I believe that this boom will only make US richer, because they benefit from having the initial advantage... South America can't repeat Taiwanese or Japanese boom... We will only geet poorer.
Why can't you create your own boom?
Who or what is stopping you?
Are you one of those people who assumes that economics is a zero sum game? That the only way I can accrue wealth is to take wealth away from you or someone else?
Here's a helpful thought: Wealth can be created where there once was none, through a suitable application of intellect. So tell me again, why can't you make your own boom? Who prevents you?
We forgot to decide where we're going? Who is this "we" you speak of? I have a pretty good indication of where I want to go, and how I'm going to get there. No doubt the guy down the street has a reasonable idea of his answers to those questions, as well.
Of course, he and I aren't going to the same splace, and we're certainly not using the same methods. So why exactly do we, by implication, both have to decide on the same destination and use the same methods to get there?
In a very real and very practical sense, how can we ever get 250,000,000 people (just to take the United States as an example) all to agree on the same location and the same methods? Does that not strike you as being completely contrary to the idea of Western style freedom in the first place, that we all have to go to the same place at the same time? How boring. How unimaginitive. How depressing, for 249,999,995 of us who aren't going where we want to go, but rather where you want to go.
And in reality, how tremendously error-prone a process. Western technological freedom works precisely because we are all free to run as many experiments as we are able to fund; because that process provides better solutions than only doing things one way.
And no one is forced to buy bigger and better anythings by the market as a whole. People buy new toys, new games, new televisions, new grills, and so forth, because they want them. You don't want them? Don't buy them. No one is forcing you to.
Preface: I am about halfway through Virginia Postrel's "The Future and it's Enemies" an interesting book. My comments are unavoidably tinged with the ideas in that book.
My first comment is that There Is No Problem. The author seems to think that all the bright people, everywhere, are wrapped up into computer and internet technologies as outlets for their creative outlets, technical and otherwise. This is, of course, simply not so. The internet is my hobby, but what I do for a living is high frequency analog electronics. Basically, specialized radios. And believe me, I know a very large number of people, all of whom are very intelligent, working in that field.
Keeping up with the scientific literature (and my old college contacts) I know perfectly well that there are tremendous numbers of very bright people working in physics, chemistry, biogenetics and mechanical engieering; composing music, writing books, and so forth.
I don't see an internet brain drain.
My second comment is that even if this were happening, There Would Still Be No Problem. There is money to be made in internet technologies, and many people are concentrating on internet technologies, because people want internet technologies. It's as simple as that. A hundred million people have made their hundred million individual choices and the net result has been the influx of hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into that particular technology sector.
It seems somehow churlish to engage in what I consider to be a handwringing stream of thought about how much better other things might be if the internet weren't so nifty. This necessarily implies, despite the protestations that "this is all speculation," that the author has a better feel for how the money and talents of hundreds of millions of people (here in the US, in Europe, in Canada, in Australia, etc) should be deployed, than those hundreds fo millions of people.
Postrel would probably class this as a stasist, technocratic viewpoint. I think it's tinged with a bit of arrogance.
Are these decisions sometimes purely hedonistic? Yes, sometimes. And this leads to my third comment-- that the author apparently lacks a certain historical perspective. Why is the internet singled out for this "brain drain" commentary? Well, in fact, it isn't. Going beyond the original author, similar claims have been levied against other efforts-- including our fixation on automobiles, our attempts at space exploration, the movie and entertainment industry... all of it.
I see no difference between those claims, and this, all of them tinged with the ieda that the few or the one know better than the masses how to direct their interests.
My fourth comment, of course, is that this focus on the internet is most certainly not entirely hedonistic. In my profession, we are able to coordinate much larger projects than before, with comparatively smaller efforts, through internet technologies. The ability to lob design specifications-- and designs-- back and forth in seconds rather than in days makes our lives much simpler. The ability to through designs to foundries electronically also makes life easier.
Similar things happen, I'm sure, in all professions. The easy manipulation of data over large distances is, to use a military science metaphor, a force multiplier. What that means is that, used properly, long distance data manipulation makes other large scale endeavors easier. This includes the design of better cars, the exploration and exploitation of space, feeding the poor, and anything else we might think of.
Finally, the author seems to want to have his cake and eat it, too. First, the internet is causing a great sucking brain drain from other more noble fields of endeavor, to the detriment of those other fields. But then, he says, the internet is truly insignificant on a global scale.
Well, that doesn't follow at all. How can there be so much money, and so many of the strongest minds of the present day involved in this whole internet thing.... and yet it still remain globally insignificant at the same time?
The people saying that, while on corporate property, on corporate time, using corporate equipment, one must play by the corporate rules are basically correct. But the people saying that this is (or has the potential to be) a major violation of personal privacy also have their points.
So what's the deal?
The deal is, I think this is a tool which can be appropriate in a few limited situations with appropriate forethought and control. But I don't trust the teeming masses of management to apply it that way, and I expect it will be used as a sledge hammer.
What are some appropriate uses? Look to the original article, expand on their examples, and qualify the usage. Like it or not, a lot of companies have some very important data and information-- sales databases, customer databases, source codes, proprietary technologies, even something as simple as employee salaries-- that they don't want tranferred out of the company.
It gets worse when you start thinking about government or defense-related companies, where concerns change from corporate security to the national security information of a nation.
Additionally, companies can get into serious troubles if their equipment is used maliciously or illegally, even if they had no idea what was happening, and did not sanction it. Consider a corporate machine being used to distribute or download illegally cracked game software. Now consider a firm in the United States working on a government contract, where an idiot employee does this. The company is now in serious trouble if this comes to light.
Some of these things are going to be easy to detect, others, very difficult. And it is hard to tell a corporate security dude that he has no right to police his own equipment.
However, I can't see any real reason to start subjecting all employees to this form of scrutiny. This, I think, should be reserved for the situations when there is already an indication that "something is up," and then used to clinch the case.
Issue of productivity are, of course, either red-herrings or plain old misconceptions. There are time honored ways to waste time at work that have nothing to do with computers-- reading a newspaper, lounging, excessive coffee-breaks or chats with co-workers, and just plain old malingering will always be with us. Any supervisor who would need to rely on this sort of ham-fisted, intrusive foolishness should himself be fired for incompetence. A good supervisor relies on non-automated metrics of productivity, not automated metrics of diversionary activities.
What this would resolve down to is a reason to fire someone. Dilbert manages to embarass the Pointy-Haired Boss too many times? Well, PHB downloads Dilbert's electronic records, discovers that he e-mails his mother once a week, and terminates him for mis-use of equipment. If it weren't, it would be someone else.
So, it's a trade-off: Is it really worth annoying your workers by making the assumption that they are all crooks, criminals, spies, and professional malingerers, just to catch the 1.5 percent that are?
I'm a little underwhelmed by the perceived attack on the natural rights of the Phillipine school children.
Point the first: These kids are supposed to be in school, going to school, or coming home from school, during the hours of the ban. I know we all agree that The Internet Is A Wonderful Thing, but so is a structured and regular education. That's part of how we in America invented the Internet in the first place-- a large body of mandatorily educated adults.
When someone can make a good demonstration that a child sitting unsupervised on the Internet for eight hours a day will be more aptly prepared for the complexities of adult life, I'll rethink my position.
I smell sacred cow-burger because this involves the Internet.
Point the second: This is not entirely different from passing laws to keep your kid out of video arcades during the day.
Point the Third: We are talking about children, here. It is accepted legal policy (and just plain good sense) that children by their natures are not the most qualified individuals to plot the courses of their own lives. We can quibble about statistical outliers, special circumstances, and whether the cutoff should be 14, 16, 18, or 21 years, but the sense of it remains.
Therefore, children do not have the same spectrum of rights as adults. Among other things, they are told to get their kiesters in school, not to drink, not to do drugs, not to gamble, not to drive automobiles, and so forth.
When they become adults, their status and spectrum of rights change accordingly.
Point the Fourth: The only way this law could be improved is to split the fine between the legal gaurdians (to keep the parents' responsibilities uppermost in their minds) and the shopkeepers (to prevent them from enticing the kids with impunity.) That, and maybe apply the same fines (if they are not already) to comic book shops, video arcades, movie theaters, and wherever else Philippine kids spent their truancy hours, these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Why can't you create your own boom?
Who or what is stopping you?
Are you one of those people who assumes that economics is a zero sum game? That the only way I can accrue wealth is to take wealth away from you or someone else?
Here's a helpful thought: Wealth can be created where there once was none, through a suitable application of intellect. So tell me again, why can't you make your own boom? Who prevents you?
Of course, he and I aren't going to the same splace, and we're certainly not using the same methods. So why exactly do we, by implication, both have to decide on the same destination and use the same methods to get there?
In a very real and very practical sense, how can we ever get 250,000,000 people (just to take the United States as an example) all to agree on the same location and the same methods? Does that not strike you as being completely contrary to the idea of Western style freedom in the first place, that we all have to go to the same place at the same time? How boring. How unimaginitive. How depressing, for 249,999,995 of us who aren't going where we want to go, but rather where you want to go.
And in reality, how tremendously error-prone a process. Western technological freedom works precisely because we are all free to run as many experiments as we are able to fund; because that process provides better solutions than only doing things one way.
And no one is forced to buy bigger and better anythings by the market as a whole. People buy new toys, new games, new televisions, new grills, and so forth, because they want them. You don't want them? Don't buy them. No one is forcing you to.
My first comment is that There Is No Problem. The author seems to think that all the bright people, everywhere, are wrapped up into computer and internet technologies as outlets for their creative outlets, technical and otherwise. This is, of course, simply not so. The internet is my hobby, but what I do for a living is high frequency analog electronics. Basically, specialized radios. And believe me, I know a very large number of people, all of whom are very intelligent, working in that field.
Keeping up with the scientific literature (and my old college contacts) I know perfectly well that there are tremendous numbers of very bright people working in physics, chemistry, biogenetics and mechanical engieering; composing music, writing books, and so forth.
I don't see an internet brain drain.
My second comment is that even if this were happening, There Would Still Be No Problem. There is money to be made in internet technologies, and many people are concentrating on internet technologies, because people want internet technologies. It's as simple as that. A hundred million people have made their hundred million individual choices and the net result has been the influx of hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars into that particular technology sector.
It seems somehow churlish to engage in what I consider to be a handwringing stream of thought about how much better other things might be if the internet weren't so nifty. This necessarily implies, despite the protestations that "this is all speculation," that the author has a better feel for how the money and talents of hundreds of millions of people (here in the US, in Europe, in Canada, in Australia, etc) should be deployed, than those hundreds fo millions of people.
Postrel would probably class this as a stasist, technocratic viewpoint. I think it's tinged with a bit of arrogance.
Are these decisions sometimes purely hedonistic? Yes, sometimes. And this leads to my third comment-- that the author apparently lacks a certain historical perspective. Why is the internet singled out for this "brain drain" commentary? Well, in fact, it isn't. Going beyond the original author, similar claims have been levied against other efforts-- including our fixation on automobiles, our attempts at space exploration, the movie and entertainment industry... all of it.
I see no difference between those claims, and this, all of them tinged with the ieda that the few or the one know better than the masses how to direct their interests.
My fourth comment, of course, is that this focus on the internet is most certainly not entirely hedonistic. In my profession, we are able to coordinate much larger projects than before, with comparatively smaller efforts, through internet technologies. The ability to lob design specifications-- and designs-- back and forth in seconds rather than in days makes our lives much simpler. The ability to through designs to foundries electronically also makes life easier.
Similar things happen, I'm sure, in all professions. The easy manipulation of data over large distances is, to use a military science metaphor, a force multiplier. What that means is that, used properly, long distance data manipulation makes other large scale endeavors easier. This includes the design of better cars, the exploration and exploitation of space, feeding the poor, and anything else we might think of.
Finally, the author seems to want to have his cake and eat it, too. First, the internet is causing a great sucking brain drain from other more noble fields of endeavor, to the detriment of those other fields. But then, he says, the internet is truly insignificant on a global scale.
Well, that doesn't follow at all. How can there be so much money, and so many of the strongest minds of the present day involved in this whole internet thing.... and yet it still remain globally insignificant at the same time?
One or the other, please.
Not both.
The people saying that, while on corporate property, on corporate time, using corporate equipment, one must play by the corporate rules are basically correct. But the people saying that this is (or has the potential to be) a major violation of personal privacy also have their points.
So what's the deal?
The deal is, I think this is a tool which can be appropriate in a few limited situations with appropriate forethought and control. But I don't trust the teeming masses of management to apply it that way, and I expect it will be used as a sledge hammer.
What are some appropriate uses? Look to the original article, expand on their examples, and qualify the usage. Like it or not, a lot of companies have some very important data and information-- sales databases, customer databases, source codes, proprietary technologies, even something as simple as employee salaries-- that they don't want tranferred out of the company.
It gets worse when you start thinking about government or defense-related companies, where concerns change from corporate security to the national security information of a nation.
Additionally, companies can get into serious troubles if their equipment is used maliciously or illegally, even if they had no idea what was happening, and did not sanction it. Consider a corporate machine being used to distribute or download illegally cracked game software. Now consider a firm in the United States working on a government contract, where an idiot employee does this. The company is now in serious trouble if this comes to light.
Some of these things are going to be easy to detect, others, very difficult. And it is hard to tell a corporate security dude that he has no right to police his own equipment.
However, I can't see any real reason to start subjecting all employees to this form of scrutiny. This, I think, should be reserved for the situations when there is already an indication that "something is up," and then used to clinch the case.
Issue of productivity are, of course, either red-herrings or plain old misconceptions. There are time honored ways to waste time at work that have nothing to do with computers-- reading a newspaper, lounging, excessive coffee-breaks or chats with co-workers, and just plain old malingering will always be with us. Any supervisor who would need to rely on this sort of ham-fisted, intrusive foolishness should himself be fired for incompetence. A good supervisor relies on non-automated metrics of productivity, not automated metrics of diversionary activities.
What this would resolve down to is a reason to fire someone. Dilbert manages to embarass the Pointy-Haired Boss too many times? Well, PHB downloads Dilbert's electronic records, discovers that he e-mails his mother once a week, and terminates him for mis-use of equipment. If it weren't, it would be someone else.
So, it's a trade-off: Is it really worth annoying your workers by making the assumption that they are all crooks, criminals, spies, and professional malingerers, just to catch the 1.5 percent that are?
I doubt it.
Point the first: These kids are supposed to be in school, going to school, or coming home from school, during the hours of the ban. I know we all agree that The Internet Is A Wonderful Thing, but so is a structured and regular education. That's part of how we in America invented the Internet in the first place-- a large body of mandatorily educated adults.
When someone can make a good demonstration that a child sitting unsupervised on the Internet for eight hours a day will be more aptly prepared for the complexities of adult life, I'll rethink my position.
I smell sacred cow-burger because this involves the Internet.
Point the second: This is not entirely different from passing laws to keep your kid out of video arcades during the day.
Point the Third: We are talking about children, here. It is accepted legal policy (and just plain good sense) that children by their natures are not the most qualified individuals to plot the courses of their own lives. We can quibble about statistical outliers, special circumstances, and whether the cutoff should be 14, 16, 18, or 21 years, but the sense of it remains.
Therefore, children do not have the same spectrum of rights as adults. Among other things, they are told to get their kiesters in school, not to drink, not to do drugs, not to gamble, not to drive automobiles, and so forth.
When they become adults, their status and spectrum of rights change accordingly.
Point the Fourth: The only way this law could be improved is to split the fine between the legal gaurdians (to keep the parents' responsibilities uppermost in their minds) and the shopkeepers (to prevent them from enticing the kids with impunity.) That, and maybe apply the same fines (if they are not already) to comic book shops, video arcades, movie theaters, and wherever else Philippine kids spent their truancy hours, these days.