24 Oct 2003
Coolie Labor

Well, these two news items came aross the 'Net earlier today - I just got so steamed over them that it's taken me this long to even try and put something coherent together.

If this trend continues, all that'll be left in America is the ultra-rich CEO types with their foreign labor camps, and those who service their every immediate need: cooks, busboys, drivers, lawyers, doctors and healthcare workers.

I guess what really amazes me is that the only voices speaking out against this trend are those of the Kook Brigade, both Left and Right. The rest of our Congress-critters and politico's seem content to let the rest of us practice saying "You want fries with that?" ...

I guess what really nails me is that "free trade" isn't free at all - it's basically us lifting all import duties/tariffs/immigration restrictions for a particular nation, while allowing them to maintain their existing high or onerous duties/tariffs/immigration restrictions. It's us maintaining super stringent regulation - enviromental, labor and otherwise, while allowing duty free imports from places where labor regulation means giving the guards more bullets.

I'm sick of Republicrats and Demilicans both sucking the hind tit off the corporate sow - these corporations have apparently lost all ability to think beyond the next quarterly balance sheet, as the government has apparently lost the ability to see further than the next election. We're digging ourselves a hole the size of the Marianas Trench here, folks, and unless and until somebody says "Stop!" and takes a good, hard look at what we're doing to ourselves, I'm afraid it's only gonna get worse.

Now I think I'll let the articles speak for themselves - taken together, they speak reams.

The Case for Coolie Labor. American IT people cost too much, so U.S. companies continue sending jobs overseas, where grateful workers happily toil for a fraction of the cost. The folks who think that's a good idea make their pitch. Amit Asaravala reports from San Francisco. [Wired News]

Transcriber Threatens Release of Medical Records [Slashdot]

00:00 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

Just a provincial American

Opps! I'll still stand by the conclusions I came to here on file swapping and iTunes, but an astute reader from outside North America pointed out a rather silly discrepency in the numbers.

Re-reading the original linked news items, it's obvious that some of the numbers represented global network utilization, while a survey cited in the same paragraph represented American numbers for client downloads.

I'll take the rap, even though the linked item wasn't exactly explicit about the source of the data cited. It's obvious, going back over it, that there was some serious apple-and-orange mixing going on here.

I didn't do any actual calculation in the piece, which is a good thing, as I was working with half-baked numbers. Still, I think the point of the piece, which was inflation of actual file sharing data by the folks with a vested interest in making "piracy" appear to be more prevelant, still stands, even when the entire globe is calculated in...

I do try to avoid "American provincialism" ... but I sure screwed up on this one! So - opps! Sorry!

00:00 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

NAT

I gotta think about this ... as a developer, NAT has caused me no end of grief. And as a user, workarounds to get certain P2P services running behind NAT can be a royal pain. But ...

NAT also provides some measure of protection as a sort of "firewall" (and I know I'm using the term loosely here). NAT provides, via the options usually attached to a NAT router, for example, the ability to run a completely promiscious mail server inside a LAN - which can be most useful in the case of mixed networks (such as my home LAN).

NAT is also cheaper - I don't care how many IPv6 numbers are available, it's still finate, and they will still cost cash - if not immediately, at some point in the future where everybody's refrigerator is online all the time.

So, like I said, it's something to think about - I just can't see it being as cut and dried an issue as the headline might suggest.

NAT: Just Say No. Fueled by the lack of public IP addresses, 70% of Fortune 1000 companies have been forced to deploy NATs (Source: Center for Next Generation Internet). NATs are also found in hundreds of thousands of small business and home networks where several hosts must share a single IP address. It has been so successful in slowing the depletion of IPv4 addresses that many have questioned the need for IPv6 in the near future. However, such conclusions ignore the fact that a strategy based on avoiding... [CircleID]

00:00 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

Down Under Copyright

Apparently, "free trade" means imposing our copyright law elsewhere - why not the rest of our regulatory regime,as well? I guess workers and farmers and small business folks don't have the same political clout as "artists". Of course, most of the art so protected is actually owned by large, multinational entertainment conglomerates, but I'm sure that's just a coincidence .... it couldn't be a nefarious trade asociation behind the scenes, could it?

Copyright Extension In Australia [Slashdot]

00:00 /Copywrongs | 0 comments | permanent link

Frankenfood Code

Why are the folks pushing genetically modified foods so afraid of putting that fact on a label? If it is, as they say "irrelevent", then why not put it on the label? If it's a matter of "fear" on the part of consumers, then label and educate to erase the needless fear, but don't try to pawn off something as "natural" or even "organic"(!) when it's had it's DNA manipulated ... that's just wrong, I don't care where you stand on the issue.

Cracking the Frankenfood Code. Sure, you could tell whether that banana is genetically modified by checking its code number. But the label won't necessarily be there. By Kristen Philipkoski. [Wired News]

00:00 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

Saint Who

From Secular Blasphemy comes More about Mother Teresa

00:00 /Home | 0 comments | permanent link

Software Sharecropping

I ran into this wonderful little essay on software development embedded in a tag line of a Slashdot comment:

Are You A Sharecropper?

00:00 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

Blog SPAM

These scumbags never give up ... Usenet is useless now, email is getting there: is this to be the fate of the Weblog?

Spammers Clog Up the Blogs. Ever searching for paying customers, spammers have turned their attention to blogs, where they mass-post target URLs in the comments section. By Chris Ulbrich. [Wired News]

00:00 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link