We we all sing kumbaya round the campfire and world peace will be achieved :)

Precisely their motivation to go there...low wages.

That's an excellent point.

I wasn't looking for my own financial gain when I left Honduras. I was part of a missionary team that planted a church in Monterrey, Mexico. I've since left Christianity, and become an agnostic.

But to the point, crime in my country is horrific and wages low. A lot of skilled developers have fled.

I wonder if I were successful in starting a company in Honduras I would be target for criminals and corrupt government officials. Crime and corruption are worsening every year there.

For instance, I was mugged 6 times in 2008, my final year in Tegucigalpa. Having your laptop stolen at gunpoint a few blocks from home, and being mugged every other month gets your attention! Kidnapping is very common there too, and not only for the rich. Also, a corrupt government official raided my workplace, accusing us of telephone fraud, because we competed with his state-owned company. We sued the government and won, after a year of litigation. But, my boss lost his marriage, his home, his car, and his savings in the process. Happily the corrupt official went to jail, even if it was for a different crime.

I think I could probably live in Monterrey, partner with someone in the US, and use the cheap labor in Honduras and Monterrey with the funding and market of the US. We could get the best of all three countries and everybody would win.

And it's the wet dream of most employers, to pay their employees less than half of what they do now. Since this is North America, you will not live comfortably on that. But why should they care, as long as their stock price rises and they get big bonuses?

If you're saying that the rich are overpaid in comparison with the wages of their employees, I agree with you.

Mitt Romney had to sell some stocks to make ends meet while he was in college. Since you went to school in the US, I expect you're familiar with having to do that. No, it's not a meritocracy, though we like to pretend it is.

I'm not sure what you mean here, are you implying I'm not familiar with poverty? You'd be wrong there.

Umm., no, Sam Walton paid for my scholarship. I paid for my own masters. Understand why I don't want to live in the US? Its attitudes like this.

I agree with General Secretary.

Anecdotal evidence:

I'm a Honduran who won a college scholarship to study in the US, but forced to return to Latin America immediately after graduation (1998). I now live in Mexico, and work as a consultant. Often I'm hired to do work for US firms, and am paid less than half of what I would be in the US. But since this is Latin America, these wages let me live comfortably in the middle class.

I've since got my master's degree, and dream about starting a company someday. But I hesitate to return to the US. If I did, because of my ethnicity and birth country, many would think I stole their job. But isn't the US a meritocracy? What about the American dream?

Happy to oblige! What's the RGB code for impressed?

I thought the plural of Smoot was Smeet!

... Or, 100 million times the power to fill a house with popcorn from a military satellite.

Well, then, don't kick them out. I got my CS degree in the US under a scholarship that forced me to return to my home country. I am now working for a US company, but live in Latin America, and paid a lower salary than a comparable US citizen. If I had stayed in the States, I'd have probably started my own startup by now and be employing US citizens.

Its basic psychology, if given larger containers, people consume more.

Cornell University did a study in a Philadelphia movie theater with stale popcorn. Given the larger containers, people still ate more of it, even though it was like eating styrofoam.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16053812

You must mean Bishop Diego de Landa...a contradictory man, he ended up being our best source of ethnographic research on the Maya. Not all friars were so cruel though, for instance Bartolomé de las Casas, but he was Dominican, not Franciscan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diego_de_Landa
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolomé_de_las_Casas

The cruelty of the Europeans against the native peoples of America, Africa and Asia is unconscionable, and its remnants persist in the xenophobia of their descendants in the US, Europe, and in the oppressed nations themselves.

Are there any cases of technologically advanced civilizations being friendly with less advanced civilizations?

As an ex-conservative turned agnostic, I can say that what's really happening with conservatives is that among them, science is now perceived as fabricated to suit liberal political leanings or the interests of mega-corporations.

This has a kernel of truth...but since their faith makes them biased against science anyway, it is too tempting for politicians to use their bias to get themselves elected.

oops, typo: I meant SEO, not CEO.

I think this is why they're insisting on real names for Google+.

When every user is a person, it is more difficult for spam CEO hackers to skew Google results. I suppose they could still try to harvest millions of Google accounts to use as +1 slaves but that's a lot harder than setting up a content farm. Spammers will have to create fake personas or steal real ones in the millions to be able to cheat now.