Fair enough. I thought you were just being deliberately and needlessly snarky, so I responded in kind.

Now if you want to seriously discus the relative impact of health and safety regs vs exchange rate on outsourcing, let me know. But that wasn't the impression I got from your post.

Offshoring works to a large extent because the jobs are being moved to a country with a much weaker currency.

Also weaker health & safety laws.

And weaker civil rights.

And weaker pay scales.

And a weaker fourth estate.

But yeah, weaker currency, that's the ticket.

*sigh*

Whoops, my bad. Obviously there has to be an evil reason why outsourcing is possible.

What was I thinking?

Personally, I'm in favour of pressuring the countries that are the recipients of those jobs to institute minimum wage laws, too... rinse and repeat until we run out of places for exploitative practices to hide

Won't work, sadly. Offshoring works to a large extent because the jobs are being moved to a country with a much weaker currency. Which means that the employer can pay far less than he would pay a domestic employee and the employee still sees a higher standard of living.

If you force such countries to pay minimum wages pegged to the dollar, then most of the local employers won't be able to employ anyone at all. Which means they'll either abolish the law or else turn a blind eye when all the business ignore the legislation.

Which isn't to say I approve of off-shoring. Just that the proposed solution doesn't seem likely to work.

his desire to prioritize the "freedom" of systems over those systems actually doing anything useful is totally unreasonable

It's more like a desire to prioritize the freedoms of software users over those of software distributors. He's not against software doing "useful" things, except where the usefulness lies in somehow exploiting the software user.

Software freedom is so much less importsant than other forms of freedom (freedom from slavery, freedom of speech, freedom of association, etc) in the real world that I can't take his writing seriously.

Of course, freedom from slavery is clearly much less important than freedom from murder. I mean if you are enslaved you can regain your freedom, but if you're dead you're dead. Should we then legalise slavery once again so we can concentrate on the big picture? I'm sure there are lots of other pesky laws that we could get rid of while we're at it. Always assuming your logic of prioritising freedoms holds water, obviously.

The only people who can stand to listen to him are those who forgive those traits because they already agree with what he says.

Counter example right here. I don't agree with everything rms says. I don't believe that proprietary software is necessarily a bad thing, and I take particular issue with him on the "GNU/Linux" thing. In this instance, however, I think he's got it about right.

You can't expect to grow a movement that way, even if your movement has a purpose that makes sense.

So you're saying that popularity is more important than principle? Presumably rms should abandon his notion of the Four Freedoms and adopt something less controversial, like maybe "oxygen is good" in the expectation of seeing the GNU movement expand dramatically. Personally I think it's his refusal to compromise his principles that has gained him so many followers.

Clearly voting for a major party candidate is more pragmatic than voting for a third party candidate

I think that depends on the timescale.

If you don't like the common agenda of the main parties and you keep voting for one or another of them, you send the message that what they are doing is acceptable. At one time you could have responded to this by boycotting the election or spoiling your ballot, but that doesn't work any more. Not voting at all is simply seen as apathy, and spoiling your ballot makes you indistinguishable from an idiot at party HQ.

If you want the political landscape to change, you have to vote for third-party candidates. It won't happen overnight; it may not happen in your lifetime. But if you want change it's a lot more pragmatic than validating existing practice.

Also free speech as I define it only truly exists in the US so I'm not interested on what other countries did.

Now that's an interesting approach.

So, following your methodology, if I don't like what you're saying I can redefine "intelligence" as something that occurs in people other than yourself and that allows me to disregard anything you say. How useful is that?

Admittedly, it's only formalising an approach that's already ready widely used, so I don't suppose I can claim any great novelty here. Maybe I should redefine "innovation" as something that only happens when I do it. That would work ...

For that to be true MSFT would have had to plan that 1.- Nobody would buy WinPhone...okay I see that one, 2.- Nokia would leave them with a product to sell in that gap...which if they wouldn't buy WinPhone on Nokia a change of brand name sure as hell isn't gonna help move units, and 3.- The gap wouldn't just be absorbed by Google, with the CCC Android 2.x phones taking the low end while the more expensive Android and Apple units take the high.

So anyone who proposed such a strategy without taking these factors just wouldn't be all that smart, then?

So you see this is the problem I have when people describe Bill Gates kind of evil moves at MSFT....Ballmer just ain't that smart.

Hmmm ... Explain the problem to me again? :)

Maybe some liberals "like" conservative topics/people as a way to show their friends that they've considered those topics/people.

Could be. But those people are probably not the same people who are complaining that their facebook account erroneously liked Mr. Romney.

I was trying to find the plant on my S III but I first had to reboot, after which the battery promptly went dead.

I'm just waiting for the new to break that even bigger riots have been reported from at least three Samsung factories. And Samsung senior executives have been personally executing the rioters. By crucifixion, I expect.

C'mon, you Appleturfers! Time to earn your salary!

Isn't it odd that now when Samsung gets attacked these heartwarming stories pop up, but when Foxconn (or rather Apple) was attacked for better working conditions, there was silence.

I wouldn't know about that. I did however think it was interesting that this story gets so much exposure at about the same time as Apple is attacking Samsung in a patent war.

It's almost as if some PR type at Apple had said "we've had a lot of negative publicity over workign condtions in the past, and that seems to be counting against us with the general public. Why don't we see what can dig up on Samsung. If we can't make the public see us as good guys, we can at least make sure that Samsung seem tarred with the same brush". I guess someone's taken a leaf out of the old Microsoft Playbook.

If so, I can't help but find it rather sad. I mean all this effort and the best they can muster "my job is boring, but apart from that it's ok?" I mean seriously?

Well, Miguel was one of the ones that had a project that did some of that fucking up of desktops so that inspires a bit of a reaction

Indeed. The only surprise is that he's doing down Linux in favour of Apple rather than Winows.

One can only assume that the promised cushy job at Microsoft failed to materialise, so now he's sucking up to Apple in the hopes of a job there.

Your Native American tribes would fail that test in so far as the woodlands and buffalo herds were not privately owned.

I don't think that would be true. You could easily defend the position that the leader of the tribe that has won the last war over the buffalo herd/woodland privately owns it.

Mmmm... A more conventional analysis would be to say that the tribe controls the territory as a result of the last war. If the tribe has a single totalitarian ruler (and I don't think that's a given) then you can argue that the resource is perhaps vested in him personally, but it's a stretch to cite that as evidence of capitalism. Otherwise you could argue that Josef Stalin becomes one of the 20th Century's most prominent capitalists, and that doesn't seem right.

In any case, the tribal chief didn't charge his own tribesmen for permission to use the territory. And "capitalist on an inter-tribal level" is just another way of saying "trade".

And it strikes me as true that on a small scale the differences between systems is not very large. Totalitarianism, communism, maybe even very limited forms of capitalism would look very similar if not the same within a tribe.

I think that some economic and/or political models don't work very well at the tribal scale. Probably the best fit for most tribal structures would be socialism, with some individual ownership but with many resources held in common by the tribe, an accepted duty of care by the tribe for its members. Obviously a sweeping generalisation, but I think it fits the general case better than most.

But yeah, it's possible to fit analyse any facet of the world purely in terms of one theory or philosophy if someone is inclined to make the effort. Really it's about how well the notion fits overall.

So at what point are you capitalist ? What does it require ? Native Americans did trade goods for "money", even if it was not paper money like we have.

That's a reasonable question. The I believe the standard definition is that a capitalist system is one where the means of production of goods and the resources needed to do so are vested entirely in the hands of private individuals rather than in the state

Your Native American tribes would fail that test in so far as the woodlands and buffalo herds were not privately owned.

Now if they'd had to buy a hunting permit from the owner of the woods, or pay a surcharge for each buffalo killed, that would have been a capitalist system.

Communism is what existed within a tribe : a central organ (the guy with the biggest axe) "decides what happens" (through what we'd call murder).

I believe the generally accepted term for that system is "totalitarianism". It's not entirely incompatible with communism, but neither is it the defining feature of the system.

Totalitarianism isn't entirely incompatible with capitalism either, for that matter.

I have. It works the other way around. Congressmen stalk and harass the lobbyists for dough.

So you're apparently saying that instead of the lobbyists offering bribes to the politicians to do something, the politicians are actively extorting money from the lobbyists or they won't do what the lobbyists want.

And apparently this means that the system is less corrupt because the lobbyists have their integrity intact?

And to think I was worried for a minute.

Inter-tribe relations in native American tribes were capitalistic. They traded and even had various things that took the function of money, and this was partially used within a tribe as well

Mmmm... I think you're conflating "trade" and "capitalism" there. I'll grant trade as a fundamental of human behavior. However, if we define any social grouping that conducted trade or used a form of currency as "capitalist" then we have a definition that encompasses everything from Stalin's USSR to England under William the Conqueror.

That's admirably consistent, but not especially useful, you know?

Besides, if you want to see how a tribe functions for yourself, visit one in Central Africa. I think you'll agree that it's a much worse system than capitalism. And yes, inter-tribe relations in central africa are also mostly based on money exchange.

So hang on. By your earlier argument, they use money relations therefore they are capitalist. So your point would seem to be that capitalism is much better than capitalism.

Perhaps there's some inconsistency in your use of the term after all.

In any case, the GP's point wasn't that tribal society was better than capitalism (whether they were capitalists or not) but simply that it only seems natural to people because they've grown up with the system.