1. Thanks for the grammar advice. To return the favor: generally the first letters of sentences are capitalized.
2. Essentially, your post amounts to little more than conspiracy theories, paranoia, and incorrect definitions. To back up the last of those three assertions, I present points three and four (the first two of the three are self-evident, and I suppose that I just don't care enough to try and convince you).
3. Has anyone forced you to believe a particular religious belief or espouse a certain political view? If so, I'm sorry for you, you'll get out of the house eventually and you won't have to listen to your parents any more. However, that is not the general experience in this country. Hence, the country is not Totalitarian.
4. As far as the part about fascism being rule by businesses, that is completely wrong as well. The word you are looking for is "Corporatocracy;" look it up on Wikipedia. Also, while you're at it, you can update your understanding of fascism.
This is all stuff that you'll learn in history classes at some point, even the first of the four things I said.
I suppose technically one can make a case that what republicans do is closer to fascism then socialism but i'll leave that for another day.
Actually, you couldn't make that case at all. Republicans, whatever their merits and flaws, are not interested in state control of business, which is one of the key tenants of fascism. Oh, and they don't support a totalitarian ruler either. You probably also couldn't make the case that they are socialist, but you could make the case that they know they would lose in any election if they tried to do any of those things you mentioned.
PS: This is preemptive, I know, so I may be jumping the gun, but just in case you were thinking about it: if you respond that the Bush presidency is Totalitarian, you will have lost all credibility.
I'd class your comments as dangerously naive rather than malicious.
OK, I'll class yours as ignoring the main thrust of my post, and we'll be even. I was talking about the kinds of social constraints that keep people from saying nasty things to each other and doing nasty things to each other. I guess I should have specified, but in the context of the poster before me, I'd say that it's pretty clear what I mean.
Hot damn, I've been called a conformist. Maybe I should go shoot myself . ..
Listen, even your "non-conformist" attitude conforms to expectations of people who consider themselves non-conformist. How about trying something original and being a "non-conformist" who isn't a jerk. That would be much closer to originality.
Darwinism is not what you think it is. Read. Understand. I won't address your other questions, because, though you may not realize it, you espouse a world-view so alien from mine that it's not even pointful to talk about it.
No one will listen to you as long as you type like that. And, as for not following the rules of society because society says so: it's called "real life." You'll either have to learn to cope with being nice to people, or you'll have to cope with people not liking you. Either way, society will enforce its rules; you just have to choose which way you want to take the hurt.
True, especially the last paragraph. I suppose I should have specified more and said, "The kinds of things the people might say to ruin an editorial website i.e. 'first post,' or, 'this site sucks!'" There are times when social constraints can cause people to not do things that would be OK to do.
As to criticizing out of context, I still hold the opinion that the main of my post criticizes the great-grandparent (grandparent of your post =)) mostly in context with what he was trying to say. But thank you for your insight on the issue of the inappropriateness of certain constraints.
Interesting. I really didn't think about that angle. Thank you.
Re:Bungie said that the next wouldn't be a Halo .
on
Halo 3 Rumours Surface
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· Score: 1
Maybe you should change your nickname to "H4lo-l0v3r?" Look at the article before jumping to conclusions, please.
Bill Gates is the only one who is saying that it's going to come out on the same day; all the other XBox developers wish he would stop talking about it. Bungie hasn't even started on the game, and it's gonna take hella longer than a year to finish, no matter what, because of the kinks that almost always arise in the APIs of new platforms (i.e. the XBox 360) and because of the porting of the engine over to the 360. If they decide to write a new engine, as they probably will, it will take even longer.
Don't think I don't sympathize with you; I do, because I also have at times been unconfident in the way I speak, have been afraid of being hurt. I was an unpopular guy in elementary, middle, and high school, and at a lot of times, it was not a good experience.
On the other hand, I learned that the person to blame for my problems was not the nebulous society that was oppressing me, but me myself. I am still in the process of learning this, but I feel like I have come a long way already. Looking to things outside myself to find a target for blame would not have helped me.
What I'm trying to say is that it's not good to go online and look for ways to vent, but rather to eliminate that which makes you want to vent. Getting rid of social constraints, though, is not the solution (Nor will it ever happen anyhow, even if it is the solution, so it's kind of pointless to talk about it.).
PS: Physical hurt is not the only kind of hurt that exists, nor is the assertion that NY Times was not physically damaged sufficient argument to back up the idea that it is fine for them to be damaged in the way they were. They tried to do something that, in my opinion, would have added value to the world, and it was destroyed by a bunch of idots who wanted to "express themslves." That kind of expression is worthless. As to the real life question: are you saying it's OK, then, for people to be dicks to each other in real life? Of course not: it's wrong in real life, and it's wrong online.
Words are just words. They don't hurt like a stick or a stone. People should feel that they can say anything they want to, at any time.
This is wrong. First of all, words do hurt (as clearly shown in the example of the NY times, which was "hurt" or damaged by the words of internet users to the extent that they had to take down a product that they had spent a lot of time developing and now will likely have to scrap).
Second, it seems like everyone assumes that social constraints are generally bad things. That is wrong thinking. Social constraints exist so that we can live with each other as humans in a fashion where the amount of pain that people have to go through is lessened. Almost all situations in which these constraints are removed tend toward decay.
You need to think further through your ideas about society. People are afraid to say things in person because they know those are wrong things to say and they know they could be held accountable in person, but not online.
All of these updated features are making me wonder why I would want to pay any kind of premium to use AOL's service over the next best DSL or Cable. Do I want to be price-raped or my internet content to be dumbed down? No? Then why should I ever buy AOL products when I can get them for free on their web portal?
Re:Bungie said that the next wouldn't be a Halo .
on
Halo 3 Rumours Surface
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· Score: 1
Bill Gates announces a lot of things. If you look at the tone of that article, it is generally doubtful of the possibility that the game will actually be released. Bungie might not be the next developer anyhow.
The fact that MS announced that a game would be out on a certain date really has little relationship to the date that game will actually come out. I would say that MS's announcing the game on that day in particular makes it a somewhat less likely candidate for being the eventual true date of the game's release.
And even if they do release it then, it still might suck the same way Halo 2 did.
It seems that current trends are all pointing to the constant expansion in both economic and legal power of individual businesses. (We're enacting laws to protect the profits of particular industries, as a result of their lobbying, to borrow from the "open source molecules" thread). They're gaining the muscle to erect barriers to entry (there's no realistic way anyone could start a business that competes with Wal-Mart, for example).
This is something that I also at times have feared. However, the fact is that if at any time this causes harm to enough people, it will be stopped by the government. Although candidates for seats in our government do receive a lot of financial support from these corporations, what they are concerned about is their bottom line (i.e. votes). If the corporations ever do anything that is sufficiently against the good of the common man that the common man wants to do something about it, our government will inevitably (after a group of old dudes who don't know the new score get voted out) do something about it.
It might be slightly too optimistic, but that's what I believe.
Is there some real-world, observable factor counteracting this? If not, it seems like the biggest of companies will eventually swallow everything else, and "tragedy of the commons" society to death.
Our anti-trust laws will act powerfully as our allies if a company gains a monopoly. If a company is not monopolistic but still controls such a dominant market share that they begin raising prices, a competitor with more realistic prices will suddenly have a hope of competing. And, although Walmart does have a huge market share in this nation, it was not that way twenty years ago, and it will probably not be that way in twenty years.
Plus, you talk about it like Walmart has no competitors, but the fact is that, even though Walmart is making a lot of money, there are competitors in evey aspect of Walmart's business that make money consistently (grocery stores, Target, department stores like JCPenny and Dillard's, etc.). If you're asking, "What about the guy who's trying to start a new business," well, yes, that probably won't work, but that's par for the course with new businesses and has been for centuries. New businesses rarely succeed, and even more rarely grow up to really compete with the bigger businesses in the market.
This is only true so far as some competitive advantage exists. Unless you propose that Americans are genetically superior to the rest of the world then there comes a point very soon where you have no fundamental advantage - not in education, not in infrastructure. At this point everything becomes a numbers game - and the numbers are no longer on your side, statistically it becomes more likely that any new thing will come from elsewhere.
It seems highly unlikely that in the near future we will get to the point where Americans have no competitive advantage over the other nations of the world. Of course we are not genetically superior to anyone, but our national economic infrastructure as well as our attitude of "make money at any cost" will carry us well into the next century at least.
If we ever did get to the point of the whole world being on an even playing field with us, I would think that would be nice. It doesn't matter that much where things are coming from, as long as everyone is producing something that someone else wants, and that's something that America would continue to be able to do even if everyone was on the same level.
Observations in a over 60 or 70 cannot be extrapolated over history. Historically civlisations can go backwards as well as forwards in terms of economic development - a good example is the Italian peninsula during Roman times, a market develops which then disintegrates back into rural economy with no trade apart from that in raw materials. You can't take a small part of a graph and extrapolate towards infinity.
Two issues with this paragraph. First: we did not have any economic science that accurately predicted the way things would go a hundred years ago. Now, we find that we can increasingly control inflation and economic growth (along with unemployment) so that all are at consistent equilibrium levels. We haven't perfected it yet, but we're getting closer.
Second: it has been almost five centuries since the last time the world in general had an economic backslide on an international scale that lasted more than twenty years. We (the US) are, on top of that, largely immunized by our current economic infrastructure against the kind of thing that happened during the great depression, since growth is kept around 4.5% per year and is not allowed to race out of control.
Did you read any of the articles? What you are talking about is not how banks create money. That is a service charge that offsets the temporal difference of the value of money (money now is, on a probabalistic scale, more valuable than money in the future because if you have it now, you can put it to work). It's not about people paying back loans. Here's how it works, since you wouldn't be troubled to look it up:
Banks are only required to keep about %20 of the money that people save in them on hand in cold hard cash. This is because people are not going to all take their money out at once (this is also why the FDIC exists: just in case they do). So, suppose you put in $10 to the bank. The bank can now loan $50 to someone so that they can create or build or whatever. So how much real value is there? The guy was able to build $50 of value while you will still get back your $10; even though the guy has to pay back that money, it was there for long enough to build something, and increase the output of the economy.
Banks create money is not a theory but a fact. Please go ahead and read one of the articles on how banks actually create money rather than assuming you know what I am talking about. This is not "armchair" economics, but well proven science that is backed by decades of observation.
And: yet another? I've never heard anyone else in my entire life talk about banks creating money.
PS: Your condescending tone is unwelcome.
Bungie said that the next wouldn't be a Halo . . .
on
Halo 3 Rumours Surface
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I distinctly remember reading interviews with Bungie that said that the next game would not be in the Halo franchise . ..
Here's one link. I think that there was also one about it on Gamespot.
I think that in the end Toshiba will find that not updating their requirements for the PS3 will be a huge financial mistake that might lead to the adoption of Blu-ray as the primary disk type in the future of mass storage and movies. The cost of this mistake could potentially reach into the billions of dollars for Toshiba.
Anyway, I digress; that was just to poke at the "but stockholders' gains will just be reinvested, and that creates more wealth" mentatlity.
Even if they save it and put it in a bank, the bank can then lend more money, which allows others to invest the wealth that the rich are saving. Look up "Banks Create Money" on Google for more about this. If the rich buy stuff, then that money goes to whoever produces that stuff. Granted, this may be another rich person, but some of that money goes to the basic labor which was hired to produce that commodity. I'm not advocating trickle down effect here, because I also believe we need to help our poor, but I'm also trying to show that the expenditures of the rich are not just to their own benefit.
Americans don't magically work harder or are any more capable than anybody else. Our higher standard of living persists because of good infrastructure and because of trade barriers (not necessarily artificial trade barriers).
Actually, Americans are wealthy because they have produced and continue to produce a great many goods that have value. Just because others begin to produce goods that have value does not mean that Americans will cease to do the same. And if some other group can produce a certain good at a lower price, the free market always has new products that people are willing to buy, new things for American companies to produce, new things to buy. Even if some American companies that compete with companies abroad go out of business, as the cost of producing a new type of good decreases, new companies will pop up that will try to create that new good.
The most common example of such is Americas multi-billion dollar entertainment industry, which is producing a variety of goods that did not exist a century ago that have real value (that is, people are willing to buy it and people feel that it increases their quality of life). As Americans become less burdened with producing more basic goods like shirts and pants, they are freed to take on more advanced goods like movies, technology, and financial services.
This is not speculation either. Observations over the course of the last sixty to seventy years by economic scientists have shown that our model of the free market is accurate, and that that same model suggests a continual increase in quality of living all across the world, in America and abroad.
You can't expect people to create jobs in your city for your comfort. If you want a job and aren't willing to move, you might have to accept that you won't get the job you want.
The good news is, there's fast food work everywhere! No danger of having to move then, huh?
OK, I guess I can see where you're coming from, but the question in my mind is why you choose to limit how far your caring extends. If it only extends to yourself, then it's OK, since you're not going to get laid off (you'll be a hard worker, and even if your coworkers do get laid off, OK). On the other hand, if you let it extend a little further, the current economic trend seems very negative (if you stop at your community). However, if, instead of stopping at your community, you don't stop until your world, you will suddenly again gain a positive perspective on things.
On the other hand, I guess it's pointless arguing about it. It is inevitable, regardless of how we feel.
This assumes that technology and personal capital of the world is not increased through investment (widely shown to be false -- though people are not gaining better judgement, they are gaining knowledge and intelligence). Economics Is Not A Zero Sum Game.
At any rate, where in the world did you come up with that upper bound of yours? Not from any economics class I've ever taken. Care to cite any research to back up your assertion? I'd be interested to see how an academic author came up with that kind of idea.
If you're concerned with the lives of individuals, families, and communities, then you should be even more supportive of outsourcing. Or do you only care about American individuals, families, and communities?
If our jobs go to India, each one can pay for three or four people who might otherwise live in a situation that is more impoverished than the poorest of Americans. Even if the family of the coder to whom that job moves is well enough off, the presence of more money in the economy of India or other such poor nations will help people who are concerned with whether they will eat, not whether they will be able to join that nice country club or whether their house will be 3000 square feet instead of 2000.
As for the fate of the American worker: although the manufacturing jobs in this nation were long ago moved offshore and many of the jobs that used to be worked by Americans are being worked by immigrants, legal and illegal, the average (and even the below-average) American makes a much higher "real-value" income than he or she did fifty years ago when almost all manufacturing was done here in the States. The outsourcing of jobs to India is the same -- it will allow American workers to focus on more important, more complex tasks. Although it will require some adjustment and some people will live in extremely unfortunate conditions for a time, the nation as a whole and as a set of individuals will benefit from that transition.
In the mean time, work hard and learn quickly to avoid yourself being one of those who is in the unfortunate position of unemployment. I know that's not all there is to it, but that is the best way that you can affect your own fate.
You were just fine until you started talking about revolt. It makes good economic sense for America to oursource and most economists believe that, in the long run, Americans and people in other nations will both live better because of outsourcing.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Thanks for the grammar advice. To return the favor: generally the first letters of sentences are capitalized.
2. Essentially, your post amounts to little more than conspiracy theories, paranoia, and incorrect definitions. To back up the last of those three assertions, I present points three and four (the first two of the three are self-evident, and I suppose that I just don't care enough to try and convince you).
3. Has anyone forced you to believe a particular religious belief or espouse a certain political view? If so, I'm sorry for you, you'll get out of the house eventually and you won't have to listen to your parents any more. However, that is not the general experience in this country. Hence, the country is not Totalitarian.
4. As far as the part about fascism being rule by businesses, that is completely wrong as well. The word you are looking for is "Corporatocracy;" look it up on Wikipedia. Also, while you're at it, you can update your understanding of fascism.
This is all stuff that you'll learn in history classes at some point, even the first of the four things I said.
I suppose technically one can make a case that what republicans do is closer to fascism then socialism but i'll leave that for another day.
Actually, you couldn't make that case at all. Republicans, whatever their merits and flaws, are not interested in state control of business, which is one of the key tenants of fascism. Oh, and they don't support a totalitarian ruler either. You probably also couldn't make the case that they are socialist, but you could make the case that they know they would lose in any election if they tried to do any of those things you mentioned.
PS: This is preemptive, I know, so I may be jumping the gun, but just in case you were thinking about it: if you respond that the Bush presidency is Totalitarian, you will have lost all credibility.I'd class your comments as dangerously naive rather than malicious.
OK, I'll class yours as ignoring the main thrust of my post, and we'll be even. I was talking about the kinds of social constraints that keep people from saying nasty things to each other and doing nasty things to each other. I guess I should have specified, but in the context of the poster before me, I'd say that it's pretty clear what I mean.I thought that was a really funny comment. Good job.
Hot damn, I've been called a conformist. Maybe I should go shoot myself . . .
Listen, even your "non-conformist" attitude conforms to expectations of people who consider themselves non-conformist. How about trying something original and being a "non-conformist" who isn't a jerk. That would be much closer to originality.Darwinism is not what you think it is. Read. Understand. I won't address your other questions, because, though you may not realize it, you espouse a world-view so alien from mine that it's not even pointful to talk about it.
No one will listen to you as long as you type like that. And, as for not following the rules of society because society says so: it's called "real life." You'll either have to learn to cope with being nice to people, or you'll have to cope with people not liking you. Either way, society will enforce its rules; you just have to choose which way you want to take the hurt.True, especially the last paragraph. I suppose I should have specified more and said, "The kinds of things the people might say to ruin an editorial website i.e. 'first post,' or, 'this site sucks!'" There are times when social constraints can cause people to not do things that would be OK to do.
As to criticizing out of context, I still hold the opinion that the main of my post criticizes the great-grandparent (grandparent of your post =)) mostly in context with what he was trying to say. But thank you for your insight on the issue of the inappropriateness of certain constraints.Interesting. I really didn't think about that angle. Thank you.
Maybe you should change your nickname to "H4lo-l0v3r?" Look at the article before jumping to conclusions, please.
Bill Gates is the only one who is saying that it's going to come out on the same day; all the other XBox developers wish he would stop talking about it. Bungie hasn't even started on the game, and it's gonna take hella longer than a year to finish, no matter what, because of the kinks that almost always arise in the APIs of new platforms (i.e. the XBox 360) and because of the porting of the engine over to the 360. If they decide to write a new engine, as they probably will, it will take even longer.Don't think I don't sympathize with you; I do, because I also have at times been unconfident in the way I speak, have been afraid of being hurt. I was an unpopular guy in elementary, middle, and high school, and at a lot of times, it was not a good experience.
On the other hand, I learned that the person to blame for my problems was not the nebulous society that was oppressing me, but me myself. I am still in the process of learning this, but I feel like I have come a long way already. Looking to things outside myself to find a target for blame would not have helped me.
What I'm trying to say is that it's not good to go online and look for ways to vent, but rather to eliminate that which makes you want to vent. Getting rid of social constraints, though, is not the solution (Nor will it ever happen anyhow, even if it is the solution, so it's kind of pointless to talk about it.).
PS: Physical hurt is not the only kind of hurt that exists, nor is the assertion that NY Times was not physically damaged sufficient argument to back up the idea that it is fine for them to be damaged in the way they were. They tried to do something that, in my opinion, would have added value to the world, and it was destroyed by a bunch of idots who wanted to "express themslves." That kind of expression is worthless. As to the real life question: are you saying it's OK, then, for people to be dicks to each other in real life? Of course not: it's wrong in real life, and it's wrong online.Words are just words. They don't hurt like a stick or a stone. People should feel that they can say anything they want to, at any time.
This is wrong. First of all, words do hurt (as clearly shown in the example of the NY times, which was "hurt" or damaged by the words of internet users to the extent that they had to take down a product that they had spent a lot of time developing and now will likely have to scrap).
Second, it seems like everyone assumes that social constraints are generally bad things. That is wrong thinking. Social constraints exist so that we can live with each other as humans in a fashion where the amount of pain that people have to go through is lessened. Almost all situations in which these constraints are removed tend toward decay.
You need to think further through your ideas about society. People are afraid to say things in person because they know those are wrong things to say and they know they could be held accountable in person, but not online.All of these updated features are making me wonder why I would want to pay any kind of premium to use AOL's service over the next best DSL or Cable. Do I want to be price-raped or my internet content to be dumbed down? No? Then why should I ever buy AOL products when I can get them for free on their web portal?
Bill Gates announces a lot of things. If you look at the tone of that article, it is generally doubtful of the possibility that the game will actually be released. Bungie might not be the next developer anyhow.
The fact that MS announced that a game would be out on a certain date really has little relationship to the date that game will actually come out. I would say that MS's announcing the game on that day in particular makes it a somewhat less likely candidate for being the eventual true date of the game's release.
And even if they do release it then, it still might suck the same way Halo 2 did.I suppose the same could be said of all the Linux fanboys who troll /. too though . . .
It seems that current trends are all pointing to the constant expansion in both economic and legal power of individual businesses. (We're enacting laws to protect the profits of particular industries, as a result of their lobbying, to borrow from the "open source molecules" thread). They're gaining the muscle to erect barriers to entry (there's no realistic way anyone could start a business that competes with Wal-Mart, for example).
This is something that I also at times have feared. However, the fact is that if at any time this causes harm to enough people, it will be stopped by the government. Although candidates for seats in our government do receive a lot of financial support from these corporations, what they are concerned about is their bottom line (i.e. votes). If the corporations ever do anything that is sufficiently against the good of the common man that the common man wants to do something about it, our government will inevitably (after a group of old dudes who don't know the new score get voted out) do something about it.
It might be slightly too optimistic, but that's what I believe.
Is there some real-world, observable factor counteracting this? If not, it seems like the biggest of companies will eventually swallow everything else, and "tragedy of the commons" society to death.
Our anti-trust laws will act powerfully as our allies if a company gains a monopoly. If a company is not monopolistic but still controls such a dominant market share that they begin raising prices, a competitor with more realistic prices will suddenly have a hope of competing. And, although Walmart does have a huge market share in this nation, it was not that way twenty years ago, and it will probably not be that way in twenty years.
Plus, you talk about it like Walmart has no competitors, but the fact is that, even though Walmart is making a lot of money, there are competitors in evey aspect of Walmart's business that make money consistently (grocery stores, Target, department stores like JCPenny and Dillard's, etc.). If you're asking, "What about the guy who's trying to start a new business," well, yes, that probably won't work, but that's par for the course with new businesses and has been for centuries. New businesses rarely succeed, and even more rarely grow up to really compete with the bigger businesses in the market.This is only true so far as some competitive advantage exists. Unless you propose that Americans are genetically superior to the rest of the world then there comes a point very soon where you have no fundamental advantage - not in education, not in infrastructure. At this point everything becomes a numbers game - and the numbers are no longer on your side, statistically it becomes more likely that any new thing will come from elsewhere.
It seems highly unlikely that in the near future we will get to the point where Americans have no competitive advantage over the other nations of the world. Of course we are not genetically superior to anyone, but our national economic infrastructure as well as our attitude of "make money at any cost" will carry us well into the next century at least.
If we ever did get to the point of the whole world being on an even playing field with us, I would think that would be nice. It doesn't matter that much where things are coming from, as long as everyone is producing something that someone else wants, and that's something that America would continue to be able to do even if everyone was on the same level.
Observations in a over 60 or 70 cannot be extrapolated over history. Historically civlisations can go backwards as well as forwards in terms of economic development - a good example is the Italian peninsula during Roman times, a market develops which then disintegrates back into rural economy with no trade apart from that in raw materials. You can't take a small part of a graph and extrapolate towards infinity.
Two issues with this paragraph. First: we did not have any economic science that accurately predicted the way things would go a hundred years ago. Now, we find that we can increasingly control inflation and economic growth (along with unemployment) so that all are at consistent equilibrium levels. We haven't perfected it yet, but we're getting closer.
Second: it has been almost five centuries since the last time the world in general had an economic backslide on an international scale that lasted more than twenty years. We (the US) are, on top of that, largely immunized by our current economic infrastructure against the kind of thing that happened during the great depression, since growth is kept around 4.5% per year and is not allowed to race out of control.
Did you read any of the articles? What you are talking about is not how banks create money. That is a service charge that offsets the temporal difference of the value of money (money now is, on a probabalistic scale, more valuable than money in the future because if you have it now, you can put it to work). It's not about people paying back loans. Here's how it works, since you wouldn't be troubled to look it up:
Banks are only required to keep about %20 of the money that people save in them on hand in cold hard cash. This is because people are not going to all take their money out at once (this is also why the FDIC exists: just in case they do). So, suppose you put in $10 to the bank. The bank can now loan $50 to someone so that they can create or build or whatever. So how much real value is there? The guy was able to build $50 of value while you will still get back your $10; even though the guy has to pay back that money, it was there for long enough to build something, and increase the output of the economy.
Banks create money is not a theory but a fact. Please go ahead and read one of the articles on how banks actually create money rather than assuming you know what I am talking about. This is not "armchair" economics, but well proven science that is backed by decades of observation.
And: yet another? I've never heard anyone else in my entire life talk about banks creating money.
PS: Your condescending tone is unwelcome.
I distinctly remember reading interviews with Bungie that said that the next game would not be in the Halo franchise . . .
Here's one link. I think that there was also one about it on Gamespot.
I think that in the end Toshiba will find that not updating their requirements for the PS3 will be a huge financial mistake that might lead to the adoption of Blu-ray as the primary disk type in the future of mass storage and movies. The cost of this mistake could potentially reach into the billions of dollars for Toshiba.
Anyway, I digress; that was just to poke at the "but stockholders' gains will just be reinvested, and that creates more wealth" mentatlity.
Even if they save it and put it in a bank, the bank can then lend more money, which allows others to invest the wealth that the rich are saving. Look up "Banks Create Money" on Google for more about this. If the rich buy stuff, then that money goes to whoever produces that stuff. Granted, this may be another rich person, but some of that money goes to the basic labor which was hired to produce that commodity. I'm not advocating trickle down effect here, because I also believe we need to help our poor, but I'm also trying to show that the expenditures of the rich are not just to their own benefit.
Americans don't magically work harder or are any more capable than anybody else. Our higher standard of living persists because of good infrastructure and because of trade barriers (not necessarily artificial trade barriers).
Actually, Americans are wealthy because they have produced and continue to produce a great many goods that have value. Just because others begin to produce goods that have value does not mean that Americans will cease to do the same. And if some other group can produce a certain good at a lower price, the free market always has new products that people are willing to buy, new things for American companies to produce, new things to buy. Even if some American companies that compete with companies abroad go out of business, as the cost of producing a new type of good decreases, new companies will pop up that will try to create that new good.
The most common example of such is Americas multi-billion dollar entertainment industry, which is producing a variety of goods that did not exist a century ago that have real value (that is, people are willing to buy it and people feel that it increases their quality of life). As Americans become less burdened with producing more basic goods like shirts and pants, they are freed to take on more advanced goods like movies, technology, and financial services.
This is not speculation either. Observations over the course of the last sixty to seventy years by economic scientists have shown that our model of the free market is accurate, and that that same model suggests a continual increase in quality of living all across the world, in America and abroad.
You can't expect people to create jobs in your city for your comfort. If you want a job and aren't willing to move, you might have to accept that you won't get the job you want.
The good news is, there's fast food work everywhere! No danger of having to move then, huh?
OK, I guess I can see where you're coming from, but the question in my mind is why you choose to limit how far your caring extends. If it only extends to yourself, then it's OK, since you're not going to get laid off (you'll be a hard worker, and even if your coworkers do get laid off, OK). On the other hand, if you let it extend a little further, the current economic trend seems very negative (if you stop at your community). However, if, instead of stopping at your community, you don't stop until your world, you will suddenly again gain a positive perspective on things.
On the other hand, I guess it's pointless arguing about it. It is inevitable, regardless of how we feel.
This assumes that technology and personal capital of the world is not increased through investment (widely shown to be false -- though people are not gaining better judgement, they are gaining knowledge and intelligence). Economics Is Not A Zero Sum Game.
At any rate, where in the world did you come up with that upper bound of yours? Not from any economics class I've ever taken. Care to cite any research to back up your assertion? I'd be interested to see how an academic author came up with that kind of idea.
If you're concerned with the lives of individuals, families, and communities, then you should be even more supportive of outsourcing. Or do you only care about American individuals, families, and communities?
If our jobs go to India, each one can pay for three or four people who might otherwise live in a situation that is more impoverished than the poorest of Americans. Even if the family of the coder to whom that job moves is well enough off, the presence of more money in the economy of India or other such poor nations will help people who are concerned with whether they will eat, not whether they will be able to join that nice country club or whether their house will be 3000 square feet instead of 2000.
As for the fate of the American worker: although the manufacturing jobs in this nation were long ago moved offshore and many of the jobs that used to be worked by Americans are being worked by immigrants, legal and illegal, the average (and even the below-average) American makes a much higher "real-value" income than he or she did fifty years ago when almost all manufacturing was done here in the States. The outsourcing of jobs to India is the same -- it will allow American workers to focus on more important, more complex tasks. Although it will require some adjustment and some people will live in extremely unfortunate conditions for a time, the nation as a whole and as a set of individuals will benefit from that transition.
In the mean time, work hard and learn quickly to avoid yourself being one of those who is in the unfortunate position of unemployment. I know that's not all there is to it, but that is the best way that you can affect your own fate.
You were just fine until you started talking about revolt. It makes good economic sense for America to oursource and most economists believe that, in the long run, Americans and people in other nations will both live better because of outsourcing.