The US military gets to define what is and what isn't murder. Killing anyone in a poor country who isn't a child or too old to fire a machine gun is by definition never murder according to America.
300 karma · joined August 10, 2011
>each center, when it was at its peak, was a place where foreign merchants felt safe and comfortable.
And talking about foreign merchants feeling safe and comfortable, did you ever ask how the American Indians felt as the US become an economic empire, or how comfortable it was for non-europeans to do business in the European colonies? Yes, London allowed a few traders from it's colonies but they worked damn hard to make sure the colonies didn't industrialize. India in particular become deindustrialized under British rule - all of India's cotton mills were packed up and send to Manchester, and the production of cloth forbidden. Even relatively small things like the production of salt in India was forbidden so British salt could be exported to India.
The majority of foreign merchants weren't even allowed to participate in British markets and were violently suppressed if they tried to. This world you speak of - where economies grew because they set up such nice and comfortable places to do business in - never existed.
You say China isn't open to business - why then is the entire Fortune 500 doing business in China and increasingly shifting more and more of their manufacturing there? There is cost, but there is also the fact that besides cost, as Steve Jobs told Obama, the expertise, supply chains and capability is shifting to China.
If you read any recent works on China, like the recent one on China by Dambiso Moyo - she makes the point that China is better at doing business with developing countries than America. http://www.dambisamoyo.com/
>Do foreign merchants feel they can make deals as equals with the native Chinese merchants?
This is exactly the point she addresses, and most African and many developing Asian countries are increasingly favoring dealing with Chinese. The Chinese pay more for resources, build useful infrastructure, and provide much needed goods at affordable prices - all things which are increasingly making it an essential part of the economic center in much of the world.
The blurb from their website, and yes, it is a really useful app once you commit to actually taking the pictures:
>>Want to take real steps to improve your eating habits? Use The Eatery to snap photos of your food. We’ll give you something much more helpful than calorie counts. We’ll provide a big-picture breakdown of your habits, including your strengths, weaknesses, and the best places to start making a change. Other apps tell you about your food. We tell you about yourself.
"Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson conclusively show that it is man-made political and economic institutions that underlie economic success (or the lack of it)."
A good review of the book: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jun/07/what-ma...
If the pricing isn't right, than it's algorithims get thrown of to, so some flights which are better and cheaper aren't even displayed as it will have instead display some other flight which Hipmunk for some reason thinks is cheaper and so displays that instead.
The hipmunk interface is light years ahead of everyone else in terms of displaying information - but flights and pricing - not so much. I wish it was though, as I hate booking through sites like expedia where you have to fill out 15 gazillion things each time and it's a pain to compare different flights.
* Can you add a free python reference like this one: http://www.diveintopython.net/
* Syntax highlighting!
* Dropbox support - a very simple module to save .py or txt files into a dropbox folder and sync - this would be great!
There are no speed issues on my laptop browser or ipad...
Of course, the RIAA and MPAA of the world's will be fighting tooth and nail over regional restrictions, I have a feeling Amazon made it easy to bypass regional restrictions because book publishers are technologically challenged and didn't quite realize what happened.
Of course, there is always the piratebay for countries which aren't in the G7...
Though of course they could just tap into the local last mile...
Basically, if you're a multinational or a large local corporation you get to use VPN's. Private citizens need not apply.
VPN's work too, so far. I'm on one right now. As to why - the filtration system the government is using is so brain dead - there is basically one Juniper router and a couple of Cisco routers (last time I looked) - through which the entire country's traffic is routed.
Using a VPN makes web browsing much faster, with no annoying "waiting" moments - which I presume is the routers locking up under massive load.
The day VPN's are blocked is going to be a sad day indeed. I am going to explore for alternatives to VPN's. Way back in the days of super slow dial up I used these services which would take a link and email the page or entire site to you depending on the command you sent, in a zip file.
I have been buying books from the American kindle store and paying using a non-US credit card and it works just fine, have been doing so for over a year.