From another view, the neoliberals (in the economic sense) were right: globalization is actually increasing the wealth in the periphery somewhat, standards of living and work conditions and productivity are improving in Asia, and American workers are competing with them and their far lower cost of living. Ultimately, there are only so many hours in the day, and only so much 'productivity' to be squeezed out of the more-expensive American worker.
The long-term view would be to go into "maintenance mode" in the first world while increasing the costs of labor in the developing world (which also means increasing their value as markets - and increasing the resource strain on their environments). But that's not what happens - the US is still defined as "the market," capital goes where labor is cheapest, and instead of improving working conditions elsewhere, the strategy is to make them worse in the first world. Bad news all around.
The first regulations against child labor did not come to pass in 19th century England just because of pressure from below: it was a group of ethically-motivated factory owners themselves that ultimately pushed it through.
Why?
Because they wanted to end the practice themselves, but knew that they could not do so unilaterally and remain competitive. Unless the entire industry was required to abide by certain standards of behavior, those who did not would enjoy too great a competitive advantage - their costs would be lower, their goods would be cheaper to produce, their output greater, etc.
We see this in an industry where EA is acquiring most of its competitors - its unethical practices work, enabling it to keep costs low, forcing down the price for games of that level of complexity.
There have been too many holes cut in labor regulations in this industry, partially because of skillful scare-mongering by industry lobbyists and partially because of the passivity and timidity of the workers involved. Unionization may help, but I think that regulation is even more important: enforce existing labor laws without the loopholes, and a lot of these problems would go away.
Only a fraction of the people in game development are programmers. Many are artists, sound engineers, etc. who do work very much comparable to that done in the film industry. If all the artists unionized, and the programmers didn't, and we then saw artists enjoying a higher quality of life while programmers continued to labor in the salt mines - I bet we'd see programmer unions pretty quickly thereafter.
No, for having cash, which is abstract, rather than a skill, which only has a use value. Your labor is what it is - you can only barter it with people who need that labor. Money can be exchanged for goods and services universally. The differential in power is based on the difference between the flexibility of money and the reduced flexibility of labor and goods.
Exploitation is pretty much the story all around. You think the people who hire you, ultimately, have the same standard that you do? Where does their improved standard of living come from? You don't have to be a Marxist to get what "surplus value" means.
There are signs that 'staying home' may not be the economically 'safe' thing to do anymore. This has nothing to do with outsourcing or offshoring, and everything to do with the imminent collapse of the debt-bubble in the US.
The DOW, as of yesterday, is up one-half of one-percent from the beginning of the year. Investors are starting to look elsewhere. Meanwhile, some fairly respectable economists are starting to see only a 10% chance of avoiding a coming economic meltdown - I don't just mean the little recession we just had, I mean a serious change in the standard of living.
At the same time, if one brings up the misbehavior of the state of Israel as a way of minimizing the horror of the Holocaust ("Jews aren't nice people, either...") I think you could describe that as a pretty messed-up position to take.
The US historical record pre-WW2 includes the Indians Wars, the US Civil War, the (even at the time recognized as an expansionist ruse) Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War,the subsequent (and very bloody) campaigns in the Phillipines. It's not as if it had been 150 years of peace and prosperity before then. I suspect that the British toll is higher by far than the American, but in some sense that simply made the job of American domination that much easier: the heavy lifting had already been done.
American imperialism is not like European imperialism in a number of ways, but the term is still appropriate. The US has military bases all over the world. The US has a history of exceptionalism, most recently in its stance towards global warming and the humans rights courts. The vision of "bringing democracy" (and access to cheap labor and markets) is the updated version of the British "white man's burden."
And the nation-building efforts back by US military power bring to memory the epoch of the Raj.
I was trying to figure out how a superiour service-culture would tie into a Chinese dominance over the US and the rest of the world, and then I realized - they were getting hemmed in.
Let me add to the recommendation lists: Trigger Happy by Steven Poole and a new book, Power Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life by Chris Kohler. The first is a great casual philosophical reflection on games as cultural artifacts, the latter an interesting history of the way that Japanese videogame design developed the story-telling aspects of the game medium.
No, the stories aren't *that* good. The thing is that the FF games are *character* driven, and much of the richness of the games is created by side characters and NPCs, not just the main characters. FF7 works as much because of Barrett and Red 13 and Yuffie and Cid as it does because of Cloud, Aeris, Tifa and Sephiroth. And all those characters work well together because we spent hundreds of hours with them, building them up, nuancing their personalities with skills and materia and jobs and some choices (at one point, the exchange between Barrett and Cloud is based on who you form a party with.)
A film has 2 hours to do all that. It can't. Character, in film, is created more by appearence, gesture and style than by dialogue.
Most good films are not *that* character driven - the characters, when compelling, are more story-driven. Final Fantasy and other epic RPGs have more in common with literary epics than with cinematic ones, in terms of how we get pulled into caring about them.
I've repeated this enough that it's gotten tiresome, but I'll say it again: the best videogame that was ever made into a movie was never a videogame per se: it was Run Lola Run.
But the marginal cost of each added node is miniscule. The cost of setting up a city-wide LAN is far, far less than the cost of each of the 800,000 San Franciscans each getting wireless service. Or even, I daresay, less than the cost of 80,000 San Franciscans. That's the way infrastructure works. Do you want to have to pay, personally, for every square inch of road you drive over?
My productivity has doubled since I've begun using it, and my bibliographies are now the equivalent of "reuseable code." Note that I said "academic work;" I'm not talking about undergraduate papers here, I'm talking about conference papers and dissertation chapters.
If I can be twice as productive in a certain amount of time, it's not a matter of being "lazy."
It's not the "realness" of the person on the other side of the medium that I am challenging - it's the sufficiency of that sort of contact to fill the human need for others.
As for your claim that you can know someone better by letters, etc, I disagree: it's fair easier to decieve someone, intentionally or even unintentionally, about one's true nature, situation, and motives, when using media at a remove. In proximity to someone, the unintended cues they give off in speech will tell me things about their cultural and class background that they are probably unaware of themselves, not to mention the way that nervous habits and body language communicate needs and anxieties.
There's a difference between human contact and human communication. It's why we still miss people we're far from when we talk to them on the phone. When we miss someone who is far away, what we miss is their presence - the proximity of their bodies, the sense that bodies are in the same space.
With a few exceptions, humans and their ancestors have long been social creatures. The presence of other bodies sends out a variety of chemical and visual signals that we respond to subliminally, and the absence of those inputs has real effects.
Would you be happy with a girlfriend/boyfriend with whom all your "contact" was by IM and the telephone? Would you consider that a worthwhile intimate relationship? If you were a child, would you feel that a parent who "phoned in" regularly was really part of your life?
Do you know there are various IQ measures, some of which are absolute rather than relative (which is why species like chimpanzees can be assigned IQ?)
The average was defined as 100 at the point in time of fabrication of the scale. Sex is not an issue. Age is, since many, though not all, IQ scales are a relative function between age and cognitive performance.
Incidentally, I think that the average IQ is now higher than it used to be, and depending on whether or not the system you are using recalibrates or is pegged to a historical standard, the average IQ can be above 100.
The historical rise in IQ's is called the Flynn effect.
I agree completely. Some episodes of DS9 moved me profoundly. The cast had an excellent ensemble chemistry. As television and as drama, it was far and away the best of the franchise.
That's just not true. Some of the best stories have absolutely nothing of the sort. Even in the fantasy realm, the stories of Studio Ghibli show a remarkable absence of the good guy/bad guy dualism. It's part of the American - and, perhaps in origins, English - astigmatism that good vs. bad is the master narrative. Homer even depicted a war without such limits - the Trojans were neither bad nor evil.
Until I started using EndNote, I was using OpenOffice.
EndNote is, for those of us who use it, a "driving" application - it determines other platform choices. Without it, I might be half as productive as I am.
Slashdot Mirror
From another view, the neoliberals (in the economic sense) were right: globalization is actually increasing the wealth in the periphery somewhat, standards of living and work conditions and productivity are improving in Asia, and American workers are competing with them and their far lower cost of living. Ultimately, there are only so many hours in the day, and only so much 'productivity' to be squeezed out of the more-expensive American worker.
The long-term view would be to go into "maintenance mode" in the first world while increasing the costs of labor in the developing world (which also means increasing their value as markets - and increasing the resource strain on their environments). But that's not what happens - the US is still defined as "the market," capital goes where labor is cheapest, and instead of improving working conditions elsewhere, the strategy is to make them worse in the first world. Bad news all around.
The first regulations against child labor did not come to pass in 19th century England just because of pressure from below: it was a group of ethically-motivated factory owners themselves that ultimately pushed it through.
Why?
Because they wanted to end the practice themselves, but knew that they could not do so unilaterally and remain competitive. Unless the entire industry was required to abide by certain standards of behavior, those who did not would enjoy too great a competitive advantage - their costs would be lower, their goods would be cheaper to produce, their output greater, etc.
We see this in an industry where EA is acquiring most of its competitors - its unethical practices work, enabling it to keep costs low, forcing down the price for games of that level of complexity.
There have been too many holes cut in labor regulations in this industry, partially because of skillful scare-mongering by industry lobbyists and partially because of the passivity and timidity of the workers involved. Unionization may help, but I think that regulation is even more important: enforce existing labor laws without the loopholes, and a lot of these problems would go away.
Only a fraction of the people in game development are programmers. Many are artists, sound engineers, etc. who do work very much comparable to that done in the film industry. If all the artists unionized, and the programmers didn't, and we then saw artists enjoying a higher quality of life while programmers continued to labor in the salt mines - I bet we'd see programmer unions pretty quickly thereafter.
No, for having cash, which is abstract, rather than a skill, which only has a use value. Your labor is what it is - you can only barter it with people who need that labor. Money can be exchanged for goods and services universally. The differential in power is based on the difference between the flexibility of money and the reduced flexibility of labor and goods.
Exploitation is pretty much the story all around. You think the people who hire you, ultimately, have the same standard that you do? Where does their improved standard of living come from? You don't have to be a Marxist to get what "surplus value" means.
There are signs that 'staying home' may not be the economically 'safe' thing to do anymore. This has nothing to do with outsourcing or offshoring, and everything to do with the imminent collapse of the debt-bubble in the US.
The DOW, as of yesterday, is up one-half of one-percent from the beginning of the year. Investors are starting to look elsewhere. Meanwhile, some fairly respectable economists are starting to see only a 10% chance of avoiding a coming economic meltdown - I don't just mean the little recession we just had, I mean a serious change in the standard of living.
Bioware also has an good reputation for quality-of-life issues.
At the same time, if one brings up the misbehavior of the state of Israel as a way of minimizing the horror of the Holocaust ("Jews aren't nice people, either...") I think you could describe that as a pretty messed-up position to take.
The US historical record pre-WW2 includes the Indians Wars, the US Civil War, the (even at the time recognized as an expansionist ruse) Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War,the subsequent (and very bloody) campaigns in the Phillipines. It's not as if it had been 150 years of peace and prosperity before then. I suspect that the British toll is higher by far than the American, but in some sense that simply made the job of American domination that much easier: the heavy lifting had already been done.
American imperialism is not like European imperialism in a number of ways, but the term is still appropriate. The US has military bases all over the world. The US has a history of exceptionalism, most recently in its stance towards global warming and the humans rights courts. The vision of "bringing democracy" (and access to cheap labor and markets) is the updated version of the British "white man's burden."
And the nation-building efforts back by US military power bring to memory the epoch of the Raj.
I was trying to figure out how a superiour service-culture would tie into a Chinese dominance over the US and the rest of the world, and then I realized - they were getting hemmed in.
Let me add to the recommendation lists: Trigger Happy by Steven Poole and a new book, Power Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life by Chris Kohler. The first is a great casual philosophical reflection on games as cultural artifacts, the latter an interesting history of the way that Japanese videogame design developed the story-telling aspects of the game medium.
No, the stories aren't *that* good. The thing is that the FF games are *character* driven, and much of the richness of the games is created by side characters and NPCs, not just the main characters. FF7 works as much because of Barrett and Red 13 and Yuffie and Cid as it does because of Cloud, Aeris, Tifa and Sephiroth. And all those characters work well together because we spent hundreds of hours with them, building them up, nuancing their personalities with skills and materia and jobs and some choices (at one point, the exchange between Barrett and Cloud is based on who you form a party with.)
A film has 2 hours to do all that. It can't. Character, in film, is created more by appearence, gesture and style than by dialogue.
Most good films are not *that* character driven - the characters, when compelling, are more story-driven. Final Fantasy and other epic RPGs have more in common with literary epics than with cinematic ones, in terms of how we get pulled into caring about them.
I've repeated this enough that it's gotten tiresome, but I'll say it again: the best videogame that was ever made into a movie was never a videogame per se: it was Run Lola Run.
But the marginal cost of each added node is miniscule. The cost of setting up a city-wide LAN is far, far less than the cost of each of the 800,000 San Franciscans each getting wireless service. Or even, I daresay, less than the cost of 80,000 San Franciscans. That's the way infrastructure works. Do you want to have to pay, personally, for every square inch of road you drive over?
My productivity has doubled since I've begun using it, and my bibliographies are now the equivalent of "reuseable code." Note that I said "academic work;" I'm not talking about undergraduate papers here, I'm talking about conference papers and dissertation chapters.
If I can be twice as productive in a certain amount of time, it's not a matter of being "lazy."
One reason only: EndNote, and its cite-as-you-write functionality. Indispensible for academic work for me at this point.
It's not the "realness" of the person on the other side of the medium that I am challenging - it's the sufficiency of that sort of contact to fill the human need for others.
As for your claim that you can know someone better by letters, etc, I disagree: it's fair easier to decieve someone, intentionally or even unintentionally, about one's true nature, situation, and motives, when using media at a remove. In proximity to someone, the unintended cues they give off in speech will tell me things about their cultural and class background that they are probably unaware of themselves, not to mention the way that nervous habits and body language communicate needs and anxieties.
There's a difference between human contact and human communication. It's why we still miss people we're far from when we talk to them on the phone. When we miss someone who is far away, what we miss is their presence - the proximity of their bodies, the sense that bodies are in the same space.
With a few exceptions, humans and their ancestors have long been social creatures. The presence of other bodies sends out a variety of chemical and visual signals that we respond to subliminally, and the absence of those inputs has real effects.
Would you be happy with a girlfriend/boyfriend with whom all your "contact" was by IM and the telephone? Would you consider that a worthwhile intimate relationship? If you were a child, would you feel that a parent who "phoned in" regularly was really part of your life?
"I loved Gigli"
I suspect that yours is the first use of this phrase, ever.
Did you bother to click the link?
Do you know there are various IQ measures, some of which are absolute rather than relative (which is why species like chimpanzees can be assigned IQ?)
The average was defined as 100 at the point in time of fabrication of the scale. Sex is not an issue. Age is, since many, though not all, IQ scales are a relative function between age and cognitive performance.
And she is both a geek and woman, giving a twist to the annoying write-up.
"Written for women, not for geeks" indeed. Good grief.
Well, I was excited about the movie until I saw the trailer.
That dialogue. Horrid. The acting - I've seen better from used car ads.
I literally shuddered.
Yes, it's pretty, but I'm afraid that I just can't afford the lobotomy I would need to enjoy the film.
Incidentally, I think that the average IQ is now higher than it used to be, and depending on whether or not the system you are using recalibrates or is pegged to a historical standard, the average IQ can be above 100.
The historical rise in IQ's is called the Flynn effect.
I agree completely. Some episodes of DS9 moved me profoundly. The cast had an excellent ensemble chemistry. As television and as drama, it was far and away the best of the franchise.
It takes good guys and bad guys to make a story.
That's just not true. Some of the best stories have absolutely nothing of the sort. Even in the fantasy realm, the stories of Studio Ghibli show a remarkable absence of the good guy/bad guy dualism. It's part of the American - and, perhaps in origins, English - astigmatism that good vs. bad is the master narrative. Homer even depicted a war without such limits - the Trojans were neither bad nor evil.
Until I started using EndNote, I was using OpenOffice.
EndNote is, for those of us who use it, a "driving" application - it determines other platform choices. Without it, I might be half as productive as I am.