"Know how" is global, and so is the economy

[FarCenter]

The world wide web, the graphical web browser, free information bases like Wikipedia, and free web search engines mean that anyone who wants "know how" can access it globally. Despite the best efforts of companies and countries to hang on to intellectual property, information wants to be free.

Anyone in the world can use the web to learn, to find out how to do things, to set up a business, and to compete economically.

World wide production of mobile phones is at about 1,600,000,000 per year. Five years of production would be one phone per person on earth.

World wide production of personal computers is at about 400,000,000 per year. Five years of production would be one PC per household on earth.

So get used to global competition.

[OHdem10]

1. Are you telling us it is okay to bring American Wages down low

enough to compete with Chinese Wages.

Spoken like a Deregulated Capitalist.

[pampango]

12. German manufacturing wages are 50% higher than ours yet they export

almost as much as we do with 1/4 of our population.

As Paul Krugman wrote: There have lately been quite a few stories about manufacturing moving back from China: the labor costs will always be much higher in America, but other advantages, especially logistical, can make even labor-intensive production worth doing at home.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/08/re-shoring

[kentuck]

2. Even Afghanistan?

Then why are we there? They can take care of themselves, right?

Mostly, computer technology was created in this country and sent to other countries to produce. Perhaps that is all well and good, but why do we furnish the rope to hang ourselves with??

[Spider Jerusalem]

6. Economic and technological supremacy doesn't last forever

and technology by its very nature tends to spread in one way or another. Whether through commercial means (like British manufacturers of steam locomotives selling them to early American railways in the 1830's) or others (like the Soviets building reverse-engineered Packards and B29 bombers).

[FarCenter]

8. The US doesn't have a lock on computer technology

Actually never did. The sealed hard drive with non-removable platters was originally called a "Winchester drive" after the IBM lab in the UK where it was developed. The CD was developed by Philips of the Netherland and Sony of Japan. The mp3 audio coding used for digital music was developed by Fraunhofer in Germany. The world wide web was developed by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Switzerland. Standard Telephone and Cables in the UK invented the modern optical fiber.

A large percentage of the engineers and scientists who worked on computers and communications in the US were either immigrants or first generation Americans. They are no longer coming.

Besides, the situation now is that most of the mobile phones, PCs and networking gear are manufactured in the Far East using Asian manufacturing know how and an increasing amount of Asian design know how. US "manufacturers" mostly just write specs of what the want Asian OEMs to send them.

[girl gone mad]

3. Time for a new paradigm.

Global cooperation, not global competition.

[kentuck]

4. Good point.

There is no competition.

Industrialized countries cannot compete with third world countries with unlimited cheap labor. It is a misnomer.

[BOG PERSON]

11. weird

only twenty years ago it was the other way around - third world countries couldn't compete with industrialized countries that had an overwhelming technological advantage. i wonder what happened.

[FarCenter]

13. Information technology and an emphasis on education in many countries

Illiteracy is way down, knowledge of English as a second language is way up. Combined with information technology, literacy and English are the basic tools needed to acquire know how.

So now the competition is between people with "know how" and those without.

"Know how" is different from education. People can be very will educated without obtaining economically competitive skills. You can learn all about Shakespeare, but unless you can perform it well enough to bring in paying ticket holders, it is not economically useful.

[Herlong]

29. Clinton economics?

[FarCenter]

5. Correct, national labor movements are obsolete

Labor movements must also go global, and worker solidarity must be international.

[jwirr]

18. What do you think labor has been doing. There have been international

labor movements for decades and more. They work in well developed countries but other countries have governments who do everything including murder and general violence to stop them. So far it has worked.

[pwb]

7. Markets are global, Economies are local. IMO,

Global economy is a puke talking point. Try global markets and local economy, they sound less puky.

[tama]

9. Or global ecology and

local ways of life. "Think global, act local!"

[FarCenter]

10. Local way of life?

So would that mean, for example, that you are good with reducing crude oil consumption by roughly half?

[pwb]

14. Actually I consume refined oil products

I have reduced my refined oil consumption by 80%. I switched from heating oil to natural gas three years ago. The car I drive now gets 50% better mileage than the one I use to drive.
So to answer your question, Yes i have reduced my oil consumption by more than half. And you.?

[FarCenter]

16. I'm down over half

I replace my furnace with a high-efficiency model, and although I've always driven high-mileage small sedans, I've reduced my driving by over half.

But if the US as a whole were put on half-rations of crude oil, the economy would tank. Diesel fuel for trucking would go up drastically with severe economic consequences. Gasoline prices would also go up, collapse\ing further house prices in all the suburbs.

[tama]

19. Not if but when

US consumes quarter and imports currently 60-70% of crude after local production peak in 1970. Military-industrial complex and US foreign policy exist mainly to guarantee import of oil. Global production of crude peaked in 2005 and of all liquids in 2008 and the price peak of 140 bucks per barrel in 2008 was not able to increase global production but lead to economy and oil consumption tanking. As predicted by the PO scene long time ago.

This situation does not call for wishful and/or fearful thinking but realistic situation awareness, acceptation and evolutionary adaptation. How does this relate to the 1% vs the 99% class war? The 1% are quite aware of limits of growth and that the continuation of their way of life is based on massive die-off scenario of human race, so that they can keep on consuming what consumables are left with less and less consumers competing for the resources. Yes, they are psychopaths and many of them are very clever.

How does this relate to 99%? I hear and heart you and appreciate what you are doing on your part. We are adjusting. We are adapting. We are learning - fast! We are rEvolution.

[tama]

15. Yes

never owned a car, lived only a year in oil heated building and there I talked to owners about geothermal and they got interested and are proceeding. Student of organic gardening and permaculture, consider dumbster diving ethical response to criminally insane wasting. I'm good with reducing crude oil consumption by 100% - gradually. Call me PO aware realist.

[tama]

17. And the question of localism goes much deeper

my ethnicity is non-indoeuropean indigenous people that has been conquered by indoeuropean Crusaders hundreds of years ago and we have become homogenized with European culture to great extent - but even still in my native tongue we say that we are "going to Europe" when we take a ferry trip to Sweden, Germany or Poland - but not when we go to Estonia, where closely related Fenno-Ugrian language is spoken. In "universalist" geography Finland and Estonia are located in Europe, but the local linguistic experience and identity speaks otherwise: we are here in our home land and in our home language and Europe is elsewhere where Europe is spoken.

On the other hand I've studied the roots of European cultures - Greek language and literature and general linguistics - in university and made a career of translating classical and modern Greek literature - poetry, prose and philosophy - into my native language, which has shamanistic roots and world view that can still be "heard" with poetic sensitivy. I've gone quite deep both into "localism" of my native language and natural environment and the "universalism" of European culture, which "universalism" in the end boils down to common cultural hegemony and homogenizing imperialism of "manifest destiny".

With background like this, I've adopted the philosophical stand point of ethical relativism of open localism. To put simply, it's the principle of Golden/Silver rule on scale of communities and cultures with open-minded and evolutive attitude towards "others" sharing Mother Earth.

[FarCenter]

20. The US has no such sense of localism

In the US, most people speak English, which is unlikely to be the language that their great grandparents spoke. The largest ethnic component of the US is German, mostly dating from the emigrations in the 1800s, but other large components would be English, Irish, Italian, Polish, etc.

The predominant culture in the US was the White Anglo Saxon Protestant or WASP culture up through the 1940s. That has been largely rejected in the latter part of the 20th century in favor of multiculturalism. However, multi-culturalism is mainly expressed in neologisms, rather than authentic ties to home cultures. Classical European culture, i.e. Greece and Rome, are seen as largely irrelevant and/or having no particular primacy compared with the classical cultures of other regions.

Given the mobility of the population and the recent movements and migrations, there is no particular tie of any culture to any one geographic region within the US. Only Native Americans express the notion of blood ties to land, and that can usually be shown to be mostly reflective of only their location in the most recent centurys during the European invasion.

As you can see, the American outlook is truely puzzled by localism, and we are unable to cope with the localized tribal social structures of countries like Iraq or Afghanistan, where tribes have been fighting over the land square meter by square meter for centuries.

N.B. -- Genetic studies of Finns indicate that they are predominantly European with only a small admixture of Siberian ancestry. In fact, it appears that other Europeans share all the Finnish genes, while Finns do not have some genes that were introduced to Europe during the introduction of agriculture. So Finns are the authentic original Europeans. DNA studies are more informative than linguistics, since it is harder to borrow or have imposed new DNA.

[tama]

21. Yes

Descendants of the people who moved first to north when the Ice Age ended - as are our Native American distant cousins. Sami people are genetically interesting, one recent theory says that Fenno-Ugrian hunter-gatherer people shared the Ukraina sanctuary during Ice Age with people that became nomadic and agricultural Indo-Europeans, but the Sami people came from the sanctuary of the Pyrenean peninsula - where indigenous Basque people still remain - along the Western coast line. Many possible mythological and ethnic indications to coastal forefathers of Sami people in Britain.

Sami and Finns are the westernmost remnants of the indigenous nordic tribes and Native Americans easternmost, there were Finnish slash and burn farmers brought along in the first Swedish colonies of North America who got very well along with natives and knew how to survive in the woods. The colonies would have not survived without them. The ties between native American peoples and Finns and Sami peoples have been lately strengthening when also Native Americans have started to cross the Atlantic in our direction. Myself I've participated in local ecovillages in sweat lodges, peyote seremony of the Native American Church, Ayahuasca seremonies, Rainbow and related gatherings - as well as local traditions of drumming circles etc. and we have had the honor to share our sauna, lakes and woods and songs with our cousins from America - open localism! These "family reunifications" bring to my mind the Hopi mythology. And few weeks ago before the OWS started to happen a fellow DUer brought to my attention these words from the Hopi Elders:

We are the ones we have been waiting for.

Good to be here with you, brother/sister. :)

[Odin2005]

22. You are Saami? I did not know that!

:hi:

Many linguists are coming to believe that the Indo-European, Uralic, Eskimo-Aleut, and Altaic languages are related, they share many similarities in pronouns and verb markers (1st person with "m" and 2nd person with "t", like Middle English "me"/"thee") and all these families are (at least originally) suffixing and verb-final with huge noun case systems. This hypothetical ancestral language of all of these families was probably spoken on the Asian steppes 15,000 years ago.

I have participated in the Genographic Project, which studies human migrations through genetic markers on the Y chromosome (paternal line) and mitochondrial (maternal line) DNA. My paternal lineage, R1a1a, traces back to the Indo-Europeans.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroup_R1a_%28Y-DNA%29

There is a significant presence in peoples of Scandinavian descent, with highest levels in Norway and Iceland, where between 20 and 30% of men are in R1a1a. Vikings and Normans may have also carried the R1a1a lineage westward; accounting for at least part of the small presence in the British Isles.

[tama]

24. Not Saami, Finnish

or rather, in terms of localism from the Savonian tribe, both my grandfathers were Savonian, mothers mother Swedish speaking Finn from Big City who married to Savonia and fathers mother originally from the Botnia plains. :)

When I was studying general linguistics in university among other subjects, my main interest was historical and comparative linguistics and linguistic variation. Joseph Greenberg, to whom you first and foremost refer by "many linguists", was one of my big heroes, along with Sapir and Worf. And needs to be said in this topic that as politically savvy commentator a certain well known anarchist may be, we Greenbergian empirical "localists" didn't think very highly of his "universalist" English based "General Linguistics"... and still don't! ;)

As for Saami people, the latest theory goes that they didn't originally speak Fenno-Ugric when they came to North but language related to Basque and adapted Fenno-Ugric when the ice between north shore and south shore melted and they came in contact with Fenno-Ugrians. Are you up to date with current knowledge of Saami genetics, haven't been checking that front lately?

[Odin2005]

27. Unfortunately I haven't been reading up on it lately, LOL.

[FarCenter]

23. You might find Dienekes' Anthropology Blog to be of interest

http://dienekes.blogspot.com/

He comments a lot about recent publications regarding late Paleolithic and Neolithic migrations in Europe.

[tama]

25. Thanks nt

[Odin2005]

28. He used to have a great message board, but it was overrun by racist and got shut down.

[Herlong]

26. Wrong

America has a right to stand up for it's own best interest.

[tama]

30. This competition is moronic

So assuming things computers and mobile phones were built to last and work as intended, instead of breaking up on the day that guarantee ends so that artificial demand can be created and corporate profits increased by artificial scarcity and using up planets resources and fucking up ecosystems with waste...

So every one on Earth would have mobile phone and every family a PC in five years. And then we could scale down production, work less and spend more time talking with friends and playing with computers, and pollute less. Gee, how about that!?!?!?! :)