> The conspiracy buffs are too busy howling in protest at the thought that their government could uncover how long they spent on the phone with their dear aunt. Let me break this to you gently. The government is not interested in your conversations with your aunt, unless, of course, she is a key terrorist leader.
Let me break this to you gently. The president of the United States would never send burglars into the opposing political parties national headquarters to ransack the place and conduct espionage, in addition to many other covert and illegal actions, in an attempt to force the next presidental election his way. If the FBI and press began uncovering this, he would never abuse executive powers to strongarm the FBI, have congressmen of the same party attack television media licenses of the media companies reporting this etc. Oh yaa, this actually did happen. Within my lifetime.
It's good to hear the CIA can be trusted. In the 1980s, Congress banned the US from sending money to terrorists who were fighting to overthrow the elected government of Nicaragua. Terrorists who killed Americans like Ben Linder. Oliver North joined the National Security Council and began secretly funding these terrorists in violation of Congressional mandate. When it became public he was doing this and Congress began investigating, North testified CIA director William Casey shred all documents pertaining to his illegal activity, so that Congress could not find out what had happened.
The average American has no idea what it means when it leaks out that fibre optic beam splitters are making records of our conversations and data connections, or how something like XKeyscore work. We have a better idea of what is actually happening in this respect, which is why we have some extra concern. And a more realistic view of what is happening, despite what this former-CIA Rand Corp. apparatchik says.
> But capitalism works based not just on what you can produce, but what you can withhold. It's a "tragedy of the commons" problem: if anyone can hit a "clone chair" button for zero cost, few would pay to sustain enough professional chair makers.
You contradict yourself once here. You say capitalism is based on what can be withheld. Another word for that might be scarcity. In 1932 Lionel Robbins said "Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses." This is still the modern mainstram definition of capitalism.
Then you say:
> if anyone can hit a 'clone chair' button for zero cost, few would pay to sustain enough professional chair makers
The idea that value comes from the labor of chair makers is a Marxist idea. You are making a Marxist argument here. It also contradicts your first argument. You say value comes from scarcity (modern mainstream economists agree), then you say value comes from labor (which is what Marx said) which contradicts the first argument.
You're trying to make a Marxist argument for capitalism (Actually Marx did make an argument for capitalism - he said it was better than feudalism and slavery, but that's not what I mean here).
You should go on the web and read about the subjective theory of value, and then about the labor theory of value. You argue STV in the first sentence and then LTV in the second. They can not both be right, their definition of value is contradictory.
I should note you're not the first person I see making this error. As things become digital they lose their scarcity. I see all kinds of odd statements come out of this. You're not alone in this. But across the entire political spectrum, from far left to far right, all serious students of the economy agree only one side can be right, value comes from either subjective marginal/scarce/utility reasons or from a certain type of labor, but it is either one or the other. You flip back and forth between a capitalist-supporting argument and a Marxist argument. A Marxist argument for capitalism. I see this more and more, and I find it odd.
> In 1932 Lionel Robbins said "Economics is the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses." This is still the modern mainstram definition of capitalism.
The quote there appears to be defining "Economics", not "capitalism".
I'm curious about this: when did Capitalism stop meaning "the opposite of cottage industry" and start meaning "a market with limited regulation"? Was it Marx that introduced this?
The academics are interesting, but I'm talking about the more tangible microeconomic concerns: How can an author get paid for their book if anyone can print their own copy? What investor would invest in a movie if it can be downloaded for free? There are possible answers to these questions, but I'm skeptical whether replacing copyright completely with alternative business models and hobbyists would result in the same level (and quality) of production.
A century and a half ago, Karl Marx said the only force outside of nature which could create value was labor. This was not a new concept, but in line with what economists before such as Adam Smith had thought.
A counter-argument arose from what he may have called the "capitalist hegemons" that value arose through supply and demand and marginal utility. That if there was enough demand for something, prices would rise and a supply would come into being.
Yet nowadays these hegemons seem to be saying something different. There is a demand for IT talent. There are billions of people in the world, so it seems obvious that if you set hours at 40 a week and then raise the salary enough, eventually the demand will be filled.
The bottom line is they don't want to raise the salary.
It is possible other factors are in the way. If, to take one example, Pell Grants were higher and easier to get, maybe there would be more CS graduates. The opposite is happening with Pell Grants - they have been cut back, and are covering less college costs than they have in history.
This means less CS graduates. This means you'll have to pay more for the ones who come out, because less are coming out.
It's a strange contradictory thinking. Employers preach supply and demand, yet think it does not apply to their desire for engineers. Set hours at 40 a week and pay for them. If you want people to work more, you'll have to pay more.
There is not a shortage of engineers. There's just a flood of people who want a very accomplished, knowledgeable engineer, and want them to work on boring, brain-dead projects for 60 hours a week, and to pay them nothing and treat them like junk.
I have 10,000 jobs open right now. I need experts in Java, Python etc. I'll pay you minimum wage. You need to work 12 hours a day. See, I just added 10,000 new job openings to the shortage. How come I can't find anyone to fill these jobs?
Several years ago I was at a company and we were hiring for a position. One guy came in, who was maybe in his mid-50s. His technical skills were excellent, he could answer any question thrown at him in detail. Aside from that he was a normal, genial guy with a solid resume - we has passed on another guy with good tech knowledge but who did not act normal. I was desperate to have the position filled as people had quit and I was handling a large load.
Two managers said they didn't want to hire him. I really protested this - we had interviewed so many people and had finally found someone decent. I said he was perfect, what more could they want, what was wrong with him? I asked that last question repeatedly. Finally one said, "I think if we called him up in the middle of the night to fix a problem, he would be unhappy with that". Months later we hired a guy in his 20s, who had less technical talent.
That's the position companies are in. They pass over perfect candidates like this guy in his 50s, and then bemoan they can't find candidates.
These companies fund think tanks who have economists who tell us that value is determined by supply and demand, that if there is enough demand for something, the price for it will rise until a supply comes about. This is their philosophy, yet now they're saying there is a shortage of engineers. It is total BS. Engineers are being overworked and underpaid. People talk about high engineer salaries, they don't talk about how engineers have to pay for their own college degrees, do all that studying, then go to work, make a starting salary, then have death marches on projects etc.
Engineers are usually undercompensated for the work they do. The only exceptions to this are during tech bubbles (say 1999), but those only last for a short while. They're also made up for on the other side by tech slumps, where IT workers employable during normal times, but perhaps without a college degree, are out of work.
I don't believe in the "labor shortage should result in higher wages" argument. Usually we are talking about a baseline. If companies believed, they could make more profit by doubling the salary and thus maybe attracting more talent, they would do so.
Supply/demand is all the economics most people understand. But it's not just about the labor market, but what the company is doing with the labor.
First world problems...right now the US is arming Syrian rebels so more Syrians can get blown to bits. You're surprised that the culture perpetrating atrocities around the world like that would also hurt the feelings of some upper middle class white "creative type"? Let me break out my violin. What happened, you opened up the window of your ivory tower and didn't like what wafted in? Take off your rose-colored glasses and take a look around you.
You have the right idea. Really puts it into perspective, when these people act like their on a moral crusade defending a upper middle class assholes because he got mean comments from other middle class assholes.
> It is little surprise then that Western liberals no longer breed above replacement rates. Denigrating motherhood is not the way for a people to last the aeons of time. I believe the future of the West is profoundly more conservative than the present, because Darwin. Liberalism is a suicidal ideology.
It doesn't really work like that. India has over 1 billion people, and I'm sure "traditional" lower caste women there "breed above replacement rates" as you put it.
On the other side you might have an upper middle class, white, historically mainline Protestant couple living in the US. Both have a sibling, both have advanced degrees, both have parents who went to college. Their families have slowly been acquiring wealth for generations. The couple will have two "replacement rate" kids.
On the other hand, the lower caste Indian woman has more than one child die in infancy. The family does not always have enough food to eat every day.
Yet in your mind, the Indian family is a winner because of "Darwin", because the western liberals have a "suicidal ideology". But who would doubt the upper middle class American son would not want to trade places with the Indian kid, and there's a much more significant chance that the Indian kid would trade places with the white kid.
You seem to see some "contempt" and a "misogynist" tone in the parent which I do not. You're advocating a way of life and morality and such that belongs to history, and to rural farmers in that history. The US is losing its industrial jobs never mind its agricultural jobs. Traditional life in the US is Michael Moore's "Roger & Me" vision of 1950s blue collar unionized industrial workers driving their cars back to the suburbs. A way of life going away with Detroit's bankruptcy. Your vision of women only raising kids, and more than two as you say, is not traditional, it's almost ancient tradition. It's like, Pennsylvania farmers circa late 17th century. The Amish and Mennonites in Pennyslvania live like you're talking. But most of America considers it rather antiquated.
It does not matter who is happier or have better life - middle class family in US or low-cast family in India. Sad fact is that ALL western societies are below replacement level. White US population is on decline (and it's not steep only because of conservative rural population). Depopulation is a bitch and nature hates void. Two kids are not replacement level - you need 2.33 kids on average.
Fertility rate for white female with college degree (liberal dream) is 1.6 in US. What it means? It means that it takes only 10 generations (180-250 years) to go from 150 million species to 15 million (10x reduction). That means that current model of liberal society just does not work from evolutional perspective. Being educated white female is a negative trait from evolutionary perspective.
I am saying this as somebody who has highly educated girlfriend and who is very unlikely to have more than two kids (one reason being that it takes 200k to send one kid to college).
There is no such thing as a liberalism gene. Cultural evolution plays a much larger part in the development of human society than traditional biological evolution does. "Caucasians", insofar as that term has any scientific basis in fact, might be on the decline. Liberal society is not.
It's only true if conservative=>liberal conversion continues in future which is not necessarily true. Currently liberal societies generally outperform conservative ones but historically it was often not the case.
Just look at Siege of Baghdad by mongolian hordes or depopulation and fall of Roman Empire.
This graph[1] is the number of children of white Americans age 44-55 by political leaning in the 2000-2010 GSS survey, which seems to suggest that there is a pattern of liberals breeding themselves into extinction. This graph[2] is the same thing over time.
Don't you get it, this is our way of keeping the wealth to fewer and fewe people. That 1% will be turned into .5% soon, and we will all be twice as rich.
I'm an American, and my e-mails, text messages, phone calls, and I guess even this post I am making right now is being eavesdropped on by the NSA. Snowden informed me of this.
The fourth Amendment to the Constitution is: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
When I was young, there was a president named Richard Nixon. It's probable he sent a bunch of burglars to the Democratic National Committee campaign headquarters at the Watergate hotel to do some espionage to try to fix the election his way. It's known he tried to illegally cover up this break-in - there's an audio tape of him doing this. He also was involved in a more extensive and illegal effort to fix the election and eavesdrop and conduct espionage on his political opponents. Later revelations showed the FBI was going beyond its mandate as well, sometimes to the ignorance of the Congress (such as an FBI-run political campaign against Martin Luther King Jr.) This happened in my lifetime, so fears of such things are not out of place. The tyrannical English king acted the same way in the 18th century, it's probably why fresh in the founding fathers midns they put such things in the Constitution.
Chomsky praises Snowden, and opposes bureaucratic attacks on the fourth amendment consitutional rights of Americans. For this you call him "un-American". Supporting the fourth amendment constitutional rights of innocent Americans to not have their fourth amendment rights violated is anti-American?
Here is what Chomsky says about the charge of "anti-American":
Chomsky: The concept "anti-American" is an interesting one. The counterpart is used only in totalitarian states or military dictatorships, something I wrote about many years ago (see my book Letters from Lexington). Thus, in the old Soviet Union, dissidents were condemned as "anti-Soviet." That's a natural usage among people with deeply rooted totalitarian instincts, which identify state policy with the society, the people, the culture. In contrast, people with even the slightest concept of democracy treat such notions with ridicule and contempt. Suppose someone in Italy who criticizes Italian state policy were condemned as "anti-Italian." It would be regarded as too ridiculous even to merit laughter. Maybe under Mussolini, but surely not otherwise.
Actually the concept has earlier origins. It was used in the Bible by King Ahab, the epitome of evil, to condemn those who sought justice as "anti-Israel" ("ocher Yisrael," in the original Hebrew, roughly "hater of Israel," or "disturber of Israel"). His specific target was Elijah.
It's interesting to see the tradition in which the people you refer to choose to place themselves. The idea of leaving America because one opposes state policy is another reflection of deep totalitarian commitments. Solzhenitsyn, for example, was forced to leave Russia, against his will, by people with beliefs very much like those you are quoting.
> you can't train people to be stars
Just like you can't train people to be star athletes. Except you can. Star athletes get free college tuition. Star college athletes get sent to training camps and minor leagues where they get paid and are trained on their game so they can make it to the professionals. They go through training there as well.
A tuition free university, University of Helsinki, is what Linux came out of. Free CS classes. A star was trained there.
The mentality of "you can't train stars" is bogus...it's more "we don't want to invest anything and want everything handed to us free and easy, and if we don't get it that way we'll complain about a shortage of stars"
It's great that it's been deduced that organizer labor is behind this article, and thus it's not neutral and has a hidden agenda. I'm sure someone who takes a 6% stake of high-growth companies for $14,000 is completely neutral with no hidden agenda. Also it's false that "none of these programmers are unionized". Programmers are represented by unions such as the IAMAW, CWA etc. It's possible 3 person startups have no union representation, but that's not out of the norm.
During the twentieth century, US economists promoting the values of those controlling production talked about how production was fundamentally controlled by laws of supply and demand, and economic theories thinking otherwise were silly.
Yet flying in the face of that is this idea of a "high tech worker shortage". If there really could be a shortage of high tech workers for longer than a short period, than the bedrock idea of supply and demand are bogus. Even miniscule hurdles like visas would mean nothing - if there is a mass of talent in India and a worldwide demand for that talent, then if visas were a problem, multinationals and trans-continental consulting firms would just set up there.
There is no high-tech worker shortage. There's a bunch of "idea guys" sitting around who think how much money they could make if they could hire a bunch of rock-star programmers on the cheap.
Let me break this to you gently. The president of the United States would never send burglars into the opposing political parties national headquarters to ransack the place and conduct espionage, in addition to many other covert and illegal actions, in an attempt to force the next presidental election his way. If the FBI and press began uncovering this, he would never abuse executive powers to strongarm the FBI, have congressmen of the same party attack television media licenses of the media companies reporting this etc. Oh yaa, this actually did happen. Within my lifetime.
It's good to hear the CIA can be trusted. In the 1980s, Congress banned the US from sending money to terrorists who were fighting to overthrow the elected government of Nicaragua. Terrorists who killed Americans like Ben Linder. Oliver North joined the National Security Council and began secretly funding these terrorists in violation of Congressional mandate. When it became public he was doing this and Congress began investigating, North testified CIA director William Casey shred all documents pertaining to his illegal activity, so that Congress could not find out what had happened.
The average American has no idea what it means when it leaks out that fibre optic beam splitters are making records of our conversations and data connections, or how something like XKeyscore work. We have a better idea of what is actually happening in this respect, which is why we have some extra concern. And a more realistic view of what is happening, despite what this former-CIA Rand Corp. apparatchik says.