I know it's slightly off topic, but are we really so detached from reality that we actually believe that we have more jobs when profits are higher?

There's an optimal balance where profits are enough to motivate investors, but companies spend as much as possible on production. Profit is an inefficiency that has value only insofar as it keeps capital flowing in from investors, when needed. The idea that corporate ethics implies maximizing profit at the cost of all other business objectives has done quite enough damage to investors. If you bleed off too much profit, you destroy value for the investor overall. (In fact, if that profit isn't going straight to dividends or back into the business, which it usually isn't, then it's probably bad for the investor, even in the short run.)

I'm not one of these types that argues that America is going down the toilet because we lost manufacturing jobs, and we should freak out. But the argument that manufacturing is not as valuable to the economy because it's less profitable than being Apple is nonsensical. There are only so many Apple shares around, and their value depends on other businesses with solid value as well, which aren't as profitable but have other advantages.

China != the company that builds iPhones. China as a whole is making a whole lot more from iPhone production than the profit, which, according to the article, is quite reasonable anyway.

Likewise, America != Apple. Since Apple's profitability is so much higher, its value to America is proportionally lower, knowing that Apple's profit doesn't generally get spent proportionally in America. (Not that Apple isn't great or I'm not glad to have their jobs in the US. That doesn't happen because they're so profitable, though. It's just correlated with profitability, i.e., Apple is good at what they do, they make money, they can afford to bank a lot of cash, and they can also afford to hire the best people. Then, they use their cash and people wisely to do their business well, a virtuous cycle.)

Associating corporations and their profits with their home countries makes no sense, even if they operated entirely within their home countries. The purpose of corporations is to allow capital to flow freely, including across national borders. Corporations are only boons to countries to the extent that they spend money and pay taxes in those countries.

The scary part is the effectiveness of the indoctrination, if documentaries like National Geographic Inside Undercover In North Korea can be taken at anywhere near face value. Of course, with any visit, there is staging, but it really seems like there are too many cataract patients too believably thankful to Dear Leader to be under duress. Anyway, they're effective enough to scare me.

It's scary because of the idea that you might need to kill a large fraction of the country in a conflict, that they would throw themselves on your sabers for no good reason.

One hopes that they were just very effective at choosing the best actors for the cataract surgeries. Everyone involved is surely in constant fear for their families and would act thankful to the best of their ability. But you're not quite sure, because a couple of generations have been raised under this indoctrination now, so there is the real fear (to the lay person such as myself) that Kim Il Sung simply got it "right".

Your argument is that financial risk, which was carefully hedged by the risk-taker to be almost all upside, is equivalent to mortal danger?

While I don't agree with the general point, your counter-argument doesn't even make sense.

(I think you could make an historical argument that Americans have always been panicky, litigious, etc. I'd have to agree that we weren't always so pathetic when it came to physical risk, but we have always overreacted to some physical and financial risks, often to our own harm and loss of civil liberties. But, being willing to take financial risks with other people's money is not quite the same thing as being willing to die in a fireball with your family for the sake of a corporation's competitiveness and profitability.)

I have recently experienced some modest insight into this incomprehensible (to me and perhaps you) way of thinking (legal = right) by seeing Sandel's lecture on communitarian moral philosophy and recalling a TED talk on the empirical psychological differences between liberal and conservative values.

Of course, it wasn't that I thought of all conservatives as slavering idiots or scheming monsters or anything. You can basically understand and respect their motives by knowing and listening to them; you don't need no fancy book lernin. Conversely, approaching from a different angle doesn't make them any less wrong, when they're wrong. Still, it was interesting and humbling to look at the issue a different (for me) way.

I still don't agree with the communitarian idea that we need a moral explanation for group-oriented choices, or the idea that many people have that adhering to group law is in itself a moral good. I wasn't compelled by any of the examples I saw in Sandel's lecture, of situations where you would allegedly need to choose between a group (communitarian moral) obligation and a liberal moral one. I would still call it immoral to help your friend bury a body, no questions asked, just because they're your friend. However, these ideas do provide another way to look at things from the perspective of my many brothers and sisters who do think that way, either communitarian or conservative.

By way of kudos to Sandel, I had no idea he was a communitarian (even if a moderate one) after watching his course lecture videos. Being more or less ignorant of this subject, I hadn't read about his criticism of Rawls. Maybe you could tell he wasn't totally on board with the libertarians, but he still gave the ideas a fair hearing, it seemed to me (if in my ignorance).

(Terminology alert: if you have trouble distinguishing the word "liberal" in the political context from the term in the philosophical context, please fix that before replying. It's trivial to do so.)

Maybe he did mean that, but he didn't say it, and I didn't hear it.

I think it's about half, too. Indeed, it's not all conservatives, although it's a disproportionate number of conservatives. I know liberals who are (I would say) inappropriately paranoid, and, indeed, it's that fraction that pushes the present administration over the edge from what most liberals would like to see. The right-leaning atmosphere made for some quite conservative Democratic choices in the last presidential race.

Likewise, on the Republican side, there is a large minority of libertarian-leaning and other relatively level-headed (yes, I'm biased) conservatives that would like to see civil liberties protected. You can see the evidence for this in that it was a small handful of Democrats and Republicans both that voted in Congress to protect civil liberties when everyone was frothing at the mouth after September 11, 2001. (Voting against AUMF, Patriot Act, etc.)

This is Slashdot, not Fox News or MSNBC, so I kind of assume readers here will not interpret a statement like the GP's strictly along party lines like you seem to imply. Maybe I'm underestimating the peanut gallery here, and sure there are plenty of partisans, but I generally perceive a fairly good comprehension of this problem being bi-partisan.

Which rhetoric is that? Rhetoric by Bolsheviks (ruling-class people that would manipulate public sentiment to gain power) or the protesters themselves? I haven't heard a protester interviewed that sounded like they were looking for a worker's revolution. (I'm sure there were some, but not more than a small minority, based on what I've heard them say.)

I can't tell if you're being sincere or trying to discredit the whole idea of protest against a broken financial system as communism. (Not that I think we should dismiss communists out of hand, but these protesters are generally not communists.) If the former, I think you should relax, as there is really not much communism happening that I've heard. I mean, the revolutions you link to all started with a philosophy calling for armed rebellion, not peaceful protests in the street that allow the authorities to identify all the participants.

I'm not down there with them, but many of them are protesting real problems with real, simple solutions. For example, there are a lot of people successfully convinced that it was somehow individual, irresponsible mortgagees or regulations that forced banks to lend to them that caused the triggering real estate collapse in the US. You really don't have to look at many numbers or think too hard to realize that wasn't the case, and our financial system makes it very easy to build castles of sand, even without any one person being malicious about it. You can't have banks leveraged to the extent they were, or buying securitized debt from each other the way they were, or relying on corrupt, easily manipulated ratings agencies. These problems are all pretty easy to solve, without bloodshed.

So, what are governments doing about it? In the US, for example, who should I vote for to fix this problem, as opposed to marching in the streets, to make my voice heard? The regulatory changes are perfectly simple, evolutionary solutions, and protesting in the street is about the only way to be heard. It's all perfectly rational and democratic.

In the US, at least, you also have rhetoric and general belief that a liberally interpreted limited-liability corporation is everyone's birthright, i.e., when you simply substitute some definitions, that nobody should be personally responsible for anything they do. When you say it that way, does it still sound anti-capitalist to say that maybe our corporate legal structure and culture has a problem? When people talk about "corporate greed", this is ultimately what they mean, and it doesn't require bloodshed to reform corporate law.

Most of the protesters I've heard interviewed are suggesting a perfectly solid alternative to what we have now, which is basic regulatory and possibly corporate structural reforms. Sure, some of them don't say anything sensible when they're interviewed, so we somehow should ignore the lot of them as retards? To say they're not offering a solid alternative is really to build a straw man you don't have to respect.

It's good that it's going global, because many of the simple solutions can be dismissed by saying "but then the US wouldn't be competitive with the rest of the world". But it's clear that people all over the world perceive some of the problems with the state of the art financial, legal, and cultural norms, even though most countries are not as far gone as the US (in terms of income inequality, incarceration rates, and finance industry deregulation, for example).

To answer your question directly, the simple alternative is modest, common-sense reforms. If you're not getting that from the protesters, you're intentionally ignoring it, because it's generally known what needs to be done to fix some of the most egregious structural problems that led to the recent global recession. Not that the protesters speak with a unified or articulate voice, but you really have to wilfully ignore the context to not understand where the protesters coming from, or identify them as (uniformly) communist.

(I apologize if my response is a little heated. I don't mean to make it personal. I think we disagree but I hope I can be civil.)

He was talking about a culture of respect for engineers, or at least that's what I heard, not the political leadership aspect.

I'm not familiar enough with chinese culture to agree or disagree with the claim, though. Does the average chinese respect engineers? I have a little more familiarity with the german culture's respect for engineers and teachers, v. the american culture's respect for high salaries almost without regard for profession. (Not that german culture doesn't respect high salaries, or that american culture is totally degenerate, just talking about the kinds of things everyday people say about who they want their daughters to marry, etc.)

That is funny, but made me wonder this stuff tastes funky like tripe, intestines, chitlins, etc. Looking at the world as a whole, people can handle that kind of taste just fine. It is quite the additional mental hurdle that it's coming from humans, though.

Except you don't need high speed rail for commerce. You need freight. I expect China's freight network will benefit from this as well, whereas in the US we actually have a pretty good freight rail network already. (Does China already have enough of a freight rail network heading west into neighboring countries and the Chinese interior?)

High speed rail is for commuters (so locally around cities that are too spread out for their own good anyway) and shuttling executive types around for meetings. Sure, the former is important, but I don't think California's economy will benefit that much from commuters that live in one of LA or SF and work in the other. And we can already shuffle executives around plenty fast with planes. (High speed rail is great for this, but if it's not there, they will fly and it will not hurt anything. High speed rail is more energy efficient and a little faster for neighboring cities but there aren't enough executives to make that important.)

Not that he's not an idiot, I don't really know, but NIST has now defined "cloud" precisely enough and inclusively enough to cover private or internal clouds. So, you can safely advocate commodity cloud technologies for almost any purpose, really, and it doesn't mean ipso facto that you're an idiot. It doesn't imply that the government should be using Amazon for anything, just that, at least, they should consolidate their IT. In itself, that's not a bad thing, although, again, I don't know to defend or not defend this guy's particular policies.

Wow. Just, wow. This is the kind of thing that creates global warming deniers.

I mean, the guy may even have a point, but how am I supposed to tell? He's also doing the classic "the weather sucks this year" approach to evaluating climate research, and somehow bringing the Middle East in as the nexus of the global economy.

I know it's just an opinion piece, and it's not that I disagree with it, really, but it is just so dramatic and unsubstantiated. So, there's a dramatic paradigm change coming to a happiness-based economy, but let's not say anything about what that might look like?

Interesting. I came to the opposite conclusion, or maybe it's the same conclusion from a different perspective: The Simpsons does take a clear position, but it's a moderate-liberal position on almost everything (not extreme), and they don't bash your head in with it to where a stupid viewer gets the message. It wouldn't be remotely as funny otherwise, and I think it wouldn't make its point as well. It's not South Park (which I also enjoy), where the overstatement is part of the joke.

It's like Talladega Nights: I don't see how you could interpret it as other than making (perhaps loving) fun of Applebee's, but you can't come out and just say that, it would not be funny. Part of the funny is imagining all the drooling morons thinking they're actually not making fun of Applebee's, or thinking about how the executives at Applebee's thought about the product placement, presumably knowing they were being made fun of, but either having a sense of humor or gambling on the numerical majority of audience members not getting it. At each meta level, funny.

I don't see The Simpsons contributing to a notional decline American cultural values. It makes some fun of some serious problems and makes points about where we're going that might not be so great. It's laughing at your own faults in a funhouse mirror, as opposed to pointing and laughing across an "us versus them" line between us smarties and them dummies.

Donuts, NASCAR, pickup trucks, etc., are great. Yeah, maybe we go overboard. But making it really obvious that Homer is not a role model isn't going to get through to anyone more effectively. Making Jean Girard a less ridiculous character would not make us realize that we shouldn't be so xenophobic. We have to love the Homer in ourselves and laugh at how we look at the French, or it's not funny. If Homer is "them" or we don't accept that we are ourselves part of the racist and xenophobic whole of America, we don't laugh, and we don't take the point.

So, I think it's the opposite. The Simpsons only has a hope of reaching the masses by being inclusive of them, and sincerely accepting the good with bad.

Consider the Daily Show. Not trying to bring politics into it, but purely from outside, you can see that the Daily Show is not really inclusive of a conservative position, although it tries to be balanced. (I've heard better points from conservative guests in that venue than almost anywhere else.)

Anyway, the Daily Show is clearly one-sided and takes a clear position. (I think it's much better than Fox News / MSNBC, but I claim it's clearly biased.) Do you know anyone who's changed their political views based on it? Jon makes plenty of great points, most of which I agree with, but I don't expect it to change anyone's mind.

Likewise, a cultural position piece has to really go out of its way to be inclusive, and I think to do so sincerely, to have any hope of changing anyone's mind, or even making them think about anything. Humans are just like that (all of us). We reject overt challenges to our thinking and need to be approached very cautiously, from common ground, to keep an open mind.

Ooh, sounds fun. When is that?

I'll be happy to host. I'm agriculturally zoned and can light bonfires without attracting 5-0.

I'll agree with the comment above on Atlas Shrugged not being an overt paean to psychopathy, but I have to agree with the GP that Rand's "philosophy" is bankrupt and psychopathic at its core. (I use quotes because, from the two main books, I didn't really get much of a philosophy at all, just kind of a pep rally. Maybe it made sense at the time, as a counterpoint to some radical communist sympathies or something, but it didn't seem realistic or philosophically useful to me. It's a caricature of a philosophy that we use to discuss actual philosophies.)

I thought The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was a much better outline of what an anarcho-libertarian utopia might look like, and fun to read to boot. (I'm not an anarcho-libertarian, and I don't think it's quite realistic, but at least Heinlein tries to be plausible.) I like to point people away from Rand and towards Heinlein, while pointing out that it's still an unrealistic extreme when you look carefully. Then you can take Milton Friedman and bang on his ideas to get even closer to practical reality.

I'm pretty much as cynical and misanthropic as the next guy. Yeah, the mass of sheeple are willfully ignorant and unambitious. But the vast majority do their jobs and earn their keep, and we need them, even from a perspective of enlightened self-interest. Yes, there will always be freeloaders, and politicians, etc. They all end up being reflections and parts of ourselves if we look at the big picture (like reflecting for a moment on all people that were essential to making such a miracle as a modern automobile what it is today, for example).

If I understand correctly, he's talking about the voters' thinking, or society in general, not specific interests. Yes, you can assume that a fascism (corporatocracy) will come up with the cost-benefit analyses you describe. That's correct for them. But the voters don't do their own cost-benefit analyses, so they don't actually know what's in their best interests, and are therefor easier to manipulate.

The key being "contradictory". You get to manipulate voters by pulling whichever side's "principle" you want. Both sides of a feasible yes/no decision have principles, after all. This is the usual "think of the children", "terr'rists!", "drugs are bad, m'kay", "socialists!", "communists!", etc.

Not that every decision comes down to cost-benefit analysis, but many of them do. Environmental and safety issues usually should.

It's not just corporate interests lobbying against nuclear plants, for example. Not that every single opponent is an idiot, but most that I've talked to genuinely don't have a sense of the quantities involved and how that makes the problem of nuclear waste storage much smaller than it's made to appear.

(By the way, has anyone tried moving up close to a nuclear plant? I was kind of thinking of doing that, on the principle that it should be kind of a reduced stupidity zone.)