Fadeway wrote:

Why is outsourcing bad? Companies earn more and are able to hire more laborers.

Ya, in another country. It cuts jobs from the other country though. This is a lose of income in one country moved to another. If you outsource an entire industry which used you to employ millions of people, but no new jobs of equal pay open up for these millions of people, then you have a lot of people who suddenly can't even afford to make rent let alone buy your products. The engine of every economy is the middle class and to a lesser extent the lower class. The upper class is composed of so few people that they don't ever factor in when it comes to consumer buying and driving the economy, compared to middle class families. (Ie: Even though Mr.Rich has 4x the income of Mr.Middle, that doesn't mean Mr.Rich is going to buy 4x the iphone's (for instance) that Mr.Middle has. ) This is why income equality is so important and why the hollowing out of the middle class spells the doom for many Western countries if they don't fix it.

That aside, I think you underestimate how much those 5-30 matter. Taking the median, that's 3% extra (which is plenty), assuming all of the price is profit. Assuming that 400 of those 500 dollars are costs (manufacturing, distribution and share for stores, marketing etc), suddenly those 15 median dollar become a flat 15% extra profit.

Actually according to a bit of googling.

The cost of the new iPhone 5 sets Apple back between $207 and $238, according to IHS, depending on whether the model is the 16 GB, the 32 GB, or the 64 GB version. At $649 for the 16 GB model, Apple is generating $442 per phone in profits, excluding outside expenses.

That means profit margin could be as high as 60%. Though there is still some figuring in concerning marketing and stores.

I also found a newer article with a revised analysis. url. Sounds like the margin currently is at 40% give or take.

Thinking about it though. I suspect other reasons for working in China have to include lower work safety requirements and an absence of environment protection laws which allow companies to dump pollutants where ever is convenient. These things would likely drive the cost up even higher.

Even considering all this, the motivating factor for keeping it in China is greed. Investors expect companies to grow their profits every quarter which results in this race to the bottom condition that leaves the US screwed. (You'll eventually reach a saturation point where squeezing out larger growth figures becomes increasingly difficult.) Maybe people just haven't learned anything from the past two bubbles and area currently hoping for the next one ASAP.

Fadeway wrote:

In any case, claims of specieism are silly unless proven otherwise. There is no indisputable way to provide evidence; but it can still be philosophized about, and that counts for evidence too. Sadly there's too much fallacy load on the term already, and that is when it's still in its creation stage.

It boils down to compassion, and not capitalizing on the unnecessary suffering of others for personal gain. "Species" as a term is incredibly broad and encompasses species without central nervous systems and which we have not researched enough to understand in what ways they experience suffering, so for those cases yes it is mostly a matter of philosophy. However, the species that the term is actually referring to are the ones under human exploitation, which are dominantly mammals with central nervous systems that we do understand well, and know beyond all reasonable doubt that they do experience pain and suffering.

Orcas suffering at the hands of Sea World. Dolphins stolen from the wild and put into tiny pools where they have no freedom of moment and stimulation. Elephants physically abused with bull hooks at Ringling Brothers' Circus to get them to do tricks for human amusement that run so contrary to their natural behaviors. Sows in gestation crates chewing on the metal bars of their prison. Silverback gorillas poached in the wild, animals killed for bs reasons like cutting off their testicles for superstitious medicinal uses. Animals that are abused in research labs, such as the recent incident at the med school in San Francisco, that got front page coverage. These are the types of speciesism that are being talked about. Unnecessary cruelty and suffering on a scale so large that it makes even The Holocaust look like a single murder by comparison.

I don't want to get into the science of animal pain and suffering again since we covered that already, but the fact of the matter is that the majority of the species we exploit DO feel tremendous suffering at our hands. If compassion alone isn't enough for you, and a species has to share your own moral values for you to care if it experiences pain and suffering, then I don't really have anything to say. It all hinges on if you believe unnecessary cruelty and suffering is wrong, and if you think there are all these requirements that have to be met for you to care, such as the species sharing your values, then yep 'speciesism' won't matter for you. But 'racism' as an inherently wrong concept doesn't work for people who think that others have to share their race for their suffering to be morally relevant, and 'sexism' won't seem bad to those who believe someone has to share their gender for their suffering to matter.

Aijin do you have tips on living a vegan lifestyle other than food? Right now I am just a dietary vegan. I still wear clothes that have leather and buy products that are tested on animals. I know that the clothing industries treat animals horribly and that animal testing has a lot of things wrong with it but I don't know all that much about them. I have been against the animal entertainment business since I was a kid and went to a zoo for the first time. Just looking at wild animals pacing miserably in fake habitats I knew it was wrong.

Did you hear the Dalai Lama's speech last week at the launch of the Humane Society International in India? It fits into this argument about compassion. The Dalai Lama said “Animals deserve our compassion. We must know their pain. We should nurture this compassion through education. Showing concern about animal rights is respecting their life."

The taste thing is mostly irrelevant, to me - the taste buds are very malleable, and it only matters at the start. Perhaps the distaste for vegetables is borne from our focus on bread and meat. Many people dislike vegetables even in their cooked form, until they are put in a situation where they have to eat them and get used to it quickly - I myself have yet to get to this point.

Vix, I feel you just moved the answer from the individual level to the global level. Instead of saying "employment of Americans is better than employment of the same or higher number of Chinese", you said "America's economy declining is worse than China missing out on the outsourcing it depends on [and declining accordingly]", as well as focusing on the sad decline of America, ignoring the other side (for every unemployed American there might be 1.5 employed Chinese who have reached the same qualification level with far less resources spent on them than said American; not because the Chinese educational system is better, but because they have a higher net amount of talent owing to higher population; not that corporations shy away from also hiring, say, programmers with a lower qualifications - but they do so at their own peril). I find that my models on economy are too primitive to make any predictions (or to judge yours) on whether cheap labor from outside is gonna ruin the market; I'll take your word for it and get on with improving my scholarship in that area after I pass my German exams.

Compassion is within me, not the animal, so it doesn't matter. There is hardly a human being who wouldn't flinch at a pained creature - some of us are able to distance ourselves when it's through a TV screen, but for the most part, non-vegetarians feel the same compassion as vegetarians. Whether we choose to ignore it and deal with the actual issue depends on the person. Vix, you made a good analogy. How can we be certain that a cow feels pain? Humans need to feel pain because we have willpower - we can prioritize goals and make our decisions in opposition to our instinct. To make sure we don't completely ignore the needs of our body, we feel experience pain and other negative stimuli in increasing intensity until those stimuli are able to move the problem up the priority stack.

Have you seen how cows are kept? In my visit to Germany, I saw several farms, all fenced the same way - two metal wires, the highest at about one meter above the ground or less, the other a bit lower, with electricity flowing through both. They would be no issue for a cow to cross - just run in their general direction and they would snap - except the cow has so little willpower that merely its neurons detecting what we experience as pain force it to move away (and, presumably, not attempt again). Now, are cows complex beings of willpower who can ignore their stimuli (and thus require stimuli in the first place), or are they just bots who unquestioningly respond to nerve signals (and thus don't require pain)?  Of course, our AI is made by a benevolent programmer, unlike evolution - it is completely reasonable to say that the AI can prioritize and still doesn't feel pain, while the cow can't and still feels it. However, it would be a big error to assume that, if they do indeed feel pain, it approaches the intensity of ours. There's just no reason to, and any mutations who have a heightened sensitivity without the corresponding willpower (which cows lack) would be at an evolutionary disadvantage and wiped out (due to being crippled far more easily). Pain-sensitivity doesn't come automatically from the carbon atoms, just like self-awareness - it comes from a certain cognitive structure. If cows don't have higher thought, morals etc, why would they experience pain as we do? They may be large and they may be mammals, but that's where their similarity to humans ends - if we're using their mammalhood to propose similarity in one area, why is there none in the areas directly related (everything brain-related)? Cows maybe feel some pain - it's likely that the evolution of that particular mechanism didn't start at monkeys - but even if they do, it's probably at a low intensity.

And then there are the vegetarians which say avoiding meat but eating fish is not true vegetarian. Are fish, too, supposed to feel pain? At that scale, wouldn't the cognitive capacity required be better used for other purposes, if it can fit at all?

Fadeaway,

To think that mammals like cows do not experience pain is about as insane as saying they do not have eyesight despite having functioning eyes, displaying all signs of using eyesight for navigation and sensory understanding, possessing optic nerves, and a complete visual system. It's just a giant: WTF? I really don't want to repeat all the information about the nervous system and pain that I've already gone on about, so I'll just restate: Mammals feel pain. This is a simple fact. They possess all the same neurological components that generate the experience of pain, and display every behavioral sign of it as well. If you want to claim that other mammals don't experience pain, you'll have to go out and do some pretty ground breaking research and disprove pretty much every single thing known about the mammalian nervous system in the process.

And yes, fish feel pain as well. I remember when I was a kid and went fishing with my parents I asked them, "Doesn't the fish feel pain when it gets the hook stuck in its mouth?" and they told me, "Oh no, fish are designed to not feel pain in their mouths so that we can catch them." And I believed them.

Things like "Oh, animals don't feel pain," are lies we as a society tell ourselves, because if we did acknowledge animals feel pain it would make us very uncomfortable with our lifestyles. No one thinks of themselves as a bad person. No one wants to think that every single day they are engaging in the single largest genocide in history, the systematic cruelty of tens of billions of animals every year. If we acknowledged animals feel pain, we would have to look differently at our chicken dinner that had its limbs cut off with zero anesthetic, suffered organ failure and crippled limbs from our genetic modification of its bodies, and then had its throat slit open while it was conscious, and perhaps was even scalded alive in the de-feathering tanks.

I once talked to a worker in the pork industry, who as part of the job rips off the testicles of squealing baby pigs, and he told me with a straight fact, "The piglets don't feel pain, the testicles just fall off." If humans are masters of one thing, it's of rationalizing our behaviors no matter how horrid they are. I told him, "Fall off? Are you joking me? You are ripping off an organ with your hands. You saying if I grab your testicles with pliers and rip them off right now it's a-okay because they'll just fall off, no pain, no problem?" He didn't have a response to that, only looked incredibly uncomfortable.

As a society we have to stop rationalizing atrocity just so we can feel good about ourselves. That applies to every sector of life, not just animals.

But to think that animals don't make choices, that they aren't capable of compassion, love, friendship, and volition, and are only mindless procreating and eating machines, only shows an ignorance of animals. In our societies we are so detached from animals except cats and dogs that it's not surprising, but if anyone spends time with animals, and gets to know them, it's impossible to say they don't experience all of those things, and are just mindless bags of flesh.

People see clips of animals hunting each other in documentaries and think that that's all there is to animals: mindless instinct to survive. But that's as narrow minded as watching a clip of humans murdering one another and extrapolating that human beings are mindless killing machines. With our own species we are surrounded by all the different facets of humanity on a daily basis, so we don't have a single narrative in our mind for what "human" means. But for animals we have such limited exposure to them that we do form very biased, ignorant views of them based upon fragments of information. We do this to our own species too, creating stereotypes and prejudices towards people groups we don't have much exposure to, such as Americans who have never been to Africa thinking of Africa as just poverty, disease, and death, when in reality "Africa" is a place of infinite narratives, not just our media stereotypes. So it's no surprise that we do this tenfold towards other species, when we do it constantly to our own.

vix86 wrote:

I am a bit curious where lines are drawn on compassion. Do insects count? Should we be horrified if insects have legs cut off with no anesthesia (assuming such a feat is possible) in an experiment? What about mice or rats? As was mentioned earlier in the thread, are we just showing favoritism to mammals cause we are mammals? Put another way, is it simply because animals have a nociceptor response like ours that they should be given compassion? Or is there some other quality?

As a thought experiment..

I honestly don't know much about the nervous systems and pain experience of insects. Where the line is drawn is up to the individual, and some people do feel fine eating seafood that doesn't have central nervous systems, or has very rudimentary ones, yet would never in their dreams think of eating a cow or pig. Favoritism towards mammals tends to be shown simply because we know the most about how the mammalian brain works, and can relate more to their experiences of pain and suffering. But yes, animals like rats and fish experience pain as well, and I find cutting off their limbs with no anesthetic to be just as morally sick as cutting off the limbs of a mammal.

As for the AI argument, just watch Spielberg's "AI" The ethical arguments of AI are very interesting, and I love sci-fi, but bringing them into this argument is as silly to me as people who are anti-gay using that argument, "Well if we let gays get married then where does it stop? we'll have to let people marry dogs, and it'll be a giant landslide effect." It does nothing but distract from the real issue at hand by bringing up extreme hypotheticals. The inhumane slaughter of tens of billions of animals is going on this very instant, whereas no genocide against AI is, so frankly I don't think there's any merit to discussing the comparison.

re the topic of outsourcing:

Outsourcing is only bad if you were one of the naive people who didn't see it coming and skill up or change industries. When outsourcing occurs, it allows more to be done with less and makes the world as a whole wealthier. If Americans or whoever else are sick of losing their production jobs, they should be willing to work for lower wages to match the new market price of that labor. If a country like America abolished it's minimum wage, production jobs would start flowing back to America and the lower wages would be okay because everything would cost less, especially if inflation was halted. As the world becomes more efficient and technology becomes more advanced, the purchasing power of the dollar should never be going down.

Fadeway wrote:

Vix, I feel you just moved the answer from the individual level to the global level. Instead of saying "employment of Americans is better than employment of the same or higher number of Chinese", you said "America's economy declining is worse than China missing out on the outsourcing it depends on [and declining accordingly]"

I always viewed it as a global issue because the decision to move jobs overseas is almost always an economic one. Management isn't going "Gosh, these Chinese are the smallest people on the earth, lets have them build our iphones instead of Americans!" they are going "These Chinese will work for a buck a day and give us $40 dollars more per phone in profit which will boost our margins and increase dividends and stock prices. Lets move to China!"

Aijin wrote:

The ethical arguments of AI are very interesting, and I love sci-fi, but bringing them into this argument is as silly to me

I don't think its silly because I see it as an attempt to figure out if the only reason why we are making an issue out of everything is because they react like we do and have the same neural system as we do. If the determining factor to gaining "protection from cruelty" is simply that you need to scream/whine/cry/run-n-hide when you get stabbed/beaten/cut then so be it. But if there is some other factor that would set an advance sentient AI outside this level of care, but not humans/animals/etc, I'd love to hear it. Because in my honest opinion, animals are about on par with a low level AI.

Before I even start addressing any of this, I have a serious question.
Do you even know any people that qualify in the category as poor? People with 2 jobs or who live month to month on a single pay check in cheap housing. Because I just can't imagine someone holding libertarian/free market ideals and having friends that live in projects and have to pawn stuff every other month just to pay bills.

nadiatims wrote:

Outsourcing is only bad if you were one of the naive people who didn't see it coming and skill up or change industries.

Why yes, those 30-40 yr olds working manufacturing jobs are so totally going to 'skill up' or get a new career when they are working a [sometimes physically demanding] 9-5 job.

If Americans or whoever else are sick of losing their production jobs, they should be willing to work for lower wages to match the new market price of that labor.

The ridiculousness of this statement is astounding. The people in third world countries are working at wages close to $1-2s an hour. This also happens to turn out to be decent pay in some cases as well since the cost of living in these countries matches the pay. No factory worker in the US is ever going to be able to compete with cheap labor like that.

If a country like America abolished it's minimum wage, production jobs would start flowing back to America and the lower wages would be okay because everything would cost less

You are so sure that cutting the minimum wage would suddenly make everything cheaper. But with the increase in unemployment and businesses salivating for inflation; I doubt this would happen. Hell, even with the minimum wage in place today in the US you can't survive. If you are working for minimum wage in most states in the US, you are barely making enough to pay for your own apartment. Most of my friends who are stuck working min. wage jobs have to have 2-3 roommates because thats the only way to pay rent and have money for food. Though, if they are lucky, they might get food assistance. None of them can afford health insurance though and since most businesses don't employ anyone full time, they don't get any help on health insurance from their place of work either.

Cutting min. wage, would be the quickest way to turn much of the US into paupers on the street because I'm pretty sure most businesses would cut their current wages by half.

^ This is correct. Although when I wrote the "I see animals on par with AI" I think I was stating that as separate from the hypothetical example. I clarify below.

IceCream wrote:

How exactly do you get from:
1. Animals have exactly the same neural system as humans
2. That neural system responds in exactly the same way as humans when given what would in humans be pain inducing stimuli
3. Animals react behaviourally very similarly to humans when given what would in humans be pain inducing stimuli (screaming, avoiding pain stimuli, nursing wounds, etcetc)
^^basically we can find no significant difference between humans and animals about pain, or even any reason to beleive that they are different.

to:
Therefore animals are on a par with low level AI.

I'm not seeing the logic of this argument at all.

I decided to rewrite my response to this. Since the last didn't make much sense to what I wanted to say.

In the context of what I meant by equating AI to Animals. I wasn't looking at the physical properties of the two. I was looking more at the basis of reaction since most arguments seem to boil down to the suffering aspect, which is a response. So if you could make an AI like I described, but leave off the higher level creativity functions, animals and an AI robot would be pretty similar.

Even in modern day technology. AI work on Input in, processing, action out. Animals are pretty much exactly the same save that their wetware allows for them to do more processing and learn to do more things. I believe there are some bots being made now that have an intelligence level on par with some animals even. The only difference between the two is that one doesn't have a system in place to react to damage to its body and a line of processing that encourages it "to survive and reproduce."

Last edited by vix86 (2012 December 03, 7:38 am)

vix86 wrote:

Before I even start addressing any of this, I have a serious question.
Do you even know any people that qualify in the category as poor? People with 2 jobs or who live month to month on a single pay check in cheap housing.

Yes. I'm not exactly earning big bucks myself, nor am I getting any handouts. Thanks to Japan's shitty protectionism I also have to pay 200yen one apple, instead of getting a bag full.

vix86 wrote:

You are so sure that cutting the minimum wage would suddenly make everything cheaper. But with the increase in unemployment and businesses salivating for inflation; I doubt this would happen.

Of course it would. Every company would have immediate incentive to lower its costs to undercut their competitors. It would also make the country more competitive globally bringing back jobs. The only businesses that would salivate for inflation are those that are spoon fed the increases in the money supply through bailouts/subsidies, (ie not the little guys). Welfare recipients also benefit (at least in the short term) from inflation, or more correctly the money printing that causes it, as they are major recipients. Ultimately though, if inflation is a problem (and i agree it is, it screws everyone in the long run) then why don't people vote in a party that will stop inflating the money supply? Because they want the free stuff of course. I feel as much pity for the poor who are going to suffer as a result of all this insanity just as much as the next person, but it is inevitable until people wake up and start having a clue about economics.

vix86 wrote:

Cutting min. wage, would be the quickest way to turn much of the US into paupers on the street because I'm pretty sure most businesses would cut their current wages by half.

which would massively reduce consumer prices and make the US competitive once again.

I never said the recovery would be easy. It won't be. It's just the inevitable result when the nation has been living on borrowed or printed money for decades. I just hope US citizens are smart enough to work their way out of the hole they've dug for themselves instead of turning to some dictator with easy answers. At this point I wouldn't be surprised to see the rise of a dictator in the US.

IceCream wrote:

[...]If AI and animals are similar, animals and humans are still infinitely more similar. [...]

I don't understand. I thought I presented a thought experiment where the AI is more similar to humans than animals are, behaviorally. It could also be equally similar construction-wise - you just need to use organic materials instead of inorganic ones. It is, hence, more similar to a human than an actual cow is; it also, by definition of its programming, doesn't feel pain (unless you postulate that no matter the level of technology, organic sensors are not programmable and always come with pain; or at least that imitating the mammal construction is impossible without programming for pain - which is not provable, since we haven't detected the combination of neurons, the "line of source code" that causes pain in humans; and we're thus unable to search for it in animals, or to claim that excluding it is impossible).

@nadiatims: Rather than forcing the poor to scrabble even harder for the little they get already, why not simply force companies to stop treating their workers like they are costs?

The children of Wallmart in 2007 had the same net worth as the bottom 30% of all Americans. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/0 … Inequality

How much of those profits do you think came from squeezing Wallmart workers in the first place?

You seem to think there is something inherently correct about workers being paid based on the market price for their labour, while also believing that business owners should be paid based on the market price of the product they are selling. In reality, this is a completely arbitrary division which allows the CEO to take a disproportionate amount of the profits and squeeze their workers pay. As one of the graphs underneath shows, the amount a CEO is taking has risen from 39 times the average employee to 1039 times the average employee in just a couple of generations. Any wonder the average employee is not getting richer any more?

You cannot eliminate poverty while this continues, no matter how little you regulate a market. The only way to do so would be to have a permenent shortage of labour to drive wages up, which is not going to happen.

Remember, a lot of the industry that was shipped abroad was not unprofitable, and the price of such goods has not been reduced significantly in a lot of cases. It's the difference for a CEO to be able to make $20 profit per pair of shoes rather than $5, for example. We don't get the full benefits of such cheap labour because the CEO takes it. Even so, i'm not saying that outsourcing labour is an absolute bad. Just that there are economic factors that you are not taking into account here.

Last edited by IceCream (2012 December 03, 9:06 am)