Method-for-method comparisons of Smalltalk and Java aren't really fair. Java has to use more method calls for the same functionality, because each Smalltalk method call includes an implicit conditional (based on class). This can be used to avoid a lot of if statements that a language like Java uses.
Typically Smalltalk programs also have more functionality than Java programs, even if they initially seem equivalent. The dynamic method calls in Smalltalk make it possible to use new environments or novel objects in a manner orthogonal to the original program.
Smalltalk still probably comes out slower, but maybe not as badly as it might seem. Just like Java is slower than C, Smalltalk pays a penalty for being a more powerful language.
BTW, I agree that Squeak/Smalltalk/Croquet's persistence does introduce serious UI issues that haven't been well addressed (well, I haven't looked at Croquet, but I would be surprised if they really solved that issue).
ASCII is semantic markup. It has characters for start-of-header, start-of-text, end-of-text, file-separator, field-separator, record-separator, unit-separator, etc.
And no one uses those stupid characters! Semantic ASCII is stupid, and tab is the last of many stupid characters to be discarded. And it is being discarded -- tabs get thrown away in lots of places. They are a curse!
The width-changing argument is pretty fishy, too. Does it really matter? Everyone should just use four spaces -- eight is absurd, and only very few people use two. No one uses three or five or any of that. The vision argument is even more absurd -- no one who can read can't tell the difference between four and eight spaces.
Word wrapping obviously makes more sense with spaces -- you can actually say wrap at 72 columns and people know what you mean. You can adjust your environment to that width. 72 columns doesn't mean anything when you use tabs.
I think people make too much of whitespace on both sides. It's just a detail.
However, it does mean massive tab-vs-space flamefests on comp.lang.python! (I'm a tab-hater myself -- tabs are a total PITA, and only advocated by people with stupid editors or people who don't understand that ASCII is not a form of semantic markup).
It's also easy to do it the other way around, to make a Python module out of some code written in another language (usually C/C++). Writing something from scratch in C is a great way to boost performance of your Python application -- take some important inner loops and write them in C, then use them from Python. And the ease of wrapping external libraries means that Python has a lot of very up-to-date access to external libraries.
A lot of it comes from people who have been forced to use Perl for some reason (maintenance, management, whatever). The programmer who really likes Python (enough to write a book or advertise a conference) will generally detest Perl (I do, though I try not to make too big a deal of it -- Perl's time in history has passed anyway:).
Python people, when amongst their own, don't talk about Perl much. But/. is known Perl territory:)
Why a gun? I don't see why a post-apocolyptic world would be particularly violent, though I guess it depends on what kind of apocolypse.
If the mass of humanity was killed, and you survived, wouldn't you seek the company and assistance of others? In the wake of tremendous destruction, what purpose would violence have? Cooperation would seem infinitely more important.
Sure, in a riot people are violent. But a riot involves people doing things they can't normally do in their lives amidst their society. It's a temporary state, almost by definition.
In a war people are violent, often long after the war. But that's more than just the collapse of society, that's an extension of society's self-destruction. Few apocolyptic scenarios involve mass societal collapse as a cause, unless the apocolypse is somehow based on everyone being turned crazy by Radio Waves From Space or something (very Steven King-like). In that case you wouldn't want a gun, because you'd kill someone you love or some other horror.
It'd look real silly if the survivors of an apocolypse were toting around guns in an empty landscape.
Privaterra is an organization dedicated to training human rights workers to use encryption tools to ensure their safety. Less about new software, and more about training people to use the software that already exists.
If that experience is irrelevant because it didn't ultimately amount to anything, so is education -- in school the only work you do is work that is irrelevant.
I wouldn't rate school experience as highly as real-world experience, but I wouldn't disregard it either.
But then, when you get a thousand resumes, you have to do something to cut down the numbers...
Why do you think the world has as much peace as it has? It's the called the US Military.
You think the only war in the world is due to expansionism? That's absurd, and very obviously incorrect. We live in very violent times, and if this is the peace that overwhelming force brings, then overwhelming force is obviously not very effective in creating peace. There are military conflicts throughout the world -- Chechnya, central Africa, Colombia, Indonesia, Phillipines, Pakistan/India, Sudan, Liberia, Kosovo/Macedonia. That's not complete, and just the conflicts going on at this moment.
The world would be a hell of a lot better off if there were a lot less weapons.
It's not just very small enclosed fixtures -- not a single overhead light in my apartment can take a flourescent bulb (of sufficient wattage). At first glance the bulbs don't look that much bigger than their incandescent equivalents, but when you put them side-by-side they are considerably longer (somehow the eye ignores the size of the balast).
Perhaps more modern fixtures are made with these bulbs in mind, but certainly older ones are not. For these bulbs to really work, we need to start seeing lighting fixtures that are designed specifically for their dimensions. Or better flourescent lamps. If I owned my place I might consider building recessed flourescent lighting (incidentally, Frank Lloyd Wright really liked flourescent lights used this way).
Most weapons are not used to defend nations, they are used to oppress. Few nations use their armies to guard their borders or defend their nation; many use their armies to "quell unrest."
I worked before for someone who had code like that put into his application (without his knowledge, of course). There was some pay dispute, and the programmer started triggering it. In this case it deleted the customer database, not the code. Ultimately the programmer was charged criminally (still awaiting trial), and possibly a civil case following.
Now, I have a feeling there was bad stuff on both sides (and it's taken me a while to extract myself from this job), but you have to be careful when you destroy stuff. It's probably okay when you are deleting something that is your property and isn't paid for. But it's questionable if he already paid for part of the work, or if you were destroying any data created by his operations. If any money had been paid, or if it would compromise data that didn't belong to me, I wouldn't try it unless I had written something into the contract (I've seen pretty generic-looking contract terms which would imply you could effectively confiscate the work if it wasn't paid for). You also need to define when it's not paid for -- 30 days after completion, 60 days...? It's not professional to do something so forceful without making an effort to resolve things more peacefully.
Now we hear complaints that it can't replace Sun on the back end.
For many people Linux (on x86) can absolutely replace Sun (and for a huge number it already has). For situations where x86 hardware is powerful enough, and the available hardware is reliable enough, Linux totally trounces Sun. That's a huge number of servers, and it's not just about price. Linux operating systems (which is to say, some of the Linux distros) are far more usable and maintainable than Solaris. (Obviously if you have lots of experience on a different platform then the playing field isn't level) Linux distributions -- not the kernel -- have been the real force of modernization amoung Unices. The Linux kernel development will chug along, but the Linux environments is really where the best stuff is.
Of course, some of that depends on what distro you're talking about, but they all share from a lot of cross-pollination.
Definitely. "Present Your Papers!" should be the new way of business in our airports! Not just airports, but all interstate travel. Travel is a priviledge! Present Your Papers!
PIN #'s do stop fraud occuring over the counter, but not mail-ordering, web-site. Actually, it doesn't even stop over the counter, since all you need to do is wipe you card with a magnet and demand they do your card the old way, stating it works in every other store. (Most stores will relent if you pressure them).
But if you make a big fuss they're much more likely to remember you when someone comes to investigate. Plus if using a stolen card you're often under a time pressure to use the card before it is cancelled.
Think more creatively. Don't just hash the PIN - that's pretty useless since there are only 10^4 possible PINs and you can enumerate all of those (on paper even!). Hash the concatentation of the PIN and the CC number.
While this would be typical for hashing, it doesn't alleviate the problem that given a credit card number there's only 10^4 hashes you have to go through to find the PIN.
It's presumed that the attacker already has the credit card number -- the PIN is meant to increase security in this circumstance. If the PIN is stored together with the number -- even in any hashed form -- it will be easy to find by an exhaustive search of all possible PINs.
I had problems with Wells Fargo ATM/Visa cards as well, several years ago, not long after they acquired my bank. It took me a while to figure it out, but my parents' ATM card was sometimes withdrawing from my account. Different ATM card numbers and unassociated accounts, though my mother did happen to be listed on both accounts. It was while I was in college, so it was easy enough to spot what charges were from whom.
While it's a different error, it's a sign that their systems must be really fucked up. It's just not the sort of thing that should happen.
Sometimes I think there are no more Einar Skinnarlands, at least not in America. On my cynical days, I think that if another Hitler came to power, no one would even attempt to stop him.
We're in a war that is supposed to have no end, extending to every part of our nation. The enemy is vague, and the government can arbitrarily decide who the enemy is without presenting any evidence. They can deny their "enemies" of due process. They want to be able to strip citizenship. They want to make people disapear (i.e., secret arrests).
Our top powers also have affiliation with some truly horrible people, like Pat Robertson, who are are conscious enemies to democracy, and convicted criminals, like Poindexter.
At the same time our democratic processes -- as soft as they were to begin with -- are under active attack. Our president was appointed, not elected, and now the polling places are being controlled by partisan and secretive companies without any accountability.
I think we'll soon find out if there's Einar Skinnarlands in this country. But I wonder if we'll only recognize who they are and what they did after our heads have cleared, after we've dragged the world through tremendous misery, after we've awoken from our stupor to realize what savages we are being led by.
The next fascists won't look like the last ones, but still they aren't hiding it all that well.
That makes no sense. The average user will not use an FTP client, that would require them to read the link before they clicked on it, note the "ftp://", then open up their FTP client and copy the link into it -- after they find where the FTP client accepts URLs, when it usually expects hostnames and directories and such.
That's so far beyond a normal user it's silly. I don't do that, why would an average user?
And of course HTTP is just as capable of resuming than FTP, and that support is nearly universal among modern HTTP servers, but not necessarily FTP servers.
when does the populace not need hand holding any more and instead needs something more significant, more sophisticated?
The alternative to AOL isn't more sophisticated, it's less. Increasingly the only thing people need from an ISP is an internet connection, which is far less sophisticated than what AOL provides. It's not that AOL didn't grow with the times, AOL is just becoming insignificant. Maybe they could have found an alternative model, but you can't blame them for not doing so, no one else has either.
AOL's competitors are essentially utility companies. There's no way to create a value added service for my electrical supply, and connectivity is getting to be the same way. AOL is coming from a time when you didn't just buy the electricity, but the service included all your electrical appliances as well.
Nixon (watergate - I am not a crook) and Raygun (sandanista - I do not remember) did
That would be the Iran-Contra scandal, where there was a military/CIA conspiracy to sell weapons to Iran, despite the fact there was an embargo against Iran because of its terrorist activities. Then the money was used to fund the Contras in Nicaragua, which were a terrorist organization -- the group was formed from the death squads that preceded the Sandanista revolution, and their primary recruitment was the kidnapping of Nicaraguans and Hondurans. The primary Contra targets were hospitals, civilians, and other non-military targets that would qualify as terrorist targets.
And just to tie it all in, Iran used the weapons in a war against Iraq, who was also armed by the United States. If you were forgiving you could imagine that was just crazy, but if don't explain everything with "stupidity" you'll see that as an effort to weaken both of those countries.
Anyway, the important point is that Iran-Contra supported terrorism on both sides of the transaction. People who are convicted criminals (but were pardoned by Bush Sr.) are currently serving in the Bush administration. The one you most likely would have heard about is Poindexter, who I believe has a high position in the military intelligence, and at the center of Total Information Awareness and TIPS. There are also other convicted Iran-Contra criminals in other positions.
These people deliberately lied to congress. The question is not what conspiracies might be possible, but what conspiracies are already occurring.
And to tie in the Nixon era, Bush tried to bring in Nixon conspirer Kissinger -- who lied to congress about starting a secret war in Cambodia and Laos, among other crimes -- to investigate what lead to 9-11. How can anyone believe anything from the Bush adminstration?!? The administration does everything it can to show they are liers.
People in other countries realize this in greater and greater numbers. Only with incredible blindness (and with a media that blindfolds itself) have the American people not seen this.
Typically when I arrive on site to show the customers the software we just spent a year creating for them, (**after the customer signs off on the requirements**) and I show them some super wham-o-dyne feature that is not included in the base package, I usuallyt get one of these responses...
1. (90% of the time) What a stupid feature. Why do we have that? Does anyone on earth use this feature?
Sounds like a bad development process to me. There shouldn't be year between someone defining the features (essentially just a hypothesis) and actually user interaction. If you are just dropping a finished program on the customer of course the interface won't be good.
And that's not the customer's fault -- it's your companies fault. The customer doesn't know how to make what they want, and as a result usually doesn't even know what they want. It's not because they are dumb, it's because it's very difficult to pinpoint a solution that's very far off.
Your company is the software producer. That company is supposed to be experienced in that process, and is largely to blame if it can't communicate that experience to the customer, or cannot bring the customer to understand the process and the nature of software production.
I also agree that options and configurable behavior is a bad idea -- usually just there to smooth over a disagreement, or to avoid determining the best behavior empirically. But if there's no potential for user-developer interaction, then it's understandable that the developer won't be able to make those choices.
As noted in this comment employer credit checks do not effect your credit rating.
Re:You've lived on $7 an hour in a homeless shelte
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Giant Sucking Noise
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· Score: 1
That's why it is impractical to live in Boston on your own. $1000/mo isn't so bad shared five ways.
And lots of cheap places exist in the US. You just aren't willing to live there -- either in the cities that are cheaper, or in the neighborhoods that are cheaper.
And on a different note, I believe in Calcutta about two million people leave the city on the weekend, commuting back home, returning the next Monday. In don't know how many people commute each day, but I saw a program about the train system there and they were talking about a dozen people dying in train accidents each day in just one city (New Delhi, I think, but it sounded like that was typical). The things people do to get to cheaper housing, or to get to a job from their home...
Re:Ramblings on overpriced labor & ecology
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Giant Sucking Noise
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Part of globalization -- and actually more specifically the transportability of goods -- is that some geographical advantages are lost, and even become disadvantages. Moreso with information which is so easily transported so far.
One of the reasons that downtowns have been in bad shape in many places, and why so much light industry and office space has moved to the suburbs, is because downtowns are silly in a world where it's not hard to deal with people more than half a mile from you. That changed a while ago, with cars and phones and fax machines, and the expensive density and concentrated demand of downtowns was no longer warranted. Successful downtown areas exist now based largely on prestige and legacy infrastructure, not function.
But obviously that's not why people can live on so little in India. Sure, the real estate is cheaper, and it follows rent is cheaper too, but that's not enough to make the difference. You can find cheap land in the US too, but Gary Indiana hasn't become a high-tech mecca as a result.
Something they do have in India is lots of people that work for much less than $7/hr, and that saving is passed on to everyone else (with the expense of great poverty). We have some of that dynamic, but not to the degree of India.
But I think people don't realize what prices are really like in other countries. I've never been to India, so I don't know quite what it's like there, but from what I've seen in Latin America it's not what people think. I doubt it would be that much cheaper to live in India if you were living by American standards. After all, a lot of the products are global products -- electronics, clothing, etc. -- and you might save some of the retail markup but nothing else. Simple food tends to be cheaper, but packaged food like so many of us are used to isn't that much cheaper. You basically save on outrageous markups (eyeglasses sure are cheap!) and labor (which admittedly is significant -- but you have to get used to being surrounded by abject poverty).
I think a big part of the difference is that the Indian standard of living isn't like the American standard. You don't expect the same things. I know in Latin America it seems quite unusual to move away from your parents until you are married or at least in your mid-20s. And the dynamic is totally different than here as well -- living with your parents doesn't mean you're a slacker. There's lots of other things they go without. You don't have a yard. You don't have a lot of personal space or privacy, you might share a room with a sibling well into adulthood. You don't eat frozen food for every meal, you don't wash your body in water you could drink, you can't put your toilet paper in the toilet, etc.
And you're right, you can live on very little here in the US. I know people who live happily on next to nothing except the modest kindness of others and the excess of our society. I've lived on income equivalent to $7/hr (though my hourly rate was much more), because I decided working less would make me happier than having more money. If more people in the US had the values and the skills to live thrifty lives -- no, not thrifty, simply economically sane -- it would benefit not just our society (if not our economy), but would have a tremendous effect on the entire world.
But of course none of this is fair when desperation is part of the equation. It's not fair if they are working for so little because they would go hungry if they did not. That's when the free market just becomes a cover for the machinations and conspiracies of the capitalists -- labor markets have been manipulated far longer than energy markets or operating systems. Laborers can only be real participants in the free market when their needs -- if only their perceived needs -- are significantly exceded by their earning potential. Otherwise we are inevitably slaves to capital. Anti-consumerism is a revolutionary concept in a nation like ours.
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Typically Smalltalk programs also have more functionality than Java programs, even if they initially seem equivalent. The dynamic method calls in Smalltalk make it possible to use new environments or novel objects in a manner orthogonal to the original program.
Smalltalk still probably comes out slower, but maybe not as badly as it might seem. Just like Java is slower than C, Smalltalk pays a penalty for being a more powerful language.
BTW, I agree that Squeak/Smalltalk/Croquet's persistence does introduce serious UI issues that haven't been well addressed (well, I haven't looked at Croquet, but I would be surprised if they really solved that issue).
The width-changing argument is pretty fishy, too. Does it really matter? Everyone should just use four spaces -- eight is absurd, and only very few people use two. No one uses three or five or any of that. The vision argument is even more absurd -- no one who can read can't tell the difference between four and eight spaces.
Word wrapping obviously makes more sense with spaces -- you can actually say wrap at 72 columns and people know what you mean. You can adjust your environment to that width. 72 columns doesn't mean anything when you use tabs.
However, it does mean massive tab-vs-space flamefests on comp.lang.python! (I'm a tab-hater myself -- tabs are a total PITA, and only advocated by people with stupid editors or people who don't understand that ASCII is not a form of semantic markup).
It's also easy to do it the other way around, to make a Python module out of some code written in another language (usually C/C++). Writing something from scratch in C is a great way to boost performance of your Python application -- take some important inner loops and write them in C, then use them from Python. And the ease of wrapping external libraries means that Python has a lot of very up-to-date access to external libraries.
Python people, when amongst their own, don't talk about Perl much. But /. is known Perl territory :)
If the mass of humanity was killed, and you survived, wouldn't you seek the company and assistance of others? In the wake of tremendous destruction, what purpose would violence have? Cooperation would seem infinitely more important.
Sure, in a riot people are violent. But a riot involves people doing things they can't normally do in their lives amidst their society. It's a temporary state, almost by definition.
In a war people are violent, often long after the war. But that's more than just the collapse of society, that's an extension of society's self-destruction. Few apocolyptic scenarios involve mass societal collapse as a cause, unless the apocolypse is somehow based on everyone being turned crazy by Radio Waves From Space or something (very Steven King-like). In that case you wouldn't want a gun, because you'd kill someone you love or some other horror.
It'd look real silly if the survivors of an apocolypse were toting around guns in an empty landscape.
Privaterra is an organization dedicated to training human rights workers to use encryption tools to ensure their safety. Less about new software, and more about training people to use the software that already exists.
I wouldn't rate school experience as highly as real-world experience, but I wouldn't disregard it either.
But then, when you get a thousand resumes, you have to do something to cut down the numbers...
The world would be a hell of a lot better off if there were a lot less weapons.
Perhaps more modern fixtures are made with these bulbs in mind, but certainly older ones are not. For these bulbs to really work, we need to start seeing lighting fixtures that are designed specifically for their dimensions. Or better flourescent lamps. If I owned my place I might consider building recessed flourescent lighting (incidentally, Frank Lloyd Wright really liked flourescent lights used this way).
Most weapons are not used to defend nations, they are used to oppress. Few nations use their armies to guard their borders or defend their nation; many use their armies to "quell unrest."
Now, I have a feeling there was bad stuff on both sides (and it's taken me a while to extract myself from this job), but you have to be careful when you destroy stuff. It's probably okay when you are deleting something that is your property and isn't paid for. But it's questionable if he already paid for part of the work, or if you were destroying any data created by his operations. If any money had been paid, or if it would compromise data that didn't belong to me, I wouldn't try it unless I had written something into the contract (I've seen pretty generic-looking contract terms which would imply you could effectively confiscate the work if it wasn't paid for). You also need to define when it's not paid for -- 30 days after completion, 60 days...? It's not professional to do something so forceful without making an effort to resolve things more peacefully.
Of course, some of that depends on what distro you're talking about, but they all share from a lot of cross-pollination.
Definitely. "Present Your Papers!" should be the new way of business in our airports! Not just airports, but all interstate travel. Travel is a priviledge! Present Your Papers!
It's presumed that the attacker already has the credit card number -- the PIN is meant to increase security in this circumstance. If the PIN is stored together with the number -- even in any hashed form -- it will be easy to find by an exhaustive search of all possible PINs.
While it's a different error, it's a sign that their systems must be really fucked up. It's just not the sort of thing that should happen.
Our top powers also have affiliation with some truly horrible people, like Pat Robertson, who are are conscious enemies to democracy, and convicted criminals, like Poindexter.
At the same time our democratic processes -- as soft as they were to begin with -- are under active attack. Our president was appointed, not elected, and now the polling places are being controlled by partisan and secretive companies without any accountability.
I think we'll soon find out if there's Einar Skinnarlands in this country. But I wonder if we'll only recognize who they are and what they did after our heads have cleared, after we've dragged the world through tremendous misery, after we've awoken from our stupor to realize what savages we are being led by.
The next fascists won't look like the last ones, but still they aren't hiding it all that well.
That's so far beyond a normal user it's silly. I don't do that, why would an average user? And of course HTTP is just as capable of resuming than FTP, and that support is nearly universal among modern HTTP servers, but not necessarily FTP servers.
AOL's competitors are essentially utility companies. There's no way to create a value added service for my electrical supply, and connectivity is getting to be the same way. AOL is coming from a time when you didn't just buy the electricity, but the service included all your electrical appliances as well.
And just to tie it all in, Iran used the weapons in a war against Iraq, who was also armed by the United States. If you were forgiving you could imagine that was just crazy, but if don't explain everything with "stupidity" you'll see that as an effort to weaken both of those countries.
Anyway, the important point is that Iran-Contra supported terrorism on both sides of the transaction. People who are convicted criminals (but were pardoned by Bush Sr.) are currently serving in the Bush administration. The one you most likely would have heard about is Poindexter, who I believe has a high position in the military intelligence, and at the center of Total Information Awareness and TIPS. There are also other convicted Iran-Contra criminals in other positions.
These people deliberately lied to congress. The question is not what conspiracies might be possible, but what conspiracies are already occurring.
And to tie in the Nixon era, Bush tried to bring in Nixon conspirer Kissinger -- who lied to congress about starting a secret war in Cambodia and Laos, among other crimes -- to investigate what lead to 9-11. How can anyone believe anything from the Bush adminstration?!? The administration does everything it can to show they are liers.
People in other countries realize this in greater and greater numbers. Only with incredible blindness (and with a media that blindfolds itself) have the American people not seen this.
And that's not the customer's fault -- it's your companies fault. The customer doesn't know how to make what they want, and as a result usually doesn't even know what they want. It's not because they are dumb, it's because it's very difficult to pinpoint a solution that's very far off.
Your company is the software producer. That company is supposed to be experienced in that process, and is largely to blame if it can't communicate that experience to the customer, or cannot bring the customer to understand the process and the nature of software production.
I also agree that options and configurable behavior is a bad idea -- usually just there to smooth over a disagreement, or to avoid determining the best behavior empirically. But if there's no potential for user-developer interaction, then it's understandable that the developer won't be able to make those choices.
As noted in this comment employer credit checks do not effect your credit rating.
And lots of cheap places exist in the US. You just aren't willing to live there -- either in the cities that are cheaper, or in the neighborhoods that are cheaper.
And on a different note, I believe in Calcutta about two million people leave the city on the weekend, commuting back home, returning the next Monday. In don't know how many people commute each day, but I saw a program about the train system there and they were talking about a dozen people dying in train accidents each day in just one city (New Delhi, I think, but it sounded like that was typical). The things people do to get to cheaper housing, or to get to a job from their home...
One of the reasons that downtowns have been in bad shape in many places, and why so much light industry and office space has moved to the suburbs, is because downtowns are silly in a world where it's not hard to deal with people more than half a mile from you. That changed a while ago, with cars and phones and fax machines, and the expensive density and concentrated demand of downtowns was no longer warranted. Successful downtown areas exist now based largely on prestige and legacy infrastructure, not function.
But obviously that's not why people can live on so little in India. Sure, the real estate is cheaper, and it follows rent is cheaper too, but that's not enough to make the difference. You can find cheap land in the US too, but Gary Indiana hasn't become a high-tech mecca as a result.
Something they do have in India is lots of people that work for much less than $7/hr, and that saving is passed on to everyone else (with the expense of great poverty). We have some of that dynamic, but not to the degree of India.
But I think people don't realize what prices are really like in other countries. I've never been to India, so I don't know quite what it's like there, but from what I've seen in Latin America it's not what people think. I doubt it would be that much cheaper to live in India if you were living by American standards. After all, a lot of the products are global products -- electronics, clothing, etc. -- and you might save some of the retail markup but nothing else. Simple food tends to be cheaper, but packaged food like so many of us are used to isn't that much cheaper. You basically save on outrageous markups (eyeglasses sure are cheap!) and labor (which admittedly is significant -- but you have to get used to being surrounded by abject poverty).
I think a big part of the difference is that the Indian standard of living isn't like the American standard. You don't expect the same things. I know in Latin America it seems quite unusual to move away from your parents until you are married or at least in your mid-20s. And the dynamic is totally different than here as well -- living with your parents doesn't mean you're a slacker. There's lots of other things they go without. You don't have a yard. You don't have a lot of personal space or privacy, you might share a room with a sibling well into adulthood. You don't eat frozen food for every meal, you don't wash your body in water you could drink, you can't put your toilet paper in the toilet, etc.
And you're right, you can live on very little here in the US. I know people who live happily on next to nothing except the modest kindness of others and the excess of our society. I've lived on income equivalent to $7/hr (though my hourly rate was much more), because I decided working less would make me happier than having more money. If more people in the US had the values and the skills to live thrifty lives -- no, not thrifty, simply economically sane -- it would benefit not just our society (if not our economy), but would have a tremendous effect on the entire world.
But of course none of this is fair when desperation is part of the equation. It's not fair if they are working for so little because they would go hungry if they did not. That's when the free market just becomes a cover for the machinations and conspiracies of the capitalists -- labor markets have been manipulated far longer than energy markets or operating systems. Laborers can only be real participants in the free market when their needs -- if only their perceived needs -- are significantly exceded by their earning potential. Otherwise we are inevitably slaves to capital. Anti-consumerism is a revolutionary concept in a nation like ours.