Bay 12 Games Forum

RedKing, educated English-speaking and technically adept workers are worth far to an American company that needs those skills than all the child labor in China, so that's a false dilemma.

It's a false dilemma for certain sectors. But not for manufacturing, broadly speaking. Or certain types of service sector jobs where customer interaction is minimal and physical location is irelevant (records processing, for instance). And these same sorts of jobs tend to be low or negative "value-added" jobs. The service sector jobs are particularly tempting to offshore because they're rarely "value-added" jobs. That is, they don't directly contribute to revenue--they don't make or sell a product, but are instead support for the overall business model. They're considered overhead. Customer support is a great example. Providing support for your products is seen as a net loss of money, but not providing it could lose you customers in the long run. But because it doesn't actively generate revenue, it's a liability and one of the prime areas for pricks with newly minted MBAs to come in and 'save the company money' by sending those jobs to Bangalore.

Don't give me that crap about companies valueing skilled workers. Most large companies treat their workers as interchangeable parts that can be replaced as needed. The days of "The Company" taking care of you and giving you a gold watch and a nice pension when you retire are long gone. Now you're more liable to get the axe when a couple years shy of retirement, to save the company from being on the hook for your whole pension. If you even have a pension. More often, you have a 401(k) which thanks to the rampant mismanagement and greed on Wall Street (laissez-faire capitalism at its finest), is worth a fraction of what it was a few years ago.

And now you want to take away the price floor on the labor market, during a period of near-record unemployment? I guess in your Ayn Rand fantasy-world, those desperate unemployed rubes would throw themselves at all the new $1.50/hr jobs that would spring up, and the Captains of Industry would stride boldly forward with the surge of cheap domestic labor at their disposal.

But in the real world, very few people are going to work for less than the current minimum wage, other than illegal immigrants. At a certain point, the costs associated with working (dependent care, lunches, travel to and from work, wardrobe/uniforms, etc.) dictate a logical minimum wage, even if you take unemployment benefits and/or welfare out of the picture.

I'd say legislating wage creep, outsourcing to countries with lower minimum wage, loss of competitiveness internationally, pushing economic sectors to rely on illegal immigrants and the resulting unemployment of citizens to be "living in misery". And as for freedom, telling people they can't work unless they're worth $8.50 an hour isn't my definition of it. I hate to repeat the phrase, but the minimum wage and other bits of legislative do-gooding trades freedom for security and gives the poor neither.

Yes, of course. The solution to making our labor competitive with the Third World is obviously to pay them Third World wages. 

This thread makes me sad. I have a GeForce 6400GT, which in terms of the discussion means I basically have the Flintstones equivalent of a graphics card, with a pterodactyl inside my screen chiseling the picture out of stone.

Also, it makes me sad that HL2 isn't considered "modern", especially since it makes my computer beg for mercy when I run it.

Found my Voltron Yellow Lion up in the attic last night and showed it to my four-year-old daughter. She was fairly interested, until she asked what the fins along the back were for, prompting this exchange:

Me: "Oh, those are to help it fly."
Her: "Dad, it can't fly."
Me: "Well, the toy can't. But in the cartoon, it could. They were flying robot...lion...spaceships...that turned into a bigger robot."
Her: "......" (look of utter skepticism)
Me: (meekly) "It made sense when I was a kid...."

Meh. There's a certain amount of self-aggrandizement that goes with being in the military, regardless of combat status.

Take my brother, for instance. He has a bumper sticker that says, "God judges the enemy. I arrange the meeting." along with some various other hoo-rah paraphenalia.

But in practice, he's one of the least confrontational folks I know. And, he's not combat infantry or a sniper or anything, he's EOD. Granted, he's a qualified sharpshooter and he's been in some nasty bits of combat, but killing the enemy is not his primary occupation.

I think from a psychological standpoint, there's an armouring effect to buying into the "baddassery" / machismo that goes with the military, that keeps you from shitting your pants every time someone shoots in your general direction.

 

Yeah, that's the text I read too. I don't see how that could be interpreted to mean "all international treaties are null and void in the state of Oklahoma".

Especially in the explicit reliance on Federal law, which typically must conform to international treaties (at least ones that we've signed and ratified). I mean, the whole thing is worded poorly but I just don't see it.

Quote from: RedKing on November 10, 2010, 04:21:10 pm

I believe that's one less professor that would be teaching by the time I was done. If that was me. That kind of behavior towards a student is simply not acceptable.

He's 79 years old    He'll be dead soon enough, and there's people in his class who have been taking it for 5-10 years.  I don't feel like trying to torch his career right at the end, especially because it seems many of the students use it as a sort of support group.

Ah, never mind then. Dude probably has enough tenure that he'd have to be caught snorting blow out of a dead hooker's navel to lose his job.

The lunch lines at my school are a sight to behold, in that they're amorpheous blobs where the stupid people try to slip past everyone else and scream like kindergardeners if they can't. It's fucking awful, and it's every day.

Sounds like every lunch line ever in China. Seriously, I was in the university chow hall at ZJU, there were five "stations" and about 700 students, and you'd have thought they were in the New York Stock Exchange, yelling at the top of their lungs and waving their lunch tickets like they had a 1,000 shares of pork bellies to unload.

It was awesome.