The entire gist of my comments is that everybody matters and no group of people should be thrown under the bus for any other group. I know that's not as PC as saying that Americans, white males, or your oppressors de jour don't matter and that the only way to make the world a better place is to cut them down, but you're letting your need to fit my argument into a racist context keep you from understanding what I'm actually saying.

Globalism and offshoring, the way it is currently implemented, is not a process that is making the world a more equal and fair place. Those benefitting the most from the current setup are the rich white Americans you despise so much (in fact, the richest and whitest of the lot). The fortunes they accumulate have historically been spent on directly oppressing and subjugating the poor brown people you pretend to care about (and not through their vague "privilege", but through actual East India Company style incursions into their land).

I'm not an isolationist or some jingoist "they took our jobs" guy. I'm not even white. I'm interested in an ideal solution that has a more solid chance of a long-term successful outcome. If you could at least temper your need to see everyone who disagrees with you as some sort of monster, maybe you could participate in finding solutions to our world's problems. We need fewer closed-minded, my-way-or-the-highway ideologues and more people capable of rational, non-histrionic discussion. Would you care to join us?

Oh, come now.

Is that how you signal that you're done with this discussion and you just want me to shut up? You're not even arguing against anything I said at this point. Nowhere in any of my posts did I even imply that, but you've got to shoehorn that card in don't you?

Please come back when you have something intelligent to add to this discussion. I didn't agree with you, but your posts were rational up to this point.

Lower costs for products generally aren't of the same order as lower costs of production, and this doesn't help someone whose income has been significantly slashed. While over half of Americans may own stock, stock ownership only represents a source of income for a tiny fraction of them. Most of the owned stock is held by a small number of people. The "over half" statistic also counts participation in retirement funds, which obviously do not offset a lack of income before retirement age. The lack of income before retirement age also halts further contribution to retirement funds and limits their potential for useful growth. The largest beneficiary of the current trend is indeed some "rich guy somewhere".

How do we race toward middle class standards for all by cutting middle class jobs in first world countries and simultaneously concentrating the wealth of those countries in fewer hands?

I'm aware of the differences in the context of the wages and I'm completely sympathetic to the plight of those living in abject poverty. What I don't agree with is the current method of "equalization", since it is unnecessarily destructive to the first world middle and working classes while also further increasing global wealth disparity. The social and safety nets in the first world depend on tax paying workers in those countries, so the long term prospects for the first world counties become more bleak as/if unemployment rises. The resources exist to bring everybody's lifestyle up to the level of the first world middle class, they're just poorly distributed. Equalizing almost everybody's lifestyle to just above abject poverty is a non-optimal solution.

There are other methods to achieve this uplifting effect that are truly "equalizing" across the entire range of incomes and not as destructive to to the first world middle and working classes. Avoiding participation in labor arbitration and encouraging the growth of local economies is a more ideal solution. Depending on a richer country for handouts (that they will certainly withhold when your standard of living increases) is short-term zero-sum thinking.

The reason Verizon can stay in business despite having "very limited interest in what their customers want" is because of municipal and state granted monopolies, federal grants and subsidies, and the reason they even exist at all is because of a government approved corporate charter. Why is "government friends with guns" an acceptable argument for them getting their way, but not an acceptable argument against it?

It isn't as though each $50,000 (say) job lost in the US or Europe leads to $50,000 worth of jobs in India or whereever, though. Jobs aren't being moved overseas out of some egalitarian desire to bring the third world up. The difference in wages is pocketed and further enriches the already wealthy. Instead of making the entire world better, you're making one place slightly better while making another significantly worse. At the moment, the people paying the salaries of those jobs are the people who are losing their own jobs. If offshoring is all about fairness, why is the whole system run as a labor arbitrage: paying third world salaries for labor but charging first world prices for products? That is wrong.

Besides that, it's nice that you and the wealthy get to decide who is more deserving of these jobs when your lot clearly isn't on the line. Why is it fair to demand that the American middle class give up their tiny portion of the pie (to make the world a better place, no less) while demanding nothing of those who hold most of the pie?

Touché.

Three times a small number is still a small number. I don't think $15 is too extravagant and if you need more than a one-off part, you're better off making your own anyway. The link I included was just an example, but their list includes four with adjustable output of the fourteen total. What do you mean by "variable", if not that? (Anyway, that wasn't part of the original specification, nor was that part of your original description.)

Unless you're dead set on saving a few bucks, you're much better off getting little modules like this from a reputable source (with schematics, test results, and so on) than from fly-by-night eBay sellers. For example, here's a decent buck-boost from Pololu that fits the bill and it's that much more expensive.

If you start looking hard at some of the anonymously produced and undocumented stuff that comes from China, you'll scream. You wouldn't believe some of the rookie mistakes made in the design of (some of) those modules. Also, in some cases there are some serious compromises made to reach the lowest possible price.

You're claiming that ten percent of the US citizens (~32 million people) don't have Social Security numbers assigned or ID of any kind? That's hard to believe, which is why the parent suggested that you were talking about illegal aliens. Nearly 85% of the US population lives within a largish metropolitan area [], which would mean that half-to-most rural people would have to lack a SSN for your claim to be true.

That's very unlikely.

Hughes' legacy is enormous, too. As a philanthropic institute, it's endowment is second only to Gates.

That's a cop-out, though. Yes, there is always an element of trust in whatever you do. That's unavoidable, though it's smart to minimize the amount of trust you must put in others. Taken to the extreme it's ludicrous, as you've pointed out. But, that doesn't mean that there's no merit in limiting the amount of trust you put in third parties. Just because you can't completely trust your OS or compiler, doesn't mean that you should throw the entire concept of limiting trust out the window. It's dishonest to suggest that the risk is the same between trusting (your compiler), (your compiler + your OS), and (your compiler + your OS + the CA system).

The CA system is truly an honor system by design. It requires you to put your complete trust in a large, and growing, list of opaque and unfamiliar third parties and the decision to trust them is made by others though an opaque and unaccountable process. It's putatively a "security system", but is insecure by design. It depends entirely on unaccountable, secretive, and self-selected "authorities" to determine who should trust who.

Look at your OS's list of trusted CAs sometime. Any of these organizations, or anyone delegated by any single one of them, are implicitly trusted by your system. Completely trusting Microsoft, Apple, or various Linux devs is naive, but completely trusting everyone in the root CA list is absolutely insane!

OK, to clarify... disappearances and purges are bad news, but it's not as if these historical dictatorships were all fine and dandy up until the point where people started disappearing. Holding off judgement until something is allowed to fully develop into its inevitable final product is dangerous and naive.

So people disappearing is the line at which you think a government is atrocious? There was more wrong with the dictatorships of the past than just purges. Would a dystopia where everyone is kept locked up in cages, but nobody is missing, not compare to a real fascist dictatorship? This argument people like you keep parroting is like the No True Scotsman argument of bad government.

Because you are getting ripped off (at both ends of the risk pool). Insurance is about pooling risk so that the cost of unlikely events are spread among more people. If statistical analysis allows insurance companies to segregate and condense those pools by risk, then eventually all of the individuals (high and low risk) end up paying what they'd normally pay if they didn't have insurance plus the profit that the insurance company is collecting. Insurance companies are profitable because the risks of the insured are increasingly well known, but withheld from the insured.

You're getting ripped off by being moved between the risk pools without any regard to what you've already payed into the system. When you're young and healthy, your premiums are pure profit as you never collect on them. When you're old and sick, your premiums rise to cover your costs (plus profit). If increased data mining allows even finer grained risk assessment (and adjusted premiums), where is the benefit in having insurance?

Or more robots... It's robots all the way down.