, the number of jobs which you mad-Mac-skills can get you, the number of applications and, yes, games which are Mac-compatible, the number of web-sites and video-clips and what not that you can view on your Mac. (In most of these cases, I would rate Apple's "success" as higher than that of Linux, incidentally.) And market share is far more important a component of *this* measure of success.
50 years of China's history is nothing, and the structure of Chinese politics and economics had stronger roots in the feudal tradition than in any kind of socialism that had been practiced to date. While the US government was strongly anti-communist, the tax rate of the wealthiest Americans was around 90 percent (lowered only by Kennedy), virtually everyone was the beneficiary of a number of programs meant to help the middle class (FMA, the GI bill), the greatest ongoing invocation of the doctrine of eminent domain was occuring under the rubric of the construction of the US highways, the difference in incomes between the richest and poorest was, generally, the smallest it had been for a while and would be for a while, and Eisenhower made his famous warning about the impending military-industrial complex.
That seeming would be wrong. The US was more "socialistic" during the 50's and 60's, and only a tiny drop of China's history could be called "traditionally" communist. China is China more because it's China than because it's Communist.
Hard work is an important element, and you can't just discount it out of hand.
Hard work can make a difference between levels of success. However, someone with knowledge and connections can put forth a mediocre effort (albeit backed by a good plan) and outperform someone who works much, much harder.
What is a choice, then? I know smart people who are "addicted" to EverQuest to the point that their work quality seriously suffers. Are they making a choice? If I go home early to watch TV or read a book, am I making a choice or just a slave to some electrochemical impulse in my brain?
A good working definition of addiction is in the displacement of normal-typical developmental goals. If taking a drug / gambling /drinking / playing a game displaces goals such as maintaining relationships / paying rent / caring for children / obtaining medical care, then there's a problem. I'm not going to profer a model for something that is still not understood, but I will suggest that different stimuli in different people can trigger such a displacement.
I think that there are models of choice that are compatible with determinist models of cognition (and I otherwise pass on any free will v. determinism argument - I'd rather discuss cognition and social behaviour than metaphysics), that given a fairly intact set of goal states, an agent is aware of any number of strategies for achieving them, and the process of determining one of them is not unduly constrained. Addiction distorts the goal-state values, and mentall illness in general constrains throughout the system.
When you are dealing with economies of infrastructre of this sort, where it is essentially impossible to create the economy without some kind of public power and regulation, the sort of easy Economy 101 Supply-and-Demand-for-Dummies classical economics that you're invoking are less than useless, they are misleading.
It's why people from "better" backgrounds can recover from poverty quickly - why good business-people can create new businesses from catastrophes repeatedly - and why very hard working people who don't know how to work tactically can still die poor. Knowledge and social networks are what keeps one out of poverty, not hard work.
As an aside, drug addiction exists in that gray area between choice- and not-choice, since it can be thought of practically as a "disease of the choice-making mechanisms of the mind." When drug addiction is responsible for poverty, there's little chance of escaping the poverty without addressing the addiction; likewise for mental illness.
The 1st Amendment is pretty flimsy nowadays. The contexts under which speech can fail to be protected - from obscenity to trademark and copyright violations to "homeland security" - are multiplying, and there are far too many Americans who agree with the sentiment that perhaps there is too *much* freedom.
That may be so in the US, but in Japan the arcade market is still quite strong and profitable, and in much of the world "public" gaming is a bigger sector than stay-at-home gaming.
Even taxpayers who don't use freeways benefit from them, insofar as they make interstate transit and commerce much cheaper and faster than they would otherwise be. Tolls are frankly fairer than taxes, because they target just those people who are using an overburdened resource the most.
Interestingly enough, the US Interstate system was originally developed (by Eisenhower) in the interests of national defense, and building the interstate led to the greatest ongoing invocation of the federal right of eminent domain in the history of the US.
RTS is still my fave (and I think that the C&C franchise peaked at Red Alert 2 and jumped the shark with Renegade - I prefer the Total War series at this point), but as far as having a few friends over to gather around the Playstation, nothing beats FIFA Soccer 2003 (except maybe Konami's Winning Eleven!).
It was Tokyo. In the post-industrial future. I suspect that the sky would be a mixture of smog, "light pollution," and cloud cover.
Have you ever been to Tokyo? In 1984, when the book was written, it was immediately obvious that he was talking about an oppressive, unfocused grayness.
Um, how is what I said wrong? I said that the marginal savings on overhead are bigger than marginal savings on tax. That's true even within a state.