True, this is one of the reasons. But so what? There are some things that private individuals can advocte that the government can't. I don't want the government making religious decisions. It's okay if private individuals do it.
I cannot fathom why leftists in this country can't bring themselves to support vouchers. Just bizarre.
I do support them. I think that the other anarchist leftists aren't that well organized. Big surprise there, you know?
Ignore for a moment that the fact that what Jones is doing is illegal and violates copyright law as the article described.
Frankly, a bunch of private citizens doing as they wish is hardly comparable to the state-sanctioned insane paranoia of the McCarthy-era, but who needs facts? It's always about imposing your beliefs on other people - you just like the ones being imposed right now, so you don't care.
As long as they're fair, and include discrimination from all sides, not just the left, I think it's a good idea.
Except that Jones is clearly not going after any conservatives.
A while back, Republicans tried to establish as unquesiotnable fact that the media was "liberal." The major media outlets are conservative on quite a few economic issues. They may be middle of the road on social issues. But Republicans have taken to denouncing anything which doesn't unquestioningly support the Republican party, whether true or false, as being "liberal." The media is liberal for not supporting Bush and Bush is liberal when he screws up. This is used as the groundwork to justify seriously slanted, factually inaccurate pundits to 'balance things' and 'fight back.' The easiest call to battle is "we're being attacked." I'm worried that Jones is going to be selective in how he decides if someone is 'radical' and not nearly as even handed as he claims. If Jones was attacking professors for being factually inaccurate, it would be a different story.
Do you think that they're going to be going after the economics professors for teaching 'conservative' economics? Or will they go after the sociology teacher who says that the CIA supported torture in El Salvador (which it did) calling him 'unpatriotic'?
Just discarding the idea that students are discriminated against because of their political views
I'd agree it's a problem if people are given bad grades simply for their political views. And they may be. But this is not what Andrew Jones is going after. He's going after course content.
A student still needs to be able to demonstrate that they learned the material, whether or not they agree with it. The hall mark of a liberal education ( in the non-political sense of the word) is being able to understand arguements which you don't agree with. Whether you agree with evolution or not, you have to comprehend the argument being made or you flunk the class.
If Jones can demonstrate factual inaccuracy, that's another story. But it seems clear so far that he's just interested in trying to marginalize opinions different than his own. He's pretending to be even-handed, but there's every indication that he has no intention of 'outing' conservative professors. In the conservative view, if you put a book about a guy dating a girl in the school library, that's normal. But if you put a book about a guy dating a guy in the school library, that's political and pushing an agenda. They're both political. Outside of math and science, you're not going to be able to separate your work from some political perspective. At best, you can include multiple viewpoints. And even which of those is 'political.' Is someone obligated to present the Nazi view of feminism in order to provide a sense of balance? Tenure is intended to protect people from the political correctness of the moment.
But it's arguable whether people who dislike physical closeness are really benefiting the human gene pool at all to begin with.
Okay, so make the argument. I've known some brilliant people who were agorophobic or otherwise disinclined to social interaction.
People who like 'physical closeness' are more likely to be philanderers and rapists, while the shy quiet folks I've known are more likely to remain faithful simply because they don't have such an overpowering need for social interaction.
I don't know where you get the 'antisocial = inferior' equation. Of course, evolution is not a moral good or evil. A trait can be socially good (such as fidelity) and still be disadvantageous.
Don't you think it's a little deeper? Japanese write stories about mobile suits and artificial intelligences being used by humans to fight aliens. Americans write stories about humans fighting against machines.
In American, machines are the enemy ever since John Henry. In Japan, they are a logical extension of humanity.
I wonder if it has anything to do with different labor relations in the two countries.
They've found a solution for the speed of light in copper or fibre? Quick, somebody tell NASA:)
The speed of light in fiber is the solution. The center I worked for didn't rely on copper cables. It used a dedicated, undersea fiberoptic pipe that went from the Philippines to Los Angeles.
The circumference of the earth is 24,901.55 miles at the equator. Lets assume LA to the Philippines is about half that distance or 12,400 miles. Light through cable can move close to the speed of light in a vacuume. So ignoring for a moment things like the time to encode and decode the signal, the time a packet takes to travel from Makati to LA is.06 seconds. After that, it's like a call in the US. A call center in the Philippines is functionaly identical to a VOIP based center stateside.
Or maybe you were just joking around and I went and took you seriously. lol.
For one thing, they can't hold a telephone conversation without various degrees of annoying lag.
This is a technical issue which has been resolved by some centers though not others. It's not insurmountable, and some call centers have already delt with it.
The other thing they can't do is relate to life in the USA - Some guy that makes $100 per month in a phone sweat shop can't possibly give me any kind of meaningful advice about any consumer products other than maybe cheap food like bannanas, tripe, fish sauce, and rice
You've obviously never been to an overseas call center. I'll bet you've never been overseas. I've worked in a Philippine call center (setting up an LMS and training the trainers to use it.) It was nicer than any of the corporate environments I've worked in in the staes. Your perceptions of Philippinos and Philippine culture are off base. Didn't you read my earlier post? A lot of people in the Philippines have been to the US, spent time in California, or have relatives here. Half the people I talked to in the country had relatives in the states. A lot of Philippine doctors come here and work as nurses, in particular, till they can get medically certified. Others offer in-home medical assistance. Things are less expensive in foreign countries, particularly if you live outside the city. The biggest real difference between the Philippines and the states was that most of the people in the center didn't have cars and commuted to work. A person can afford some luxury goods if they're willing to commute, though. Philippine call centers aren't 'sweat shops' any more than American call centers are. On the contrary, most of the folks in Philippine call centers have college educations. Some of the trainers I worked with had Masters degrees (admittedly this isn't quite as impressive as it would be in the states, since Philippine public education ends at 16. Two years of college is rougly equal to an American high school diploma.)
But provided that a person is willing to live in the countryside and make an hour long commute to and from work each day, sometimes at odd hours, they made a decent living. I went to the houses of the people who worked in my call center (for various parties). They had TVs and karaoke machines. They were technically and culturally capable of booking flight reservations and similar work. I don't know why you want them to give you advice about consumer products. But if it's their job, they can be trained to do it as capably as Americans could be. It's just a matter of whether the company is willing to pay for the training. And that training will cost less in the Philippines than in the states. The top level trainers were well off, owned computers, and had tech skills, etc. If you're not getting the service you want, ask to elevate the call to a superior trainer. Many had been to the states, had wealthy parents and were not particularly worse off than Americans were. If you have money in a third world country, it goes a long way. Do YOU have a housekeeper? Some of my coworkers did. Overseas call centers are not like in the states where you can only hire people who are in school or at the bottom of the pay scale. In the Philippines, working in a call center is a middle class job, so you can hire more intelligent candidates.
The Chinese have been a consumer economy for thousands of years and have been able to evolve past us in business practices
I'm curious what you mean by that? I didn't really see their busienss practices as being very efficient. They're just now getting the large supermarket-style stores. They lack the standards that would make buildings safe. They're recovering from their flirtation with communism and have only recently been allowed to own land. The people I met were incredibly resourceful and hard working, but their ability to manage large organizations seemed abysmal. There wasn't proper planning or sharing of information between management and employees. Calendars are much less frequently a cultural artifact in China. On many streets, you'd see a row of small shops, each selling almost the same thing, each operated by a sole proprietor, each undercutting the other. It seems remarkably inefficient, but the low value of manual labor makes inefficiencies like that possible for now.
If there was one thing that gave me any glimmer of hope regarding the US ability to compete with China (aside from the fact that their quality is still, for now, in the shitter), it was the superiority of our ability to organize and manage, as opposed to doing any function associated with manual or professional labor.
don't forget these companies are incorperated by the government to offer us a service when we think that service isn't valuable we can dissolve them.....Or just let them go out of business. Unless you're saying that Circut City is not just not a good place to shop, but is actively colluding to maintain their position in the market? (I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, I was just tring to clarify here.)
But I have one question for you, did you ever develop brand loyalty there?
I did actually. Or retailer loyalty, which I guess is the same thing in this case.
The Chinese view towards business is a little different than the American view. We view business in terms of professional obligations. Friendships are important in the US. Friendships and connections (guanxi) are even more central in China than in the US. There's more blurring of the line between professional and private. The problem with this, of course, is corruption and false friends. But sometimes it works for the benefit of both parties. Supposedly, once you have a good friendship with a businessman they can be more loyal than Americans who are more likely to switch based on price, quality, etc. Of course, it was hard for me to really appreciate this part of Chinese society given my language skills and brief time in the country, but there were a few instances where I think I caught a glimpse of what it was all about.
Anyway, I bought a ton of handmade art while I was there. I probably spent half my salary (3000 yuan) just on ~$10 hand-painted wall scrolls. I bought them at this little enclave where people regularly gathered to resell art from the provinces. Some of the merchants would try and cheat me of course, trying to sell me prints with a little paint on them and telling me they were paintings, etc. My Chinese friend would give me hand signals, letting me know that the art wasn't genuine and I could get it for a much lower price than what the guy I was haggling with was asking for. In return, I gave him a ton of business. When I was shopping at his store, I didn't have to haggle. He would give me a fair price, right off the bat. There were even times I offered him more than his asking price and he wouldn't take it.
I also had a teacher friend of mine who had essentially made a business of being a broker of foreigners, in a sense (in Nanjing, the demand for American English teachers was far less than the supply, it seemed.) I helped him with some of his freelance teaching (technically a violation of both our teaching contracts) and he got us on TV. (that was probably as much a benefit for him as for us) I also got a trip to his home province, where I was treated like a guest. I think he wanted help from me visiting the states. To be honest, I felt a little uncomfortable with this type of relationship, and some Chinese people did too.
Fei Xiaotong, the father of Chinese Sociologoy, discusses this mentality breifly in the book whose title is alternately translated "From the Soil" \ "Rural China" when he describes how pesants would travel long distances to sell their crops sometimes, so that they could deal without emotions. They couldn't ask a good price from a friend.
If you don't mind me asking, when did you go to China?
What can an American do that a Filipino can't? What does it matter if the person taking your call is 300 miles away or 3000? It's racism to think that a foreigner can't do the same job as an American, given appropriate training.
Many Filipinos have spent time in the states and understand American culture. Unlike tech savvy Indian call centers Philippine call center agents have American accents.
While the pool of Filipinos with good English skills not yet employed in call centers is starting to run dry, the centers that are already established are sure to remain, and will continue to devalue American call center labor long into the future.
Chances are, you're a process person. (A simplification of Kirsey temperment) Process people are, by far, the minority of the market.
Quite probably they're even a minority in the tech market, though they'd proportionally more numerous there. Tactics which don't work on you (or me) may work quite well applied to other people.
Would you prefer if a company pays just as much to create two processors, but hobbles one to make it slower and charges less for it to satisfy a low-end market.
From the company's standpoint, the problem is not what they're doing, but the fact that the process is so obvious to you. After all, you're saying you'd be less likely to buy an item simply because it has a rebate attached to it, even if the price was the same.
You can't effectively immunize against HIV, for example, because it's always changing.
True, but HIV does respond well to chemotherapy as do most highly mutagenic viruses. If HIV didn't have a resivoir somewhere in the body it could probably be wiped out by chemotherapy.
Only the coat changes. The portion of DNA which codes for reverse transcriptase changes rapidly.
Frankly, I don't understand how they can use anything except PCR to test for the presence of HIV. A Western Blot test is often used, I know, but that seems like it would have a hideously high false negative rate, even if it was adjusted to have a high false positive rate with a false positive followed up with a DNA test.
True, but if I were a virus writer I'd include some code from MS Word in my virus. Then perhaps the AV program would attack software on a person's computer.
Companies want to make as much money as possible. (duh)
Lets say person A is willing to buy a particular hard drive for $20. Person B is willing to spend $25.
If you set the price at $20, you don't make as much money as you could. If you set the price at $25, you lose a customer.
Ideally, you get each person to pay the most that they're willing to pay. Rebates help accomplish this. A person who makes a high salary will be willing to pay more for an item, and they'll value their time more. They won't send in the rebate.
A person who values their time less and makes less money will take the time to fill in the rebate.
To put it another way;
When I lived in China, you had to haggle over the price of most goods. If you sat there and haggled for half an hour, you could get the price down. A person who made more money wouldn't see the value in haggling for half an hour for a few quarters of a price reduction, and would pay a higher price just to get the sale done. Rebates accomplish the same thing, without requiring any inefficiency on the part of the seller.
I'm sure there are other reasons as well, but this would seem to be one use for a (deliberately inconvenient) rebate.
If you were one of my students I'd gladly fail you.
That's sad, really. Maybe you should consider gladly rechecking your work before criticizing someone? Seems like someone misses not being able to look up their answers in the back of the book.
I hate unions because they too often wind up protecting people like you, when they should be working to kick you out on your ass.
I promise I won't laugh too much.
You seem to be suffering from delusions of adequacy.
There is certainly a demand for good p2p video to support live distance learning.
Imagine the cost savings of conducting training online as opposed to flying a few executives to a central location to get trained.
Such training would need to be supplimented by other resources, but as someone who has done a lot of e-learning and technical training, I can tell you I've been specifically asked for technology such as this to support some of our trainers.
there is no accountability when someone anonymously prints something clearly libelous against a private party.
IP addresses are tracked on wikipedia. He can go after his accuser if he wants to. Publications can say 'according to so and so... xxx' and be reporting the news rather than committing libel or acting with malice.
In the above quote, you stated "can." What I'm getting at is that this is the exception (or at least not the norm).
Are you saying that some introverts can be arrogant, but most are not? Or are you saying that an introvert will not be arrogant most of the time, while an extrovert may be? Your comment that introverts can 'play the extrovert game' leads me to believe you mean the second, which I don't agree with.
You're not getting my point.
Or perhaps I just disagree with it?
Try googling; introvert, "not shy"
You'll get a lot a lot of people making the statement "I'm introverted, but I'm not shy." What sense does that make if introversion is synonymous with shyness? These are self described introverts. Introversion, at least as a technical term from Jungian and Freudian psychology is not the same as shyness, though some people use it colloquially the same way because they can't tell the difference between someone who is introverted and someone who is shy. They tend to look the same from the outside, after all. This is similar to the 'hacker vs. cracker' debate. Programmars can distinguish the nuance between the two terms, but in the popular mind everyone who breaks into a computer is a 'hacker.' Computer people all look the same. I'm using a technical rather than a colloquial definition here, if that clears up anything.
If you're using 'introverted' as synonymous with 'shy' this debate is moot, of course. But given the context of this discussion ( the posted article used 'introvert' in the technical sense, after all, and not as meaning "shy" ) I assumed we'd be using a technical definition.
I'd also like to know how I'm using an odd definition of introvert.
It would seem, so far as I can tell, that you're using the more generic defintion of introvert as meaning "shy," as opposed to "someone who is oriented inwards towards their own thoughts rather than outwards towards people." That may not be true, but it's the only think of that would make your argument cohesive.
Introverts are not nessicarily shy except in a bastardized colloquial usage as expressed above. Neither does introversion equate to humility. Extroversion or introversion, at least in psychology, referes to focus - outwards on people or inwards on ideas.
I tend to test as a 'mesovert' on most tests I've taken, incidentally, though I was strongly introverted when I was younger. The better portion of my friends test as introverts. I hang around with language geeks and programmers rather than salespeople.
Extroverts focus on people, introverts focus on ideas. An arrogant introvert would have an inflated view of the rightness of his or her ideas compared to other people's. They would state things as fact that lacked proper support, which is quite common among academics. Academic standards may try to work against arrogance, force citation, etc. and the internalization of those standards can be a hedge against arrogance, but that doesn't mean you can't have an arrogant academic. This would be seen in the way that some academics would use "arguments from authority" to argue with non-academics, and make untennable assumptions.
I'm not saying "having an opinion is arrogant." I'm saying that a person may equate their opinion with fact as a result of arrogance, and that introversion will not protect them from this.
You can, of course, have humble extroverts who want to get along with everyone just as easily you can have arrogant introverts who see the people around them as dull or stupid.
Extroversion does not automatically equal arrogance, nor does introversion equate to humility. Go to a chess meet sometime, and you'll find plenty of introverts with an overbearing and arrogant attitude.
After all, proud being arrogant?!? Seriously.
Arrogance is usually defined as an excessive form of pride.
I'm not trying to 'prove a rule by using one person.' I'm saying that you're using an odd definition of 'introvert' and giving an example of how an introvert who I've known would assert their superiority, for illustrative purposes.
The extrovert is characteristically the active person who is most content when surrounded by people; carried to the neurotic extreme such behavior appears to constitute an irrational flight into society, where the extrovert's feelings are acted out. The introvert, on the other hand, is normally a contemplative individual who enjoys solitude and the inner life of ideas and the imagination. The extreme introvert's fantasies give him or her libidinal satisfactions and tend to become more meaningful to him than objective reality.
(Note that Jung, who invented the 'introvert' and 'extravert' (sic) labels uses the term 'libidinal' in a generic nonsexual sense, inconsistant with the mainstream Fruedian definition)
So the notion that an introvert would be passionate about the superiority of one idea over another or one thinker over another, including their own ideas, is exactly consistant with the definition of introversion. You don't think that there are some very introverted people who compete academically and intellectually and are proud of their success? It would be uncharacteristic of an introvert to run out and tell the world about their successes. It would not be uncharacteristic for them to tell an associate in a one-on-one environment, or similar controlled situation.
Introverts can be quite social in one-on-one situations or small groups of close friends. And they can be just as arrogant as extroverts.
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True, this is one of the reasons. But so what? There are some things that private individuals can advocte that the government can't. I don't want the government making religious decisions. It's okay if private individuals do it.
I cannot fathom why leftists in this country can't bring themselves to support vouchers. Just bizarre.
I do support them. I think that the other anarchist leftists aren't that well organized. Big surprise there, you know?
Ignore for a moment that the fact that what Jones is doing is illegal and violates copyright law as the article described.
Frankly, a bunch of private citizens doing as they wish is hardly comparable to the state-sanctioned insane paranoia of the McCarthy-era, but who needs facts? It's always about imposing your beliefs on other people - you just like the ones being imposed right now, so you don't care.
As long as they're fair, and include discrimination from all sides, not just the left, I think it's a good idea.
Except that Jones is clearly not going after any conservatives.
A while back, Republicans tried to establish as unquesiotnable fact that the media was "liberal."
The major media outlets are conservative on quite a few economic issues. They may be middle of the road on social issues. But Republicans have taken to denouncing anything which doesn't unquestioningly support the Republican party, whether true or false, as being "liberal." The media is liberal for not supporting Bush and Bush is liberal when he screws up. This is used as the groundwork to justify seriously slanted, factually inaccurate pundits to 'balance things' and 'fight back.' The easiest call to battle is "we're being attacked." I'm worried that Jones is going to be selective in how he decides if someone is 'radical' and not nearly as even handed as he claims. If Jones was attacking professors for being factually inaccurate, it would be a different story.
Do you think that they're going to be going after the economics professors for teaching 'conservative' economics? Or will they go after the sociology teacher who says that the CIA supported torture in El Salvador (which it did) calling him 'unpatriotic'?
Just discarding the idea that students are discriminated against because of their political views
I'd agree it's a problem if people are given bad grades simply for their political views. And they may be. But this is not what Andrew Jones is going after. He's going after course content.
A student still needs to be able to demonstrate that they learned the material, whether or not they agree with it. The hall mark of a liberal education ( in the non-political sense of the word) is being able to understand arguements which you don't agree with. Whether you agree with evolution or not, you have to comprehend the argument being made or you flunk the class.
If Jones can demonstrate factual inaccuracy, that's another story. But it seems clear so far that he's just interested in trying to marginalize opinions different than his own. He's pretending to be even-handed, but there's every indication that he has no intention of 'outing' conservative professors. In the conservative view, if you put a book about a guy dating a girl in the school library, that's normal. But if you put a book about a guy dating a guy in the school library, that's political and pushing an agenda. They're both political. Outside of math and science, you're not going to be able to separate your work from some political perspective. At best, you can include multiple viewpoints. And even which of those is 'political.' Is someone obligated to present the Nazi view of feminism in order to provide a sense of balance? Tenure is intended to protect people from the political correctness of the moment.
But it's arguable whether people who dislike physical closeness are really benefiting the human gene pool at all to begin with.
Okay, so make the argument. I've known some brilliant people who were agorophobic or otherwise disinclined to social interaction.
People who like 'physical closeness' are more likely to be philanderers and rapists, while the shy quiet folks I've known are more likely to remain faithful simply because they don't have such an overpowering need for social interaction.
I don't know where you get the 'antisocial = inferior' equation. Of course, evolution is not a moral good or evil. A trait can be socially good (such as fidelity) and still be disadvantageous.
Don't you think it's a little deeper? Japanese write stories about mobile suits and artificial intelligences being used by humans to fight aliens. Americans write stories about humans fighting against machines.
In American, machines are the enemy ever since John Henry. In Japan, they are a logical extension of humanity.
I wonder if it has anything to do with different labor relations in the two countries.
They've found a solution for the speed of light in copper or fibre? Quick, somebody tell NASA:)
.06 seconds. After that, it's like a call in the US. A call center in the Philippines is functionaly identical to a VOIP based center stateside.
The speed of light in fiber is the solution. The center I worked for didn't rely on copper cables. It used a dedicated, undersea fiberoptic pipe that went from the Philippines to Los Angeles.
The circumference of the earth is 24,901.55 miles at the equator. Lets assume LA to the Philippines is about half that distance or 12,400 miles. Light through cable can move close to the speed of light in a vacuume. So ignoring for a moment things like the time to encode and decode the signal, the time a packet takes to travel from Makati to LA is
Or maybe you were just joking around and I went and took you seriously. lol.
was far less than the supply, it seemed
grr... That should read 'far greater' not 'far less.'
For one thing, they can't hold a telephone conversation without various degrees of annoying lag.
This is a technical issue which has been resolved by some centers though not others. It's not insurmountable, and some call centers have already delt with it.
The other thing they can't do is relate to life in the USA - Some guy that makes $100 per month in a phone sweat shop can't possibly give me any kind of meaningful advice about any consumer products other than maybe cheap food like bannanas, tripe, fish sauce, and rice
You've obviously never been to an overseas call center. I'll bet you've never been overseas. I've worked in a Philippine call center (setting up an LMS and training the trainers to use it.) It was nicer than any of the corporate environments I've worked in in the staes. Your perceptions of Philippinos and Philippine culture are off base. Didn't you read my earlier post? A lot of people in the Philippines have been to the US, spent time in California, or have relatives here. Half the people I talked to in the country had relatives in the states. A lot of Philippine doctors come here and work as nurses, in particular, till they can get medically certified. Others offer in-home medical assistance. Things are less expensive in foreign countries, particularly if you live outside the city. The biggest real difference between the Philippines and the states was that most of the people in the center didn't have cars and commuted to work. A person can afford some luxury goods if they're willing to commute, though. Philippine call centers aren't 'sweat shops' any more than American call centers are. On the contrary, most of the folks in Philippine call centers have college educations. Some of the trainers I worked with had Masters degrees (admittedly this isn't quite as impressive as it would be in the states, since Philippine public education ends at 16. Two years of college is rougly equal to an American high school diploma.)
But provided that a person is willing to live in the countryside and make an hour long commute to and from work each day, sometimes at odd hours, they made a decent living. I went to the houses of the people who worked in my call center (for various parties). They had TVs and karaoke machines. They were technically and culturally capable of booking flight reservations and similar work. I don't know why you want them to give you advice about consumer products. But if it's their job, they can be trained to do it as capably as Americans could be. It's just a matter of whether the company is willing to pay for the training. And that training will cost less in the Philippines than in the states. The top level trainers were well off, owned computers, and had tech skills, etc. If you're not getting the service you want, ask to elevate the call to a superior trainer. Many had been to the states, had wealthy parents and were not particularly worse off than Americans were. If you have money in a third world country, it goes a long way. Do YOU have a housekeeper? Some of my coworkers did. Overseas call centers are not like in the states where you can only hire people who are in school or at the bottom of the pay scale. In the Philippines, working in a call center is a middle class job, so you can hire more intelligent candidates.
The Chinese have been a consumer economy for thousands of years and have been able to evolve past us in business practices
....Or just let them go out of business. Unless you're saying that Circut City is not just not a good place to shop, but is actively colluding to maintain their position in the market? (I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, I was just tring to clarify here.)
I'm curious what you mean by that? I didn't really see their busienss practices as being very efficient. They're just now getting the large supermarket-style stores. They lack the standards that would make buildings safe. They're recovering from their flirtation with communism and have only recently been allowed to own land. The people I met were incredibly resourceful and hard working, but their ability to manage large organizations seemed abysmal. There wasn't proper planning or sharing of information between management and employees. Calendars are much less frequently a cultural artifact in China. On many streets, you'd see a row of small shops, each selling almost the same thing, each operated by a sole proprietor, each undercutting the other. It seems remarkably inefficient, but the low value of manual labor makes inefficiencies like that possible for now.
If there was one thing that gave me any glimmer of hope regarding the US ability to compete with China (aside from the fact that their quality is still, for now, in the shitter), it was the superiority of our ability to organize and manage, as opposed to doing any function associated with manual or professional labor.
don't forget these companies are incorperated by the government to offer us a service when we think that service isn't valuable we can dissolve them.
But I have one question for you, did you ever develop brand loyalty there?
I did actually. Or retailer loyalty, which I guess is the same thing in this case.
The Chinese view towards business is a little different than the American view. We view business in terms of professional obligations. Friendships are important in the US. Friendships and connections (guanxi) are even more central in China than in the US. There's more blurring of the line between professional and private. The problem with this, of course, is corruption and false friends. But sometimes it works for the benefit of both parties. Supposedly, once you have a good friendship with a businessman they can be more loyal than Americans who are more likely to switch based on price, quality, etc. Of course, it was hard for me to really appreciate this part of Chinese society given my language skills and brief time in the country, but there were a few instances where I think I caught a glimpse of what it was all about.
Anyway, I bought a ton of handmade art while I was there. I probably spent half my salary (3000 yuan) just on ~$10 hand-painted wall scrolls. I bought them at this little enclave where people regularly gathered to resell art from the provinces. Some of the merchants would try and cheat me of course, trying to sell me prints with a little paint on them and telling me they were paintings, etc. My Chinese friend would give me hand signals, letting me know that the art wasn't genuine and I could get it for a much lower price than what the guy I was haggling with was asking for. In return, I gave him a ton of business. When I was shopping at his store, I didn't have to haggle. He would give me a fair price, right off the bat. There were even times I offered him more than his asking price and he wouldn't take it.
I also had a teacher friend of mine who had essentially made a business of being a broker of foreigners, in a sense (in Nanjing, the demand for American English teachers was far less than the supply, it seemed.) I helped him with some of his freelance teaching (technically a violation of both our teaching contracts) and he got us on TV. (that was probably as much a benefit for him as for us) I also got a trip to his home province, where I was treated like a guest. I think he wanted help from me visiting the states. To be honest, I felt a little uncomfortable with this type of relationship, and some Chinese people did too.
Fei Xiaotong, the father of Chinese Sociologoy, discusses this mentality breifly in the book whose title is alternately translated "From the Soil" \ "Rural China" when he describes how pesants would travel long distances to sell their crops sometimes, so that they could deal without emotions. They couldn't ask a good price from a friend.
If you don't mind me asking, when did you go to China?
What can an American do that a Filipino can't? What does it matter if the person taking your call is 300 miles away or 3000? It's racism to think that a foreigner can't do the same job as an American, given appropriate training.
Many Filipinos have spent time in the states and understand American culture. Unlike tech savvy Indian call centers Philippine call center agents have American accents.
While the pool of Filipinos with good English skills not yet employed in call centers is starting to run dry, the centers that are already established are sure to remain, and will continue to devalue American call center labor long into the future.
Chances are, you're a process person. (A simplification of Kirsey temperment) Process people are, by far, the minority of the market.
Quite probably they're even a minority in the tech market, though they'd proportionally more numerous there.
Tactics which don't work on you (or me) may work quite well applied to other people.
Would you prefer if a company pays just as much to create two processors, but hobbles one to make it slower and charges less for it to satisfy a low-end market.
From the company's standpoint, the problem is not what they're doing, but the fact that the process is so obvious to you. After all, you're saying you'd be less likely to buy an item simply because it has a rebate attached to it, even if the price was the same.
Look at the post I was replying to;
If you were one of my students I'd gladly fail you. Try it in a calculator
800,000 divided by 200,000,000, It's 0.004%. Feel like coming back and studying grade school math under me? I promise I won't laugh too much.
I think that's a great idea. I doubt the Slashdot Editors would have the balls to do it, but I think it would be wonderful.
Of course, anyone who consistantly identifies dupes is probably spending too much time on Slashdot.
and we can talk to their robot telephone operator.
no no no, that's after they have your money.
You can't effectively immunize against HIV, for example, because it's always changing.
True, but HIV does respond well to chemotherapy as do most highly mutagenic viruses. If HIV didn't have a resivoir somewhere in the body it could probably be wiped out by chemotherapy.
Only the coat changes. The portion of DNA which codes for reverse transcriptase changes rapidly.
Frankly, I don't understand how they can use anything except PCR to test for the presence of HIV. A Western Blot test is often used, I know, but that seems like it would have a hideously high false negative rate, even if it was adjusted to have a high false positive rate with a false positive followed up with a DNA test.
Anyone care to enlighten me?
True, but if I were a virus writer I'd include some code from MS Word in my virus. Then perhaps the AV program would attack software on a person's computer.
Um... I think you replied to the wrong comment.
I'm surprised noone's mentioned differential pricing yet.
Companies want to make as much money as possible. (duh)
Lets say person A is willing to buy a particular hard drive for $20.
Person B is willing to spend $25.
If you set the price at $20, you don't make as much money as you could.
If you set the price at $25, you lose a customer.
Ideally, you get each person to pay the most that they're willing to pay.
Rebates help accomplish this. A person who makes a high salary will be willing to pay more for an item, and they'll value their time more. They won't send in the rebate.
A person who values their time less and makes less money will take the time to fill in the rebate.
To put it another way;
When I lived in China, you had to haggle over the price of most goods. If you sat there and haggled for half an hour, you could get the price down. A person who made more money wouldn't see the value in haggling for half an hour for a few quarters of a price reduction, and would pay a higher price just to get the sale done. Rebates accomplish the same thing, without requiring any inefficiency on the part of the seller.
I'm sure there are other reasons as well, but this would seem to be one use for a (deliberately inconvenient) rebate.
millions of people on welfare depend on taxpayers.
Welfare is less than 1% of the federal budget.
Though I assume you were just trolling, or you'd post with a username.
.004 = .4%
If you were one of my students I'd gladly fail you.
That's sad, really. Maybe you should consider gladly rechecking your work before criticizing someone? Seems like someone misses not being able to look up their answers in the back of the book.
I hate unions because they too often wind up protecting people like you, when they should be working to kick you out on your ass.
I promise I won't laugh too much.
You seem to be suffering from delusions of adequacy.
There is certainly a demand for good p2p video to support live distance learning.
Imagine the cost savings of conducting training online as opposed to flying a few executives to a central location to get trained.
Such training would need to be supplimented by other resources, but as someone who has done a lot of e-learning and technical training, I can tell you I've been specifically asked for technology such as this to support some of our trainers.
there is no accountability when someone anonymously prints something clearly libelous against a private party.
IP addresses are tracked on wikipedia. He can go after his accuser if he wants to. Publications can say 'according to so and so... xxx' and be reporting the news rather than committing libel or acting with malice.
Maybe a lot of techies are Jews?
Happy Hannuka. Merry Christmas. Cheerful Winter Solstice and a culturally enriching Kwaanza to you.
In the above quote, you stated "can." What I'm getting at is that this is the exception (or at least not the norm).
Are you saying that some introverts can be arrogant, but most are not? Or are you saying that an introvert will not be arrogant most of the time, while an extrovert may be? Your comment that introverts can 'play the extrovert game' leads me to believe you mean the second, which I don't agree with.
You're not getting my point.
Or perhaps I just disagree with it?
Try googling; introvert, "not shy"
You'll get a lot a lot of people making the statement "I'm introverted, but I'm not shy."
What sense does that make if introversion is synonymous with shyness? These are self described introverts. Introversion, at least as a technical term from Jungian and Freudian psychology is not the same as shyness, though some people use it colloquially the same way because they can't tell the difference between someone who is introverted and someone who is shy. They tend to look the same from the outside, after all. This is similar to the 'hacker vs. cracker' debate. Programmars can distinguish the nuance between the two terms, but in the popular mind everyone who breaks into a computer is a 'hacker.' Computer people all look the same. I'm using a technical rather than a colloquial definition here, if that clears up anything.
If you're using 'introverted' as synonymous with 'shy' this debate is moot, of course. But given the context of this discussion ( the posted article used 'introvert' in the technical sense, after all, and not as meaning "shy" ) I assumed we'd be using a technical definition.
I'd also like to know how I'm using an odd definition of introvert.
It would seem, so far as I can tell, that you're using the more generic defintion of introvert as meaning "shy," as opposed to "someone who is oriented inwards towards their own thoughts rather than outwards towards people." That may not be true, but it's the only think of that would make your argument cohesive.
Introverts are not nessicarily shy except in a bastardized colloquial usage as expressed above. Neither does introversion equate to humility. Extroversion or introversion, at least in psychology, referes to focus - outwards on people or inwards on ideas.
I tend to test as a 'mesovert' on most tests I've taken, incidentally, though I was strongly introverted when I was younger. The better portion of my friends test as introverts. I hang around with language geeks and programmers rather than salespeople.
Extroverts focus on people, introverts focus on ideas. An arrogant introvert would have an inflated view of the rightness of his or her ideas compared to other people's. They would state things as fact that lacked proper support, which is quite common among academics. Academic standards may try to work against arrogance, force citation, etc. and the internalization of those standards can be a hedge against arrogance, but that doesn't mean you can't have an arrogant academic. This would be seen in the way that some academics would use "arguments from authority" to argue with non-academics, and make untennable assumptions.
I'm not saying "having an opinion is arrogant." I'm saying that a person may equate their opinion with fact as a result of arrogance, and that introversion will not protect them from this.
You can, of course, have humble extroverts who want to get along with everyone just as easily you can have arrogant introverts who see the people around them as dull or stupid.
Extroversion does not automatically equal arrogance, nor does introversion equate to humility. Go to a chess meet sometime, and you'll find plenty of introverts with an overbearing and arrogant attitude.
After all, proud being arrogant?!? Seriously.
Arrogance is usually defined as an excessive form of pride.
I'm not trying to 'prove a rule by using one person.' I'm saying that you're using an odd definition of 'introvert' and giving an example of how an introvert who I've known would assert their superiority, for illustrative purposes.
from http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/sci/A0818058.html
The extrovert is characteristically the active person who is most content when surrounded by people; carried to the neurotic extreme such behavior appears to constitute an irrational flight into society, where the extrovert's feelings are acted out. The introvert, on the other hand, is normally a contemplative individual who enjoys solitude and the inner life of ideas and the imagination. The extreme introvert's fantasies give him or her libidinal satisfactions and tend to become more meaningful to him than objective reality.
(Note that Jung, who invented the 'introvert' and 'extravert' (sic) labels uses the term 'libidinal' in a generic nonsexual sense, inconsistant with the mainstream Fruedian definition)
So the notion that an introvert would be passionate about the superiority of one idea over another or one thinker over another, including their own ideas, is exactly consistant with the definition of introversion. You don't think that there are some very introverted people who compete academically and intellectually and are proud of their success? It would be uncharacteristic of an introvert to run out and tell the world about their successes. It would not be uncharacteristic for them to tell an associate in a one-on-one environment, or similar controlled situation.
Introverts can be quite social in one-on-one situations or small groups of close friends. And they can be just as arrogant as extroverts.