Free trade is great if you're a rich capitalist (e.g. someone that makes their living by owning capital). What about the rest of us? There's plenty of evidence to show NAFTA has been a disaster for everyone on both sides of the boarder except a few wealthy factory owners. Google a little and you won't find much to encourage you.

Karl Marx predicted that capital flowing to where labor was cheapest would result in a race to the bottom, but all anyone can remember about him is that a couple famous dictators happen to use his books for their rhetoric. Not that it's hard to predict that.

Organization (via Unions) is the only solution I can think of to this. Sure, we could call it something else, but it's basically Unions.

Un-Organized workers are too weak to demand or get better wages or a better way of life. Life basically stunk for everyone but a few kings thousands of years. It still stinks if you're not in one of the countries with a strong, well organized pool of labor that has solidarity. Sure, a few on /. might "Got Mine, FU" right now. But the powers that be are coming for you too....

they'll move on when the time comes. Most of 'em have degrees. They'll leave behind the slums. While they're there the locals won't mess with them, because if they do the police (who are heavily armed thanks to 30 years of hand-me-downs from the military) will bust some heads until they do. Remember the last round of riots in Los Angeles? Everyone laughed and called them dumb because they trashed their own neighborhoods. That wasn't by choice. There were cops in full riot gear with military grade tanks cordoning off the rich communities so they didn't spill over...

The poor have learned to keep their misery to themselves...

it's a scientific fact that people decline rapidly when they hit 50. They might be living till 80 now, but those aren't very productive years. Unless we're gonna start letting them die like dogs in the street (and periodically round them up and euthanize them like said dogs) then we need to do something with the millions of people that are still alive but not fit for work.

Or we could just stick are head in the sand and bitch about "entitlement". I guess that works too. Nice troll, btw. You kept it straight right until the end and then through in your flame bait. I couldn't have done it better myself (not even in this last sentence :) )

I've got some concerns over the 209 model...

and cheap wages (lower rent means you can pay people less). People will go where the work is, whether they like it or not.

there was some way to only read the parts that were relevant to you. You'd need a Table to put all the Contents on though, and we all know no table can survive are tax code.

Com'on. Laws are complicated because the real *bleepin'* world is complicated. Ideas and principles don't hold up to reality. Sooner or later you have to either sit down and do the hard work of making thinks work or let it go to hell and stick your fingers in your ears.

So yeah, I kinda do. Especially if you take my health insurance premiums into account.

But as the saying goes, never let a facts get in the way of a good right wing fallacy :P

I'll say I've found the IRS way easier to deal with then some of the other Creditors I've had. If my wages had kept pace with inflation and I got socialized medicine for my taxes instead of broken down buildings built by corrupt contractors in Iraq I wouldn't even have anything to complain about...

I think it's 30 years of declining wages. Half of all Americans live paycheck to paycheck. We're too busy trying to keep ourselves afloat to worry about anyone else, which is probably the whole point.... Keeps us at each other's throats :(.

but hey, free project management? Sign me up!

Seriously though, I am seeing more and more companies pushing to get more productivity out of their work force in an effort to keep the stock price where they need it....

I'm genuinely curious. If they're doing the whole "Hire Contractors to dodge taxes" thing that really only works for a few of the most undesirable jobs (auto part runners come to mind) where they can take advantage of ex cons. For anything else sooner or later the IRS notices and drops the hammer.

They over estimated the cost of GDDR5. You can only lose so much money on your console, and Microsoft has lost massive amounts for 2 generations.

They thought the price of GDDR5 was going to be so high they console would sell for more than people could pay. Remember the $799 3DO? No. There's your answer.

They tried to make up for it by putting 64 megs of high speed on die cache, but again screwed up. The cache was expensive and took up space on the CPU die that Sony used for more Cuda cores.

So yeah, it was a money decision, but it wasn't about profit, it was about making a console people could afford. Both companies guessed, and Microsoft guessed wrong.

Not until Netcraft confirms it.

is there anyone here that is in favor of, or will even defend the rights to do this merger?

What I like is, when this goes through with almost universal opposition it'll be just one more reminder of how little power we here in America all have...