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?

How much do Kremlin astroturfers get paid?

And where exactly are you from? Some of the most accusatory reporting is coming from Europe.

I feel like I just read a Soviet era Pravda article.

Tor has only ever been an enabler for spammers and other criminals, making it possible for them to hide their tracks. Time to get rid of it.

"And this picture we see the tin pot wearing Johnny Appleseed and distributing Spam to all the starving earthworms in the New York subway system."

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.

There was at least one American on board.

Because some relatively small number of events may have a conspiratorial aspect does not mean all events do. In this case, it does appear that a bunch of separatists in Ukraine got their hands on some pretty sophisticated hardware and, obviously by accident, blew a civilian airliner out of the sky. Now, that's not as sexy an explanation as secret US operatives standing in the bushes near the separatists, or secret Russian operatives bringing the plane down in an even more elaborate scheme to make the West look bad by making themselves look bad so they can say "Those rotten Americans are trying to make us look bad."

Something like this was bound to happen when relatively poorly trained and disciplined weekend warriors get their hands on serious military hardware. The Russians have been quite keen to back the separatists with weapons, intelligence and some of their own personnel. It would be nice that if they are going to allow these separatists to use advanced AA equipment that maybe they have someone nearby who actually knows how to use such equipment, or at very least to put a bullet in the head of some daft nimrod who thinks he knows how to use the equipment.

"bascially, tt looks like what needs to be done is the PHP runtime needs to be tightned up."

Boy, you could put that on the PHP developers headstones.

Winston Churchill confessed, guiltily, in his History of WWII, to being happy at the news that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, because he knew at that moment, the Germans had lost the war.

You know, I'm beginning to think conspiratorial thinking is just another form of apathy. "Oh well, it's probably made up, so I'll sit in my cocoon, spout my paranoia on the Internet on occasion, and play PS3 the rest of the time."

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?