🚀 go-pugleaf

Kelly Bert Manning (ua602@victoria.tc.ca) wrote:
: On Tue, 12 Jun 2001, SunnyJim wrote:
: > 
: > A bunch of letters at the end of someone's name means nothing. Lots of
: > Phd's drive cabs and many more without anything have amassed great
: > wealth thru their own drive and determination. Education means nothing

What you mean is capitalists that are ignorant, illiterate and whose
religion is that of Mammon. The "creed" is lying, cheating and stealing.
Yea, we know all about it, for hundreds of years in fact.

One other thing. This group of pagans vote for either the communist or the
conservative form of government.

: > unless you are appealing to a crowd that requires the comfort of some
: > level of education. Backroads and other high end bike touring
: > companies have lots of bike mechanics and tour guides that have BA's
: > and MA's. See what that got them.

: So you are ignorant and proud of it?

Like most capitalists, he is proud for what he does not know. They wear it
like a badge of honor. Something like communist commissars used to wear
theirs, or somewhat like the pigs in George Orwell's Animal Farm talked
about apples.

: How come someone as smart as you isn't a millionaire?

Its an irrelavant question. The real question is why would the author pose
such a dumb question in the first place.


: The biggest lesson out of the current economic system is that wealth
: generally belongs to a hereditary clique, eg. William Gates III, etc.

Agreed. Just look at the Hollywood set.

: Getting a degree doesn't mean that much and doesn't guarantee a job, but
: people with a clue make the right choices. I was about to start the final
: year of a physics honours program when I realized that the same Ph.Ds that
: were teaching my first year labs were still teaching labs 4 years later.

You might wish to ask a better question, namely what has gone off the
tracks when PhD drive cabs and teach undergrad labs while at the same time
six week wonderkids have crazed on cocaine are paid a million or more
dollars becasue they are "Internet gurus". A related question is related
to 18 year olds getting tens of millions of dollars a year to play hockey
while hospital workers struggle on minimum wages. The real answer lies in
understanding capitalism and how it actually works in practice.

: A switch to a 5 year double major left me with a double degree in physics
: and computing that has left me with virtually guaranteed job security and
: no reason to put up with a working environment I don't like. I remember
: having envious people commenting "you're lucky to both still have jobs" to
: my wife or myself back in the depression/recession in the early 80s. We

The truth is that all workers including skilled workers did not keep up
with the rate of inflation in North America for the past 30 years. That is
why most families must now have both parents working to earn basic
necessities. It is also the reason why you have multi-million dollar
hockey players while such past greats as Gordie Howe struggle on a pension
that is very meagre compared to his past status.

Capitalism, like communism, is based upon the theory that the pigs know
what is best for the barnyard, and they need more apples then most other
farm animals because they have to think harder for all the other dumb
animals. But a pig is a pig, and it will never be a swan.

: just give them a puzzled look and ask if they knew any unemployed computer
: programmers. There were a few in Ontario, but the concensus was that they
: either couldn't move for some reason or were the ones who could only get
: employed when employers were extremely desperate. Even as a student I had
: someone call me once and offer me a job as soon as they heard me tell them
: what SPSS stood for.

Most high end "software jobs" have been exported from Canada. Most high
end research and development jobs have already been exported from Canada.
The "free trade crazies" altered our economy without a good answer for
those left behind the boundaries of nation states.

As for multi-national companies, they enrich themselves on trained
manpower without paying the freight. Many do not even set foot into
Canada, but they benefit from past contributions made by Canadian
taxpayers. Funding education for example. Or healthcare. Or student loans.

: It's quite interesting how many people with science or engineering degrees
: end up in computing. As for letters after your name, that gets you in the

The best engineers avoid stock "computing" all together. That is because
offshore "software manufacturers" utilize "intellectual property" to
prevent real engineers from checking the calculations their programs
produce. Good engineers are therefore left with the option of leaving
their field, or writing their own programs.

: door, but you can either make computers do what they are supposed to for a
: reaonable cost or you can't. If you can't people won't pay you to stay
: around unless they are very desperate, which does happen sometimes.

Most Windows 98 applications in Canada today are so unstable that they
rarely run more than a week without a software crash of some sort.
Microsoft, the king of the modern school of piracy, disclaim up front any
responsibility for the impact of their computer software on any real world
application.

: http://www2.mybc.com/news/bc/fs.cfm?source_id=&id=898877
: "IT workers in short supply: study
: VANCOUVER (CKNW) - A survey commissioned by the federal government 
: shows what the information-technology sector has
: been saying for years: IT workers are in short supply."

Well, after bad government policy in Alberta toward doctors and nurses,
you can also say the same thing about there being a shortage of doctors
and nurses. 

It was only a few years ago that the Klein government laid off over 4,000
nurses in Edmonton alone. Today there is a shortage. The same thing can be
said for software experts. Having exported all the opportunities via the
FTA and NAFTA, the multi-national firms moved to the US. There they raided
Canada for experts and encouraged their migration and emmigration to the
US. Now there is a shortage. Same as with doctors and nurses. Its cause of
bad government policy.

: http://www.shrc.ca/lmi/index.html

: Why an I going on about IT? Well for one thing, it will overtake forestry
: as an economic factor in the province, if it hasn't already. The only

Not in Canada it won't. Its exactly the same story with Canadian
semi-conductors. There was a time when micro-computer chips were
manufactured in Canada. Not any more. Bad government policy encouraged
these people to move from Alberta to California.

: limit is the number of qualified employees available. It takes a lot less
: time to train an IT professional that it does to grow a tree. Forestry
: propagandists used to trot out bogus statistics using ridiculous spin off
: factors to try and inflate their position in the economic scheme of thigs,
: but people figured out that it was bogus decades ago. IT just keeps on
: growing at double digit %s every year, while old growth available for
: strip mining/clear cutting gets scarcer every year.

The IT propaganda that you are presenting is the same thing. The reality
is that almost all the money spent in Canada today on software leaves
Canada. What little is left is applied to "IT experts" with a six week
training program to "try to make things work" with such things as Windows
98 for example.

The most serious thing that has gone wrong in Canada with IT, is that
government policy has allowed multi-national firms to paralyze the
economy. The old IBM monopoly of the 1960s could only dream of the kind of
control exerted by MicroSoft, and scores of other "software manufacturers"
today.

: BTW, I'll take the views of anyone with a biology or related degree over
: yours anytime, but why waste your time trying to convince people in BC? 

Bullshit baffled brains in the 1960s and it does the same today.

: It seems that the market places of USA and Europe are where the real
: decisions are being made about what is happening in BC forests. If you

You are only partly right. Increasingly, these decisions are made from the
full time resorts of the world that cater to the "owners" that have
concentrated wealth sufficiently to control multi-national firms that defy
the rule of law and the people of the nation states where they operate.
Much the same as is the case with organized crime.

: can't peddle diapers or newsprint made out of centuries old trees there is
: no point in cutting down the trees in the first place. You don't even have
: to convince the entire consumer base. Even a 1% shift in buying preference
: is enough to get the attention of wood fibre industry customers. 

Manufacturing paper diapers is an excellent example of capitalism run
amok. At one point it accounted for something like 20% of all land fill
sites in the United States.

The central idea that is wrong with capitalism is the idea that decisions
in the economy should only be made by those with the money to spend or
invest. That is, as Mr. Spock would say, "irrational" and "illogical".

If there are no laws governing interest rates, someone somewhere will
charge 1000% interest rates for the use of capital. And no doubt making it
a criminal offence as is the case in Canada, "interferes" with the market
of loan sharks. 

Curbing the excesses of capitalism and replacing it with a more sane and
stable system that serves the large majority of people in each nation
state of the world is the central objective that reasonable men should
apply themselves.

Joe Green