Nope. That's not what smart people do. Smart people get disqualified as soon as the lawyers realize they are smart. Lawyers don't want smart people on juries because smart people are not easily malleable in their hands.
Obviously, you've never been through jury selection.
Here's a cluestick: Economics is not a zero-sum game. Wealth is routinely created and destroyed. Being wealthy does not require the poverty of others.
The countries in South America and Haiti are poor because of their screwed up forms of government which do not allow the creation of wealth. See the difference between East and West Germany?
I bet it'll be modded as flamebait, but it's my oppinion anyway, so I'll post it.
Yeah, right. Which Slashdot have you been reading? Anything Anti-Bush always gets modded up here.
I think right now at this time and this place the greatest threat to American liberty comes from Bush and their sympathizers rather than from Al-Qaida.
Oh, wonderful. So now everyone who agrees with the President is threatening the liberty of Americans. Great argument you have going there!
This works this way: An unjustifiable attack to other countries (like Iraq) leads to more anger from its citizens and even other countries. Now we have not just one group of loons who hate the US (Al Qaida), but many.
I call bullshit. The attack was not on Iraq. It was on its leadership. The attack has not led to many groups of loons (sic) who hate the US. Follow the situation in Iraq. The attacks there are being led by Al Qaeda who, in their increasing desperation, have gradually begun to alienate their support base by attacking them (the victims of the attacks in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iraq are mostly Arabs and Muslims, not westerners).
And while the national crime rate rose 2 percent from 2000 to 2001, Chicago rates have dropped 16 percent in the last three years. So all this information can and does prevent crime and save lives
Repeat after me: Correlation is not causation. Correlation is not causation. Correlation is not causation.
Does anyone else have a problem with a science news site that has ads for "FDA cheap weight loss prescriptions" and "Complete out free profile and find your soulmate today" (TrueBeginnings)
The West didn't "pull the rug" out from under the Soviet Union. Gorbachev tried to take the Soviet Union slowly towards the world you are describing but couldn't resist the will of his own people to see more radical change.
The Chinese are doing exactly what you are describing - a slow transition to a free economy - but the big difference is the Chinese were willing to shoot down the protestors in Tiananmen Square while the Russian soldiers just stood down to Boris Yeltsin when he mounted that tank. I'll take a former Soviet Union in its current state over one in the state in which China is any day, thank you.
Russia is a third world nation because communism reduced its economy to rubble. Communism is full of internal contradictions and completely disregards human nature. A totalitarian society is able to mask those problems like the Soviet Union did but it is not sustainable.
Here's a clue stick: Radical Islam has nothing to do with the Soviet Unions collapse. Radical Islam has much more to do with the US's policy over the last 50 years of not getting directly involved in conflicts it cares about but using proxy agents of dubious morality (Osama, the Shah of Iran, Saddam, the Saudi princes, etc.) to try and achieve what it wanted to. In every one of those cases those proxy agents committed horrible crimes which the US ended up getting blamed for since they were our proxy agents after all.
Ultimately, it should be hoped that living costs will come down in those US cities, but the monkey wrench in the works is housing: people are not willing to sell their homes for less than they paid for it, and with low interest rates on financing, they haven't felt a reason to yet.
Living costs will come down on a relative scale when the dollar falls as it is falling right now. Sure, that means your fancy imports will be more expensive than they used to be, but overall it will lead to a much more rational international price structure. US industry has been crushed by the strong dollar and the only way to revive it is with a weak one.
So your house prices won't go down in dollar terms but they will go down in real terms i.e. in terms of what you can buy in the rest of the world with the same money.
Yes - at least to the same extent as a US worker with a similar job can - India is actually coming out of a socialist phase.
How long is your work week?
Typically 5 days
What are your working conditions like?
Not quite as nice as in the US but very nice relative to other situations in India. The offices of Indian tech firms won't usually look as fancy as the average US tech firm but that's more a function of the culture of economizing that prevails in most 3rd world countries.
What kind of benifits do you have? Vacation? Medical? Dental? Profit sharing? Stock options?
Vacation is usually more than the paltry 3 weeks/year most US workers get. Also, there are many more public holidays. Medical and dental costs are so low in India that it is really not a factor. You could get treated at some of the best facilities in the country for a 10th of what it would cost in the US. Profit sharing and stock options depend on who you are in the company - pretty much the same as in the US.
I find myself wondering, if the playing field were truly level, would your labor still be so inexpensive?
You can stop wondering. The answer is yes. The reason the labor is cheap is that the cost of living is cheaper in those countries. Sure, you can't afford a fancy automatic dishwasher but you can afford to pay someone to wash your dishes for you. Food costs a fraction of what it does in the US, etc. You pay for this by your basic facilities not being up to the same levels. Pollution levels are insanely high, roads are terribly overcrowded, electricity and water are not guaranteed, etc.
Speaking as someone who has been on an H1-B visa, you know what you're getting into. You know that there is a maximum period of 7 years on the H1-B visa and you better get a green card before that time runs out or you have to leave the country. Also, you know that if you do lose your job you have to find another one within 30 days or you have to leave the country.
I didn't consider myself exploited because I knew what I was getting into. I don't think any rationally minded person can resent US companies or the US government for the H1-B person. Most countries would make it impossible for you to live in that country. In 100% of the cases the person with the H1-B visa accepted that job because it was better than every other opportunity available to them at every other company and in every other country of the world.
Of course, my thoughts might have been different had I been one of the people who got the short end of the stick.
You can thank the teachers unions who make sure that starting teachers get paid squat while teachers who've been there a while, regardless of performance, make well above the industry median for someone with their education and experience - at least that's true in the state of Washington. Your state may vary.
If starting teachers salaries went up, the teachers wouldn't have anything to back up those extra taxes they keep asking for.
Nonsense. That is the exact kind of thinking that has led to India staying poor for the past 50 years. India's closed economy ensured that Indian companies could be successful without striving to improve their products. Compare the average quality of goods you can buy in India to the average quality of goods you can buy in the US.
Here's a newsflash: India is neither self-reliant nor powerful. Open trade improves the economy and the living standards. There are no self-reliant countries anymore. Every country depends upon other countries for essential resources.
And it's not as if the call-center jobs are taking resources away from other, more productive endeavors. Until recently the unemployment rate in India has been through the roof. You would have a very good point if these outsourced jobs meant that people were not doing other stuff that would be more useful to the national economy, however that is not the case.
The East India company took natural resources away from the country. No money was input into the country in exchange for these resources - rather money was taken away from the country when the products of these resources were sold back to India. This is not the case here. Outsourced jobs infuse valuable foreign exchange into the country and provide employment to a large number of people, improving the overall lifestyle.
It depends on what you care about. For me, that ended up being Comcast basic cable. For you it might be something else. Here are the factors you should consider:
- Price: If all you want is a basic lineup, cable wins hands down. Once you add in the cost of the satellite dish, plus the fees for having your local channels plus programming fees for additional receivers, cable is a lot cheaper. If you want the "premium lineups" satellite and digital cable are a wash as far as cost is concerned.
- Channel Surfing: If you like to channel surf like I do, satellite and digital cable can be very annoying since you have to wait at least 1 second between flipping the channel and it showing. Also, forget about PIP since your TV tuner can't tune into satellite or digital cable signals. Basic cable is the most friendly to channel surfing and PIP (which I can't live without)
- NFL Direct Ticket: Only available on satellite
- Channel Guide: The digital cable box caches the entire channel guide. The satellite boxes I've seen only cache part of it and you have to wait for it to download if you're trying to see what's on in a different segment than it has cached.
- HDTV: You can't watch your local channels in HDTV via satellite. With digital cable you can and it's no additional cost.
More people traveling daily to the "Allstate Arena" than (possibly) the busiest fucking airport on the planet?!
O'Hare is a huge hub. A lot of people fly in to O'Hare and fly out without ever getting on the Kennedy Expressway. Also, most commuters (yeah, those people that actually want traffic reports) are not going to O'Hare. I'm not defending the decision because obviously fewer people would be going to Allstate Arena but they do make the valid point that most people are going to the general area.
ClearChannel has mostly ruined Chicago radio (thank $DEITY for WXRT), and now they fuck up our traffic reports? CC has got to go, seriously.
Stop listening then. Chicago has a lot of radio stations. Obviously there are a lot of people who don't agree with you or Clear Channel wouldn't still be in business. Seriously, this is not even a real problem in a city like Chicago. It IS a real problem in smaller places where Clear Channel is the only station - although, in theory, if they are so bad, someone should be able to use the available spectrum to start a competing station that is not so bad.
I fully expect that most retailers would have a version of the software in which your big, fat butt doesn't look quite as big or fat in the clothes you're modeling. People want to buy clothes that make them look good and it is the job of the software to convince them that they look good in those clothes.
Cheaper prices in the supermarket are usually the result of greater production and lower cost to produce so the same stuff that brings you cheaper prices in the supermarket is what you need to have more food in starving countries.
GM is a tool. Like almost any other tool you can use it for good, evil or something frivolous.
What next? You want legislation saying that computers should only be used to educate low-income students and not for playing games?
Lying is covered by standard contract law and is illegal for individuals as well as groups or representatives of individuals.
The discussion was about whether we needed to restrict governments and treat them any differently than we treat corporations or individuals. My point was that we do because governments have the power of physical force. Governments are more than representatives of people since they have the power of physical force behind them.
Governments have more powers than individuals and hence need to be restricted more than individuals. Corporations, (or unions or any other association) do not have any more legal powers than an individual does and therefore should not be restricted beyond what we restrict an individual from doing. At the same time normal restrictions that apply to individuals should also apply to corporations - in particular campaign reform where corporations can donate more money than individuals can.
Corporations are individuals as far as civil offenses are concerned. If a corporation gets caught committing a civil offense it is fined just the same as an individual is.
Corporations are not individuals as far as criminal offenses are concerned however. If a corporation gets caught committing a criminal offense, it is the individuals who authorized or committed the crime who will be subject to criminal prosecution.
So in your example, if they knowingly dumped poison into someones drinking water, the people who did it would be in jail for attempted murder.
The intent of the US system of representative government is that each individual should have an equal say in governmental proceedings. The inbalance of money of corporations versus individuals compromises that goal to the point that a very few (boards of corporations) can disproportionately influence law making.
You make some valid points. However, all those points are valid about individuals just as well as they are about corporations. Individuals with large amounts of money are able to corrupt the political process too. The solution to your problem is to eliminate the system of money corrupting politics - not to eliminate corporations.
That influence is often used to push through legislation that greatly favors the influential corporations in matters of Intelectual Property while necessarily eroding the rights of the unwashed masses whose rights, by virtue of Majority, should trump those of the corporations.
Nonsense. IP laws don't favor "corporations" any more than they favor individuals. An individual can do the same stuff. Again, the solution is to fight the dumb IP laws, not rally against this thing called "corporation" which is really no different.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. That's not what smart people do. Smart people get disqualified as soon as the lawyers realize they are smart. Lawyers don't want smart people on juries because smart people are not easily malleable in their hands.
Obviously, you've never been through jury selection.
Get it right.
CowboyNeal says rune2 says a Toronto newspaper says that Steve Ballmer says that they are saying that it is more expensive.
Oh, what a bunch of revisionist crock.
Here's a cluestick: Economics is not a zero-sum game. Wealth is routinely created and destroyed. Being wealthy does not require the poverty of others.
The countries in South America and Haiti are poor because of their screwed up forms of government which do not allow the creation of wealth. See the difference between East and West Germany?
I bet it'll be modded as flamebait, but it's my oppinion anyway, so I'll post it.
Yeah, right. Which Slashdot have you been reading? Anything Anti-Bush always gets modded up here.
I think right now at this time and this place the greatest threat to American liberty comes from Bush and their sympathizers rather than from Al-Qaida.
Oh, wonderful. So now everyone who agrees with the President is threatening the liberty of Americans. Great argument you have going there!
This works this way: An unjustifiable attack to other countries (like Iraq) leads to more anger from its citizens and even other countries. Now we have not just one group of loons who hate the US (Al Qaida), but many.
I call bullshit. The attack was not on Iraq. It was on its leadership. The attack has not led to many groups of loons (sic) who hate the US. Follow the situation in Iraq. The attacks there are being led by Al Qaeda who, in their increasing desperation, have gradually begun to alienate their support base by attacking them (the victims of the attacks in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iraq are mostly Arabs and Muslims, not westerners).
And while the national crime rate rose 2 percent from 2000 to 2001, Chicago rates have dropped 16 percent in the last three years. So all this information can and does prevent crime and save lives
Repeat after me:
Correlation is not causation.
Correlation is not causation.
Correlation is not causation.
Does anyone else have a problem with a science news site that has ads for "FDA cheap weight loss prescriptions" and "Complete out free profile and find your soulmate today" (TrueBeginnings)
Science geeks are fat and lonely - of course.
What a bunch of crap!
The West didn't "pull the rug" out from under the Soviet Union. Gorbachev tried to take the Soviet Union slowly towards the world you are describing but couldn't resist the will of his own people to see more radical change.
The Chinese are doing exactly what you are describing - a slow transition to a free economy - but the big difference is the Chinese were willing to shoot down the protestors in Tiananmen Square while the Russian soldiers just stood down to Boris Yeltsin when he mounted that tank. I'll take a former Soviet Union in its current state over one in the state in which China is any day, thank you.
Russia is a third world nation because communism reduced its economy to rubble. Communism is full of internal contradictions and completely disregards human nature. A totalitarian society is able to mask those problems like the Soviet Union did but it is not sustainable.
Here's a clue stick: Radical Islam has nothing to do with the Soviet Unions collapse. Radical Islam has much more to do with the US's policy over the last 50 years of not getting directly involved in conflicts it cares about but using proxy agents of dubious morality (Osama, the Shah of Iran, Saddam, the Saudi princes, etc.) to try and achieve what it wanted to. In every one of those cases those proxy agents committed horrible crimes which the US ended up getting blamed for since they were our proxy agents after all.
Their webserver sure didn't seem to be able to stand up to the law of large traffic directed at it.
No kidding? What's the use of having a "famous" phone number
Think dating service. That would be the perfect number.
Ultimately, it should be hoped that living costs will come down in those US cities, but the monkey wrench in the works is housing: people are not willing to sell their homes for less than they paid for it, and with low interest rates on financing, they haven't felt a reason to yet.
Living costs will come down on a relative scale when the dollar falls as it is falling right now. Sure, that means your fancy imports will be more expensive than they used to be, but overall it will lead to a much more rational international price structure. US industry has been crushed by the strong dollar and the only way to revive it is with a weak one.
So your house prices won't go down in dollar terms but they will go down in real terms i.e. in terms of what you can buy in the rest of the world with the same money.
Are you allowed to organize into unions?
Yes - at least to the same extent as a US worker with a similar job can - India is actually coming out of a socialist phase.
How long is your work week?
Typically 5 days
What are your working conditions like?
Not quite as nice as in the US but very nice relative to other situations in India. The offices of Indian tech firms won't usually look as fancy as the average US tech firm but that's more a function of the culture of economizing that prevails in most 3rd world countries.
What kind of benifits do you have? Vacation? Medical? Dental? Profit sharing? Stock options?
Vacation is usually more than the paltry 3 weeks/year most US workers get. Also, there are many more public holidays. Medical and dental costs are so low in India that it is really not a factor. You could get treated at some of the best facilities in the country for a 10th of what it would cost in the US. Profit sharing and stock options depend on who you are in the company - pretty much the same as in the US.
I find myself wondering, if the playing field were truly level, would your labor still be so inexpensive?
You can stop wondering. The answer is yes. The reason the labor is cheap is that the cost of living is cheaper in those countries. Sure, you can't afford a fancy automatic dishwasher but you can afford to pay someone to wash your dishes for you. Food costs a fraction of what it does in the US, etc. You pay for this by your basic facilities not being up to the same levels. Pollution levels are insanely high, roads are terribly overcrowded, electricity and water are not guaranteed, etc.
Speaking as someone who has been on an H1-B visa, you know what you're getting into. You know that there is a maximum period of 7 years on the H1-B visa and you better get a green card before that time runs out or you have to leave the country. Also, you know that if you do lose your job you have to find another one within 30 days or you have to leave the country.
I didn't consider myself exploited because I knew what I was getting into. I don't think any rationally minded person can resent US companies or the US government for the H1-B person. Most countries would make it impossible for you to live in that country. In 100% of the cases the person with the H1-B visa accepted that job because it was better than every other opportunity available to them at every other company and in every other country of the world.
Of course, my thoughts might have been different had I been one of the people who got the short end of the stick.
You can thank the teachers unions who make sure that starting teachers get paid squat while teachers who've been there a while, regardless of performance, make well above the industry median for someone with their education and experience - at least that's true in the state of Washington. Your state may vary.
If starting teachers salaries went up, the teachers wouldn't have anything to back up those extra taxes they keep asking for.
Nonsense. That is the exact kind of thinking that has led to India staying poor for the past 50 years. India's closed economy ensured that Indian companies could be successful without striving to improve their products. Compare the average quality of goods you can buy in India to the average quality of goods you can buy in the US.
Here's a newsflash: India is neither self-reliant nor powerful. Open trade improves the economy and the living standards. There are no self-reliant countries anymore. Every country depends upon other countries for essential resources.
And it's not as if the call-center jobs are taking resources away from other, more productive endeavors. Until recently the unemployment rate in India has been through the roof. You would have a very good point if these outsourced jobs meant that people were not doing other stuff that would be more useful to the national economy, however that is not the case.
The East India company took natural resources away from the country. No money was input into the country in exchange for these resources - rather money was taken away from the country when the products of these resources were sold back to India. This is not the case here. Outsourced jobs infuse valuable foreign exchange into the country and provide employment to a large number of people, improving the overall lifestyle.
The only way the US will compete, ever, is if our standard of living drops...a lot.
Or if the standard of living in India rises...a lot.
It depends on what you care about. For me, that ended up being Comcast basic cable. For you it might be something else. Here are the factors you should consider:
- Price: If all you want is a basic lineup, cable wins hands down. Once you add in the cost of the satellite dish, plus the fees for having your local channels plus programming fees for additional receivers, cable is a lot cheaper. If you want the "premium lineups" satellite and digital cable are a wash as far as cost is concerned.
- Channel Surfing: If you like to channel surf like I do, satellite and digital cable can be very annoying since you have to wait at least 1 second between flipping the channel and it showing. Also, forget about PIP since your TV tuner can't tune into satellite or digital cable signals. Basic cable is the most friendly to channel surfing and PIP (which I can't live without)
- NFL Direct Ticket: Only available on satellite
- Channel Guide: The digital cable box caches the entire channel guide. The satellite boxes I've seen only cache part of it and you have to wait for it to download if you're trying to see what's on in a different segment than it has cached.
- HDTV: You can't watch your local channels in HDTV via satellite. With digital cable you can and it's no additional cost.
More people traveling daily to the "Allstate Arena" than (possibly) the busiest fucking airport on the planet?!
O'Hare is a huge hub. A lot of people fly in to O'Hare and fly out without ever getting on the Kennedy Expressway. Also, most commuters (yeah, those people that actually want traffic reports) are not going to O'Hare. I'm not defending the decision because obviously fewer people would be going to Allstate Arena but they do make the valid point that most people are going to the general area.
ClearChannel has mostly ruined Chicago radio (thank $DEITY for WXRT), and now they fuck up our traffic reports? CC has got to go, seriously.
Stop listening then. Chicago has a lot of radio stations. Obviously there are a lot of people who don't agree with you or Clear Channel wouldn't still be in business. Seriously, this is not even a real problem in a city like Chicago. It IS a real problem in smaller places where Clear Channel is the only station - although, in theory, if they are so bad, someone should be able to use the available spectrum to start a competing station that is not so bad.
I don't think you know what you're talking about. Disney Corporation owns a LOT of stuff
To be truly Disney free you will have to:
- Never watch ABC
- Never watch ESPN
- Not use Tivo
- Not watch any of these Touchstone movies
- Not watch any of these Miramax films
- Not watch any of these Hollywood pictures
The list goes on. I will be very impressed if you have indeed managed to be Disney-free but the smart money is going against you.
I fully expect that most retailers would have a version of the software in which your big, fat butt doesn't look quite as big or fat in the clothes you're modeling. People want to buy clothes that make them look good and it is the job of the software to convince them that they look good in those clothes.
We can work around IBMs patent if we come up with a way to pay Open Source developers with porn.
Submit a patch and you'll be rewarded with 5 minutes of unlimited access.
Cheaper prices in the supermarket are usually the result of greater production and lower cost to produce so the same stuff that brings you cheaper prices in the supermarket is what you need to have more food in starving countries.
GM is a tool. Like almost any other tool you can use it for good, evil or something frivolous.
What next? You want legislation saying that computers should only be used to educate low-income students and not for playing games?
Lying is covered by standard contract law and is illegal for individuals as well as groups or representatives of individuals.
The discussion was about whether we needed to restrict governments and treat them any differently than we treat corporations or individuals. My point was that we do because governments have the power of physical force. Governments are more than representatives of people since they have the power of physical force behind them.
Governments have more powers than individuals and hence need to be restricted more than individuals. Corporations, (or unions or any other association) do not have any more legal powers than an individual does and therefore should not be restricted beyond what we restrict an individual from doing. At the same time normal restrictions that apply to individuals should also apply to corporations - in particular campaign reform where corporations can donate more money than individuals can.
Governments are very different than corporations. Governments have the ability to use physical force which a corporation cannot (legally) do.
Nonsense. Where do you people get this crap?
Corporations are individuals as far as civil offenses are concerned. If a corporation gets caught committing a civil offense it is fined just the same as an individual is.
Corporations are not individuals as far as criminal offenses are concerned however. If a corporation gets caught committing a criminal offense, it is the individuals who authorized or committed the crime who will be subject to criminal prosecution.
So in your example, if they knowingly dumped poison into someones drinking water, the people who did it would be in jail for attempted murder.
The intent of the US system of representative government is that each individual should have an equal say in governmental proceedings. The inbalance of money of corporations versus individuals compromises that goal to the point that a very few (boards of corporations) can disproportionately influence law making.
You make some valid points. However, all those points are valid about individuals just as well as they are about corporations. Individuals with large amounts of money are able to corrupt the political process too. The solution to your problem is to eliminate the system of money corrupting politics - not to eliminate corporations.
That influence is often used to push through legislation that greatly favors the influential corporations in matters of Intelectual Property while necessarily eroding the rights of the unwashed masses whose rights, by virtue of Majority, should trump those of the corporations.
Nonsense. IP laws don't favor "corporations" any more than they favor individuals. An individual can do the same stuff. Again, the solution is to fight the dumb IP laws, not rally against this thing called "corporation" which is really no different.