And isn't that the reality of military discipline? Soldiers are meat, fodder, expendable.
The reality of military discipline is that you have to do what you're told, because you can't manage complex military operations on the basis of nuanced discussions. But that doesn't mean that the people in the US military are considered expendible.
The truth is that in wars people die. As a soldier you know you might loose your life, but American doctrine has never relied on sheer numbers. For better and sometimes for worse, Americans apply technology to minimize casualties. We go in after downed airmen. We mount rescue operations for captured soldiers. Americans tend to fight well because they know that their commanders will not send them in to die like fodder.
Does war dehumanize its participants? Yes, to varying degrees in varying conflicts. But particularly in an all-volunteer army, to say that soldiers are simply fodder is not an accurate representation. Ask American soldiers if they think their commanders are doing the best they can to safeguard their troops, and the results would be strongly positive.
One of the interesting things about the 1990s is that it made us all so used to near zero-casulalty wars that we grew used to the notion of sanitary combat. We kill thousands of the enemy and loose none of our own. But that's not how it works most of the time, and the current situation in Iraq is proof that you can't alwyas win with technology alone. A pity President Bush didn't figure that one out before he invaded Iraq.
Try Santa Cruz, shoebox wedged into a lot with hardly a yard, no garage (as it was probably turned into another room or is full of stuff, so you park on the street) $600K and up. Try to find a job here, though. For central coast Calif, $65K household income is considered the poverty line.
No doubt. As someone who grew up in SC County, left, and came back a few years ago, I can tell you all signs indicate to me that Santa Cruz is fast becoming another Carmel. My friends in real estate tell me that the majority of the people looking for homes here are retirees from out of the area who have already made their money and don't have to worry about income. One friend just sold his house and moved out of the area altogether, and of the six offers he received, all but one were from out of the area. Two were from out of state!
The county and city government bodies don't do anything to help, because they're so fixated on maintaining Santa Cruz as it was back in the '60s and '70s, before it was "discovered." Mardi Wormhoudt thinks using the clogged Highway 1 is a "lifestyle choice" and Mark Primack has had a bitch of a time convincing people that mixed housing is better than the class-segregated zoning we have now. The same coterie of ageing hippies has been in power since the 1980s, and their hostility to businesses (other than those that cater to tourists on the Pacific Garden Mall) makes the irony of Santa Cruz's situation that much more appalling.
A huge number of Santa Cruz county inhabitants commute over Highway 17 every day to work in the bowels of Silicon Valley, yet the government in Santa Cruz (re-elected like clockwork in large part because of the UCSC voting population) refuses to understandd that it is possible to maintain slow growth and build a tech business climate at the same time. They just keep arguing that it's a zero-sum game, because they bought their houses long ago when they were easy to buy, and they've long since paid off their mortgages. They don't care about real diversity or real economic sustainability. "If you want to make big money, go live in Silicon Valley," seems to be the mentality. Unfortunately, you need big money just to survive here.
If I sound frustrated, it's because I am. I ride my bike to work. I want Santa Cruz to stay weird. I love the fact that we protect the environment in our community. I have friends who wear suits and friends who live to surf. But Santa Cruz the tolerant, vibrant Santa Cruz of old is turning into a bizarre mixure of college town and retirement community. If you're in your 20s, 30s, 40s, or early 50s (unless you've made a ton of money in Silicon Valley), you'll only find work in Santa Cruz maintaining other people's houses or selling them coffee at Lulu Carpenter's. The middle class is being squeezed out, and quickly.
This week's Good Times (or was it the Metro) has a great article about the whole Santa Cruz affordable housing quagmire. I know this sounds like a rant, but I feel so passionate about it because I just hate to see Santa Cruz going down this path.
Anything that is reacheable from our universe is, by definition, part of the universe.
As you can see, it's not easy to come to agreement about what the term "our universe" actually means. A term this broad invites all manner of semantic arguments
No argument there. Directors have become mere rubber stamping tools for management teams. Why? Because the boards are all composed of O-level guys from other public companies, all of whom seem to observe a tacit agreement not to screw with each other's executive decisions.
ESPN gave someone an exclusive license for FIFTEEN YEARS?!
The industry could radically change in fifteen years. EA could shoot itself in the foot in five years, becoming an also-ran. Fifteen years in the video game industry is like 45 years in the world of broadcasting.
It might be three years from now, or five, or 10 years from now, but ESPN will live to regret this deal.
Why does anyone pay any attention to Wong Hoo's comments about the iPod shuffle?
Does anyone think that the CEO of Apple's biggest competitor is going to gush about how great the iPod shuffle is? Of course he's going to cut it down and try to make it sound inferior to his own products.
marketing however should not be lying about what your product does.
Of course marketers shouldn't lie. Usually they don't. Instead, they use broad, vague terms that can seldom be disproven. "Well, when we said our product could integrate with Snaftech System 3000 servers, we were correct. You need the Goatbleat 150 Converter in order to obtain full functionality, but you can still connect to the Snaftech 3000 using our product. It all depends on how you define the word 'integrate' I guess."
As the world becomes more complex, it becomes more and more difficult for marketers (who are supposed to sell product) to get people to get people to understand what their product does before they move on to the next product. Potential customers present a limited window of opportunity.
One way to deal with this is to take the straight-shooter approach. You don't overstate what your product can do, and you consciously set realistic expectations. Companies that operate in this fashion are almost always a surprise, because they seem so rare these days.
The other approach is to come as close to lying as possible without doing so in an overt fashion.
If someone's job is to get you to buy a product, marketing and sales people who operate in a freewheeling, "just sell the damn things" environment will bend the truth wherever they can. Ultimately in my experience, the culture in the marketing department is a *direct* reflection of the example provided by the executive team. If they want results at any cost, principled marketing and sales people will be weeded out.
[soapbox] So many public companies operate this way because they've been conditioned to do so by the Cult of Shareholder Value, which states that as long as the company is making money in the short term, (i.e. - rewarding shareholders) then the company is doing well. Hardly anyone things about the effect of their decisions beyond the current fiscal quarter. The result is the continuing decline of integrity.[/soapbox]
Marketing is lies, more lies and damned lies in a pretty package so you'll put your money and reputation on the line.
A company that doesn't let potential customers know about its products will usually die quickly. This is a fundamental business truth that is often obscured by the obnoxious and sometimes deliberately misleading actions of marketers. Think of the number of great applications, for example, that don't do well in the market because the people behind the apps didn't have effective marketing.
If your company can make good products that match the expectations you set with your marketing, then you're good to go. The problem is that so many companies don't understand that if you overpromise and underdeliver, people will wise up. It may take years, but eventually they'll grow suspicious of your exorbitant promises.
What is really sad is the scenario you outlined, in which the people who can best judge the effectiveness of a product are kept out of the decisionmaking part of the purchase process. That sounds like an internal management problem, in that the managers at your company aren't listening to the people in the trenches who will actually be working with it.
In my experience, scumbag marketers and salespeople are only successful when the people at the buying end suffer from overdeveloped credulity.
Wouldn't it be easier to work from home? That's what I do.
I started a company with a friend of mine three years ago. We each worked out of own homes, and met twice a week in person (at a coffee shop, natch') to be sure we were synched up. But after a while it started to become difficult for me to stay in the same damned room all day, then move over a few feet into the kitchen for dinner, a few feet over to the living room to watch a movie, and then a few feet again to go to sleep. I felt like a freakin' hamster.
When we got the chance to share office space with a couple of other guys who ran their own small companies, we jumped at the chance. Splitting the money three ways makes rent much cheaper, and we get human contact. Sometimes you don't need to have specific interaction. You just need to be around people.
That's part of the appeal of working in a coffee shop. You can focus on what you're doing, but there's enough human activity that you can also get that feeling of connectedness. When you work alone at home by yourself it's easy to feel disconnected from the rest of humanity, no matter how many IMs you get from your buddies.
But maybe it's just me. I haven't yet transcended meatspace.
I've never posted to slashdot before, simply because it wasn't worth it or I didn't have time.
Good strategy, my friend. Start off your post with a comment denigrating the forum and giving a backhanded insult to its inhabitants. My guess is people will be eager to absorb your insights.
Is today a slow news day or what? We've got this non-story. Then we have...
This story seems to be about how people perceive video games and the people who play them. Since a huge slice of Slashdotters likely are also gamers, this probably is of interest to more people than you might think.
One of the reasons I like Slashdot is that it goes beyond the same tech stories I could find at any number of other sites. Slashdot is an online magazine of geek culture, and that culture includes plenty of things beyond new *NIX applications.
I can see the marketroids now: "Alpaca is fast and lean, able to scale to new heights, and it's warm and fuzzy, just like all Microsoft products. Alpaca: It's no goat!"
This sort of nastiness is really part of the whole spam/phishing/credit card fraud continuum. Because the Internet is such an important part of all our lives now, it seems to me that governments need to start putting out some education about this sort of crap. I don't know if it's already being done in other countries, but in the United States the federal government doesn't seem to be lifting a finger to educate people about how to effectively use the Internet.
This is one of those "ounce of prevention vs. pound of cure" things. If we spend a little bit of money up front to put out TV and radio advertisements, it seems that the government would have to spend far less money investigating these assholes and helping victims of this sort of fraud. If K-12 schools taught kids how to detect online b.s. and community colleges featured this sort of instruction as part of entry-level computer classes, it could go a long way toward minimizing the negative economic impact of the broad range of Internet fraud.
But of course current thinking in the United States is an extreme form of caveat emptor, so I'm just engaging in wishful thinking.
I see your points much more clearly now. I'd definitely agree with you that lack of health care is still lack of health care, and that the middle class waxes and wanes. I also understand your point about the siren song of revolution. I previously was unclear on whether you agreed with the notion or were merely pointing out its appeal to people.
One of the most frustrating things about discussing the perils of 2005 American Style capitalism is that so few Americans understand that capitalism as practiced by the United States in 2005 is very different in many ways from the capitalism practiced by the United States in, say, 1965, and even further divorced from the capitalism practiced in many other countries.
There seems to be this all-or-nothing mentality, which is the by-product of a society oriented around black and white interpretations of reality. For example: Can we have government-sponsored health care? NO! That would be a move toward Communism! This is an interesting view, given that Truman, Nixon, and many other staunchly anti-communist American leaders advocated universal health care.
Your comments about the international corporation, unbound by the restrictions of an individual state are well put. I'm not sure, however, that international corporations, in looking for opportunities where the rules are lax, makes them a bad influence. One of the areas in which the people of developed nations are most hypocritcal is our insistence that developing nations not head down the path we took on our way to becoming information-based economies. We are in essence practicing a form of paternalism. The White Man's Burden is now to save these people from the horrors of globalization, when from what I've seen many of them welcome the economic opportunities it presents.
I'm saying that global corporations operate from intrinsic good, but neither does your corner baker or the guy who sold you your car. In capitalism everyone operates on the basis of self-interest. Ostensibly the governments of less-powerful countries are letting multinationals into their countries because they see some gain coming from the move. Of course, you could argue that many of these countries are run by despots lining their own pockets, but that issue has been with since the rise of the nation-state. The democratization of large chunks of the globe in the last 20 years indicates to me that when given the choice, people want jobs and they want economic growth.
I'm guardedly optimistic that the continued trend of democratization, which I feel has been aided by economic globalization, will introduce more localized forms of capitalism, some of which may pervade the current dominant American-style paradigm. I see this being possible in part because the quarter-to-quarter mentality foisted on us all by Wall Street is forcing companies to be more and more reactive. Larger companies have a much harder time at this than smaller ones, so it very well could be that the future of business will be in ad-hoc relationships between smaller companies from around the globe.
I'd like to think that I'm being cautiously hopeful, rather than blindly optimistic. In any case, I appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions.
Get off it. It's been done before. The people were called peasants or serfs or comrades. When the people are unable to contribute to the GDP, then society has no need for the people and they are marginalized.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Are you implying that the waves of successive social rearrangement have made things worse for the underclass? The underclass in medieval European societies were essentially owned by the lords. The underclass during the Industrial Revolution were essentially indentured to their employers. The underclass now are still the underclass, but would you argue that their situation is worse than that of the underclass from ages past?
The global economy abstracts the whole capitalist marketplace into two camps: producers and consumers. As long there is some population somewhere that can buy your product (maybe a tiny western European nation with a small, rich population) the rest of the world can go get bent. Crank out your product with robots or slaves or serfs or peasants and make a profit.
You're radically simplifying to the point of distortion. First, producers don't operate solely within a given nation. Second, nations can be both producers and consumers in the same market.
Internal markets are where it's at in the rapidly developing economies that used to be beholden to the industrial leaders. Take a look at the computer technology and automotive markets in China. Not only are foreign companies entering China, home-grown companies are serving the increasing demands of the Chinese themselves. Would they have been able to build up internal demand without the wealth generated by exports?
Rampant capitalism is known as the black market and it doesn't work very well in the long run. The global economy isn't far from rampant capitalism, but it will work to some extent right up until the point where everybody's job has been replaced by a robot. Then nobody will be able to afford a new television, and the system will be in trouble.
Black markets are present in all economies, but large black markets are the product of restrictive state controls on commerce. People want something that the state doesn't want them to have, so people steal from the state and sell the goods on the black market. The rest of your statement comparing capitalism as a whole to the black market is strange, given that the freer the market, the less likely it is to have a black market.
A little international labor law and careful import/export management would be help, but one thing is for certain - this is not the path to utopia where "societies are rearranged so that a decent living is provided for everyone". This is the path to peasantry, serfdom, servitude, and slavery through debt. This is the road to a life where a communist revolution starts to sound like a good idea.
You mentioned the terms peasant, serf, and Comrade interchangeably in the first paragraph, but now you're saying that a Communist revolution sounds like a good idea. Given the historical failures of Communism (including the liquidation of, rather than marginalization of undesirables), it doesn't sound like such a great idea to me.
You're talking about design, Sam. I've found Slashdot users in aggregate are pretty tone deaf about design. Features, speed, and quantifiable aspects of a product attract attention. Aesthetics are for women, fags, and Apple-lovers.
But design is important outside the geek inner circle. It's one area where the ignorant masses are starting to understand something that hard core geeks haven't yet figured out. Perhaps in time more geeks will begin to understand that technology is coolest when it doesn't call so much attention to itself. I guess I'm just being emotional, though.;-)
Thanks for taking the time to give me all the info. Now it's time for me to do some reading. I'm in a position similar to the one you were in a couple of years ago, in that life has taught me lessons that are in many ways incompatible with organized religion built around the concept of a supreme being, original sin, and so on.
I like the last line of your post. If only more people felt that way about their beliefs.
The concept of karma as I understand it doesn't incorporate judgement. It stipulates that your actions have consequences because the energy you put into the world affects the world. Good begets good. Bad begets bad. There's no entity out there sitting on a cloud deciding who is naughty and who is nice.
The obvious correlary to this to wonder what will happen to American scientific prowess as we head toward a closer integration of church and state in the US.
As a someone who has read the Koran, the Bible, and the Bhagavad Ghita, I always find it fascinating how people "get started" with a belief system (when the choice is theirs to make, as opposed to simply growing up with and accepting the prevailing religion). If it's not too personal a topic, what was the text that introduced you to Buddhism?
Chaos theory may one day reveal that the concept of karma is based on scientifically valid underpinnings. Until then, I just believe it because I've experienced it. Cause and effect, baby.
High-tech companies like the term "solution" because of the limitations of the terms "product" and "service". No single product can ever be right for every customer. So customers are rightly suspicious of a single product that purports to solve all problems. A service implies that you simply pay money to a company on a continual basis so they can brush off problems you'd rather be able to take care of yourself.
But a solution is often a set or range of products, and in the case of vendors like IBM those products are paired with service. When you sell a product, the assumption is that once you sell it, you want nothing to do with the customer from thereon after. Tech support is offered only for problems. But if you are trying to impress upon customers the notion that the product and the sometimes rather involved, in-depth service associated with it are equally important, the term "solution" makes sense.
While the term is applicable to IBM, it's not applicable to many products that simply bill themselves as a solution, when in fact the vendor would rather eat rat poison than provide integrated and thorough support.
Why try attempting something that takes infinte resources when it's a hell of a lot easier to commandeer a couple of airliners and crash them into tall things?
Indeed.
That's also the same logic that explains the "hunker down, let the Americans roll over you, then pop out and retake control of the area" strategy being employed by the insurgents in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Slashdot Mirror
The reality of military discipline is that you have to do what you're told, because you can't manage complex military operations on the basis of nuanced discussions. But that doesn't mean that the people in the US military are considered expendible.
The truth is that in wars people die. As a soldier you know you might loose your life, but American doctrine has never relied on sheer numbers. For better and sometimes for worse, Americans apply technology to minimize casualties. We go in after downed airmen. We mount rescue operations for captured soldiers. Americans tend to fight well because they know that their commanders will not send them in to die like fodder.
Does war dehumanize its participants? Yes, to varying degrees in varying conflicts. But particularly in an all-volunteer army, to say that soldiers are simply fodder is not an accurate representation. Ask American soldiers if they think their commanders are doing the best they can to safeguard their troops, and the results would be strongly positive.
One of the interesting things about the 1990s is that it made us all so used to near zero-casulalty wars that we grew used to the notion of sanitary combat. We kill thousands of the enemy and loose none of our own. But that's not how it works most of the time, and the current situation in Iraq is proof that you can't alwyas win with technology alone. A pity President Bush didn't figure that one out before he invaded Iraq.
No doubt. As someone who grew up in SC County, left, and came back a few years ago, I can tell you all signs indicate to me that Santa Cruz is fast becoming another Carmel. My friends in real estate tell me that the majority of the people looking for homes here are retirees from out of the area who have already made their money and don't have to worry about income. One friend just sold his house and moved out of the area altogether, and of the six offers he received, all but one were from out of the area. Two were from out of state!
The county and city government bodies don't do anything to help, because they're so fixated on maintaining Santa Cruz as it was back in the '60s and '70s, before it was "discovered." Mardi Wormhoudt thinks using the clogged Highway 1 is a "lifestyle choice" and Mark Primack has had a bitch of a time convincing people that mixed housing is better than the class-segregated zoning we have now. The same coterie of ageing hippies has been in power since the 1980s, and their hostility to businesses (other than those that cater to tourists on the Pacific Garden Mall) makes the irony of Santa Cruz's situation that much more appalling.
A huge number of Santa Cruz county inhabitants commute over Highway 17 every day to work in the bowels of Silicon Valley, yet the government in Santa Cruz (re-elected like clockwork in large part because of the UCSC voting population) refuses to understandd that it is possible to maintain slow growth and build a tech business climate at the same time. They just keep arguing that it's a zero-sum game, because they bought their houses long ago when they were easy to buy, and they've long since paid off their mortgages. They don't care about real diversity or real economic sustainability. "If you want to make big money, go live in Silicon Valley," seems to be the mentality. Unfortunately, you need big money just to survive here.
If I sound frustrated, it's because I am. I ride my bike to work. I want Santa Cruz to stay weird. I love the fact that we protect the environment in our community. I have friends who wear suits and friends who live to surf. But Santa Cruz the tolerant, vibrant Santa Cruz of old is turning into a bizarre mixure of college town and retirement community. If you're in your 20s, 30s, 40s, or early 50s (unless you've made a ton of money in Silicon Valley), you'll only find work in Santa Cruz maintaining other people's houses or selling them coffee at Lulu Carpenter's. The middle class is being squeezed out, and quickly.
This week's Good Times (or was it the Metro) has a great article about the whole Santa Cruz affordable housing quagmire. I know this sounds like a rant, but I feel so passionate about it because I just hate to see Santa Cruz going down this path.
As you can see, it's not easy to come to agreement about what the term "our universe" actually means. A term this broad invites all manner of semantic arguments
No argument there. Directors have become mere rubber stamping tools for management teams. Why? Because the boards are all composed of O-level guys from other public companies, all of whom seem to observe a tacit agreement not to screw with each other's executive decisions.
The industry could radically change in fifteen years. EA could shoot itself in the foot in five years, becoming an also-ran. Fifteen years in the video game industry is like 45 years in the world of broadcasting.
It might be three years from now, or five, or 10 years from now, but ESPN will live to regret this deal.
Does anyone think that the CEO of Apple's biggest competitor is going to gush about how great the iPod shuffle is? Of course he's going to cut it down and try to make it sound inferior to his own products.
Of course marketers shouldn't lie. Usually they don't. Instead, they use broad, vague terms that can seldom be disproven. "Well, when we said our product could integrate with Snaftech System 3000 servers, we were correct. You need the Goatbleat 150 Converter in order to obtain full functionality, but you can still connect to the Snaftech 3000 using our product. It all depends on how you define the word 'integrate' I guess."
As the world becomes more complex, it becomes more and more difficult for marketers (who are supposed to sell product) to get people to get people to understand what their product does before they move on to the next product. Potential customers present a limited window of opportunity.
One way to deal with this is to take the straight-shooter approach. You don't overstate what your product can do, and you consciously set realistic expectations. Companies that operate in this fashion are almost always a surprise, because they seem so rare these days.
The other approach is to come as close to lying as possible without doing so in an overt fashion.
If someone's job is to get you to buy a product, marketing and sales people who operate in a freewheeling, "just sell the damn things" environment will bend the truth wherever they can. Ultimately in my experience, the culture in the marketing department is a *direct* reflection of the example provided by the executive team. If they want results at any cost, principled marketing and sales people will be weeded out.
[soapbox] So many public companies operate this way because they've been conditioned to do so by the Cult of Shareholder Value, which states that as long as the company is making money in the short term, (i.e. - rewarding shareholders) then the company is doing well. Hardly anyone things about the effect of their decisions beyond the current fiscal quarter. The result is the continuing decline of integrity.[/soapbox]
A company that doesn't let potential customers know about its products will usually die quickly. This is a fundamental business truth that is often obscured by the obnoxious and sometimes deliberately misleading actions of marketers. Think of the number of great applications, for example, that don't do well in the market because the people behind the apps didn't have effective marketing.
If your company can make good products that match the expectations you set with your marketing, then you're good to go. The problem is that so many companies don't understand that if you overpromise and underdeliver, people will wise up. It may take years, but eventually they'll grow suspicious of your exorbitant promises.
What is really sad is the scenario you outlined, in which the people who can best judge the effectiveness of a product are kept out of the decisionmaking part of the purchase process. That sounds like an internal management problem, in that the managers at your company aren't listening to the people in the trenches who will actually be working with it.
In my experience, scumbag marketers and salespeople are only successful when the people at the buying end suffer from overdeveloped credulity.
I started a company with a friend of mine three years ago. We each worked out of own homes, and met twice a week in person (at a coffee shop, natch') to be sure we were synched up. But after a while it started to become difficult for me to stay in the same damned room all day, then move over a few feet into the kitchen for dinner, a few feet over to the living room to watch a movie, and then a few feet again to go to sleep. I felt like a freakin' hamster.
When we got the chance to share office space with a couple of other guys who ran their own small companies, we jumped at the chance. Splitting the money three ways makes rent much cheaper, and we get human contact. Sometimes you don't need to have specific interaction. You just need to be around people.
That's part of the appeal of working in a coffee shop. You can focus on what you're doing, but there's enough human activity that you can also get that feeling of connectedness. When you work alone at home by yourself it's easy to feel disconnected from the rest of humanity, no matter how many IMs you get from your buddies.
But maybe it's just me. I haven't yet transcended meatspace.
Good strategy, my friend. Start off your post with a comment denigrating the forum and giving a backhanded insult to its inhabitants. My guess is people will be eager to absorb your insights.
This story seems to be about how people perceive video games and the people who play them. Since a huge slice of Slashdotters likely are also gamers, this probably is of interest to more people than you might think.
One of the reasons I like Slashdot is that it goes beyond the same tech stories I could find at any number of other sites. Slashdot is an online magazine of geek culture, and that culture includes plenty of things beyond new *NIX applications.
I can see the marketroids now: "Alpaca is fast and lean, able to scale to new heights, and it's warm and fuzzy, just like all Microsoft products. Alpaca: It's no goat!"
This is one of those "ounce of prevention vs. pound of cure" things. If we spend a little bit of money up front to put out TV and radio advertisements, it seems that the government would have to spend far less money investigating these assholes and helping victims of this sort of fraud. If K-12 schools taught kids how to detect online b.s. and community colleges featured this sort of instruction as part of entry-level computer classes, it could go a long way toward minimizing the negative economic impact of the broad range of Internet fraud.
But of course current thinking in the United States is an extreme form of caveat emptor, so I'm just engaging in wishful thinking.
One of the most frustrating things about discussing the perils of 2005 American Style capitalism is that so few Americans understand that capitalism as practiced by the United States in 2005 is very different in many ways from the capitalism practiced by the United States in, say, 1965, and even further divorced from the capitalism practiced in many other countries.
There seems to be this all-or-nothing mentality, which is the by-product of a society oriented around black and white interpretations of reality. For example: Can we have government-sponsored health care? NO! That would be a move toward Communism! This is an interesting view, given that Truman, Nixon, and many other staunchly anti-communist American leaders advocated universal health care.
Your comments about the international corporation, unbound by the restrictions of an individual state are well put. I'm not sure, however, that international corporations, in looking for opportunities where the rules are lax, makes them a bad influence. One of the areas in which the people of developed nations are most hypocritcal is our insistence that developing nations not head down the path we took on our way to becoming information-based economies. We are in essence practicing a form of paternalism. The White Man's Burden is now to save these people from the horrors of globalization, when from what I've seen many of them welcome the economic opportunities it presents.
I'm saying that global corporations operate from intrinsic good, but neither does your corner baker or the guy who sold you your car. In capitalism everyone operates on the basis of self-interest. Ostensibly the governments of less-powerful countries are letting multinationals into their countries because they see some gain coming from the move. Of course, you could argue that many of these countries are run by despots lining their own pockets, but that issue has been with since the rise of the nation-state. The democratization of large chunks of the globe in the last 20 years indicates to me that when given the choice, people want jobs and they want economic growth.
I'm guardedly optimistic that the continued trend of democratization, which I feel has been aided by economic globalization, will introduce more localized forms of capitalism, some of which may pervade the current dominant American-style paradigm. I see this being possible in part because the quarter-to-quarter mentality foisted on us all by Wall Street is forcing companies to be more and more reactive. Larger companies have a much harder time at this than smaller ones, so it very well could be that the future of business will be in ad-hoc relationships between smaller companies from around the globe.
I'd like to think that I'm being cautiously hopeful, rather than blindly optimistic. In any case, I appreciate you taking the time to answer my questions.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Are you implying that the waves of successive social rearrangement have made things worse for the underclass? The underclass in medieval European societies were essentially owned by the lords. The underclass during the Industrial Revolution were essentially indentured to their employers. The underclass now are still the underclass, but would you argue that their situation is worse than that of the underclass from ages past?
The global economy abstracts the whole capitalist marketplace into two camps: producers and consumers. As long there is some population somewhere that can buy your product (maybe a tiny western European nation with a small, rich population) the rest of the world can go get bent. Crank out your product with robots or slaves or serfs or peasants and make a profit.
You're radically simplifying to the point of distortion. First, producers don't operate solely within a given nation. Second, nations can be both producers and consumers in the same market.
Internal markets are where it's at in the rapidly developing economies that used to be beholden to the industrial leaders. Take a look at the computer technology and automotive markets in China. Not only are foreign companies entering China, home-grown companies are serving the increasing demands of the Chinese themselves. Would they have been able to build up internal demand without the wealth generated by exports?
Rampant capitalism is known as the black market and it doesn't work very well in the long run. The global economy isn't far from rampant capitalism, but it will work to some extent right up until the point where everybody's job has been replaced by a robot. Then nobody will be able to afford a new television, and the system will be in trouble.
Black markets are present in all economies, but large black markets are the product of restrictive state controls on commerce. People want something that the state doesn't want them to have, so people steal from the state and sell the goods on the black market. The rest of your statement comparing capitalism as a whole to the black market is strange, given that the freer the market, the less likely it is to have a black market.
A little international labor law and careful import/export management would be help, but one thing is for certain - this is not the path to utopia where "societies are rearranged so that a decent living is provided for everyone". This is the path to peasantry, serfdom, servitude, and slavery through debt. This is the road to a life where a communist revolution starts to sound like a good idea.
You mentioned the terms peasant, serf, and Comrade interchangeably in the first paragraph, but now you're saying that a Communist revolution sounds like a good idea. Given the historical failures of Communism (including the liquidation of, rather than marginalization of undesirables), it doesn't sound like such a great idea to me.
Bingo. The quarter-to-quarter mentality is a product of this myopia, which has been called the Cult of Shareholder Value.
But design is important outside the geek inner circle. It's one area where the ignorant masses are starting to understand something that hard core geeks haven't yet figured out. Perhaps in time more geeks will begin to understand that technology is coolest when it doesn't call so much attention to itself. I guess I'm just being emotional, though. ;-)
I like the last line of your post. If only more people felt that way about their beliefs.
I think I speak for many Linux users when I say, "Thanks, Rorshcach1!"
As a someone who has read the Koran, the Bible, and the Bhagavad Ghita, I always find it fascinating how people "get started" with a belief system (when the choice is theirs to make, as opposed to simply growing up with and accepting the prevailing religion). If it's not too personal a topic, what was the text that introduced you to Buddhism?
That prompts me to wonder if Buddhism is a more intrinsically "science-friendly" belief system than Christianity.
But a solution is often a set or range of products, and in the case of vendors like IBM those products are paired with service. When you sell a product, the assumption is that once you sell it, you want nothing to do with the customer from thereon after. Tech support is offered only for problems. But if you are trying to impress upon customers the notion that the product and the sometimes rather involved, in-depth service associated with it are equally important, the term "solution" makes sense.
While the term is applicable to IBM, it's not applicable to many products that simply bill themselves as a solution, when in fact the vendor would rather eat rat poison than provide integrated and thorough support.
Indeed.
That's also the same logic that explains the "hunker down, let the Americans roll over you, then pop out and retake control of the area" strategy being employed by the insurgents in Iraq and the Taliban in Afghanistan.