>China is just catching up to what the rest of the developed world has gone through
in the past there was no world trade organization and there were no multi-national free trade agreements. It's like saying china should be allowed to enslave people because it happened hundreds of years ago. There are now laws against it
I've seen this argument parroted multiple times on many different websites. It's either just the blind leading the blind or Chinese sock puppets spreading lies to justify blatant trade abuses
The biggest problem for small and medium communities is brain drain. It's a vicious death spiral because the smart and ambitious kids basically have to move away to large cities to get quality jobs.
The only solution I can think of is incentivizing remote work so people don't have to be concentrated in cities. You might not even have to incentivize it because it's a tremendous advantage as a tech company to be able to recruit from any where in the country where lots of talented people don't want to move for family reasons or don't want to live in a city
You're absolutely right. Incentivizing remote work could definitely help!
With that said, it may be worth considering that there is some subtlety here. It's surprisingly difficult to integrate remote workers into a company that has and uses offices. A lot of communication is lost when people aren't regularly sharing the same physical spaces, and cultural practices and technologies to date are mostly limited to mitigating this loss slightly. There's a drop in productivity, and it appears to be (in general, at scale, individuals can and do vary wildly) inevitable. Building a small company entirely from exceptional individuals is workable, but as a model it can't scale.
Right now the major incentive is that remote workers can be paid the local-to-them pay rate. This is a problem, as it rarely matches the model of remote work that smaller towns and would-be remote workers have in mind.
There's also some major wins that individuals gain by congregating in urban areas with their industry. It's harder to replace these with remote work, as much of it depends on concentration enabling serendipity.
Again, you're completely right. Remote work could definitely help! There might be some subtleties worth considering is all.
The only incentivizing needed is to provide fiber to the home so everyone has ample connectivity to compete on a level playing field, and then businesses will figure out which mix of remote and in office employees works for them and allows them to best position themselves in the market.
Fiber to the home may be desirable but it's overrated. I've had tech co-workers who managed with satellite because that was their only option to live on a rural property they wanted.
You can watch whether this is working in real time: just watch NZ which has rolled out fiber to the home: NZ could be looked at as a rural area.
From what I have seen, for most people it means Netflix, and it has had very little impact upon NZ software development (certainly not a billion dollars worth).
Truely rural areas don't get fibre (too expensive per household) and often have no ADSL either (more than 5km from exchange).
Musk is a great marketer and communicator, he convinces people that making luxury cars is saving the world because they are electric. The people buying them also feel like they are heroes saving the world. Humans have a need to feel like they are a part of something bigger than themselves and Musk provides it.
Steve jobs did the same thing, their marketing was all about pushing how apple users think different and are changing the world by being mindless consumers
Yea. Even in aerospace and defense. Pretty important industries to long-term safety and success of our country. This led us to the F35 debacle and state of orbital launch services.
What is the US supposed to do? You literally cited two cases, Ukraine and Libya, which are polar opposites. Ukraine the US is criticized for NOT intervening, middle east and Libya US is criticized FOR intervening.
And now we have Myanmar muslim situation and Yemen where people are begging for US intervention, but in all probability if we intervened we would be getting criticized for it by the same people asking us to intervene in a few years
1. US military is only 16-18% of federal spending. Entitlements like social security, medicaid, and welfare make up 65-70% of federal spending. The majority of military spending is on salaries and benefits anyway, it's essentially a welfare program itself
>delivers the least
2. most major advancements in tech and healthcare are due to the military. Silicon Valley was built on military spending. Self driving cars were initially funded by DARPA. AI was funded by military. If you have a job in the tech industry you can thank the US military
There's also the minor detail of the US navy making global trade possible and the strength of the US military making traditional war pointless which has resulted in the last few decades being the most peaceful in human history in terms of probability of dying in combat
> 2. most major advancements in tech and healthcare are due to the military.
Can you back that up? That military spending has been high gives no guarantee that having spent the same money in the private sector wouldn't have led to even better results and advancements.
private sector doesnt do basic research and has a short view of things because of the drive towards profitability.
gov't-funded R&D is why we have nice things. everyone strategically forgets that silicon valley exists because of bottomless cold war spending, so silicon valley's obsession with the superiority of the private sector is ever ironic
The private sector is generally very, very heavy on short-termism. Even when companies do have internal long-term research initiatives, there is often a strong aversion to pursuing research that could cannibalize high-margin products.
Unequivocally, no, the reasons are stated in the post you're replying to.
Which private, for profit, company would spend five (5) billion dollars (unadjusted for inflation) to launch GPS satellites into space and then allow their unlimited use free of cost to anyone in the world who has a receiver? That cost doesn't even account for ongoing maintenance.
Maybe no company would do exactly that, but that is irrelevant. Companies would do other things with that money. Maybe they would have cured some disease instead. Maybe they would have found another breakthrough technology. Who knows.
And there is nothing free about using those satellites. Tax payers pay for their launch and subsequent maintenance and running costs.
From an economics point of view, an unnecessary job is inefficient not because it gives people money (they can spend it efficiently on themselves), but because it wastes people's time when they could be doing something else. (Not to mention other wasted resources.)
Social security is efficient because it doesn't have this problem.
progressives would have an easier time convincing conservatives to support their policies if the most liberal places in the country weren't complete hell holes with the worst income inequality
be the change you wish to see in the world and all that
California, New Jersey, and Illinois all in bottom 5 for quality of life, New York at 37.
These rankings are suspect. Mississippi is #6 in quality of life, yet they are near dead last in almost everything else (health care #50, education #46, economy #48, opportunity #49, infrastructure #49). How can someone have a high quality of life if they are poor, uneducated, and unhealthy?
The answer seems to be that US News defines quality of life in an extremely narrow manner. The measurement seems to place a high emphasis on community engagement (likely tied to religiosity) and natural environment (which seems to favor areas without large cities).
The reasons for this are because they are the only places offering adequate services for low income families so people migrate to these areas. They become overburdened because most cities are not pulling their own weight. It sucks but it's better than being elsewhere for them. This only works with a collaborative effort from all over the US, not just a handful of progressive cities doing all the work while people stand in the sidelines criticizing it for not working.
Most liberal places are hell holes ? I mean Marin County is 80% Democrats is one of the best places to live in the world. In fact the entire coast of US from San Diego all the way to Washington is all blue. What about huge cities like LA and NYC ? Are they hell holes too ? I don't really need to point out what areas of the US are true dystopian, with no jobs, declining life spans, opiod epidemics, and so forth.
Also, urban areas will have blight. That is true for any country in the world. But what makes the US unique is the historical context of slavery, reconstruction, segregation, white flight, incarceration etc. It's like 400 years of history and baggage.
You can also easily go to a very brown area and see the same thing. I mean Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Fremont, Dublin, San Ramon are heavily Indian cities, if not outright majority, and heavily blue. They are also awesome places to live.
This seems to be very dependent on which factors one values; that ranking only has three non-nature related factors, which seems frankly insufficient.
One could similarly point to the suicide rate and write the same sentence with liberal/conservative switched (California, New York, etc are all at the bottom of the age-adjusted suicide rates in US states).
The idea is stealing is not a black and white concept. Stealing something digital generally has very different effects than stealing something physical.
For example, if someone the software I own without my permission and doesn’t give it back; I loose out on revenue I would have otherwise received from them.
If someone uses the car I own without my permission and doesn’t give it back; I am out thousands of dollars, I have no means to get to work, and no means of purchasing groceries.
Stealing is not black and white and rules and regulations should reflect that.
What?! Stealing is a super simple concept: what the owner will not give, the thief takes anyway.
You could try to argue theft in contexts where the owner's willingness to give is ambiguous is not clear-cut (eg taking one piece of candy from the jar is fine but taking all the candy is theft), but that's ambiguity in communication and cultural convention, not in the concept of theft itself.
Really it isn't stealing in intellectual content period - it is infringement. There are many groups conflating the two but they have very distinct meanings.
In order for something to be stolen it must be taken away. If you make an award winning painting and hang it on your mantleplace and I paint a perfect copy of it that doesn't mean that it is suddently missing from your house. I may have devalued it and I certainly would have infringed but not stolen anything.
Even ownership has such radically different meanings between the two they probably shouldn't have the same word. There is a vast space of things that nobody owns called the public domain. Saying you can't own a chair would be a bizarre invasion of rights. It doesn't matter how long chairs have been around - the fact it existed in the wood age doesn't mean you can no longer own one.
Saying that you own the concept of all chairs and all must pay tribute is a downright bizarre megalomania. They have existed from the wood age and long before any current civilizations were even alive - to claim exclusive ownership of something so universal and ancient is absurd.
Intellectual property isn't a natural right by any means - it is a pragmatic policy granted by governments meant to serve a purpose. It operates based upon treaties in the first place.
A hypothetical newly discovered underwater civilization copying from our airwaves would not be cause for military intervention. The same underwater civilization robbing freighters for cargo would be cause for intervention.
You’re right—the use of the term “intellectual property” has muddled public discourse on this important issue.
Society as a whole benefits from a robust system of copyright, trademarks and patents to incentivize art and innovation. But just as too weak a system will slow innovation by making it less financially viable, too strong a system will slow innovation by making it harder and more expensive to build new things out of old ones. We need to strike a balance, but the popular notion that ideas and expressions are strongly analogous to real property will likely lead to policies that are, on balance, harmful.
That IP law in the U.S. was conceived of as an economic incentive issue—and not an ethical one—is strongly suggested in the “copyright clause” of the U.S. Constitution, which grants Congress the power “To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” [0]
Thomas Jefferson elaborated on his own views on IP in a letter to Isaac McPherson in 1813 [1]:
“He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.”
To reiterate a bit of what you said, if “intellectual property” is not property at all, it cannot be stolen—only infringed upon. And the difference is important because whereas theft is a violation of natural law, infringement is a violation of the rules of a specific society.
China is a different society and it has different rules. If we want to make respecting our country’s copyrights, trademarks and patents a precondition of trade, that seems like a good idea—but we should just say that. The drama of calling it “theft” is unnecessary and wrong.
By the way, I recently read and recommend “Intellectual Property: A Very Short Introduction” [2] by Siva Vaidhyanathan for an all-around introduction to intellectual property.
A russian newspaper was given access to the Russia dump in 2010 and there's no evidence they have conservative info, unless you're able to post a source
Older family friend made $30/hr in the 60-70s with pension and benefits working in a meat packing plant with a high school education. Same job today pays $15/hr with no benefits thanks to illegal immigration. There's a reason people like the Koch brothers spend millions in support of illegal immigration, they wanted to drive down the labor cost for jobs like the above.
Offshoring and illegal immigration has killed low skill jobs and given billion dollar multinational corporations the ability to demand whatever they want from workers because they have unlimited labor supply.
This doesn't just effect low skill labor either, it forces more people to go to college and take on debt which then drives down the wages of high skill work as well. It's a scam and the american people should be angry
For a limited number of positions, if you have a bigger pool of people to hire from, the wages will automatically go down. This is simple economics.
While the union effect might also be playing a role, it's curious that you rush to deny the big obvious factor while propping up a relatively minor reasoning factor as a primary one.
Probably because it seems doubtful that ten million people (the estimated number of illegal aliens in the US), tanked wages for everyone in a country of 330 million.
It's curious you immediately point to illegal immigration as the big obvious factor with no citations to support your claims.
The fact is wages have been stagnating since the seventies and most people attribute that to the weakening of unions, offshoring, and automation before illegal immigration.
The US is producing twice as much today as it was in 1984 with a third less workers. That seems like it'd have a much bigger impact to me. And painting immigrants as the reason American's qualities of life has dropped off seems disingenuous, simplistic, and prejudiced.
1. I think your heart might be in the right place, but I think your facts are mistaken / misunderstood.
2. Kochs are horrible people, but historically their union-busting, and other worker rights protection attacks are the cause of income falling at their refineries and other family-owned manufacturing plants in MN, WI, KS, etc. (If you want to see what full-on Koch / Republican leadership does to a place, look at what Kansas has become).
3. You (and Ezra, and most of the watchers) misunderstand Bernie Sanders in a few ways. Yes, low income earners would be great for Koch, but Koch is happy to pay Americans low income. Because they don't need foreign workers if they just pay American politicians to screw American workers out of worker protections, health care, etc: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/recips.php?id=d000000186
4. Misunderstanding Bernie #2: open borders was brought up in the context of increasing immigration as an opening question. And Bernie said it was a Republican idea / Koch brothers idea because the context in July 2015 was that it is a Boogeyman. It was created as an idea to scare politically conservative people away from the "left" / "Democrats", as a "these crazy Democrats want open borders", not that anyone ever actually proposed as much. How do I know? Because that shit came back again this summer, making the same claims that Dems want open borders, which again had to be put down.
So yeah, hate the Kochs. Please. They are not good people. But hate them for the right reasons, not because you think they are pro illegal immigration or pro open borders (they aren't).
in the past there was no world trade organization and there were no multi-national free trade agreements. It's like saying china should be allowed to enslave people because it happened hundreds of years ago. There are now laws against it
I've seen this argument parroted multiple times on many different websites. It's either just the blind leading the blind or Chinese sock puppets spreading lies to justify blatant trade abuses