Tronic

Slave labour??? Come again?

As for cheap labour; it is due to the costs of living being much lower in India or China then the West. A person in India can afford to pay rent, provide food and clothing for say 4000 Rupees a month (which is about a $100). Can you do that with a $100 in the US? As far as I know, don't think so. You must take into account the costs of living.

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Nabha Sparasham Deeptam
-Touch The Sky With Glory

Shek

HKDan,
Your argument is valid. The Gini coefficient measures the equity of distribution within a country without providing a measure of standard of living across countries.

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"So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

Shek

Don't hate the player, hate the game!

Gamercube is correct in the presentation of who has less income inequality. However, he is using an apple to try and describe an orange. This is not the fault of the statistic, but rather the incomplete application of the statistic.

Shek

You bemoan the "middle guy", and yet you speak only of the two ends, the rich and the poor. What about the "middle guy", who has seen his compensation increase over the past decades? What about the absolute increase in the standard of living for even the poor in the US? How has this occured? Through the use of markets.

Also, this "slave" labor is happy to be provided the opportunities to work in factories that many in the West look down upon because of their own coddled sense of morality, especially in the light that we ourselves employed similar conditions in our rise out of and above poverty/subsistance. If Western moral indignation were to shutter all these "slave" labor factories, we'd be sentencing millions to a life of subsistance where a mosquito net would be a luxury to protect them from diseased mosquitoes (whose populations have increased because of our moral indignation over the supposed but not so much real in most cases harmful effects of DDT).

Yes to sweatshops! Yes to child labor!

Ray

What is sweatshop to you is OK by us!

Our cultural background teaches us to accept hardship as a normal way of life. That is why what is normal for you all, appears mollycoddling to us.

Our needs are limited. While you cannot do with a gas guzzling SUV, we are more than satisfied with our small cars. We are philosophical. A car is to carry people and we are satisfied. You require a car as a fashion statement even if it pollutes the environment!

You want to be the strongest, bestest and the powerfulest! We are satisfied if we can live our lives without interference!

We can do without airconditioning, while you think it is oppressive!

Yo don't care about the Union Carbide horror of gas leakage and death in Bhopal and feel it is a part of life and business ethics, but you ambulance chase over trifles and sue over trifles as if the world has collapsed!

You believe that by sitting with your child for half an hour is quality time and we feel that if you are not devoted to your child beyond the so called quality time, you are a failure in parenthood. It is quality time all the time here!

Culture is the difference!

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"Some have learnt many Tricks of sly Evasion, Instead of Truth they use Equivocation, And eke it out with mental Reservation, Which is to good Men an Abomination."

I don't have to attend every argument I'm invited to.

HAKUNA MATATA

S-2

"We can do without airconditioning, while you think it is oppressive!

Yo don't care about the Union Carbide horror of gas leakage and death in Bhopal and feel it is a part of life and business ethics, but you ambulance chase over trifles and sue over trifles as if the world has collapsed!

You believe that by sitting with your child for half an hour is quality time and we feel that if you are not devoted to your child beyond the so called quality time, you are a failure in parenthood. It is quality time all the time here!

Culture is the difference!"

Brigadier,

This reads as a blanket condemnation and as objectionable as it is inaccurate. There are too many good, hardworking, modest Americans devoted to their children 24-7 and contributing to causes worldwide to accept something like this.

Unfair.

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"This aggression will not stand, man!" Jeff Lebowski

bolo121

Ray sir have to disagree there, life without AC in Chennai is unbearable.
One journey by bus and I'm finished.

Jay

Not that I'm nitpicking, people did live in Chennai and a lot many still do before all the AC hoopla, that too with recurring power cuts during the license raj era.
We are used to the heat, I can live there with out an AC even though I lived in the colder parts of the US for the best part of the last decade.

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A grain of wheat eclipsed the sun of Adam !!

Jay

I would say this is the most sensible thing the FM did. Anything like this will reach the recipients directly unlike the supposedly investments the government make through babudom. Even then a lot of farmers do take loans from loan sharks who will not get any respite from this move, but atleast the next time they think about getting loans most of them will defn try the banks.

That is a very distinct possibility. It is reported that this year the repayments of loan slowed down during the run up to the budget. But the small farmers who are benefited by this scheme normally are law abiding moral people and they tend to be inspired by the system than misusing it.

You cannot disburse money randomly to farmers through babudom. It never works. If you open up the field to private companies,even though farm production increases, it will not decrease rural poor, infact it will be opposite.
The system is in-efficient now,mostly because of the number of people it involves, when you drastically remove the in-efficiency a lot of those people will have no work, no money and no marketable skills to survive.

Again, its not the banks that are driving most people to suicides, its the loan sharks. The govt has to find a way for the farmer to access capital, like the smart card system that they are planning.

The next major investment should be in irrigation and water management systems. About 60% wait for monsoon for their living and when we have a poor rainfall, most of them loose their capital.

But you should care, becoz if you dont have a person who can think, you will get some one who'll just stamp their names based on the selective inputs you get babudom.

bolo121

Jay, we need private players to come in.
Already due to various climactic problems wheat yield is low.
There is now before govt a tough choice, allow private farm companies and reduce grain prices but see farmer suicides and rural poverty rise up or do nothing and see essentials prices go up and affect common man.

gunnut

Thank you! Finally someone agrees with me. You should see the horror on people's faces when I say put the kids to work so they can have better lives.

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"Only Nixon can go to China." -- Old Vulcan proverb.

Jay

Vote bank politics rule India, not sanity. Even though I'm against regulation and redtapism, in this instance, it does make sense to regulate the private players, coz there are simply too many people that would go jobless if we let the market to decide.

chankya

Dude are you even serious? I did my undergrad in Chennai. 30kms both ways, every day, by bus. Did fine.

I did however have a big bad desert cooler at home.

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"Of all the manifestations of power, restraint impresses men the most." - Thucydides

bolo121

Heh you guys all more heat tolerant than me. But problem is not of distance (used to travel every day by bus in Cochin and no problems). Try standing in an overheated metal box stuck in traffic packed full of people (add lovely smell of Cooum river also). After the first hour it just gets me down. So need the ac in my room to recover.