Jac, you wouldn’t know “correct” if it showed up at Thanksgiving and basted your mom.
Only on the Straight Dope can you find someone stupid enough to say Haiti is not desperately poor. And absolutely no one bright enough to call him on that.
You don’t find stupidity of that magnitude anywhere else. Really.
I know what ‘abomination’ is. It’s whatever basted your mom’s insides and brought a genetic tragedy like you into this world.
Oh, you want an insult war, do you…? heh heh heh…
Your economic theories are Keynesian, in the sense that Keynes sometimes ate too much spicy food and suffered diarrhea.
What, precisely, did I quote and respond to? Here, let me go up and quote it for you:
At no point did I say that Haiti was not “desperately poor”. I responded to a very specific point that you raised. You drew from that, incorrectly, that I was talking about Haiti. Had I wanted to speak about Haiti, I would have said something about Haiti. And by the way that you drew that out of context, I surmise that you don’t really want to discuss this, you want to take shots at people (something confirmed in the next dozen or so posts). So have at it. You have plenty of people that will have fun jerking your chain for as long as this thread goes in. I’m not one of them.
I need to make something clear to you, Jackie. I am not engaging with you. I am not debating with you. I find your pet topic, offshoring, utterly uninteresting to the point that I haven’t even bothered to figure out whether I agree or disagree with you. Not that your position is unclear - on the contrary, I’ve inadvertently figured out your stance by osmosis, despite skimming 99% of what leaks out of your keyboard. No, the uncertainty is completely mine. I have spent so little time and energy considering this issue that I haven’t bothered to decide what I think about it. I am not threatened by your arguments; I am entirely uninterested in them.
What I am doing here is not attacking you for your positions. It’s not frantically flailing about, hoping to distract people from being swayed by your arguments. It is pointing, laughing, and mocking, pure and simple. You behave like a clown - again, NOT BECAUSE OF YOUR POSITIONS, BUT BECAUSE OF YOUR LAUGHABLE BEHAVIOR. I choose to react by laughing at the clown, because that is what clowns are for.
By the way, congratulations on mastering the letter “D”.
They don’t need to remain desperately poor for offshoring to work, in fact pay and living standards in places like China are rising significantly faster than they are here but they are starting from a total compensation of around $0.75/hour versus about $20/hour for the average US factory worker. Chinese wages are rising more than three times faster than US wages but even if their wages grow 10% faster than ours for the next 30 years, they will still be paid less per hour than our workers.
When you realize that people who own factories in China are making billions/year because of the cheap labor, you can’t help but wonder if the Chinese worker is being fairly compensated.
This is not an insult war. It is advice.
You guys need to lay off of the big words. You misuse and abuse them like redheaded stepchildren. And lay off on the economic concepts, too. Especially “comparative advantage” which, like other concepts, you guys have not only gotten horribly wrong, but have twisted into something completely unrecognizeable by the minds that sired them.
That is all.
Oh really? You said,
“Desperately poor? No.”
That logically means, “Haiti is not desperately poor”.
No, you are landing in the thread like a smelly hot turd. You don’t argue because you would lose a debate with a rock. You don’t argue because you have the intellect of a chia pet.
You do little more than waste people’s time, the world’s breathable air and consume food to fuel your miserable existence. However, from now on you will continue to waste your own time. You will no longer be wasting mine.
The problem with China’s rising wages is that they are starting to lose jobs. See Apple slowly moving iPod production from China to Brazil.
No it doesn’t mean that. In particular it doesn’t mean Haiti, because in the sentence where you used the phrase, YOU didn’t say Haiti. What it does mean is that, according to Airman Doors, “desperate” poverty is not necessary for offshoring to work. Any poverty that is sufficient to make the offshore labor plus transport costs less less than the domestic labor costs is sufficient. That may or may not be “desperate” poverty.
If you wish, the two of you can argue how bad poverty has to be before it becomes “desperate”. But the two are not necessarily the same thing.
In theory, at least, US companies would be willing to pay Mexican or Haitian laborers significantly more than Chinese laborers, assuming that transport from China costs significantly more. I won’t argue that they actually do this, because I have no idea, and because I suspect they agitate for the lowest possible labor costs regardless of any other costs. Nevertheless, they would probably tolerate higher labor costs from nearby locations, so long as it results in a greater profit than moving to more more distant sites with cheaper labor.
Actually, I own an apology to Airman Doors. I believe I was interpreting his comments correctly, but I shouldn’t have used the phrase “according to Airman Doors” because it was not. It was me, according to my reading of him, and I shouldn’t have suggested otherwise.
Christ, I think you may have made an understatement.
You’re the Ann Landers of advice-giving.
Landers is dead.
Wasn’t there a recent thread about the limitations of language?
One of the true tragedies of LJ is that there are significant issues at stake. A good portion of my work is devoted to economic empowerment within the developing world–much of it on-the-ground and working within and against the ‘system’. They’re actual reality-based dilemmas and issues out there, but they’re mostly obscured by the figments of the LJ’s imagination. That’s the shame of his trolling; actual discussion is subsumed to his over-the-top and completely transparent games.
If you put Qin Shi Huangdi and Le Jacquelope together, the explosion would devastate the planet. They are precise antitheses of each other.
I want to read that thread. Can we set this up?
We need to terraform a planet to evacuate to first. But right after that…
Okay, that’s it. Your reading skills are far too remedial to be worth anyone’s time to fix. Least of all someone who isn’t paid very well to do so.
There would be an entire industry devoted to the limitations that confine your intellect. The fact that you still breathe is enough to force biologists to rethink what it means to be living.
You don’t work with anyone. Unless that work involves keeping other populations ignorant, helpless and downright incompetent.
Working with others? You couldn’t even help a lemonade stand owner count change.
You continually make a fool out of yourself when you try to go against me, and then accuse me of declaring victory when all I’ve done is read your eulogy. Now all you can do is take the chickenshit route of accusing me of trolling.
You have no real world experience with economics and no one listens to your crap-trap bullshit. I’m sure, however, that to the chorus of limited minds that huddle in seclusion on this forum, you can manage to sound like you’re someone. You have as much dealings with reality as I have admirers here.
The system is the sole reason why useless idiots like you are still alive and haven’t been put out for large predators as bait. Still, though, I like that aspect of the system, because it’s entirely possible that your intellectual inadequacies aren’t even your fault.