Java
Last week I was at Sun's education center in NYC taking Introduction to
Java 275. All of the programmers on the Financial Front-End system I work
on are being trained in the language in order to migrate the user interface
to the worldwide web, where more and more of Columbia's internal business
functions are being housed. Java not only provides access to the Internet,
it also supposedly will make applications building easier because it is an
"object oriented" language. In object orientation, the goal is to make
programs like replaceable parts in a personal computer, for example. The
paradigm is a factory assembly line rather than the messy, chaotic world of
the individual programmer. This, of course, is the kind of world that I
feel comfortable in.
I work primarily in Perl nowadays, the seventh or eighth language I've
worked in over the past 33 years. With Perl, I can create a "hello, world"
program as follows:
---
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
print "hello world";
---
With Java, the same code would do the trick, according to the Sun student
guide:
---
public class TestGreeting {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Greeting hello = new Greeting("hello");
hello.greet("world");
}
}
public class Greeting
private String salutation;
Greeting(String s) {
salutation = s;
}
public void greet(String whom) {
System.out.printlin(salutation + " " + whom);
}
}
---
Now, any reasonable person might ask why all the extra code is needed. The
answer, in a nutshell, is that it helps to support reusability. For
example, the keywords "public" and "private" tell Java whether one program
can access another program's function. In the world of object orientation,
this is called "information hiding". From the standpoint of a Marxist
programmer like myself, it is a tip-off that management would prefer a more
compartmentalized world than has been the case historically. For example,
if a program (called a 'class' in the OO world) does payroll calculations,
one might decide to make the 'salary raise' function (called a 'method' in
the OO world) private.
The other important OO "breakthrough" is its strict adherence to a
hierarchical schema in which one class can be inherited from another. It is
reminiscent of Aristotle's attempt to classify the natural world with
animals at the highest level. Within animals, you have birds, fishes,
mammals and insects. Within insects, you have worms, spiders, moths, etc.
In the business world, such a hierarchical approach would gladden the
hearts of any management for obvious reasons since they see things in a
top-down manner. In the brokerage industry, instead of animals you might be
dealing with securities at the highest level. Beneath securities, you would
have stocks and bonds. Within bonds, you would have government bonds,
corporate bonds, commercial paper, etc. Any process that is common to all
securities would be "inherited" by lower level classes.
While this methodology might be quite useful in the animal world where
evolution ended long ago for most species, in the business world it can be
problematic. For instance, if a brokerage house is bought by a bank, and if
Glass-Steagall is relaxed, then one might want to merge banking and
securities class hierarchies. This is easier said than done.
If there is anything that my 33 years in the industry has taught me, it is
that programming can not be easily converted into a Fordist type
discipline. When I first entered the field and until 1970 or so, "anything
goes" was the operating principle. Armed with Cobol, programmers were given
free rein to solve a problem in any manner they chose. Since this was
before the computer science days, many programmers were like myself:
refugees from the humanities.
The first attempt to rein in the programmers occurred in the 1975 to 1985
period under the rubric of structured programming methodologies (SDM). With
SDM, there were certain prescribed ways to design systems and write
programs. For designers, this meant preparing elaborate blueprint-like
diagrams that showed how one process interacted with one another.
Individual programs were required to follow certain "dos" and "don'ts". For
example, a "go to" instruction was absolutely prohibited. "Go-to less"
programming would supposedly have ushered in a more mechanized world that
put a premium on predictability rather than creativity. It failed since it
was difficult to enforce.
The next big revolution was called CASE, which stood for Computer Aided
Software Engineering. Instead of writing programs, programmers would feed
requirements into a program that would then crank out software. CASE was
hyped relentlessly. Columbia University contracted with a consulting
company that was very big in CASE tools in 1990, the year I came aboard. My
job was to recommend CASE tools and work with programmers to make them more
productive. Somewhere along the line, CASE lost its allure. Perhaps the
best explanation is that the CASE tools were hard-wired to produce a
No Subject
Is this Aristotle or Proyect? Worms and spiders are insects? Computer science - A Biology - F Within insects, you have worms, spiders, moths, etc.
RE: Java
I emailed this to may college drop-out Web programming son in New Zealand.
I'll see what he thinks about it. Proyect and others might enjoy his
thoughts on progamming and the 20-something's Web culture at
www.benbrown.com
-Original Message-
From: Louis Proyect [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Monday, April 09, 2001 11:04 AM
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: [PEN-L:10029] Java
Last week I was at Sun's education center in NYC taking Introduction to
Java 275. All of the programmers on the Financial Front-End system I work
on are being trained in the language in order to migrate the user interface
to the worldwide web, where more and more of Columbia's internal business
functions are being housed. Java not only provides access to the Internet,
it also supposedly will make applications building easier because it is an
"object oriented" language. In object orientation, the goal is to make
programs like replaceable parts in a personal computer, for example. The
paradigm is a factory assembly line rather than the messy, chaotic world of
the individual programmer. This, of course, is the kind of world that I
feel comfortable in.
I work primarily in Perl nowadays, the seventh or eighth language I've
worked in over the past 33 years. With Perl, I can create a "hello, world"
program as follows:
---
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
print "hello world";
---
With Java, the same code would do the trick, according to the Sun student
guide:
---
public class TestGreeting {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Greeting hello = new Greeting("hello");
hello.greet("world");
}
}
public class Greeting
private String salutation;
Greeting(String s) {
salutation = s;
}
public void greet(String whom) {
System.out.printlin(salutation + " " + whom);
}
}
---
Now, any reasonable person might ask why all the extra code is needed. The
answer, in a nutshell, is that it helps to support reusability. For
example, the keywords "public" and "private" tell Java whether one program
can access another program's function. In the world of object orientation,
this is called "information hiding". From the standpoint of a Marxist
programmer like myself, it is a tip-off that management would prefer a more
compartmentalized world than has been the case historically. For example,
if a program (called a 'class' in the OO world) does payroll calculations,
one might decide to make the 'salary raise' function (called a 'method' in
the OO world) private.
The other important OO "breakthrough" is its strict adherence to a
hierarchical schema in which one class can be inherited from another. It is
reminiscent of Aristotle's attempt to classify the natural world with
animals at the highest level. Within animals, you have birds, fishes,
mammals and insects. Within insects, you have worms, spiders, moths, etc.
In the business world, such a hierarchical approach would gladden the
hearts of any management for obvious reasons since they see things in a
top-down manner. In the brokerage industry, instead of animals you might be
dealing with securities at the highest level. Beneath securities, you would
have stocks and bonds. Within bonds, you would have government bonds,
corporate bonds, commercial paper, etc. Any process that is common to all
securities would be "inherited" by lower level classes.
While this methodology might be quite useful in the animal world where
evolution ended long ago for most species, in the business world it can be
problematic. For instance, if a brokerage house is bought by a bank, and if
Glass-Steagall is relaxed, then one might want to merge banking and
securities class hierarchies. This is easier said than done.
If there is anything that my 33 years in the industry has taught me, it is
that programming can not be easily converted into a Fordist type
discipline. When I first entered the field and until 1970 or so, "anything
goes" was the operating principle. Armed with Cobol, programmers were given
free rein to solve a problem in any manner they chose. Since this was
before the computer science days, many programmers were like myself:
refugees from the humanities.
The first attempt to rein in the programmers occurred in the 1975 to 1985
period under the rubric of structured programming methodologies (SDM). With
SDM, there were certain prescribed ways to design systems and write
programs. For designers, this meant preparing elaborate blueprint-like
diagrams that showed how one process interacted with one another.
Individual programs were required to follow certain "dos" and "don'ts". For
example, a "go to" instruction was absolutely prohibited. "Go-to less"
programming would supposedly have ushered in a more mechanized world that
put a premium on predictability rather than creativity. It failed since it
was difficult to enforce.
The next big revolution was called CASE, which stood for Computer Aided
Software Engineering. Instead of writing programs, programmers would feed
requirements into a program that would then crank
Health News
from SLATE, Microsoft's on-line rag: The [Washington POST] reports that the doctor who pioneered the concept of "aerobics," Kenneth Cooper, is in discussions with the Bush administration about maybe becoming the next surgeon general. The paper says he's endorsing federal tax breaks to encourage more healthful behavior. For instance, keep your body mass index under 25, and you get a $250 deduction, ditto for blood pressure under 140 over 90, for keeping your chlolesterol under 200 and for not smoking. (Oh great--now lying about your weight's gonna be tax fraud.) Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: Java
I think your objection is overstated. Creating a
language that all users can use, no matter what
platform, seems like a good thing to me. Of course,
capitalist entities will attempt to use that language
in ways that benefit them or to bastardize (as
Microsoft has), but they do that to *everything*,
don't they?
--- Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Last week I was at Sun's education center in NYC
taking Introduction to
Java 275. All of the programmers on the Financial
Front-End system I work
on are being trained in the language in order to
migrate the user interface
to the worldwide web, where more and more of
Columbia's internal business
functions are being housed. Java not only provides
access to the Internet,
it also supposedly will make applications building
easier because it is an
"object oriented" language. In object orientation,
the goal is to make
programs like replaceable parts in a personal
computer, for example. The
paradigm is a factory assembly line rather than the
messy, chaotic world of
the individual programmer. This, of course, is the
kind of world that I
feel comfortable in.
I work primarily in Perl nowadays, the seventh or
eighth language I've
worked in over the past 33 years. With Perl, I can
create a "hello, world"
program as follows:
---
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
print "hello world";
---
With Java, the same code would do the trick,
according to the Sun student
guide:
---
public class TestGreeting {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Greeting hello = new Greeting("hello");
hello.greet("world");
}
}
public class Greeting
private String salutation;
Greeting(String s) {
salutation = s;
}
public void greet(String whom) {
System.out.printlin(salutation + " " + whom);
}
}
---
Now, any reasonable person might ask why all the
extra code is needed. The
answer, in a nutshell, is that it helps to support
reusability. For
example, the keywords "public" and "private" tell
Java whether one program
can access another program's function. In the world
of object orientation,
this is called "information hiding". From the
standpoint of a Marxist
programmer like myself, it is a tip-off that
management would prefer a more
compartmentalized world than has been the case
historically. For example,
if a program (called a 'class' in the OO world) does
payroll calculations,
one might decide to make the 'salary raise' function
(called a 'method' in
the OO world) private.
The other important OO "breakthrough" is its strict
adherence to a
hierarchical schema in which one class can be
inherited from another. It is
reminiscent of Aristotle's attempt to classify the
natural world with
animals at the highest level. Within animals, you
have birds, fishes,
mammals and insects. Within insects, you have worms,
spiders, moths, etc.
In the business world, such a hierarchical approach
would gladden the
hearts of any management for obvious reasons since
they see things in a
top-down manner. In the brokerage industry, instead
of animals you might be
dealing with securities at the highest level.
Beneath securities, you would
have stocks and bonds. Within bonds, you would have
government bonds,
corporate bonds, commercial paper, etc. Any process
that is common to all
securities would be "inherited" by lower level
classes.
While this methodology might be quite useful in the
animal world where
evolution ended long ago for most species, in the
business world it can be
problematic. For instance, if a brokerage house is
bought by a bank, and if
Glass-Steagall is relaxed, then one might want to
merge banking and
securities class hierarchies. This is easier said
than done.
If there is anything that my 33 years in the
industry has taught me, it is
that programming can not be easily converted into a
Fordist type
discipline. When I first entered the field and until
1970 or so, "anything
goes" was the operating principle. Armed with Cobol,
programmers were given
free rein to solve a problem in any manner they
chose. Since this was
before the computer science days, many programmers
were like myself:
refugees from the humanities.
The first attempt to rein in the programmers
occurred in the 1975 to 1985
period under the rubric of structured programming
methodologies (SDM). With
SDM, there were certain prescribed ways to design
systems and write
programs. For designers, this meant preparing
elaborate blueprint-like
diagrams that showed how one process interacted with
one another.
Individual programs were required to follow certain
"dos" and "don'ts". For
example, a "go to" instruction was absolutely
prohibited. "Go-to less"
programming would supposedly have ushered in a more
mechanized world that
put a premium on predictability rather than
creativity. It failed since it
was difficult to enforce.
The next big revolution was called CASE, which stood
for Computer Aided
Re: Re: Java
I think your objection is overstated. Creating a language that all users can use, no matter what platform, seems like a good thing to me. Of course, capitalist entities will attempt to use that language in ways that benefit them or to bastardize (as Microsoft has), but they do that to *everything*, don't they? You are mixing apples and oranges. Java runs on all platforms not because it is object-oriented but because there is a virtual machine on the PC or Mac or Unix workstation that interprets the byte code and converts it into executable instructions. Such an approach does not require object orientation. HTML code is executable from all platforms, but it is not object-oriented. In fact, Java got started as "Hot Java", a language that was wedded to an html browser that Sun had developed. Eventually it was spun off. Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
Michael Bloomberg
[Michael Bloomberg is the 105th richest man in America, mostly on the basis of financial information terminals that he leases to banks, brokerages, etc. He launched this business in 1979 with capital from a severance package he got from Salomon Brothers after being on the losing end of power struggle. In 1974 I was a programmer at Salomon and Bloomberg was my user. I had developed a mini brokerage system for Salomon Brothers International Limit, which was part of his fiefdom at the firm. When an African-American woman who I worked with found out that I was assigned to Bloomberg, she spat out, "He's the biggest pig at the firm." When minority women secretaries would bring coffee to a broker on Salomon's immense trading floor, Bloomberg often yelled out things like "Look at the tits on that spic." He is now running for mayor of NYC on the Republican Party ticket, only because he found the Democratic Party primary crowded. This is from a profile on him at: http://www.newyorkmag.com/] He admits he's tried to clean up his act in recent years -- he limits himself in front of me to the abbreviated "NFW," as in "no fucking way" -- but friends and colleagues acknowledge that he can be a salty guy, a true product of Wall Street's raunchy trading-desk culture. "He's a really bawdy guy, very funny," says a woman friend, "but you don't take 75 percent of what he says seriously; he just loves to get a rise out of women." Female staff report that he has a good record for promoting women and minorities and has never been accused of hitting on his employees, but he has made flip sexual comments that women have found offensive. Last month, the Daily News rehashed the details of a 1997 sexual-harassment complaint against Bloomberg by former sales executive Sekiko Garrison, who charged that when she told him she was pregnant, he responded, "Kill it." He has denied, under oath, that he made this and other crude statements, but nonetheless he settled the case last spring, for a sum said to be less than six figures. The lawsuit wasn't news per se -- it had been mentioned before in the press -- but the specific charges taken from the original legal papers made headlines. "Mike expected people would dredge it up," says Bill Cunningham, a recently hired senior political adviser to Bloomberg, "which is why he took and passed a lie-detector test." Bloomberg chooses his words carefully when he's asked about the sexual-harassment lawsuit and the press feeding frenzy after the Daily News story. "It was very hurtful," he says. "I am 100 percent convinced that this company and myself acted honorably." Why settle, then? "I settled it because it would have dragged on and on and been disruptive for me and a lot of people who would have been brought in [for depositions]." His expanding team of political advisers fervently hope the story will be old news by the time Bloomberg is expected to announce in June. "If it had to come out," one of them says, "it's much better to do it now rather than a week before the election." Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
BLS Daily Report
BLS DAILY REPORT, MONDAY, APRIL 9, 2001: A surprisingly weak employment report -- showing a loss of 86,000 jobs in the nonfarm sector -- set off alarms on the economy's health, but few analysts say the March figures are a sure sign of a recession. Rather, most economists agree the report describes an economy that is more vulnerable than it was a few months ago. Payrolls were slashed most severely in manufacturing last month, with factory cuts contributing 81,000 of the total decline, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Temporary help firms and retailers also were hit hard last month, while most services industries continued to show job growth. The nation's unemployment rate edged up 0.1 percentage point to 4.3 percent, the highest level since July 1999 (Daily Labor Report, page D-1; Statement on March Employment Report by BLS Commissioner Abraham at the April 6 briefing, page E-14). The nation's employers shed 86,000 jobs in March, the largest loss for a single month in more than 9 years and an indication to many economists that the United States may be on the verge of a recession, says Louis Uchitelle in The New York Times (April 7, page A1). The unemployment rate took another tick upward, to 4.3 percent from 4.2 percent in February and 3.9 percent in October, as the Labor Department's job figures, announced yesterday, finally reflected the parade of layoffs and hiring freezes since last fall. Job losses in March, as they have been for months, were concentrated in manufacturing. But this time job gains elsewhere were no longer sufficient to offset the cutbacks. Prospects for a quick economic rebound this summer are fading. And that calls into question more than just growth for the year. The longer this slowdown lasts, the greater the threats to two defining traits of the remarkable 1990s boom: The rise in productivity that promised higher living standards for years to come, and the spread of those benefits to minorities and lower-skilled workers left behind during previous expansions. Friday's employment report was the latest reason for pessimism. The jobless rate moved up another notch to 4.3 percent in March, the highest level in a year and a half. Payrolls outside farms fell by 86,000, the biggest one-month loss of jobs since the economy was struggling to pull out of the last recession nearly a decade ago. More worrisome, the report suggested that the economy's weakness, which had largely been contained to manufacturing, has begun to spread to services (The Wall Street Journal, page A1). The slumping economy has many employers cutting back on the job offers and internships they're offering college graduates. "It's a return to an environment where employers are acting rationally and students have to sell themselves again," says the director of the career planning and placement center at California State University, Fullerton (USA Today, page 1B). "Are we in trouble or aren't we?" asks Penelope Patsuris, Forbes.com, April 6. This morning, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a March unemployment rate of 4.3 percent, slightly up from March 2000's 4.0 percent, but still extremely low by historical standards, she says. "In 1998, the unemployment rate was 4.5 percent," says Brookings Institute economist Gary Burtless, "and at that time no one in their right mind thought the job market was anything but tight." Nevertheless, corporate America's employees are being shown the door with an alarming frequency. Yesterday, outplacement firm Challenger, Gray Christmas sounded the alarm by reporting that March's 167,867 job cuts were triple what they were for that month last year. Even the more conservative and perhaps less headline-hungry Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded a 44 percent jump in layoffs from last February to this February (March figures have yet to be released). To some extent, recent layoffs have become larger than life because they're hitting major, publicly held companies. And while public companies are obliged to pre-announce layoffs, these cuts are often staggered over long periods of time and are achieved to a certain extent through voluntary attrition like early retirements. Even at U.S.-based companies, job cuts are coming from overseas offices. "How DaimlerChrysler will achieve a reduction in its payrolls is being misrepresented," says BLS economist Lewis Siegal. "The average person sees the headlines and thinks that 26,000 people will be on the street the very next day. In reality, they're not." The Wall Street Journal's feature "Tracking the Economy" (page A25) shows import prices for March, to be released by BLS Wednesday, at minus 0.1 percent, according to the Thomson Global Forecast. The previous actual percentage was 0.1. The Producer Price Index data for March, to be released Thursday, is predicted to be a 0.1 percent increase by Thomson Global Forecast, the
Adios to the T-Bill?
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 04/06/01 04:00PM [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I wrote:So what? I'm sure that capitalism can adapt to not having a T-bill market. Asks Doug: It can adapt, but happily? Where else you going to park your cash balances in a riskless instrument? What will the Fed use for open market operations? Where will central banks keep their reserve dollars? What are you going to use as your riskless interest rate in a CAPM formula? how about the interest rate on money? Like what, commercial paper? Fed funds? These aren't purely riskless assets, unlike T-bills. Even the bluest-chip bank or corporation lacks taxing power and nuclear weapons. (( CB: I thought central banks weren't important in the Anglo-American ,as opposed to German, system ?
Economics Reporting Review : 03/31/01 -- 04/06/01
Economics Reporting Review Week of March 31 to April 6 By: DEAN BAKER OUTSTANDING STORIES OF THE WEEK "For the Boss, Happy Days Are Still Here," by David Leonhardt in the New York Times, April 1, 2001, Section 4, page 1. "Leaving Shareholders in the Dust," by David Leonhardt in the New York Times, April 1, 2001, Section 4, page 1. "CEO's Compensation Remains at Record High Despite Plunging Stock Prices," by Kathleen Day in the Washington Post, March 31, 2001, page H1. These articles examine patterns in CEO pay over the last year. They point out that CEO pay has continued to rise rapidly, even as the stock market has plummeted. Earlier in the decade, CEOs of major corporations enjoyed huge increases in compensation largely as a result of the fact that they were paid primarily in stock options and the stock market was soaring. At that time their high pay was rationalized by the fact they were making even more money for shareholders. Now that the stock market run-up is being reversed, companies are paying CEOs directly in stock or re-pricing options so that they are continuing to get very high salaries, even though they are losing stockholders trillions of dollars. "Argentina's Economic Woes Devastate Its Middle Class," by Anthony Faiola in the Washington Post, April 3, 2001, page A12. This article reports on the impact of Argentina's prolonged economic downturn on its middle class. "Mired in Debt and Seeking a Path Out," by Peter T. Kilborn in the New York Times, April 1, 2001, Section 1, page 1. This article examines the situations of some of the families that have declared bankruptcy in recent years. It points out that most of these families were forced to declare bankruptcies as a result of health problems or losing a job. Families that simply run up large debts that they subsequently can't pay appear to be exceptions. GREENSPAN AND THE ECONOMY "Once Unthinkable, Criticism Is Raised Against Greenspan," by Richard W. Stevenson in the New York Times, April 2, 2001, page A1. This article discusses the drop in Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan's stature as a result of the recent downturn in the stock market and the slowdown in the economy. The article presents some of the criticisms that have been raised against Greenspan in recent months, including that he failed to take action to stem the growth of a stock market bubble. In Greenspan's defense, the article asserts that Greenspan felt that he should not put his own assessment of the stock market ahead of the beliefs of millions of individuals investors, and therefore it could not be determined that the market had a bubble. If Greenspan had this sort of deference to the views of investors in the market, then he must have also accepted the views about the economy that were implied by stock prices. It would have been necessary for the economy to sustain real growth rates of more than 5 percent annually for the indefinite future in order to rationalize the prices that the stock market hit at its peak in early 2000. Greenspan never publicly indicated that he thought such growth rates were a realistic possibility, and in fact suggested that the maximum sustainable growth rate was in the 3.5 to 4.0 percent range. His rationale for raising rates was that the 4.0 to 5.0 percent growth rate of 1999-2000 was too fast and could not be sustained. The article also implies that Greenspan's only tool to attack the stock market bubble was raising interest rates. The Federal Reserve Board directly controls the margin requirement, the amount of collateral that investors must put up when buying stock on credit. If Greenspan had raised the margin requirement, it would have sent a powerful message to the market, in addition to making it more difficult to buy stock on credit. Greenspan probably could have also prevented the bubble simply by talking about it. He is enormously respected in financial circles. The existence of a stock bubble could be demonstrated with simple arithmetic. (The dividend yield had fallen so much due to higher price-to-earnings ratios, that stocks could not possibly give a reasonable return, based on plausible projections of profit growth.) If Greenspan made a clear demonstration of the basic facts in his congressional testimony, the bubble would probably never have grown to the extent that it did in the last four years. THE STOCK MARKET "Stocks End Gloomy First Quarter as Investors Look to Next," by Alex Berenson in the New York Times, March 31, 2001, page B1. This article reports on the stock market's poor performance in the first quarter of the year. At one point, it presents the view of some market analysts that the stock market is likely to rebound soon, and reports their assertion that "on a price-earnings basis, the overall market is no longer expensive." According to data from the Federal Reserve Board, at the end of 2000 the total value of equities of U.S. corporations was $17.2 trillion. After-tax corporate
Debt and Depressions.
Perhaps some Pen-L might comment on this.. Cheers, Ken Hanly April 6, 2001 CBC Radio One Commentary by David Gracey These days the media is full of bad news stories about the economy. We hear of massive layoffs in the auto sector. Consumer confidence is plummeting. The same economists who only a few months ago were talking about a soft landing are now using the 'R' word. Economic discourse is, however, limited to certain safe topics. Such factors as rising energy prices, declining stock markets and falling consumer demand are readily identified. These are important issues, but they are essentially symptoms of an underlying malaise. The real problem is the massive private debt -- something that is never discussed. Several years ago there was a lot of discussion in the media about the public debt. When the national debt reached $583 billion, there were cries of alarm from our corporate and political leaders which resulted in massive cuts to social spending. Due primarily to our expanding economy since 1993, government deficits were brought under control and surpluses became the order of the day. There was general euphoria, the stock markets took off, and the economy boomed. Totally unnoticed, the containment of public debt coincided with an explosion of private debt, i.e. borrowing by individuals and businesses. Consumer debt doubled in the past six years. The spending boom in the U.S. and Canada was largely fuelled by borrowing. In both countries household debt exceeds disposable income by a wide margin. This has resulted in an escalating rate of personal bankruptcies. Numerous articles have deplored this apparent reckless borrowing by consumers, but have failed to recognize our overall dependence on borrowing. More borrowing means higher interest payments. In the U.S. consumers are now spending 14% of their incomes on interest payments, a level that was last reached just before the 1990-92 recession. Individuals and businesses simply cannot continue to expand their debt indefinitely. Lower interest rates do help, but ultimately borrowing has to drop. When it does, a recession looms. For the simple truth is that our economy, as presently structured, runs on debt and can run no other way. For our economy to grow, additional money is needed -- about $25-30 billion every year in Canada. About 6% of this amount is legal tender and is provided debt free by the federal government through the Bank of Canada. The remainder is credit, created when we borrow. When they make loans, financial institutions monetize debt, that is they convert our collateral into credit, which then circulates as money. Thus the debt grows, and when the credit bubble gets unsustainable, it bursts. In the aftermath loans are defaulted, bankruptcies spread, layoffs increase, demand drops and we are in a recession. So the real problem is debt. Our monetary system requires that we increase debt in order to have economic growth, but rising debt in turn ensures that a recession will ensue. Deregulation of the financial sector, notably the abolition of bank reserves, have made the debt problem much worse. We need more debt-free money in circulation. A sound monetary system is the first prerequisite for a sound economy. David Gracey is a member of COMER. He is a retired principal, and taught economics. He actively promotes economic literacy. Copyright 2001 David Gracey. All rights reserved. "Economic Reform" is the monthly journal of the Committee on Monetary and Economic Reform (COMER), a Canada-based publishing think-tank. Annual subscription, 12 issues, is CD$30 in Canada, US$30 United States, and US$35 Overseas. COMER Publications Suite 107 245 Carlaw Avenue Toronto ON M4M 2S6 Telephone (416) 466-2642 Fax 466-5827 BOOKSHELF =
Re: Adios to the T-Bill?
Charles Brown wrote: CB: I thought central banks weren't important in the Anglo-American ,as opposed to German, system ? Central banks - e.g., the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank - are extremely important. Without them, the system would periodically come flying apart, the way it did in the 19th century. The big diff between the German Anglo-American systems is in who owns the controlling stock in corporations - dispersed shareholders, in the A-A model, vs. big private banks, in the German. Doug
Krauthammer and Reparations
One of the myriad of Washington Post house conservatives ran an OpEd last week saying he was for reparations to African Americans. But, he basically said they should take $50K per family and forever after shut up about affirmative action. Here is my response, to be published in the Washington Post tomorrow. The fact that the Post accepted this makes me worry that I am being compromised. So here it is for Pen-L to critique. Could you have done a better job and still been published? By the way, it is now really easy to submit a letter to the Post by email through their web page. In his April 6 op-ed column, Charles Krauthammer cavalierly suggests that the U.S. government make one-time reparation payments of $50,000 per family of four to African Americans. Even if one were to accept the dubious assertion that all forms of active discrimination, or the lingering effects of the legacy of discrimination, are in the past, the price he puts on the historic economic injustice done to African Americans is awfully cheap. One measure of this injustice, itself only partial, is the difference in household net wealth accumulated by middle age. Data from the U.S. Health and Retirement Survey indicate this difference to be at least $100,000 on average, double Charles Krauthammer's recommended payment. This figure itself underestimates the true difference because it is expressed in 1994 dollars and because it does not take into account both the much higher percentage of African American families with negative net wealth and the higher percentage of white families with very large amounts of net wealth, which tends to be under-measured by standard government statistics. Most tragic, it does not take into account the economic value of the deficit in human life expectancy experienced by African Americans, itself heavily related to economic deprivation. In 1993, only 66 percent of African American men reached age 60, compared with 84 precent of white men. Standard economic valuations used in legal and regulatory settings place a monetary value of at least $100,000 on a year of life expectancy (and often much more). So it appears that the just economic compensation that Charles Krauthammer advocates comes with a much higher price tag than he, at first glance, is willing to acknowledge.
Re: Krauthammer and Reparations
Nah, much better not to try to get one's arguments from the left, responding to neo-con, neo-lib or centrist bilge. ;-) Why bother to send it to the Post if you did not want to get published? Let those conservatives totally dominate the public sphere... Michael Pugliese - Original Message - From: "Brown, Martin (NCI)" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, April 09, 2001 1:29 PM Subject: [PEN-L:10042] Krauthammer and Reparations One of the myriad of Washington Post house conservatives ran an OpEd last week saying he was for reparations to African Americans. But, he basically said they should take $50K per family and forever after shut up about affirmative action. Here is my response, to be published in the Washington Post tomorrow. The fact that the Post accepted this makes me worry that I am being compromised. So here it is for Pen-L to critique. Could you have done a better job and still been published? By the way, it is now really easy to submit a letter to the Post by email through their web page. In his April 6 op-ed column, Charles Krauthammer cavalierly suggests that the U.S. government make one-time reparation payments of $50,000 per family of four to African Americans. Even if one were to accept the dubious assertion that all forms of active discrimination, or the lingering effects of the legacy of discrimination, are in the past, the price he puts on the historic economic injustice done to African Americans is awfully cheap. One measure of this injustice, itself only partial, is the difference in household net wealth accumulated by middle age. Data from the U.S. Health and Retirement Survey indicate this difference to be at least $100,000 on average, double Charles Krauthammer's recommended payment. This figure itself underestimates the true difference because it is expressed in 1994 dollars and because it does not take into account both the much higher percentage of African American families with negative net wealth and the higher percentage of white families with very large amounts of net wealth, which tends to be under-measured by standard government statistics. Most tragic, it does not take into account the economic value of the deficit in human life expectancy experienced by African Americans, itself heavily related to economic deprivation. In 1993, only 66 percent of African American men reached age 60, compared with 84 precent of white men. Standard economic valuations used in legal and regulatory settings place a monetary value of at least $100,000 on a year of life expectancy (and often much more). So it appears that the just economic compensation that Charles Krauthammer advocates comes with a much higher price tag than he, at first glance, is willing to acknowledge.
Re: Java
Louis's discussion of Java reminded me of the effect of (Peter? Philip?) Ramus's 16th century "reform" of Aristotlean dialectcs, as chronicled by Walter Ong. In a nutshell, Ramus made dialectic more "teachable" by reforming it into a vast hierarchy of dichotomies. The resulting knowledge may be crap but it can be tested to make sure it's the _right_ crap and not just any old crap. Tom Walker (604) 947-2213
Re: Adios to the T-Bill?
I just had a chance to read this exchange about T-Bills. The problem with retiring T-Bills is not that it complicates pricing problems in financial markets, but that it eliminates a riskless asset. Banks hold T-bills as "secondary reserves". Pension funds and annuities hold T-bills to cover outlays. Non-financial corporations and non-profits park cash in T-bills. And of course the Fed uses T-bills to conduct open market operations. T-bills (and T-bonds) are the ultimate "widows and orphans" financial vehicle. Without riskless assets, financial institutions will have to take on a higher level of risk. And that, I think, is a problem. Ellen [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Central banks - e.g., the Federal Reserve, the Bank of Japan, the European Central Bank - are extremely important. Without them, the system would periodically come flying apart, the way it did in the 19th century. The big diff between the German Anglo-American systems is in who owns the controlling stock in corporations - dispersed shareholders, in the A-A model, vs. big private banks, in the German. Doug
Charter 99 for Global Democracy
http://www.charter99.org/index.html Another Anthony Barnett creation. Chris Burford London
Re: Bernie Sanders addresses the IMF (politely)
At 11:53 PM 4/9/01 +0100, you wrote: No doubt for some, such initiatives are by definition opportunist. For others they are sallies into an arena of struggle. Dialectically, they could be both. Chris Burford London Can't we put this kind of baiting behind us? Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
Re: Java
I wrote something along your lines, Louis, in my Class Warfare book:
Michael Cusumano's study of Japanese programming presents perhaps the most
influential case in favor of the Japanese model. Based on a sample of 20 U.S.
and 11 Japanese firms, he finds that Japanese programmers produced 60 to 70
percent more lines of code. Defects per line of delivered code in the Japanese
sample remained 1/2 to 1/4 of the U.S. projects (Cusumano 1991, p. 458).So
far, so good. But Cusumano's title conveys an additional message about the
Japanese system: Japan's Software Factories: A Challenge to U.S. Management.
Cusumano's software factories are revolutionary in the same sense that Henry
Ford's assembly line was: Both depended on the interchangeability of parts.
Of course, Japanese programs are not actually interchangeable, but they are
built up of chunks of programming components, which are designed to be suitable
for use in other programs. Cusumano reports that Toshiba's software factory
with 2,300 personnel delivered systems in the mid-1980s containing on average
nearly 50 percent reused code (ibid, p. 218).According to Cusumano, Hitachi
is the leader in this area. In 1969, Hitachi first established a software
facility labeled and managed as a factory, calling the facility the Software
Works or, more literally, the Software Factory (Cusumano 1991, p. 161). Faced
with a shortage of skilled programmers, Hitachi settled on the model of factory
division of labor for programming (Cusumano 1991, pp. 161 and 173). By 1988,
Hitachi ranked highest among Japan's computer vendors in customer satisfaction
with hardware, overall price performance, and maintenance services for both
hardware and software, as well as fixing software defects promptly (ibid, p.
162).
Louis Proyect wrote:
Last week I was at Sun's education center in NYC taking Introduction to
Java 275. All of the programmers on the Financial Front-End system I work
on are being trained in the language in order to migrate the user interface
to the worldwide web, where more and more of Columbia's internal business
functions are being housed. Java not only provides access to the Internet,
it also supposedly will make applications building easier because it is an
"object oriented" language. In object orientation, the goal is to make
programs like replaceable parts in a personal computer, for example. The
paradigm is a factory assembly line rather than the messy, chaotic world of
the individual programmer. This, of course, is the kind of world that I
feel comfortable in.
I work primarily in Perl nowadays, the seventh or eighth language I've
worked in over the past 33 years. With Perl, I can create a "hello, world"
program as follows:
---
#!/usr/local/bin/perl
print "hello world";
---
With Java, the same code would do the trick, according to the Sun student
guide:
---
public class TestGreeting {
public static void main(String[] args) {
Greeting hello = new Greeting("hello");
hello.greet("world");
}
}
public class Greeting
private String salutation;
Greeting(String s) {
salutation = s;
}
public void greet(String whom) {
System.out.printlin(salutation + " " + whom);
}
}
---
Now, any reasonable person might ask why all the extra code is needed. The
answer, in a nutshell, is that it helps to support reusability. For
example, the keywords "public" and "private" tell Java whether one program
can access another program's function. In the world of object orientation,
this is called "information hiding". From the standpoint of a Marxist
programmer like myself, it is a tip-off that management would prefer a more
compartmentalized world than has been the case historically. For example,
if a program (called a 'class' in the OO world) does payroll calculations,
one might decide to make the 'salary raise' function (called a 'method' in
the OO world) private.
The other important OO "breakthrough" is its strict adherence to a
hierarchical schema in which one class can be inherited from another. It is
reminiscent of Aristotle's attempt to classify the natural world with
animals at the highest level. Within animals, you have birds, fishes,
mammals and insects. Within insects, you have worms, spiders, moths, etc.
In the business world, such a hierarchical approach would gladden the
hearts of any management for obvious reasons since they see things in a
top-down manner. In the brokerage industry, instead of animals you might be
dealing with securities at the highest level. Beneath securities, you would
have stocks and bonds. Within bonds, you would have government bonds,
corporate bonds, commercial paper, etc. Any process that is common to all
securities would be "inherited" by lower level classes.
While this methodology might be quite useful in the animal world where
evolution ended long ago for most species, in the business world it can be
problematic. For instance, if a brokerage house is
Michael Valpy on Free Trade
It is a bit surprising that articles such as this should be published in the Globe a paper that touts itself as Canada's #1 daily business newspaper. Cheers, Ken Hanly The Globe Mail April 9, 2001 How Free Trade Threatens Democracy by Michael Valpy Why protesters are going to Quebec City: They're going to be marching on the streets at Quebec City's Summit of the Americas within a couple of weeks because, among other things, they oppose "investor-state rights." To free-trade critics, nothing more starkly illustrates the imbalance of power that transnational corporations have acquired over democratically elected governments. The investor-state rights provision, Chapter 11, of the North American free-trade agreement, permits corporations to challenge governments' sovereignty to make policy regarding public health, the environment, labour standards and other public services. Chapter 11 permits corporations to sue a foreign government -- claiming compensation for lost and future business -- on the grounds they have been denied "fair and equitable treatment" by government policy alleged to be tantamount to expropriation of their investment. The disputes are decided upon by tribunals that conduct their proceedings in camera. While the Canadian government has stated its intention to oppose the inclusion of similar language in the proposed free trade area of the Americas, it is the fear of critics that Canadian objections will be hollow. Many corporations, including Canadian corporations, see investor-state rights as significantly beneficial in developing new hemispheric business opportunities. Here is how Chapter 11 works: The U.S. Ethyl Corp. sued the Canadian government for $250-million (U.S.) and obtained, in 1998, a settlement of $13-million for the government's ban on the gasoline additive MMT, labelled a known nerve toxin by reputed scientists. The ban was reversed. In 1998, U.S.-based S. D. Myers Inc. filed a claim for more than $10-million against the Canadian government for losses it claims to have incurred during an 18-month ban on the export of PCB wastes from Canada. The government says it imposed the ban in accordance with international conventions on disposal of PCB wastes to which it says the company did not adhere. The case is before a court. California-based Sun Belt Water Inc. is suing Canada for the decision of the British Columbia government to refuse consent for the company to export bulk water. Sun Belt's president, Jack Lindsay, has declared: "Because of NAFTA, we are now stakeholders in the national water policy of Canada." The U.S.-based Pope and Talbot lumber company, which has operations in B.C., is suing for $510-million in damages, alleging discrimination in government quotas set on softwood lumber exports to the United States -- ironic, given that U.S. softwood lumber producers are claiming that Canadian softwood is unfairly subsidized. U.S.-based United Parcel Service is claiming $230-million damages against the Canadian government, alleging that Canada Post provides unfair competition through its Purolator courier service. The Canadian Union of Postal Workers and the Council of Canadians have applied to a Canadian court to take jurisdiction away from the tribunal, arguing that constitutional Charter rights of Canadians are at stake and secret trade tribunals violate the independence of the Canadian courts to protect those rights. Will the governments of Mexico and the U.S., Canada's partners in NAFTA, agree to narrow the interpretation of the investor-state provision? Will language in the draft FTAA text assure sovereignty for democratic governments? How much influence do corporations have on their governments? The public doesn't know. Which is why there will be protests.
Economics of foot-and-mouth fallout
Village Voice, Week of April 4 - 10, 2001 Mondo Washington by James Ridgeway Nation Ignored Foot-and-Mouth Warning, Dooming 910,000 Sheep. A Special Report From the Killing Fields LAZONBY, CUMBRIA, ENGLAND, March 31Along the road into this northern English village, a couple stand leaning on the gate to a small farm. They are motionless, almost as if in a trance, staring out at something. In the near distance, a thin column of smoke rises above the sloping green fields. A little way down the road, a British soldier in rumpled camouflage waits next to a matching truck parked in front of a big barn. The barn is open and empty. Just out of town, a pickup towing a small trailer draped in a blue tarp has pulled off, and two young men, dressed all in white, are spraying the roadsides with disinfectant. Behind them, half hidden by the stone walls, lies a newly dug pit with smoke already wafting up. These three men are the execution squad, cleaning up before a visit to the next farm. Still farther along the back road, a rise gives a view across the undulating countryside, neatly divided by walls, green with early spring, the daffodils just coming out. Dotted with farmhouses and barns, the fields are empty of animals. Everywhere, plumes of smoke drift skyward. The place is enveloped in silence, and in the smell of charred flesh. By the time the weekend is over, every sheep in Lazonby will be dead. The landscape resembles a war zone, and indeed, this is a military operation. At month's end, foot-and-mouth disease had broken out at 840 farms. Nationwide, 570,000 sheep had already been slaughtered, and 340,000 more awaited the same fate. With only 921 confirmed cases, the ratio of diagnosis to killing has at times been one to 1000. The worst outbreak is in Cumbria, in northwestern England on the Scottish border. Here the campaign is being waged not at the center of the outbreak, but on its edges, where there is no infection, with the British army clearing what amounts to a cordon sanitaire around the disease. Brigadier Alex Birtwistle, a counterterrorist specialist, is in charge of the operation, and his aim, reports the London Sunday Times, is to destroy "every living thing" in a broad corridor through the countryside. . . Slaughtering animals is scarcely worth the price in lost tourism. Wealth in Cumbria comes not from the small farms with their grazing sheep. These operations barely stay alive, even with the subsidies; a lone farmer often shepherds a flock with help only from his border collie, and shears the wool himself. What makes the money is the picturesque look of the place, complete with tranquil lambs grazing on the green hills. This supports tens of thousands of businesses: BBs, restaurants, shops, and tour companiesentire busy communities that might otherwise be deserted. In southern Cumbria's famous Lake District, the back roads and trails are, according to one local, usually "black with tourists" walking the countryside; now, business has fallen off to a trickle. The lakes and villages remain accessible by paved roads, but the government has marked virtually every path and field out-of-bounds. To enter Britain's largest national park, cars must drive across mats soaked in antiseptic. A case of foot-and-mouth was discovered within the park last week, putting everyone on edge. In Winderemere, at the center of the Lake District, the proprietor of one bed-and-breakfast reported only six guests on the weekend, compared to the usual 20. Such things have a ripple effect. She, in turn, will not be able to afford to employ local contractors, as planned, to repaint her house. A man making his living taking visitors on driving tours has seen his business drop by 70 percent. There is one new profession open to locals, however: In an effort, he says, to help the local economy, Brigadier Birtwistle contracts with local companies to move through the villages and carry out the slaughter. The people of the countryside are tossing their livelihood onto the pyre, carcass by carcass. Local business owners speak of just trying to hang on until next year. But the impact of the slaughter, if not the disease, may be long-term. Over the weekend, the National Environmental Technology Center filed a report with the government warning that using gasoline, kerosene, and creosote to burn dead animals is likely to send up deadly cancer-causing dioxins into the winds, and that poisonous runoff from the shallow graves of thousands of sheep scattered about may end up leaching into the water supply. In addition, the Ministry of Agriculture has granted permission to bury young cattlesomething that's never been done because of fears it would spread mad cow disease into the water. It all seems like the wrong way to fight a disease that neither infects humans nor even kills the animals themselves. But this is the way foot-and-mouth has always been handled. The practice of slaughter in response to similar livestock
Reflections of a Marxist computer programmer
Ellen Ullman, "Close to the Machine", (City Lights Books, 1997):
Twenty years before my meeting with the vice president, I was a communist.
I joined an underground party. (I quit the party after one yearI was
expelled when I tried to leave. I then reviewed what I knew about computer
programming and got my first job in the industry. My employer was amazed at
my ability to work hundred-hour weeks without complaint, and I was promoted
rapidly. He did not know that my endurance came from my year in the party.
Being a cadre in an underground political party, as it turned out, was
excellent training for the life of a computer programmer.)
I took a nom de guerre. If I had been clever enough to write a bug fatal to
world banking, I would have been promoted to party leadership, hailed as a
heroine of the revolution. Nothing would have pleased me more than slipping
in a well-placed bit of mislogic andcrash!down comes Transnational
Capitalism one Christmas Eve.
Now the thought terrifies me. The wave of nausea I felt in the vice
presidents office, the real fear of being responsible for her system,
followed me around for days. And still, try as I might, I cant envision a
world where all the credit cards stop working. The life of normal people
buying groceries, paying bills would unravel into confusion overnight.
What has happened to me, and what has happened to the world? My old leftist
beliefs now seem as anomalous and faintly ridiculous as a masked
Subcommandante Marcos, Zapatista rebel, son of a furniture store owner,
emerging from the Mexican jungles to post his demands on the Internet.
We are all hooked on the global network now, I tell myself, hooked to it
and hooked on it. The new drug: the instant, the now, the worldwide. A line
from an old Rolling Stones song and an ad for an on-line newspaper keep
running through my head:
War, children,
its just a shot away, its just a shot away.
("Gimme Shelter," by the Rolling Stones.)
The entire world
is just a click away.
(Advertisement for "The Gate," an online service of the San Francisco
Chronicle and Examiner.)
The global network is only the newest form of revolution, I think. Maybe
its only revolution were addicted to. Maybe the form never
matterssocialism, rock and roll, drugs, market capitalism, electronic
commerce who cares, as long as its the edgy thing thats happening in
ones own time. Maybe every generation produces a certain number of people
who want change change in its most drastic form. And socialism, with its
quaint decades of guerrilla war, its old-fashioned virtues of
steadfastness, its generationlong construction of a "new man"is all too
hopelessly pokey for us now Everything goes faster these days. Electronic
product cycles are six months long; commerce thinks in quarters. Is
patience still a virtue? Why wait? Why not make ten million in five years
at a software company, then create your own personal, private world on a
hill atop Seattle? Then everything you want, the entire world, will be just
a click away.
And maybe, when I think of it, its not such a great distance from
communist cadre to software engineer. I may have joined the party to
further social justice, but a deeper attraction could have been to a
process, a system, a program. Im inclined to think I always believed in
the machine. For what was Marxs "dialectic" of history in all its
inevitability but a mechanism surely rolling toward the future? What were
his "stages" of capitalism but the algorithm of a program that no one could
ever quite get to run?
And who was Karl Marx but the original technophile? Wasnt he the great
materialist the man who believed that our thoughts are determined by our
machinery? Work in a factory on machines that divide the work into pieces,
andvoil!you are ready to see the social nature of labor, ready to be
converted from wage slave to proletarian soldier. Consciousness is
superstructure, we leftists used to say, and the machinery of economic life
is the "base." The machines decide where we are in history, and what we can
be.
During my days in the party, we used to say that MarxismLeninism was a
"science." And the party was its "machine." And when the world did not
conform to our ideas of itwhen we had to face the chaotic forces that made
people believe something or want something or do somethingwe behaved just
like programmers. We moved closer to the machine. Confronting the messiness
of human life, we tried to simplify it. Encountering the dark corners of
the mind, where all sorts of things lived in a jumble, we tightened the
rules, controlled our behavior, watched what we said. We were supposed to
want to be "cogs in a wheel." (Todays techno-libertarians have a similar
idea about the mechanistic basis of human existence, but for very different
reasons. They see human thought and consciousness merely as the result of
many small, local processes in the body and brain, rather than as evidence
of some observing self.
Re: Reflections of a Marxist computer programmer
Ellen Ullman, "Close to the Machine", (City Lights Books, 1997): What worried me, though, was that the failure of the global electronic system will not need anything so dramatic as an earthquake, as diabolical as a revolutionary. In fact, the failure will be built into the system in the normal course of things. A bug. Every system has a bug. The more complex the system, the more bugs. Transactions circling the earth, passing through the computer systems of tens or hundreds of corporate entities, thousands of network switches, millions of lines of code, trillions of integrated- circuit logic gates. Somewhere there is a fault. Sometime the fault will be activated. Now or next year, sooner or later, by design, by hack, or by onslaught of complexity. It doesn't matter. One day someone will install ten new lines of assembler code, and it will all come down. *** http://csf.colorado.edu/pen-l/2000III/msg03330.html Re: Contradictions abound by Lisa Ian Murray 22 September 2000 20:25 UTC Conveniently failing to notice that this same spread of real-time information adds exponentially to the variables and the dynamic relations between 'em all. I mean, Greenspan has a point if you define 'information' as a 'lessening of uncertainty', but that'd mean you have to call stuff that's (inter alia) wrong, polysemic, irrelevant, and decontextualised something other than 'information'. Also, as more information becomes more available, more information needs to be processed and cross-referenced, because everybody else's state of information has been altered, too. And, anyway, institutions are all about market share in these good times, no? I mean, until things go pear-shaped, the bank manager is accountable to the boss on the criterion of aggregate loans made, not how closely the loans authorised approximated some degree-of-confidence calculus. After all, a bank'd go bust being responsible in America right now ... else you'd neverf be able to get stock speculation loans at 10% down, or margin-call deals on VISA cards ... and I'm given to believe those are not at all hard to get right now. Cheers, Rob. G'day Rob, You been reading Peter Albin lately? Or perhaps Joseph Tainter's ideas on diminishing returns to complexification? "I think recent work in computational complexity theory raises the possibility that there may be another "critical mass" for a knowledge representation, a maximum size threshold above which belief systems must in effect disintegrate. For a representation to qualify as being understood by an epistemic agent, the agent must be able to perceive an adequate proportion of the interrelations among elements of a set. Otherwise, the agent will not be a ble to identify and eliminate enough of the inconsistencies that arise...The range of intractability results leads one to wonder in turn whether knowledge systems of some finite size may be so computationally unweildy in this way as to shatter...[Christopher Cherniak "Minimal Rationality"] At the same time we should avoid looking for contradictions behind every bushlest we metacontradict ourselves, Ian
Re: Reflections of a Marxist computer programmer
Democratic Workers Party? Whatever happened to Marlene Dixon? (Contemporary
Marxism was an ok journal, "Our Socialism" not, think they tried to takeover
west coast office of NACLA once) Three ex-members
wrote a summing up in Socialist Review around 1985. Knew one of the authors
when I was active in the Jesse Jackson campaign in '88. Without him the
computers and mailing labels would have been a nightmare. Janja Lalich,
another former member, and now a "cult expert" has written on her experience
in the DWP too. (And with caution see the website of cult deprogrammer, Rick
Ross, he has some stuff there too. (Yes, Lou, I remember the Cockburn stuff
on Ross) Another member I knew later through reproductive rights/clinic
defense work, had a full set of the collected works of Kim Il Sung gathering
dust.
Michael Pugliese
- Original Message -
From: "Louis Proyect" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, April 09, 2001 5:33 PM
Subject: [PEN-L:10054] Reflections of a Marxist computer programmer
Ellen Ullman, "Close to the Machine", (City Lights Books, 1997):
Twenty years before my meeting with the vice president, I was a communist.
I joined an underground party. (I quit the party after one year-I was
expelled when I tried to leave. I then reviewed what I knew about computer
programming and got my first job in the industry. My employer was amazed
at
my ability to work hundred-hour weeks without complaint, and I was
promoted
rapidly. He did not know that my endurance came from my year in the party.
Being a cadre in an underground political party, as it turned out, was
excellent training for the life of a computer programmer.)
I took a nom de guerre. If I had been clever enough to write a bug fatal
to
world banking, I would have been promoted to party leadership, hailed as a
heroine of the revolution. Nothing would have pleased me more than
slipping
in a well-placed bit of mislogic and-crash!-down comes Transnational
Capitalism one Christmas Eve.
Now the thought terrifies me. The wave of nausea I felt in the vice
president's office, the real fear of being responsible for her system,
followed me around for days. And still, try as I might, I can't envision a
world where all the credit cards stop working. The life of normal people
-buying groceries, paying bills -would unravel into confusion overnight.
What has happened to me, and what has happened to the world? My old
leftist
beliefs now seem as anomalous and faintly ridiculous as a masked
Subcommandante Marcos, Zapatista rebel, son of a furniture- store owner,
emerging from the Mexican jungles to post his demands on the Internet.
We are all hooked on the global network now, I tell myself, hooked to it
and hooked on it. The new drug: the instant, the now, the worldwide. A
line
from an old Rolling Stones' song and an ad for an on-line newspaper keep
running through my head:
War, children,
it's just a shot away, it's just a shot away.
("Gimme Shelter," by the Rolling Stones.)
The entire world
is just a click away.
(Advertisement for "The Gate," an online service of the San Francisco
Chronicle and Examiner.)
The global network is only the newest form of revolution, I think. Maybe
it's only revolution we're addicted to. Maybe the form never
matters-socialism, rock and roll, drugs, market capitalism, electronic
commerce- who cares, as long as it's the edgy thing that's happening in
ones own time. Maybe every generation produces a certain number of people
who want change - change in its most drastic form. And socialism, with its
quaint decades of guerrilla war, its old-fashioned virtues of
steadfastness, its generation-long construction of a "new man"-is all too
hopelessly pokey for us now Everything goes faster these days. Electronic
product cycles are six months long; commerce thinks in quarters. Is
patience still a virtue? Why wait? Why not make ten million in five years
at a software company, then create your own personal, private world on a
hill atop Seattle? Then everything you want, the entire world, will be
just
a click away.
And maybe, when I think of it, it's not such a great distance from
communist cadre to software engineer. I may have joined the party to
further social justice, but a deeper attraction could have been to a
process, a system, a program. I'm inclined to think I always believed in
the machine. For what was Marx's "dialectic" of history in all its
inevitability but a mechanism surely rolling toward the future? What were
his "stages" of capitalism but the algorithm of a program that no one
could
ever quite get to run?
And who was Karl Marx but the original technophile? Wasn't he the great
materialist- the man who believed that our thoughts are determined by our
machinery? Work in a factory on machines that divide the work into pieces,
and-voil!-you are ready to see the social nature of labor, ready to be
converted from wage slave to proletarian soldier.
Re: Michael Valpy on Free Trade
Ken, Valpy, a regular columnist with the GM, ran for the NDP in the last federal election. The GM has a few leftish columnists, most noteably Rick Salutin. Paul Paul Phillips, Economics, University of Manitoba From: "Ken Hanly" [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: "pen-l" [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject:[PEN-L:10052] Michael Valpy on Free Trade Date sent: Mon, 9 Apr 2001 18:55:40 -0500 Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] It is a bit surprising that articles such as this should be published in the Globe a paper that touts itself as Canada's #1 daily business newspaper. Cheers, Ken Hanly The Globe Mail April 9, 2001 How Free Trade Threatens Democracy by Michael Valpy Why protesters are going to Quebec City: They're going to be marching on the streets at Quebec City's Summit of the Americas within a couple of weeks because, among other things, they oppose "investor-state rights." To free-trade critics, nothing more starkly illustrates the imbalance of power that transnational corporations have acquired over democratically elected governments. The investor-state rights provision, Chapter 11, of the North American free-trade agreement, permits corporations to challenge governments' sovereignty to make policy regarding public health, the environment, labour standards and other public services. Chapter 11 permits corporations to sue a foreign government -- claiming compensation for lost and future business -- on the grounds they have been denied "fair and equitable treatment" by government policy alleged to be tantamount to expropriation of their investment. The disputes are decided upon by tribunals that conduct their proceedings in camera. While the Canadian government has stated its intention to oppose the inclusion of similar language in the proposed free trade area of the Americas, it is the fear of critics that Canadian objections will be hollow. Many corporations, including Canadian corporations, see investor-state rights as significantly beneficial in developing new hemispheric business opportunities. Here is how Chapter 11 works: The U.S. Ethyl Corp. sued the Canadian government for $250-million (U.S.) and obtained, in 1998, a settlement of $13-million for the government's ban on the gasoline additive MMT, labelled a known nerve toxin by reputed scientists. The ban was reversed. In 1998, U.S.-based S. D. Myers Inc. filed a claim for more than $10-million against the Canadian government for losses it claims to have incurred during an 18-month ban on the export of PCB wastes from Canada. The government says it imposed the ban in accordance with international conventions on disposal of PCB wastes to which it says the company did not adhere. The case is before a court. California-based Sun Belt Water Inc. is suing Canada for the decision of the British Columbia government to refuse consent for the company to export bulk water. Sun Belt's president, Jack Lindsay, has declared: "Because of NAFTA, we are now stakeholders in the national water policy of Canada." The U.S.-based Pope and Talbot lumber company, which has operations in B.C., is suing for $510-million in damages, alleging discrimination in government quotas set on softwood lumber exports to the United States -- ironic, given that U.S. softwood lumber producers are claiming that Canadian softwood is unfairly subsidized. U.S.-based United Parcel Service is claiming $230-million damages against the Canadian government, alleging that Canada Post provides unfair competition through its Purolator courier service. The Canadian Union of Postal Workers and the Council of Canadians have applied to a Canadian court to take jurisdiction away from the tribunal, arguing that constitutional Charter rights of Canadians are at stake and secret trade tribunals violate the independence of the Canadian courts to protect those rights. Will the governments of Mexico and the U.S., Canada's partners in NAFTA, agree to narrow the interpretation of the investor-state provision? Will language in the draft FTAA text assure sovereignty for democratic governments? How much influence do corporations have on their governments? The public doesn't know. Which is why there will be protests.
Re: Re: Java
Peter Ramus. "'Reform'" in scare quotes is about right. Ramus didn't exactly advance logic. --jks . Louis's discussion of Java reminded me of the effect of (Peter? Philip?) Ramus's 16th century "reform" of Aristotlean dialectcs, as chronicled by Walter Ong. In a nutshell, Ramus made dialectic more "teachable" by reforming it into a vast hierarchy of dichotomies. The resulting knowledge may be crap but it can be tested to make sure it's the _right_ crap and not just any old crap. Tom Walker (604) 947-2213 _ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com
bankruptcy again
Earlier, David said that firms do not engage in strategic bankruptcy. What about W.R. Grace? -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Moldova returns to communism
[EMAIL PROTECTED] 04/06/01 05:12PM Moldova returns to communism April 4, 2001 CHISINAU, Moldova -- Moldova has become the first former Soviet state to elect a communist as its leader. The eastern European nation's parliament elected Communist Party leader Vladimir Voronin as the new president on Wednesday. wouldn't Moldova elects Communist government be a more accurate headline? Also, the story suggests that the Communists who were elected are politically very different from the ones who ruled before 1989. I would guess that they are like what we used to call social democrats. -- Jim Devine ( CB: What if they are actually what you used to call Communists ? Could you handle democratically elected, by the People, Communists , Marxist-Leninists ? Note the article says the elected leaders wants to abolish the bourgeois office of president.
We've decided to invite you to join our business ethics conference!
Call for proposals/abstracts Eighth Annual International Conference Promoting Business Ethics Conference Dates: October 24-26, 2001 Abstract/Proposal Due Date: May 31, 2001 Completed Paper Due Date (if accepted): September 1, 2001 Sponsored by the Institute for Business and Professional Ethics, DePaul University Papers and presentations on progressive theory and practical dimensions of business and professional ethics are invited. Though primarily involving academics, business professionals are encouraged to present also. A special issue of the Journal of Business Ethics will be comprised of selected papers from this conference. Also, DePaul University will be sponsoring a Deans' Award which will be presented for the best paper at the conference. Conference Location: The Standard Club, 320 S. Plymouth Court, Chicago, IL 60604; phone: 312-427-9100. Registration Fee: $300 (includes 3 continental breakfasts, 3 lunches, and conference publications) Required for Consideration: one-page proposal/abstract Topic: Any area in the field of business and professional ethics Send abstracts to both [EMAIL PROTECTED] and [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more information email or telephone: Dr. H. Peter Steeves Institute for Business and Professional Ethics DePaul University 1 East Jackson Blvd., Suite 6000 Chicago, Illinois 60604 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Telephone: 773-362-8770 Dr. John T. Ahern Jr. Institute for Business and Professional Ethics DePaul University 1 East Jackson Boulevard, Suite 6000 Chicago, IL 60604 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Telephone: 312-362-6624
Re: (Insects)
Smash the fascist insect the preys on the life of the people! SLA slogan, circa '74 M.P. P.S. Another sick humor moment for y'all. Does not the hard left have such gifted rhetoricians! Dig! First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, and they even shoved a fork into a victim's stomach. Wild! Bernardine DOHRN (a leader of Weather Underground), 1968, on learning of the murders by Charles Manson and his 'family'. Recorded by D.Caute, 1988, The Year of the Barricades. - Original Message - From: Brown, Martin (NCI) [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, April 09, 2001 8:18 AM Subject: [PEN-L:10030] Is this Aristotle or Proyect? Worms and spiders are insects? Computer science - A Biology - F Within insects, you have worms, spiders, moths, etc.
