vista never closed it to shut out google. it's not like xp internally supported extra search providers either - it's just another case of some incompetent software company making a patch for something they shouldn't be patching and then *****ing when their hack job spyware doesn't work anymore.

Sometimes when people work somewhere for 30 years or so and then their job gets outsourced to another country they kinda lose motivation, and possibly their pention. It's about more than just finding another job. Alot of small towns only have one big factory or some such thing where people can get these jobs. People don't want to have to move just because the factory they worked at was closed down. And if the factory is closed down, it being the main source of money in the town, all of the small buisnesses are going to be hurt as well due to the fact that all of the factory workers have to just "find a new low skilled job somewhere else" and that somewhere else happens to be 80 miles away or so which causes the workers to relocate to this location. Conveniently enough, they don't make nearly as much money at this new job, but on the bright side there's a Wal Mart close by for them to buy all of their goods from.

yeah, except those "low-skilled jobs" aren't opening up. That's the point.

If you do machining work in a factory, and then your job gets outsourced to mexico, where are you going to work? Walmart? And make a third as much?

Economies stay strong when money circulates. By outsourcing all production (and seriously squeezing all of the profit out of the domestic supply chain) you aren't recirculating money, you're hemmhoraging it. All of the money of supply and production is simply leaving our countries and high-tailing it for China.

You want to know why that's bad for you? Hey, I know: Add up the total amount of money in the United States and China. Divide it by the number of people in the United States and China. That's your future. Unless you marry a Walton, in which case I'm sure you'll do very well for yourself.

Edit: Also, like I said, Walmart's corporate objective is to lower prices every year. Well guess what? Material prices fluctuate. Copper, for instance, has increased in price some 50x in the last decade. Walmart products that use copper can't cost extra. So what do they do? non-wal-mart products go up in price to soak the loss. but it's okay, you won't be able to buy those things on your $10 an hour cashier job anyway. that 10% staff discount, combined with the 5% average savings you get at wal-mart, should help to offset your 70% pay cut.

Edit 2: Also, if you aren't competitive enough to live on Wal-Mart pay, you don't deserve to work for Wal-Mart! You see, because that's how they treat their employees and their suppliers and it's funny because they're dicks and you shouldn't shop there if you enjoy a quality of life superior to the third world countries all of your money is going to

I'm sorry, but McDonalds does not pay enough to live on. That is, unless you like sleeping on the street and living below the poverty line.

1. Motivation is entirely upon the person. If I get laid off and "don't feel motivated" to seek a job, that is in NO WAY Walmart's fault. That's your lazy ***' fault.

2. It is not Walmart's job to "look out" for the communities of small towns


To Cool Matty: Well, that's your fault for not having a skilled labor. McDonalds jobs demand at most minimum wage. Why should we pay them more?

To Jon'C: "If you do machining work in a factory, and then your job gets outsourced to mexico, where are you going to work? Walmart? And make a third as much? " Hell yes you should get paid third as much less, ESPECIALLY if your Walmart job only demands third as much work.

Ok. Walmart outsources to China. They make bigger profits because of the lower cost of labor (even though prices at home drop). Let's say Walmart makes 10 Billion dollars in profit. What do they do? They have two choices. Either invest it themselves, or put it into a bank. In the first case, they COULD use it to perhaps build more factories in China, but they always would rather to use to build more Walmarts at home. To build those walmarts, they have to pay workers. Workers, will buy from stores to get their supplies. Home Depot / Menards will use that money to buy for their inventories, and so on and so forth. The money circulates, it does not just build up in China.

The other option is invest it in a bank and "HORDES TEH MONEYZ". Howver, this doesn't happen. Banks loan out on average the massive majority of their money. 10 Billion dollars could turn into many more billions of dollars in America due to money multipliers, not to mention government tax multipliers later on. You wanna know who receives those loans? Little startups. Those same mom and pop stores that were shut down by "big bad Walmart" are the same ones springing up from its success. Those same stores hiring domestic labor with all that dirty money.

You're missing the point. If German steel is cheaper than our steel, Wal-Mart's suppliers have to buy German steel. American steel jobs disappear. No new jobs appear to replace them, at least none that pay as well.

Nobody said it was.

Do you seriously think your job can't be outsourced? You aren't a special, pretty snowflake. It's cheaper to hire 5 Indians to do the job of a single American programmer, even though the end result isn't going to be anywhere near as good it'll still get done more cheaply.

That won't matter anyway. Even if you happen to be the one irreplacable white collar high-technologist (and you're not, but let's just say you are) you're still going to have the same problem because your company will be subjected to the same downward spiral of squeezing blood from a rock while still monetarily fellating the middle-men who are leeching off of society.

Unless you're one of those middle-men. In which case, good for you. Just make sure you remember to move to the Bahamas before the bottom falls out.

I never said you shouldn't get paid a third as much for working at Wal-Mart. Again, you're missing the point.

People who make a third as much have a third as much buying power. Unless the prices of the merchandise goes down 67% as a result of outsourcing, that person is buying a third as much merchandise. Unless outsourcing jobs to China magically makes the day three times longer, there is no way to make as much money. I'm sorry, I just can't believe I have to break it down like this for you.


That's nice.

Those startups? You know, maybe a mom-and-pop company to make shoes or a new kind of toothbrush? They'll be selling to Wal-Mart. And then Wal-Mart will get them to cut down their bottom line. And then they'll go out of business as soon as material prices go up.

When the mom-and-pop store tries to raise prices, Wal-Mart will just go to a Chinese supplier. Say bye bye to 80% of your market.

Not that it matters. Wal-Mart invests in themselves. All of the money that would be saved by going with a Chinese supplier is eaten up by price-cutting and running Wal-Mart's international shipping infrastructure. At least the government makes a lot of money on tariffs, I guess. The money doesn't recirculate, it's just burnt to keep the machine going at very-close-to-at-cost prices.

Uh what?

No, the point is, workers had a fine skilled job, until suddenly Wal-Mart moved it to China. Now they're stuck busting their *** at McDonalds below minimum wage. That's not McDonald's fault, that's the fault of Wal-Mart removing all the skilled job positions.

...and, combined with the increased shipping, handling and taxation costs, it saves about 2% on manufacturing costs.


seriously. even shipping companies don't make a lot of money doing business with wal-mart. they're big enough that you can't afford not to do business with them, and they pay you just enough to keep you from going bankrupt. THIS IS NOT HEALTHY FOR THE ECONOMY.

But because everyone else is essentially subsidizing those jobs, keeping the US steel isn't actually doing anything but change how we spread the money around.

In the end our actual wealth, stays the same. If the laid off steel workers find something else that they con produce more cheaply than we can import it, something that's bound to eventually happen, our wealth actually starts to increase.

There isn't a finite amount of work to be done. It may not always be completely smooth transition, but the more skilled workers in the work force, the more ability we have to produce more things, that need to be produced. If we can obtain things more cheaply abroad, yeah it might suck for the people making it here, but in the exact same amount it helps the other people here who are buying it. All that remains is for the people who got laid off to do something that can't be done more efficiently overseas, which granted, may suck for them, but the economy is always evolving.




Skill isn't actually helpful unless it can be used to increase production or lower production costs. You could be a master black smith, but it's not like it's going to help the economy if we paid him 100$ and hour do make things that machines turn out by the thousands for fractions of a cent.

Don't give me this "maybe those skilled workers should learn to do something they can't do overseas" garbage. They'll always be able to let foriegn workers do the same work for lower cost anyway. The idea is to pay an individual as much as is deserved to do the service. In America we have laws and standards for this sort of thing. In China they do not. A manufacturing job in America could pay 15-20$$ per hour. In China, the same job pays 5 cents a day and is done by small children for 18 hours straight.

It just doesn't work. None of the gloabalization free market rhetoric you see on Fox News actually works.

In-n-out Burger pays all of their employees a starting wage of like $10, FYI.

They aren't doing much different than your average McDonalds.

It's not as easy to just SWITCH jobs as a machinist.

Most Machinists aren't engineers. I can't draw up anything other than basic prints, and they aren't going to be anything special.

Most Machinists are trained at a company to do work for that company (Uhh duh). (For example, when I worked with Holmatro they spent most of their time teaching me about machining hardened steel and alluminum SPECIFICALLY for cutting and hydraulic applications.)

This also puts MACHINE OPERATORS out of work fairly easy. Factory jobs are disappearing, and machine operators have nowhere to go. Even though they are skilled workers.

It doesn't help that America has ridiculously high pay standards either. We whine when Mexicans come here to get paid 3$/hr. If we paid an American even 5.15 and hour to do what so many Chinese do for a hundredth of the cost, (assuming that you could even find enough willing to work for that little.) the cost of manufacture would go so high that that five dollars they would be makes here wouldn't buy a fraction of what it did before.

It's not about money, it's about stuff. Money just helps us spread the stuff around. Americans don't want to get paid the amount that makes having our ridicules amount of stuff possible.

Besides remember this: For every workers get laid off from US steel plants, other US companies that use steel, now gets it for less and have more money to hire skilled employees, allowing the industries that we can compete in to grow.

It's not like we can outsource everything. We have to be doing something to pay for our imports. If everything is outsourced we can't do that.




I do worry though, that our dieing ability to manufacture things is going to kill us if we get in a major war again.

The illegals issue and the outsourcing issue are different.

Illegals are doing jobs no one else wants to do anyways.

Outsourcing is taking jobs away from SKILLED WORKERS.

Haha, I wouldn't worry about that.

True, but we were talking about Wal-Mart and products made in china. Most of those things Wal-Mart sells don't require a lot of skill to make, but instead involve repetitive simple tasks on assembly lines.

Sure the clothes don't, but nearly everything else does. We aren't just talking about the product either, but the materials that the product are made of as well.

You're missing the point that they're taking jobs away from American workers and giving them to people whom are grossly mistreated at work overseas.

Also, don't forget about Ohio Art, the company which produced the Etcha Sketch in Ohio for decades. Wal Mart told them it would only sell the Etcha Sketch if the price was noticably less. Faced with the fact that the vast majority of the sales of it's main product come from Wal Mart, Ohio Art was faced with the dillema of either going bankrupt or outsourcing all of it's manufacturing jobs to China. They chose outsourcing as opposed to bankruptcy, and it effectively killed a town.

Imagine if that was your town.

Ok, yes I see what you're saying from a humanitarian and local standpoint, but not about the national economy as a whole. I'm talking about what's best for our national economy, not what's morally right.

Outsourcing is not good for our economy.

capitalism, lol :downs:

but, seriously, I wouldn't mind seeing Walmart getting its *** kicked... <_<

and as for outsourcing- I agree that it does hurt economy, not to mention the products are more ****y... I would like to see more high quality products out there =/

I agree with you. I have some hand-me-down tools from the 1940's and 1950's that are far more durable than anything you can buy today. I have a drill made completely from steel, for example, that still works like a charm after half a century. This plastic crap you find now, you have to replace every few years. People can't see the big picture and so they don't realize that it's much cheaper in the long run to buy good quality products even though they're more expensive than the ****ty ones.

Craftsman, *****.


Plastic isn't crap, but cheap tools made from thin, poor quality plastics will of course need to be replaced every few years. Plastics are wonderful materials if used correctly.

Craftsmen tools will soon no longer be made in America and also will no longer have the lifetime guarantee.

WTF? My life is ruined!

hmm kinda irrelevant, but i was surprised you guys were bashing norton. it's all i've ever used for AV, and it seems to work okay... if you guys dont use norton, what DO you use?

The lifetime guarantee was the only reason worth buying them.

No AV would be better than Norton. It has a reasonably high likelihood is screwing up your PC, it's an inefficient resource hog, and I don't think it's terribly effective. Stay way from Mcafee too. I'd use something like Avast or AVG, or if you want to spend money, I've heard that Nod32 is pretty good.

Norton and McAfee actually make rather good enterprise products, but their home stuff sucks. Norton's is especially bad.

That's true, when I worked computer repair, their enterprise edition did a really good job. I don't know why they don't just sell their enterprise product to home users. It's not like it costs more to produce.

Still, I'm not sure I'd put it on my PC, even if it was pretty effective at removing stuff.

What, Norton Corporate? Go for it, it's good. Just make sure to turn off scanning on reads in the active file system scanning stuff, it'll make your system slow otherwise.

norton is an absolute piece of junk, it seems to come pre-installed on virtually every system I end up having to go round to someones house to fix and it is the first thing i remove. I used to have it on my own system some 2 years ago until I started looking carefully at what processes were running and trying to trim my idle ram usage down, then I began to see what a horror of a program it actually is.

As for this whole business with google, norton and the like, I totally a agree with whats been said, its stupid, google are mad because the built in search would use microsoft's online search engine when doing a web search through vista instead of google's, well duh, of course it would, use a microsoft OS search tool what else should you expect.

And as for the norton complaint that really pissed me off learning about that some 6-8 months ago, I knew exactly why norton were complaining because if microsoft had been allowed to do what they wanted, norton would probably lose 50%+ of its business. Instead because of norton vista is not as secure as it could be.

Glad I've got a macbook to fall back on

I've been reading the articles as they've come out in the news and whatnot. I literally laughed out loud at work when I read the google one. The whole situation is ridiculous, but if you really think about it, if MS hadn't been convicted of illegally obtaining a monopoly (in the US and the EU), they wouldn't be in this situation (and yes, they did do a bunch of illegal crap to get where they are today). There are so many alternatives to Windows nowadays that I have a really hard time swallowing this anti-bundle crap that everyone is spewing. They should be able to do whatever they want with their OS. If people don't like it, they won't buy it, there are plenty of other OS vendors out there.

Mac OSX, Linux, aaaaand?

Sun SPARC?

How about FREEDOS, Dell ships it

BSD.

You have a choice between a VMS derivative or a UNIX derivative.

Which is just so different from Linux these days.