Yes. Also America's, Russia's, Japan's and other's. Though it's getting a bit less competitive now, since China's wages have started to go up a lot (free market competition for workers and all)


Wait, are you saying that every scientist on the planet believes that their scientific calculations only work on a chalk board, and don't apply to the real world???

My job got outsourced back in 2001, I saw the whole India thing coming (and especially saw that although I was a rare computer nerd way back in school, EVERYONE was a computer nerd by 2001), and decided to switch to finance instead. So... yes

Oh, also, 10 years later, I found out about #1 on this list in my Tech Management MBA class http://www.techslog.com/archives/2006/10/8_expensive_it_blunders.html
That was the project they considered me for and had me start on (I was a web developer there), which they then quickly decided to outsource to someone else shortly after laying me off. Schadenfreude!  

Yes, I am using China, a communist dictatorship, which, despite that, STILL has very plainly visible market forces at work in their labor sector. Labor there is "free market," even if the rest of the business isn't. It's why our capitalist corporations invest there.

Isn't short-wave the radio that can transmit around the world? When my grandpa was visiting USSR from Ukraine, he brought a shortwave radio with him, and was able to listen to his news stations from back home.

All of this reminds me of those "mysterious" numbers stations that the CIA used to transmit info to spies. I wonder if the same thing can be set up with Bitcoin, transmitting the most recent mined block around the world every ten minutes?

Please re-read this: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=127908.msg1377300#msg1377300
When there are minimum wage laws, there are more workers than jobs, and thus minimum wage workers are forced to compete for their job, because there are lots of unskilled workers who are ready and waiting to take their place. In places in China, as in my linked example, there are no minimum wage laws, and thus way more jobs that workers, meaning employers have to compete for workers instead. End result is workers are actually important, are treated better, and have a choice to change jobs if they want to, because there are plenty of employers willing to hire them on.

Not true. Just as machines freed up farmers, and those farmers went on to do other jobs, after programs free up traditional workers, they will go on and do other jobs as well. Despite HUGE advances in technology in the 20th century, and many many jobs being replaced or made obsolete, the unemployment rate has largely remained the same. That suggests that plenty of new, more higher level (and leaner/white-collar) jobs were created, as well as that people have to work less (need fewer jobs) in order to stay prosperous (e.g. we don't bust our backs on farms of in factories from 6am to 9pm any more)

Yep. I'm aware. It doesn't matter though. You still think that a forest is better off when no one is in charge of it.

 
Because when you cut down a few trees, immediately replace them with new saplings, and don't affect the overall surrounding forest or the forest as a whole, it still conserves the local nature, biodiversity, or what have you. In the same way that recycling is a form of conservation.


This being a human problem was kinda where I was going with it, too (but didn't want my really long post getting any longer). Yes, I agree completely, people are, generally, the same, whether they are employees, business owners, CEOs, or government workers. Thus, they can all be "corrupted" by the same things, like greed and power. And at that point, it really all comes down to incentives: do you get wealthier and better off for doing the right thing, or for doing the wrong thing? If you own the property, you get poorer for destroying it. If you're just in government and no one really owns it, you get wealthier by letting someone else screw with it. Or you go to jail, but that's unlikely, since the laws really are written or screwed with by those with money.
And, seriously, it doesn't even have to be a law that blatantly allows pollution, it can just be a law that adds an extra layer of protections so convoluted, it makes the whole thing impossible to understand and worthless.
BTW, the big key to this gov v.s. private is that government doesn't pay much. Because of that, it typically attracts lower skill workers. Anyone with good enough skills will go to higher-paying private sector. Because of that, companies in private sector who deal with government are very adept at outsmarting it, while those in government struggle to keep up. And those in government who do figure things out, are oftentimes recruited away by private companies, and are put in charge of going around government restrictions, since they know how things work on the inside. That is largely apparent by the recent oil, banking, investing, and other business scandals we've had in the last few decades (century?), where the private sector screwed up big, the government was caught completely by surprise, and then not much really came out of it.

^^ Good luck! If it works for you, then it works for you. We just haven't had a very good run of it up here in the states. If things start to go bad, though, take a look to the west of you, in Chile, where the most vibrant forest is owned, maintained, and regrown by Empresas CMPC, the largest paper pulp company in Latin America

I'm arguing that biodiversity is a general concept that may generate value, but until it is limited to a certain area, broken up into specific items, and the value potential is quantified, it is not wealth. Not any more than the moon is wealth, despite its plentiful resources and tidal benefits. Besides, an area vastly contaminated with various weapons-grade flesh-eating bacteria by a long-abandoned, derelict bio-weapons lab would be a good example of biodiversity, but it definitely wouldn't be considered of value or wealth.

I'm not arguing that government is the problem, I am arguing that government is incapable of solving the problem, because government by it's very structure distributes and bureaucratizes all responsibility (e.g. who is responsible for the greatest catastrophe of early 2000's, the Iraq War?), while following the exact same incentives it's supposed to protect against, namely greed, for tax revenue, for private lobbyist dollars, and for power. Like the anti-Occupyer statement goes, "Want corporations out of government? Get government out of corporations." The more strength and power over private business a government exerts, the more that business will be forced to influence it, and, newsflash, government doesn't pay as much as those corporations.

Regarding property owners, if they are ignorant, and they are people who read and see the same stuff as everyone (everyone) else does, why do you think the people in government will be any different? Especially when the people in those government organizations try their best to avoid or bury responsibility? If a land owner screws up, they are broke or dead. If an EPA agent screws up, it's either the fault of whoever else was up the chain who provided him information, or, at worst, they're fired. Who do you think has a bigger incentive to give a shit?

My parents were both biologists, so I grew up with the knowledge of biology, evolution, speciefication, biodiversity, and how it was all related from a very early age (I asked a lot of questions when I was little, and my parents, being good parents, always answered, without dumbing it down to a kid level). Now, granted, I am not a biologist, and don't know nearly as much as someone with a degree would, but I think I know enough to understand what you're getting at here, thanks.
That said, it was still pretty off-topic for you to bring a nature ecosystem concept into a discussion about wealth, accumulation thereof, and sharing (voluntary or otherwise). At the very least, your biodiversity is not owned by anyone, and thus can't be called wealth at all. It is something people rely on, benefit from, and would do better if it was preserved, but to put it bluntly, biodiversity is something everyone mooches off of, hoping they can get as much out of it while it lasts, without anyone owning or taking responsibility for it. It's a classic tragedy of the commons scenario.
If you can somehow explain to me how biodiversity is wealth, I'm all ears. (*points to avatar pic*)

Another thing to consider: our current system of national parks and oil leases (you may have heard this before, as I've mentioned it in another thread).
In our current system, land (your natural biodiversity) is publicly owned by the government (or, to put it another way, by a bureaucratic group that works hard to avoid any responsibility). When an oil company wants to drill, it gets a temporary lease for a plot of land. The lease is given with certain environmental safety conditions, which have been passed into law. Who gets those laws past do you think? People who care about the environment, or the money rich oil companies? (Easy question I'm sure). The oil company comes in, pumps out all the oil, and once the land is useless to them, just packs up and leaves. Thanks to the lackluster "environmental protection" laws, or the so low as to be almost useless fines they may have to pay, they often leave the area in a pretty nasty condition. The task to clean it up? That's left to the government. So, tax payers foot the bill to clean up the mess, while whoever allowed this drilling to occur is working full time to avoid taking responsibility. If that wasn't bad enough, tax payers don't want to pay taxes. Especially if it's to clean up someone else's back yard. And especially if they live in one of those oil rich states where the politicians keep promising to cut taxes.
So, really, you end up with a profit-hungry business borrowing a plot of land no one owns or wants to take responsibility for, after which no one wants to bother paying to clean it up.

A slightly more libertarian alternative would be to directly sell that land to the oil company (and maybe charge then a ton of property taxes on top of it), and have them take full ownership of it. If it gets trashed, you have one single entity to blame. And if they do trash it, their incentive would be to clean it up as fast as possible, just so that they can resell it to someone else, and stop losing money on useless land and high property taxes. Even if that land was already privately owned by someone else instead of a government, and that owner just leased it too, you can bet that the owner would be a hell of a lot more diligent at keeping an eye on it than a government. Maybe that's your problem here: you think the government's responsibility is to the people instead of the corporate lobbyists.

If there's one thing I learned back when I was working as a programmer, it's that you have to constantly learn new things every six months or so, and any skills you've obtained as little as two years ago are practically useless.
The other thing I learned was that with programming, the main thing to learn is computer logic and how it all works. After you manage to wrap your head around that, the rest is just ever-changing syntax (language), and new tools to make your life easier.

So if you learned programming just two or three years ago, you're likely not too far off skill-wise from someone who's been doing it for 50 years (sorry old-timer egos), and if you learned programming 50 years ago, and dropped it for a few decades, chances are you'll be able to pick it up again easily, since you already know the hard part (PC logic).

Phinn, start getting whoever pledged but didn't donate to send their donations. I'll be out tonight (first time going to a local Bitcoin meet tonight), and will work on reconciling the account sheet tomorrow, after which I'll send the donations.

jsmithers, thanks for your work!

Low tech war, like those waged by third world dictators, can black it out partially, and even then only temporarily. High tech war would only strengthen the internet, since it is used to communicate with troops, collect and disperse intelligence, and control remote war machines. Any threat to the internet during war would get first attention, and would be strongly defended against; defences which will become public again once the war ends. Unless you're talking about nuclear war that wipes out most of the population (or a zombie apacolypse  ), but radioactive mutants and zombies have no use for internets, so...

FYI, that ferret rescue charity I was pursuing ran into some recent issues. The owner's son got into a terrible accident, was paralyzed, and she has been too busy running between taking care of him and her ferrets to consider anything else like Bitcoin.

Yes 

Well, that was the most obvious and the least practical solution I was already aware of. I was looking for more like https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=128928.msg1375524#msg1375524 , and big props to him for those suggestions.

We do actually have a perfect example of this playing out in modern times, in China (and to a lesser extent India), which gives us a perfect example of what happens in a modern globalized country without minimum wage laws:
China has no minimum wage laws, labor is cheap >
Lots of companies move in to take advantage. Unemployed people are still desperate, so take any job >
As more companies moved in to try to compete against other companies, unemployment dropped to near zero >
What used to be long lines of prospective employees at the company gates, has turned into empty parking ports, with not enough employees >
Companies in China started struggling to find workers, and have started to compete for labor >
High demand for employees + low supply of labor = higher wages and better benefits

End result is, despite the media sensationalizing the destitute working conditions in China because drama sells in TV, the quality of jobs and the average wage in China have shot up dramatically over the last decade. So much so that for many companies it no longer makes sense to outsource to China or India, as they'll just break even on shipping charges. The same thing happened in India, but on a much more dramatic, and possibly unsustainable level. So, here's your example of the "tragedy" of the lack of minimum wage laws in modern times. The market works, and it's not as bad as you think.
(Source: series of case papers from my Global Economic Environment graduate class)

Personally I wasn't arguing against supply and demand. That minimum wage laws reduce the supply of jobs and create unemployment is 100% correct. What I was arguing is whether the demand for jobs remains constant. Take it up one level, and you have an increased supply of income for people, which reduces their demand for jobs. They can (barely) survive with one family working, or both only working part time. And though they may still want full time jobs, an increase in a minimum wage may make them be better off, even with lower employment, than they were before.

But, big emphasis on "may" here. Though minimum wage laws may make people better off financially, despite increasing unemployment, I don't believe we can know for sure. Why? Because there are waaaaay too many distortions in this economy, like those underemployed receiving food stamps, subsidized housing, subsidized healthcare, and maybe even direct welfare payments. I'm not arguing for getting rid of those things (shoo trolls!), but they do make it difficult to see how much better or worse off people are with minimum wage laws.


You forgot finance: needed in every single company and business on the planet.

Minimum wage laws may decrease employment, since companies won't be able to afford as many workers, but at the same time they may reduce the employee pool, since workers who used to work two jobs, or work two shifts, may now be able to quit their second job/shift, since they now have enough money to cover their expenses. This in turn frees up the job for someone else.
So.... complicated