Am 01.08.2013 17:45, schrieb scott:
>>>> People without a market for their labor or goods can't take their
>>>> "clothing money" and reallocate it to education or medicine.
>>>> They have
>>>> gone from almost no money to no money at all.
>>
>>> ???
>>
>> Read my last two sentences *together*.
>
> I still fail to see how supplying free clothes will cause people to go
> from having almost no money to no money.

Free clothes => local clothes industry collapses => local clothes 
industry employees lose their jobs => local would-be clothes industry 
employees get no money => local would-be clothes industry employees have 
no money to spend => local non-clothes economy suffers as well.

Oh, sure, the would-be clothes industry employees could switch over to 
some other job, like... well, what is it that the better-off people will 
now do with their money instead of buying clothes? Buy luxury products, 
maybe? Oops - there is no local luxury products industry, so that 
portion of the money now goes to somewhere outlandish. Well, maybe the 
better-off people /will/ increase their demand for schools and 
hospitals, but let's be realistic: Would /you/ trust your health or your 
children's education with a would-be cloths industry employee?

> I'm not saying that what I mentioned was the only additional factor to
> consider, it was just one example of why you can't simply say "unlimited
> free clothes equals closed textile industry equals bad for the economy".
> At minimum stating that opinion makes it sound like you haven't
> considered anything else.

To me this discussion sounded more like /you/ simply saying "unlimited 
free clothes equal closed textile industry does /not/ equal bad for the 
economy", and Shay saying "think again and reconsider".

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On 8/1/2013 7:07 AM, Shay wrote:
>
>
> "scott"  wrote in message news:51fa561a$1@news.povray.org...
>
>>> People without a market for their labor or goods can't take their
>>> "clothing money" and reallocate it to education or medicine.
>>> They have
>>> gone from almost no money to no money at all.
>
>> ???
>
> Read my last two sentences *together*.
>
> An economy is like an ecosystem.
> You might say, "if we kill off all the rabbits, the coyotes will eat the
> rats."
> But the foxes are eating the rats. I guess the foxes will eat the crickets.
> But the robins are eating the crickets ...
>
> Then you might say, "we're not killing the rabbits, we're adding more
> rabbits."
> I guess those new rabbits will eat crickets.
> But the robins are eating the crickets ...
>
> An economy, like an ecosystem, can survive a little turbulence (at least
> for a while, history indicates ruin or violent revolution are inevitable).
>
> However, too much turbulence will collapse the system. Rising
> unemployment and income disparity are indicators that this is happening
> right now.
>
> -Shay
Uh, no.. Rising unemployment and income equality is the direct result of 
the wolves deciding the the rabbits where not enough, and they should be 
allowed to eat "everything".

A good example of this is a recent examination of the "costs" of doing 
business for McDonald's Nearly every place in the US, the minimum wage 
is around $7.5 (averaged, and sort of guess at, some places it may be 
$8, but the fed has it at $7.25). The actual amount, given inflation, it 
should be at is like $15. Now.. The cost estimate has been that, if they 
doubled the pay of every single damn person, nation wide, they would 
have to increase the cost of a hamburger by like 50 cents, to compensate.

Now, that means that, if you worked there, you would be making $15 an 
hour, and your burger would cost you $4.49, instead of $3.99. So.. where 
the F is the problem exactly? Well, according to the people apposed to 
increasing wages, "Such places run on tiny margins, and even paying $1 
more would ruin them!!!!"

Uh.. bullshit! Its purely that the boards of directors, the CEOs, and 
all the people they pay to lie to congress for them, want to keep all 
the money, and not pay anyone anything. Oh, and... it gives them an 
excuse to a) fire people, so that b) they have fewer employees, and c) 
they can then pay someone else millions, to go to congress, and say, 
"See! If you got rid of minimum wages, or let us start putting things 
that are illegal in the burgers, we could hire back all the people we 
fired!"

Nothing about the current economic problems have a damn thing to do with 
the cost of labor, or the price that anything would actually "have to 
be" to hire more people, or pay them more money. Its all, 100%, about 
maximizing the wallets of the people at the top, then saying, "Well, I 
am sure you can find a job at one of the other places that pay shit 
wages, you just are not trying hard enough, obviously!"

The numbers don't lie. We could turn around everything, over night, if 
they would just a) hire people, and b) actually fraking pay them for 
working. They want to do neither, and they have a long, stupid, and 
mathematically unfounded, list of bullshit reasons to not do it. The 
biggest ones being that half the idiots in charge of companies right now 
where "trained" in schools that fell for, and taught them, quite 
frankly, the similarly delusional, mathematically implausible, and 
purely selfish, "US libertarian free market - which fixes everything by 
application of magic", economic theory of how to run businesses. Much 
like modern conservatism, someone, who wasn't already an asshole, from 
100 years ago, would look at the theory of how you pay people, how you 
treat them, etc., in the modern economy, and go, "What they hell went 
wrong here? Did everyone become a complete idiot?!"

The only answer I can, sadly, give, myself, is, "Yeah, mostly, that is 
exactly what happened."

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"Patrick Elliott"  wrote in message news:51faa419$1@news.povray.org...
> Uh, no.. Rising unemployment and income equality is the direct
> result of the wolves deciding the the rabbits where not enough,
> and they should be allowed to eat "everything".

We agree more than you think. Low-cost/no-cost goods (or labor) lead to a 
loss of economic equilibrium. This is common to both our stories.

Some people in very unfortunate situations must undersell their goods or 
labor. Remedies for this situation are not the subject of this thread.

I'm looking for others' views on our responsibility as comparatively rich 
people with excess goods or labor to offer. Specifically, I'm interested in 
what we are doing that we perhaps shouldn't, not what we aren't doing that 
we perhaps should. So far, I'm not having much luck.

-Shay

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Shay wrote:
> We've all heard stories of misguided charity organizations destroying
> micro-economies with no-cost goods. The stories go something like
> this:
> 
> * Wealthy people give poor people mosquito nets
> * The poor people sell the nets for food
> * The now-flooded mosquito-net market collapses
> * The indigenous mosquito-net craftsmen disappear
> * The no-cost mosquito nets get sold-off / used up
> * No more mosquito nets. No more craftsmen.
> 
> Google, Apple, and Microsoft are now monetizing no/low-cost software
> and *intentionally*(?) creating the above situation. The creators of
> that software are making nothing or (MUCH worse) very little. The
> 'very little' is much worse, imo, because I suspect the half-starved
> parasites will fight to defend the host.
> 
> Not saying (or not saying) the large companies are evil, just
> wondering if we should all be more careful where we put our "spare"
> money, time, talent, and personal information.

Let me make an attempt to answer this question by giving my personal 
opinion. We indeed should be more careful:

We must not buy products from companies that don't educate people or try 
to prevent people from educating themselves.

What some charity organizations don't understand is that it is much more 
important to improve education than delivering finished goods, even if 
the latter has the short-term effect of saving more lifes. You certainly 
know the saying "Give a man a fish and he has food for one day. Teach 
him how to fish and he has food for his whole life."

In the case of the mosquito net, the right thing is to give them a 
machine that produces mosquito nets and teach them how to operate it. 
But only one such machine, because they must build further machines 
themselves. This has the advantage that
1. The number of mosquito nets increases.
2. Some workers lose their jobs because mosquito nets are now produced 
more efficiently.
3. The workers who lost their jobs now build mosquito net machines.
4. They will modify the machine to improve the nets and to produce other 
things.
5. Machine and net producers maybe even teach the next generation their 
new skills.

Compare this with software and schools. Microsoft sells software to 
schools with a huge discount. Closed source software is like a mosquito 
net, because the students don't learn how to produce software. The right 
thing is to give them the tools to inspect and modify software. Like 
this, more students will start to write software. The irony is that 
Microsoft itself is moaning about the lack software developers.

So:
- Free (as in beer) closed source software is bad.
- Free (as in speach and beer) software is good.
- Free (as in speach but not beer) software is good too.

Then there is something else: Some hospitals here in Switzerland are 
constantly complaining that they can't find enough competent personell. 
On the other hand, they only have a handful of apprenticeships. (You 
know the system of apprenticeship in Switzerland? Young persons just 
having finished school start working at a company for about four years. 
During this period the company must thoroughly educate the apprentices 
in a profession. At the end, they have an exam and get a diploma.) So a 
hospital complains that they can't find enough employees, although they 
are supposed to educate them? Ridiculous. (In fact, this is just a way 
for the hospitals to justify the employment of foreign workers, with 
smaller wages of course.)

And you know what the joke is? Every human wants to learn. But then, 
there is corruption and domination, also something humans want. Efforts 
of helping poor people to get an education can work against corruption, 
but they are also stiffled by corruption.

In my opinion, you should avoid the following:
- Closed source software
- Stuff produced far away, except if it is of very high quality
- Cheap stuff (Always try to imagine what everything must be done to 
produce a good before you buy it!)
- Large companies
- Giving something for free without the recipient learning something 
from it

Greetings
Urs

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"Urs Holzer"  wrote in message news:51fabb28$1@news.povray.org...

> So:
> - Free (as in beer) closed source software is bad.
> - Free (as in speach and beer) software is good.
> - Free (as in speach but not beer) software is good too.

Here's where the second makes me nervous:

Let's say I set up a perfectly free (beer and speech), Stallmanesque 
computer.

I've still purchased "closed-source" hardware. And, the first time I visit 
an Internet forum to learn about my software, I've "purchased" support: By 
reading the forum I've most-likely viewed advertisements or solicitations, 
and by posting on the forum I've drawn other patrons and/or donors to the 
site. Some sites are owned by a software project (say, KDE), but KDE is 
pretty useless to me without other software projects that do not own the 
site. I might even (have, with Suse) purchase books. By even telling anyone 
something positive about my Stallmanesque computer, I've acted as an 
advertiser for the hardware manufacturers, forum owners, and book 
publishers.

I don't mind that any of those people profit indirectly from software, but I 
realize I'm making it impossible to profit from actually creating that 
software. This in turn makes software free (as in beer) for the large 
companies you've suggested I avoid. And I mitigate this with what? 
distribution of open-source learning? That's of no use to most people, and, 
I'll bet, fewer people every day due to the tablet "revolution."

As hard and expensive as it may be to learn programming and buy a computer 
to program on, it's (I suspect) a hell of a lot harder and more expensive to 
manufacture hardware, run a massive and profitable forum, or print and ship 
crates of books. Are we breaking the lowest rungs on the ladder?

-Shay

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"Urs Holzer"  wrote in message news:51fabb28$1@news.povray.org...


> In the case of the mosquito net, the right thing is to give them a
> machine that produces mosquito nets and teach them how to operate it.
> But only one such machine, because they must build further machines
> themselves.

I gave some money to Africare last year and had a tough time deciding 
between (iirc) livestock, water wells, medicine, and building supplies. I 
tried to choose the one I thought would be hardest to take away.

-Shay

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> Helping the poor who cannot afford clothes is ok. Saturating the market
> with free stuff that even the people who could afford it otherwise is not,
> because that kills even the little economy that there could be.

Only for discarded Sports team t-shirts and hats economy.  The rest of 
the economy can still thrive.

If it doesn't it's because the ruling class is too busy fleecing its 
citizen and using whatever money their economy generates to buy arms on 
the foreign markets, not because the Superbowl losing team sent them 
100,000 t-shirts.

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Le 01/08/2013 11:39, scott a écrit :
>>> One could argue that overall for society it's better to have cheaper
>>> mosquito nets (more people will be able to afford them and disease is
>>> then probably lower).
>>>
>> However, the local craftsmen having disappeared, society becomes
>> dependant on charity.
> 
> If the charity stops then surely the craftsmen will appear again just as
> quickly to return to the original situation?

They might, if the entry cost to craft is not higher than any other
local activities.

For a simile, let's look at the textile industry (just the part that
goes from the thread to the fabric), in Europe: wealthy in the 19th
century it is now rather in near-death state. The still existing
companies are using machines that are very old and there is no
manufacturing company any more for such machines (I speak of the most
complex ones, able to make motif of threads in the fabric)). The
knowledge is lost, and the cost to reacquire it is prohibitive.

> 
>> No win-win situation, except for the charity's
>> good conscience.

Every works is worth a rewards.
The charity should be inspired rather by the saying (guess the book ?):
"if you give a man a fish, he will eat one day. If you learn a man to
fish, he will eat every days".
Charity for day one is ok, but long-term repetition of the same action
become counter-productive if the charity is true to itself.


-- 
Just because nobody complains does not mean all parachutes are perfect.

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On 2-8-2013 8:14, Le_Forgeron wrote:
>
> Every works is worth a rewards.
> The charity should be inspired rather by the saying (guess the book ?):
> "if you give a man a fish, he will eat one day. If you learn a man to
> fish, he will eat every days".
> Charity for day one is ok, but long-term repetition of the same action
> become counter-productive if the charity is true to itself.

Exactly so indeed. As you may have guessed, I am quite critical about 
charities as most blindly just go on distributing fish without providing 
the fishing poles. I may be exaggerating some, but not much. It has been 
the policies of ngo's in the past, and it is the policy of IMF.

Thomas

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On 1-8-2013 20:38, Shay wrote:
> I'm looking for others' views on our responsibility as comparatively
> rich people with excess goods or labor to offer. Specifically, I'm
> interested in what we are doing that we perhaps shouldn't, not what we
> aren't doing that we perhaps should. So far, I'm not having much luck.

- Ban the dumping of goods, food, etc in the third world.
- Stop the IMF from dumping loans in the third world.
- Critically assess what /exactly/ the net results of providing 
micro-credits are, and /how/ they are provided. All is not well there.
- The western countries being the world leaders in armament production 
should stop exporting them (or dumping older versions). This is utopia, 
I know.
- we have replaced colonialism by a subtle form of neocolonialism in 
some countries.

I probably could go on a while by mentioning mineral resources...

Thomas

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