But India is incredibly protectionist when it comes to its job market. Look at the Bophal chemical disaster. The Indian government decided that Bophal should replace all its workers with Indian natives. They mandated it. The Indian workers weren't skilled enough and a huge environmental disaseter resulted. Why did India make that mandate? It wanted its people to have jobs. Lots of countries do this. NAFTA is about removing a lot of these protections.
Middle America thinks free trade is good when they're told to think it's good. They realize that they were lied to when they lose their jobs.
Besides, this isn't some moral thing. Governments should try and do what's best for their citizens (not just major businesses and certainly not the citizens of other countries). If they fail this, they're non-representative (i.e. corrupt)
I just got back from China. My standard of living, making ~$500 a month was pretty descent. That's about average for China, and I could have made about 40% more if I put in more time. Of course, food is cheap there because the laborers have next to nothing, so there's a wider range of incomes. Many people make subsistence wages and live with their parents till they get married, etc. Sometimes afterwards. So goods are cheaper and wages can be lower and still be good. But you don't want to be in the bottom 30% in one of these countries, or you get treated like homeless people do in the U.S.
Still, considering India has passed laws to protect their labor markets, it would be fair to retaliate and do the same. Of course, the government serves corporations, rather than labor so that isn't going to happen.
>do you think any country with that high an >unemployment rate would ever want foreigners to >come and take away their jobs?
I don't think Americans want foreigners coming in to take away their jobs either. But large businesses like the competition created by work visas, immigration, and offshoring because it forces down wages.
That should have been x-33. I did a little checking up and apparently the x-33 was succeeded by the x-34, but both were scrapped due to problems and cost overruns. The decision was 'internal' to NASA and was not based in Washington. Lockheed, which was part of a joint venture on the deal, went ahead and used the technology to make its own single stage to orbit vehicle, the VentureStar. So that takes care of that. My apologies for the outdated information.
I know I'm going to take a lot of flak for saying this, but it seems NASA is misguided. The way things work, first you build a prototype, then you develop the prototype. The shuttle program was the prototype, the proof that we could build a reusable space craft. The follow up should have been focusing on a way to make space flight cheap, based on what we'd learned. NASA shouldn't be planning a mission to Mars. It should be working on technology to make leaving the Earth's atmosphere cheap enough that it can be done recreationally and industrially by a variety of research labs, companies and private citizens.
People used to say 'if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we...' fill in the blank with the cure for your favorite social ill.
The answer, of course, was that we had the technology to put a handful of people on the moon, but we didn't have the technology to put a thousand or even a hundred people on the moon. For that, NASA needs to change gears. And they haven't.
Sagan's book "Contact" had an interesting bit about the psychological effect of having the wealthiest people in the world seeing, in person, the earth as a single, blue, borderless orb.
Why can't we work on mass drivers, revive the X11 and concentrate on making space flight a more accessable reality?
PCR allowed "DNA fingerprinting" to be useful by making DNA replication cheap so that you only needed a follicle or a drop of blood. Theoretically, you could have done DNA fingerprinting and DNA replication before that, but it would have been very expensive because you'd use up a lot of expensive polymerase in the process. So it didn't happen. This is one of the most underappreciated lessons from the history of science. The technological breakthroughs that matter most are the ones which make technology cheap enough for everyone to afford.
Take care of this, and Mars missons, when we're ready for them, will be far less costly. If there's water there now, there will still be water there in a decade or two. Not much is likely to change until Mars' moon crashes into the surface, but we still have a few decades before that happens.
It's said that Einstein got a "C" in math once. Of course, I'd be willing to believe that a Jewish kid getting a "C" in a class that he should have been excellent in might have more to do with an anti-semetic teacher than young Albert's skill, but that's just speculation on my part.
I don't think that the purpose of this particular meme is to feel better than Einsten. It's about not taking criticism and failure too personally. 'Just because you failed, don't give up hope. Some of the most successful people in their field have encountered the same setbacks and criticism that you have.'
A related (and true, to my knowledge) story is how the creator of Federal Express pitched his idea of a centralized sorting system for packages to his college professor for an assignment. He got a "D" on it. The professor thought it was ridiculous. He then went and turned his idea into the Federal Express we know today.
Conversely, if a treatment has an 80% chance of working, and 50% of the people who receive it from a particular doctor die, then you have a problem. This situation is one that is not systematically addressed, as it should be. About 10% of doctors are genuinely incompetent and shouldn't be practicing. A few doctors generate the majority of lawsuits. Ideally, the system should be more devoted to removing these doctors and less to awarding huge damages.
Of course the HMOs are currently exploiting doctors, and we're suffering a huge doctor shortage in part because of it. I'll bet you anything, the government will start subsidizing the HMOs tactics by giving doctors scholarships in order to help relieve the doctor shortage that the HMOs have created. Of course, we should be letting the HMOs stew in the consequences of their actions and letting the remaining doctors leverage their scarcity to fight back against the HMOs.
The notion that the brain remembers everything was put forward because of early work with Hypnosis where people seemed to have an incredible recall of details. Of course, it was later shown that hypnosis had caused them to fabricate huge portions of their story.
What if the Gov says 'you have to have this feature to use a filesharing program if you're in the US?' They wait for people to connect to their site, get their IP address and if they're in the US, *bam* you arrest the person using the now illegal filesharing program.
Taken out of context that way, it's not different, though if you protest peacefully in Washington DC you're a little less likely to get shot. If you want to teach in China you have to teach where they tell you before you can try teaching somewhere else and labor unions are unheard of. You need connections if you want to run a large business, etc. But some degree of exploitation is part of Capitalism as well as Fascism. Like another post suggested, depending on your race/class/political beliefs and whether you're on the top of things or the bottom, Fascism and Capitalism can look nearly identical.
I agree with most of your analysis, but there's some good evidence that the US bombing of the Chinese embassy was intentional. The bombing mission was the only misson which came directly from the CIA rather than passing through NATO, which might have fact checked things. There have been some assertions, I believe by the London Guardian, that the Chinese embassy was acting as a rebroadcasting station to help coordinate forces opposed to NATO. That's a violation of what an embassy is supposed to be - they can't be used for millitary purposes that way.
I think circumstantial evidence suggests that the bombing was intentional, though I agree that China tends towards paranoia.
I call it Facism for several reasons, first the fact that human rights and the rule of law is very lax, reminiscint of other facist governments. Labor cannot organize and business is strong. Law enforcment is based very much on class, and all kinds of abuses are tolerated for the good of the country. If you want to do big business in China you really need the support of the government right now. These characteristics are closer to Facism than Capitalism, theoretically. Restrictions apply more to Chinese nationals than foreigners. Ownership of land is still pretty recent and most of the country is still nationalized. There's considerable degre of anarchy and an enormous amount of small business going on in China, but it coresponds to a facist system at least as well as America can be said to conform to a Capitalist economy.
Fascism is defined as; A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
For a nation of it's homogeneity, China is considerably less racist than I expected it would be, though black people aren't exactly the rage and the nation seems to suffer from an inferiority complex. Chinese nationalism is based on race, however, unlike the US and that's a part of why the Chinese claim on Taiwan still seems so natural to most Chinese. Economic class is much more important. Socioeconomic controls are falling rapidly, but still exist.
China may very well be moving to an American model, but it isn't there yet and while America isn't facist it seems to be edging closer in that direction (as nations usually do in time of war).
Yeah, I just got back from teaching in China. It's a lot closer to Fascism than Communism right now. People are separating into classes, and the notion seems to be 'exploit labor to accumulate capital so that we can buy machines and weapons, and so the political brass can get their BMWs.'
I think America dislikes Cuba a lot more than China because there was a lot of American investment in Cuba when Batista was dictator and Castro nationalized, i.e. stole, that capital. It's a matter of revenge. We can't have foreign countries stealing our investments, ya know? And Cuba was setting itself up as an example, so we went and made an example of it. That, and a lot of the folks in Florida are from the former Cuban upper class and they hate Castro and they're very politically active.
1. Money is always significant. Except in some Pacific Island countries where it's coral beads.
2. I find it hard to cheer the Japanese as 'fair players.' After all, they've gotten a lot of their commercial success by ignoring our patents, (like on the TV set, for starters) by creating thier own monopolies where employees have to buy from corporate stores, and exploiting the US market while erecting all kinds of trade barriers to prevent the same things happening to them.
This whole thing reminds me of Churchill saying how if Hitler invaded Hell, he would at least make a favorable reference to the devil in the house of commons. This is just one monopoly (the Japanese corporation/government) invading another.
Things nowadays aren't as collectable since they're mass produced in such huge quantities. Besides, the money for the item plus storage space would probably be more valuable if invested, and it would also be more readily convertable into cash.
Slashdot Mirror
But India is incredibly protectionist when it comes to its job market. Look at the Bophal chemical disaster. The Indian government decided that Bophal should replace all its workers with Indian natives. They mandated it. The Indian workers weren't skilled enough and a huge environmental disaseter resulted. Why did India make that mandate? It wanted its people to have jobs. Lots of countries do this. NAFTA is about removing a lot of these protections.
Middle America thinks free trade is good when they're told to think it's good. They realize that they were lied to when they lose their jobs.
Besides, this isn't some moral thing. Governments should try and do what's best for their citizens (not just major businesses and certainly not the citizens of other countries). If they fail this, they're non-representative (i.e. corrupt)
I just got back from China. My standard of living, making ~$500 a month was pretty descent. That's about average for China, and I could have made about 40% more if I put in more time. Of course, food is cheap there because the laborers have next to nothing, so there's a wider range of incomes. Many people make subsistence wages and live with their parents till they get married, etc. Sometimes afterwards. So goods are cheaper and wages can be lower and still be good. But you don't want to be in the bottom 30% in one of these countries, or you get treated like homeless people do in the U.S.
Still, considering India has passed laws to protect their labor markets, it would be fair to retaliate and do the same. Of course, the government serves corporations, rather than labor so that isn't going to happen.
>do you think any country with that high an >unemployment rate would ever want foreigners to >come and take away their jobs?
I don't think Americans want foreigners coming in to take away their jobs either. But large businesses like the competition created by work visas, immigration, and offshoring because it forces down wages.
That should have been x-33.
s /v enturestar_000105.html
I did a little checking up and apparently the x-33 was succeeded by the x-34, but both were scrapped due to problems and cost overruns. The decision was 'internal' to NASA and was not based in Washington. Lockheed, which was part of a joint venture on the deal, went ahead and used the technology to make its own single stage to orbit vehicle, the VentureStar. So that takes care of that. My apologies for the outdated information.
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/busines
I know I'm going to take a lot of flak for saying this, but it seems NASA is misguided. The way things work, first you build a prototype, then you develop the prototype. The shuttle program was the prototype, the proof that we could build a reusable space craft. The follow up should have been focusing on a way to make space flight cheap, based on what we'd learned.
NASA shouldn't be planning a mission to Mars. It should be working on technology to make leaving the Earth's atmosphere cheap enough that it can be done recreationally and industrially by a variety of research labs, companies and private citizens.
People used to say 'if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we...' fill in the blank with the cure for your favorite social ill.
The answer, of course, was that we had the technology to put a handful of people on the moon, but we didn't have the technology to put a thousand or even a hundred people on the moon.
For that, NASA needs to change gears. And they haven't.
Sagan's book "Contact" had an interesting bit about the psychological effect of having the wealthiest people in the world seeing, in person, the earth as a single, blue, borderless orb.
Why can't we work on mass drivers, revive the X11 and concentrate on making space flight a more accessable reality?
PCR allowed "DNA fingerprinting" to be useful by making DNA replication cheap so that you only needed a follicle or a drop of blood. Theoretically, you could have done DNA fingerprinting and DNA replication before that, but it would have been very expensive because you'd use up a lot of expensive polymerase in the process. So it didn't happen. This is one of the most underappreciated lessons from the history of science. The technological breakthroughs that matter most are the ones which make technology cheap enough for everyone to afford.
Take care of this, and Mars missons, when we're ready for them, will be far less costly. If there's water there now, there will still be water there in a decade or two. Not much is likely to change until Mars' moon crashes into the surface, but we still have a few decades before that happens.
Not many people have seen the LOC.
It's like measuring oil in 'barrels'.
It's intended to obscure things.
Now, I've SEEN the other stuff they talk about.
p.s. Yeah, I know your post was a joke and all... replied anyways.
>If a politicain told the truth his head would >explode, and nobody wants to see that.
Hell, I'd pay
Compete? Dude, if you don't think you're undead, you've been getting way too much sleep.
>I sometimes wonder what an elected official would >have to do in order to get thrown out in protest.
Be "out of touch with the avearage American"
Be a racist (Unless your name is Throm Thurmond)
Tell the unvarnished truth about your motivations.
Run against a celebrity.
Remember, it's all about feeling good and being entertained.
It's said that Einstein got a "C" in math once.
Of course, I'd be willing to believe that a Jewish kid getting a "C" in a class that he should have been excellent in might have more to do with an anti-semetic teacher than young Albert's skill, but that's just speculation on my part.
I don't think that the purpose of this particular meme is to feel better than Einsten. It's about not taking criticism and failure too personally. 'Just because you failed, don't give up hope. Some of the most successful people in their field have encountered the same setbacks and criticism that you have.'
A related (and true, to my knowledge) story is how the creator of Federal Express pitched his idea of a centralized sorting system for packages to his college professor for an assignment. He got a "D" on it. The professor thought it was ridiculous. He then went and turned his idea into the Federal Express we know today.
on how many tons of dirt it takes to make a burrito.
Conversely, if a treatment has an 80% chance of working, and 50% of the people who receive it from a particular doctor die, then you have a problem. This situation is one that is not systematically addressed, as it should be. About 10% of doctors are genuinely incompetent and shouldn't be practicing. A few doctors generate the majority of lawsuits. Ideally, the system should be more devoted to removing these doctors and less to awarding huge damages.
Of course the HMOs are currently exploiting doctors, and we're suffering a huge doctor shortage in part because of it. I'll bet you anything, the government will start subsidizing the HMOs tactics by giving doctors scholarships in order to help relieve the doctor shortage that the HMOs have created. Of course, we should be letting the HMOs stew in the consequences of their actions and letting the remaining doctors leverage their scarcity to fight back against the HMOs.
Do not meddle in the affairs of medeival geeks,
for they carry swords and study fencing.
The notion that the brain remembers everything was put forward because of early work with Hypnosis where people seemed to have an incredible recall of details. Of course, it was later shown that hypnosis had caused them to fabricate huge portions of their story.
I just do it manually... er, I mean visually.
What if the Gov says 'you have to have this feature to use a filesharing program if you're in the US?' They wait for people to connect to their site, get their IP address and if they're in the US, *bam* you arrest the person using the now illegal filesharing program.
11 to the New Zealanders, who above all else, desire tourism.
>Omega man, Soylent green, Planet of the apes,
>Buck Rogers, etc . . . were all about the folly
>of man and our path to self destruction.
So are the new Star Wars films, if you take George Lucas' career into account.
Taken out of context that way, it's not different, though if you protest peacefully in Washington DC you're a little less likely to get shot. If you want to teach in China you have to teach where they tell you before you can try teaching somewhere else and labor unions are unheard of. You need connections if you want to run a large business, etc. But some degree of exploitation is part of Capitalism as well as Fascism. Like another post suggested, depending on your race/class/political beliefs and whether you're on the top of things or the bottom, Fascism and Capitalism can look nearly identical.
I agree with most of your analysis, but there's some good evidence that the US bombing of the Chinese embassy was intentional. The bombing mission was the only misson which came directly from the CIA rather than passing through NATO, which might have fact checked things. There have been some assertions, I believe by the London Guardian, that the Chinese embassy was acting as a rebroadcasting station to help coordinate forces opposed to NATO. That's a violation of what an embassy is supposed to be - they can't be used for millitary purposes that way.
I think circumstantial evidence suggests that the bombing was intentional, though I agree that China tends towards paranoia.
I call it Facism for several reasons, first the fact that human rights and the rule of law is very lax, reminiscint of other facist governments. Labor cannot organize and business is strong. Law enforcment is based very much on class, and all kinds of abuses are tolerated for the good of the country. If you want to do big business in China you really need the support of the government right now. These characteristics are closer to Facism than Capitalism, theoretically. Restrictions apply more to Chinese nationals than foreigners. Ownership of land is still pretty recent and most of the country is still nationalized. There's considerable degre of anarchy and an enormous amount of small business going on in China, but it coresponds to a facist system at least as well as America can be said to conform to a Capitalist economy.
Fascism is defined as;
A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
For a nation of it's homogeneity, China is considerably less racist than I expected it would be, though black people aren't exactly the rage and the nation seems to suffer from an inferiority complex. Chinese nationalism is based on race, however, unlike the US and that's a part of why the Chinese claim on Taiwan still seems so natural to most Chinese. Economic class is much more important. Socioeconomic controls are falling rapidly, but still exist.
China may very well be moving to an American model, but it isn't there yet and while America isn't facist it seems to be edging closer in that direction (as nations usually do in time of war).
Yeah, I just got back from teaching in China. It's a lot closer to Fascism than Communism right now. People are separating into classes, and the notion seems to be 'exploit labor to accumulate capital so that we can buy machines and weapons, and so the political brass can get their BMWs.'
I think America dislikes Cuba a lot more than China because there was a lot of American investment in Cuba when Batista was dictator and Castro nationalized, i.e. stole, that capital. It's a matter of revenge. We can't have foreign countries stealing our investments, ya know? And Cuba was setting itself up as an example, so we went and made an example of it. That, and a lot of the folks in Florida are from the former Cuban upper class and they hate Castro and they're very politically active.
1. Money is always significant. Except in some Pacific Island countries where it's coral beads.
2. I find it hard to cheer the Japanese as 'fair players.' After all, they've gotten a lot of their commercial success by ignoring our patents, (like on the TV set, for starters) by creating thier own monopolies where employees have to buy from corporate stores, and exploiting the US market while erecting all kinds of trade barriers to prevent the same things happening to them.
This whole thing reminds me of Churchill saying how if Hitler invaded Hell, he would at least make a favorable reference to the devil in the house of commons. This is just one monopoly (the Japanese corporation/government) invading another.
The porn industry pays top dollar for the latest technology?
I guess you've been watching different movies than I have...
Things nowadays aren't as collectable since they're mass produced in such huge quantities. Besides, the money for the item plus storage space would probably be more valuable if invested, and it would also be more readily convertable into cash.