I guess, it is because these are works that are copyrighted anyway ;)
1,352 karma · joined November 1, 2013
But those agreements all have a common agenda -- don't think about geography, but about the common agenda behind it. We are living in the era of globalization and one of the reasons for such treaties is, that the geographical differences should vanish.
Of course it is not about the same agreement -- but this video sheds a light about all those agreements.
So finally, who is to blame, when the window is not even? The builder? No! He did nothing. The windowing subcontractor?? Technical yes, but practical he just used hired workers. Some times ago, it was possible to say: Here we have a good company, with good reputation, the workers are proud to work for it ... Today, it is just a blaming game -- and when one of the subcontractors is sued because of bad work, they file bankruptcy, because there is also no financial basis -- the companies are just empty shells.
What also adds up to this is, that on every level of this game, only the price of the service is evaluated today -- not the quality. I also saw cases, where the builder company was a big one with great reputation, but the execution was awful! The reason: Bad contractors.
Another reason in my country is, that the requirements for workers in the building sector have been deliberately drastically lowered by the government, to make way for even cheaper work.
Today, (at least in my country) one that wants a house for his family to be build, has no means to decide, if the company will succeed and make a good house or will build a horror house. In most cases, there will be several topics where the execution was bad or really bad and you can call yourself lucky, when the additional costs after the house was finalized are moderate.
There are some really bad cases, where families thought the house would be ready in time and canceled their rent-flat just to be on the streets afterwards, because their house was not ready even months after the deadline. Some where never finished.
Either they know, that the other countries will follow anyway (because the politicians are (select one or multiple): incompetent, bought, blackmailed, Pro-US, incompetent, ignoring their own countries interests) -- or the things told about the importance of the treaties are not true, but it is just a vehicle to transport the antagonizing bullshit, because some big corporations want this to be installed.
In the EU (TTIP), my impression is, that at least at the high levels of politicians, the list above just must be applied. Many leading politicians are just hitting so hard to get this installed, that it seems they are mad, when I see what negatives they are ready to swallow. They let the US dictate the treaty and just don't seem to recognize, how the EU is hornswoggled.
What happens to colonies can be seen in the plenty of former colonies that still struggle to get out of poverty.
This is not about protecting own inventions, but about land-grabbing things that we did not invent, but nature!
The same thing, corporations try again and again. For example, once they copied cures of traditional Indian medicine, patented them in the USA and tried to forbid the free usage.
When this goes on this way, we all will soon have to pay a life-tax for having some type of DNA or bacteria in our bodies. Already, many cures are not invented, because to many patents on life building blocks make the creation to financially risky.
Unbelievable, that the EU does really accept all this! Only explanation: Those politicians are already bought.
Is this about "free trade" or about profit-maximizing and guaranteeing for some big corporations?
This is the plain reason, corporations and big pockets can convert the democracies of the world into support organizations for profits.
I see it in my country also. The big corporations more and more often make contracts with the government which nobody in the government understand and where in the aftermath the country was shortchanged in one or the other way and they don't come out of these contracts, where profits is guaranteed even when the people lose.
TTIP and the like are also a great, global way to destroy public control of the countries. Instead, profits will be guaranteed.
One further step in direction to almighty international corporations and right-less countries and people. Already, many countries are regularly blackmailed by the big corporations.
The TTIP proceedings are also controlled by the industry lobbyists -- that is the reason, that those are kept so secret, that even the parliaments of EU countries are not allowed access to the data. With such regulations like TTIP, the possibilities to abolish customer laws in the countries will be also largely enlarged.
Of course, he does it the clever way (I read the description at teamed.io, how he makes software-development cheaper by paying "more"):
By breaking down the tasks into 30 minutes microtasks, he will only buy the "fat" from the programmers cow. The muscles, filaments and veins, he does not buy.
Of course, you can buy only the raw implementation part (at best, only the typing) of a software -- but somebody will have to do the reading of the specs, to do some guesswork ... and so on.
By buying micro-tasks, this company does use the fact, that many people will only count the "real" net programming time but not the time in-between those micro-tasks -- reading the specs, preparing the next job, doing the thinking, maybe communicating, waiting for the next assignment ...
And the final clever way is: The time estimations come from the company and that is the base for the payment. When a contractor took over a job for 30 minutes and worked on it for 59 minutes (without all the reading and other stuff as said before) ... will he go and reject the money because he nearly worked 100% more on it than expected? Will he really tell the company, that he is not that big talent, he was hired for in the first place?
Of course, when you have much, you still can fare better and make even more profits ...
The news behind the news is, that the EU parliamentarians likely did sacrifice net-neutrality to get rid of the roaming charges (it is rumored, that many feared that when the whole package was not voted for fast, the roaming charges would also be dropped from agenda).
So, very possible, in the end we get nothing of it at all!
But just that is politics!
I heard that now for years, that this is the best practice approach, that is used in many countries: Put together one bad rules with one or two good laws. And when you want to be sure, that the whole package will be voted for, just put some poison-pill in -- something that will bring up (stupid) voters up against those people that vote against it.
What we get: We get cheaper roaming but may lose the future (the US is already so much ahead of Europe, when it comes to online-services and online-startups). This really is old Europe! (I as European would even say stupid Europe!)
The cost for food is kept low, because of different reasons, for example rationalization and also because worker-costs for low-cost work is not rising but falling. But, the discrepancy of our system, where a very small number of people have much much more money has to become manifest somewhere.
With the last big real estate deal in NY, the problem will be rising.
The federal poverty line does not consider the greed of investment companies. It also does not help, to count the number of breads you can (theoretically) buy.
Lets face it: Human labor is losing it's value. The reason plainly is, that more and more interest has to be drawn for the "investors". Somebody has to pay the bill for the parties held in the financial districts and for the money, the governments squander on the banks.
In the high-payed tech sector, this effect is not so much felt currently, but this will change in the future, when the low-income sector is so much bleed-ed out, that the interest for the big investors has to come from elsewhere.
Something similar would be interesting to know (but I guess, will never be researched):
How corrupting is the influence of state-money poured into many industries of western nations, because those states want to support their own big industries (like military industry, energy, ...) and are lobbied into doing so ... the result: Money goes on and on into the same corporations, but small companies get nothing.
I think, in some cases, text-input boxes are just looking awful.
When this is so, than it is worse than I thought. When C++ is making such simple things so unnecessary complicated.
When I really need speed, I always can implement single routines in pure C -- I don't need an STL abstraction for that, that feigns speed to the programmer, but in the end it does not give it to him, because he chose the wrong abstraction. It seems so easy: Just use the STL/std-c++ library and all your speed problems are solved -- but std-libraries do not make a bad programmer a good one -- instead, it creates programmers that invest their time in language specifics instead in data structures and algorithms. So bad programmers will be even worse in the end.