Hi Jesse et al:
I didn't suggest mob rule; however, we have 50 gangs that police know
of here in Montgomery County MD alone. There were two murders a few
kilometers away in the county next to us which were ordered from a jail cell
in El Salvador. That's reality and not exaggeration and we are a suburb of
the US Capitol. Washington DC and Baltimore is much worse according to
police data.
As for taxes, the number of households in Montgomery County in relation
to the state of MD which file more than $200 k income tax returns has
steadily declined over the past years; however, the past two years showed a
sharp drop while the number of households which don't file income tax
returns is steadily increasing. Higher income people are moving out.
The new OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) Foundation has produced a $130
laptop computer for kids which takes about 5 w of power. Try to get your
school system to provide a cheap laptop and software for English, math,
physics, science etc. Eight gigabytes can fit on a chip smaller than my
small fingernail. The education establishment won't allow such a thing to
take place in the US but the Foundation has just begun to supply these
laptops to less developed countries around the world. The establishment
won't allow learning Any Time in Any Place on Any Path at Any Pace. Only
brinks and mortar will do. It wants to maintain control. That's why it's
against home schooling, charter schools and vouchers for learning elsewhere.
The SI is now taught in the MC school system because we have a good
superintendent who took my suggestion a few years go to teach the SI in
science classes rather than in math classes, and to use the SI exclusively
in science classes rather than a mixture of English and metric. He has told
me on a couple occasions that he is committed to the SI.
Politicians aren't interested in Metric Only Labeling Legislation in
the US; legislation which the NIST has already drafted. Since so many
goods are imported, other countries are leading the US and determining how
much metric is used in the US. The media is against going metric. In the
1970s Bob Greene of the Chicago Tribune said that it would cost too much
because garages and mechanics would need to buy metric tools, even though
they were already repairing foreign cars built to metric specs were all over
the US. In fact, US auto manufacturers at the time were designing and
building their cars in the US to metric specs.
. Tax & spend is the name of the politicians game. for both parties.
There is no restraint despite their smooth talk. Look at the budget and
rules and regs which they produce.
I've sat in many meetings of organizations and government councils and
the only thing they talk about is how to get more money out of the public
and corporations. There is no discussion, nada, about more efficiency,
value etc. only we need more money. That's reality.
I guess you haven't heard of the illegal aliens coming into the US. We
have about 15-20 million of them. They come here to send money back to
their home county. The second largest income in Mexico behind oil is the
transfer of money from the US by those who work here. It's not a question
of need for workers nor the quality of work - it's legality.
I used cheapest to mean less expensive; sorry for the poor choice of
words. Businesses do look for value and that's why they go overseas where
they can get value for less money.
Thanks for your comments.
Stan Doore
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ziser, Jesse" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, May 05, 2008 12:52 AM
Subject: [USMA:40843] RE: The Rise of the Rest
First off, let me add my "ditto" to the list of people singing the praises
of Fareed Zakaria. His
show on PBS has been amazing every time I've seen it.
However, I think I have to respectfully disagree with some of your points,
Stan. Comments follow.
--- STANLEY DOORE <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The statement that the United States will continue to lead the world
is not true.
Military force can no longer control the world alone.
No argument here.
Other nations have found that control
of energy by the US is key to controlling the US. Gangs and other small
groups are beginning to
take control of the US too.
I think that's quite an exaggeration. The US still has a pretty strong
government; it has hardly
begun descending into mob rule as you seem to suggest. In a few
particularly poor areas, there
are some problems with street gangs (as there have been for decades, and
as there are in many
other countries as well), but to say that they are "controlling the US"
sounds hard to believe.
In fact, according to the first stats I found with a Google search,
violent crime has been
dropping steadily since 1995. http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/cvict_c.htm
The US has failed to control taxes and overspending. US policies
have forced jobs and
production overseas by increasing wages, costs and unnecessary mandates
in the US.
Here you sound like you believe the US to be a left-wing state under the
thumb of a tax-and-spend
government. I can't claim to have thoroughly researched all the details,
but our president for
the last 8 years is actually from the party that favors less taxation and
government regulation,
and that party controlled congress for much of that time too. My general
impression (from
listening to both liberals and conservatives) has always been that the US
has substantially less
government regulation than the nations of Europe. I have also been told
that we have among the
lowest taxes of any developed country (see
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=332116
for a slightly more detailed discussion). I could be misinformed. Feel
free to dig up some
numbers of your own if you disagree.
Education in
the US has failed to adopt more efficient learning practices such as
learning anywhere at
anytime policies, technologies, and the SI.
I agree that education in the US needs to catch up with the rest of the
world. But last I heard,
metric is still taught in most schools in the US. It certainly was when I
went to school. We
just never use it in the real world for some stupid reason.
Before, the US could control production and demand the use of English
units. No longer.
The rest of the world will produce products in the SI metric sizes and
cut out the US to improve
their efficiency to lower costs.
Actually, I believe the EU recently tried to tighten the rules regarding
metric products, but
ultimately changed its mind under pressure from England. I'm afraid it
will be a long time before
the US really gets cut out of the picture due to its inane units. That
said, we are no doubt
already losing some market share.
The US is not dong enough of this.
The US is moving rapidly to an all government communist type of
society where demand
increases while production and supply evaporates in the US.
Again, this is exactly the opposite of the picture I've seen, which is of
an increasingly
conservative and overwhelmingly anti-communist nation in which almost
everyone is deeply
suspicious of "more government". The government has done nearly nothing
but slash taxes for
almost a decade, and I've never seen anyone asking for a larger
government. That just isn't the
trend I've observed at all. Could you be more specific about what makes
you think this?
People struggle to get into the US to get benefits which they have not
earned.
I haven't heard of this. Where did you hear that? In general, immigrants
tend to do more work
for less pay than Americans. So much so, in fact, that part of the
stereotype of immigrants is
that they work ridiculously hard all the time. That's one of the big
reasons that
anti-immigration groups are always pushing to get rid of them, because of
this concept that they
"steal all of our jobs, work for less, and drive down wages". The idea of
lazy immigrants
collecting welfare is one I've never heard of before.
Here ( http://www.migrationinformation.org/USFocus/display.cfm?ID=45 ) it
says that immigrants
were 15% of welfare recipients before the passage of laws that made it
tough for immigrants to
receive welfare in the mid 1990s. This very informative page (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_the_United_States ) suggests
that about 10% of people
in the US were immigrants somewhere near that time. If true, these
statistics indicate immigrants
were only 50% more likely to be on welfare than native-born citizens (and
I would guess that this
is because of their tendency to be poorer than native citizens). Today,
that figure is probably a
lot lower. And regardless, since they work harder and for less, it's hard
to imagine that they
make up a very large net draw on the system.
And, the government continues to mandate contrary
standards rather than adopt the SI.
As Tom Friedman says, "The World is Flat" and politicians in the US
have not recognized it
although they have been told. Businesses go where they can produce goods
for the least cost.
That is not necessarily true as stated. Remember that things like
geopolitics and tariffs on
trade also have an effect on corporate choices. Besides that, it is false
that businesses are
concerned only with what is cheapest. Some of them also care about
quality, to say nothing of
"public image" which opens a whole other can of worms. I'm not
disagreeing that jobs are moving
overseas, but I don't think the situation is quite as simple as you imply.
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