Design and Social Consciousness

Gary:

(1) Learn to quote enough of the previous post so that your response seems sensible.

(2) GFY ;-)

(3) I auto-plonk '@gmail.com'

...Jim Thompson

What you are telling us is that you are unwilling to question your underlying assumptions, which I believe with good reason to have led you to call good bad and to call bad good.

For example, you assume that not buying from a supplier whose labor isn't paid well is good. In reality you are, without asking him what he thinks, insisting that someone go from getting a small paycheck to no paycheck at all. You aren't willing to find out who he is and send him money, but you are willing to put him out of work and turn him out in the streets to starve.

And then you insist that nobody here point out to you the consequences that your decisions have on the poor in third world countries.

This isn't about philosophy. This is about you doing evil while thinking that you are doing good and about you refusing to discuss or even think about whether what you are doing is actually good or evil.

Check out the European Union - the quid pro quo for less developed countries joining the union are development funds from the richer states. Ireland comes to mind - it is now doing well and expects to become a nett contribuotr to the EU budget in a few years ...

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Use scrap parts. My sole source of parts for much of the first years of my electronics hobby. Not out of social conciousness though ;-)

robert

Read their "Business Code of Conduct" (BCC) ;-) I read NXP's (a semi mfgr), and they have all what you need.

Seriously, what do you expect from a labor-intensive industry that relies on a multitude of chemicals and rare elements? The environmental issues will literally go down the drain in less developed countries. Wafer fabs in Europe and the US will generally be compliant with your request, but much of the processing and packaging is in Asia.

robert

Where in Bill's post did you see an advocacy of trade restrictions?

I don't think he does.

robert

This is Usenet. Not Google Groups, BTW.

robert

I recommend you ask Ethan here

I saw it in the statement "This all sounds fine, until you get to the bit about free trade", followed by "You are just parrotting economics for republicans, which is based on long exploded theories whose sole virtue is that their errors justify the sorts of economic practices that suit the people who have already made lots of money, and who want to maintain the existing inequitable distribution of capital and income." Do you see something else in the above statements?

I may have misunderstood, but until he tells me thatI misunderstood, what I see in the statements above appears to be an advocacy of at least some form of trade restrictions.

Funny, I clicked onto this thread just as Megadeth - Foreclosure Of A Dream came up on Winamp.

Tim

-- Deep Fryer: A very philosophical monk. Website @

So, it's not a working form of socialism at all, merely an elaborate shell game.

Actually, it's a lot like a cult - "You've joined us! Now here's your ticket to Heaven! Hallelujah!"

Good Luck, Rich

We can't tell - you've snipped the context.

It could be construed that he's denigrating the US's current version of "free trade", which is "free trade for the anointed, and screw everybody else".

IOW, the US may pay lip service to Free Trade, but what they're actually doing is far from the ideal.

Cheers! Rich

If so, he posted his criticism of the US's current version of "free trade" in direct response to a paragraph that lacks any mention of US practice, and indeed clearly labels free trade (along with minimal bureaucracy and minimal taxation -- terms which only someone with severe brain damage or running for office would use to describe the US Government) as being western values:

"The solutions to third world poverty are well known. If the third world is ever to become prosperous, it must abandon dictatorship, socialism, communism, Islamism, pan-Arabism, statism, protectionism, tribalism, superstition, racism and corruption, and must adopt the western values of democracy, capitalism, science, free speech, freedom of religion, free press, free society, property rights, the rule of law, the ability to make binding contracts, free enterprise, minimal bureaucracy, minimal taxation, minimal state enterprise, and free trade. Of these, free trade is the one area that a first world engineer -- and you personally -- can influence the most."

If he really replied to the above with "This all sounds fine, until you get to the bit about free trade" while transmogrifying "western values" into "US practice", it would seem to imply that thinks that the US is doing fine with everything listed before free trade.

Agreed. In fact, a case can be made that what made the US prosperous in the period shortly after 1776 was following the solutions to poverty listed above, and a case can be made that the US is in the process of destroying that prosperity by abandoning many of those western principles.

While the US has managed to avoid Islamism, pan-Arabism and tribalism and to pretty much hang on to freedom of religion, free press, and the ability to make binding contracts, they have not avoided socialism, statism, and protectionism, and have abandoned the western values of capitalism, property rights, free enterprise, minimal bureaucracy, minimal taxation, minimal state enterprise, and free trade. But this isn't about the US. It's about an engineer who has decided to go down a path that causes certain third-world individuals to starve to death, all in the name of doing good.

It's not a shell game. Ireland is a lot more prosperous now than it was when it originally joined the European Union - and - as I said in the section of my post which you snipped - it is now on the verge of becoming a nett contributor to the European Union, having started off as very much a recipient.

On the whole it looks as if the Eurpean Union has done more for Ireland than the U.S. has done for Puerrto Rico

where incomes have remained at about one third of U.S.levels since

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

In fact, I pointed out that both the US and the European Union pushed for free trade while subsidising their farmers and dumping their excess agricultural production on the world market; free trade in these circumstances doesn't make small countries richer. The European Union copes with this problem within its internal free trade area by subsidising the poorer countries with development grants, as I pointed out in a subsequent post, giving Ireland as an example of the way this process can work.

The case is regulary made by right-wingers with a restriced view of reality. It is nonsense.

Gary Henderson's scruples won't cause anybody to starve to death - countries rich enough to be competing for his business don't have a problem producing enough food for people to eat - and might encourage countries like China to be more careful about environmental issues. Air pollution and other environmental pollutions in China do seem to be bad enough to be affecting public health.

And your prescription for developing countries is the same sort of ideologically driven prescription that the World Bank and the IMF have been forcing on poor countries for many years now, which have the effect of wrecking education and public health in countries unfortunate enough to have to swallw their economic medicine in order to be able to get access to World Bank and IMF emergency help.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8Bit

snipped-for-privacy@ieee.org wrote:

How nice of you to unilaterally decide for the third-world worker that it's OK if they are put out of work. I can only hope that some day they have the same power over you.

The choice for workers in the Third World is not between a high-paying, cushy, unionised job, and a job in a sweatshop. The choice is between a job in a sweatshop and living on a rubbish dump. The choice is between eating and not eating. The choice is between buying a mosquito net to cover your children while they sleep, and having your children die slowly of malaria. A shit job at a shit wage is better than no job at all. I have never quite worked out why you anti- free-traders think that third world workers should have no work at all. I don't see you sharing your wealth with them, despite the many charities that would be glad to accept any donation. And I don't see you asking *them* if it's OK for them to lose their jobs. You just think you know better what's best for them than they themselves do.

"It's so easy to hurt others when you can't feel pain" -Hall & Oates

It is a pity that you don't appreciate that one of the side effects of free trade - one of your panaceas - is to put people out of work in third world countries.

In fact the effect of ecological conciousness in first world customers is not to put people out of work in third world counties but merely to excite vigorous bribery, usually backed up by cosmetic reforms in work practices, to make it seem that the third world products do conform to first world standards.

Look at the effects of the discovery of lead-based paints on Chinese manufactured children's toys.

Unrestricted free trade, on the other hand, destroys the domestic market for manufactured goods and makes it very difficult for local capitalists to get local production going, which is why selective tariff barriers have always made sense for countries trying to nurture local manufacturing.

It is entertaining to see you proclaiming the moral superiority of your own prescription for third world development.

If you didn't have your head quite so far up your own fundament, you might have noticed that your own - daft - prescription for economic development, as applied by the World Bank and the IMF, has put many more people out of work over the years than have ecologically concious consumers.

Try reading up on the "fair trade" movement to find out how ecologically and socially concious consumers help enterpreneurs in third world counties.

They seem to be doing a lot more good than your school of unrealistic dogma peddlars, and a lot more good that the Lady Bountiful school of charity dispensers - the kind of people who won't subsidise condom distribution as an anti-AIDS measure because sexual abstinence is morally superior (even though it appeals least the people who are most enthusiastic about spreading sexually transmitted diseases, and is - in consequence - totally ineffective).

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Bill has no wealth. He doesn't even work. He lives on welfare, and his wife's income.

Pot, kettle, black - you who've complained that you can't get VA to fix your teeth, despite trying for 35 years to scam them for it, even though your esteemed service didn't cause the problem, or any of your other health issues. No sympathy at all for you in regard to them ignoring you. It's the least they could do for the honest taxpayer. Nevertheless, I wish you the best of health.