People should read this which is written nobody but Paul Krugman himself, the intellectual leader of left-wing. Some of these economic fallacies are repeated here like fifteen times. It is like going to mainstream news and saying downloading is stealing. Sure, there're efficiency issues here but 5 second hunch isn't an educated opinion.
Moralizing about these factories is maybe signalling caring to others but it isn't helping. Increasing labor regulation is probably worst thing you could do. They have actually done some of that in Bangladesh, and people ended up in their next best alternative: dead due to lack of food or prostitution. Good intentions don't mean good results.
People who say we shouldn't buy these chinese products could do the worst damage. Living standards don't rise because of regulation, more than Moon orbits Earth because of law makers. The only reason is that all these commentators can get away with this cheap talk, is that they nothing on the line. If you actually had money on the line how to rise people's living standards, you would maybe pick up an economics textbook, or *gasp* remain silent.
By investing in something (that's not a fraud) you're doing charity aswell. Nothing has increased our living standards as much as increase in productivity that only investment in better production can bring. Basic Adam Smith. Maybe investing in developing countries is marginally more "charitable". Basic charity, while it can provide temporary relief with high marginal benefit, usually does not have this effect (externalities are not simple but ahem).
Another thing you can do is just not use the money, which will increase the purchasing power of other people equally. There was an article on slate about this.
Put a dollar in the bank and you'll bid down the interest rate by just enough so someone somewhere can afford an extra dollar's worth of vacation or home improvement. Put a dollar in your mattress and (by effectively reducing the money supply) you'll drive down prices by just enough so someone somewhere can have an extra dollar's worth of coffee with his dinner. Scrooge, no doubt a canny investor, lent his money at interest. His less conventional namesake Scrooge McDuck filled a vault with dollar bills to roll around in. No matter. Ebenezer Scrooge lowered interest rates. Scrooge McDuck lowered prices. Each Scrooge enriched his neighbors as much as any Lord Mayor who invited the town in for a Christmas meal.
Investing or saving works, probably much better than charity, but of course it isn't as high social status as charity and you won't get the warm feeling of helping someone. But if you want to go with charity, give money the recipients weren't expecting (advice I got from one economist). Helping the poorest of the poor might be better than helping the poorest of Western country. Helping children and people who are in bad position of no fault of their own is probably better too. But other commenters have better opinions on different charities so I'll leave it at that.
Sure. How many companies are you going to pull out?
Also, find a stock broker, he can probably help you short these countries. Talk is cheap.
This antitrust legislation is probably quite inefficient and pointless. That I do agree with. Its not European invention though, such regulators are everywhere.
Because marginal cost of information is zero, competition from open source software can reduce social welfare in theory. This argument however has little to do with the argument of the Slashdot's article's British blogger, who probably should talk to some economists first. Generally creative destruction is good and efficient, but these things are a lot more complex than can be analyzed here (and not really my specialty).
"Impact of Competition from Open Source Software on Proprietary Software"
Vidyanand Choudhary and Zach Z. Zhou
http://www.citi.uconn.edu/cist07/2a.pdf
Maybe consider Inkling by Wacom?
http://www.wacom.com/en/Products/Inkling.aspx
http://youtu.be/fXbBA1DRE84
I haven't used that so I have no idea if it works for lectures but on the concept it sounds interesting. I have heard people using for note-taking though.
Property rights are useful when organizing economic activity because people respond to incentives. Efficiency is much more important than "freedom" or "openness". It is like computational efficiency: if you don't know what it exactly means (basically it means everyone gets more of what they want), then just listen to the experts. When Donald Knuth talks about algorithms, I shut up. The same thing with economic efficiency.
I've watched "gaming go downhill" and it has nothing to do with DRM. There're plenty of good games out there that are completely free. It has do with the fact the games are sold to a lot of people, and most people are there for quick fun and not something that took time and practice to be able to perform (like sports). Is this progression? Well its not necessarily fun for the hardcore gamers as they won't find any interesting games to play on (like me), but because of this more people can enjoy gaming. Same happened with music as art (classical) music's golden age ended, and pop / folk music became popular. Much of the commercial pop music does not (arguably) have the "depth" compared to art music but you cannot force people to listen to music they don't want or understand. Take Starcraft:BW for example, its arguably the deepest game out there, at least in RTS market. Maybe in 10-20 years it will be gone and replace by some simple game, and SC1:BW will be left as a practice of only handful of people. Would this be progression? I don't know, but the answer isn't simple. There'll be lots of gamers (with RL priorities) who don't want to spend a week just to play an enjoyable game, and I don't think we have should force them either.
The good thing about closed applications is that usually the market for applications is better, and integration is better and it gets usually the "work done" better. On the downside customizing can be difficult if not impossible. The good thing about open applications is that they are much more customizable, are generally cheaper, and work for all kinds of users, but can be expensive to maintain and get compatible. Its exactly like the question of how much there should be standards in *nix. Probably most agree POSIX was a step forward, but I think we could go further (lots of distributions do same things differently without achieving anything). Anyone who has tried to make inter-distributional applications for Linux knows that its a mess. I probably don't need to post the legendary ALSA jungle here. Generally speaking there's not a silver bullet here, different paradigms work for different people and organizations. You should be wary of people who claim otherwise. I posted a bunch of random ramblings for ideas to improve Linux here if anyone cares: http://bit.ly/oIxhBj
People who are not programmers or power users see software as as a tool, and what matters is how the tool works not the technical details. Nobody cares how their screwdrivers are done, but how it performs the tasks it is supposed to do. Maybe the screwdriver engineers wet their pants over different details of implementation, but at the end of the day we want a tools that work, not excuses.
This OSS ideology, which I think is rampant within OSS communities, is as bad as any other. It clouds the person's judgement with easy answers and prevent objective scientific (in this case; economic) analysis of the issue at hand. I've had it when I was younger, the sooner one gets rid of it, the better. Nobody likes DIY climate science either (ok some do, but I've nothing to say to them). To make sure you don't misunderstand me, I think open-source per se is great, just trying to force open-source everywhere is something that is not a question of personal opinion, but a question of how do we solve the coordination problems involved; to make sure everyone wins in the end. These are complicated questions, and for that we turn into experts, who usually need knowledge of different branches of science (mathematics, computer science, economics). The same goes for the amount of IPR we need in the world, and simple appeals to liberty attract those who don't understand the complexity of the problem (I do not claim I do, I just understand enough not to have a strong opinion about it).
Richard Stallman sounds like a famous chief who says all chiefs should reveal their recipes or be damned in hell. Maybe, but likely no. The question of what kind of institutions and rules we need to get best meat on table with the lowest cost possible is not a question of cooking skills but a question of efficiency, and while master chiefs can definitely give some local knowledge, its not their area of expertise, at least there're plenty of other professions involved.
And as a personal side note I think Steve Jobs was a great inventor and an entrepreneur. I'm a power user and I use his products daily. I do miss his innovation and products, perhaps even more than say Linux. At least right now I'm very satisfied with Apple products, and I'm pretty sure some of that merit is because of the closed nature of Apple products. In fact one of the reasons I've headaches with Linux is because of too much possibilities for customization and lack of standards.
Suggest you just sit there and wait till life gets easier.
