Don't let your babies grow up to be programmers (was: up with PyGUI!)

[Arthur]

On 23 Sep 2004 14:37:40 -0700, luismg at gmx.net (Neuruss) wrote:

>I'd just like to add a comment, not to start an endless debate on U.S
>economic or trade policy...
>IMHO what you are experiencing in the U.S is just another sign of the
>globalization process, which is bad from an american perspective, but
>good from a global one.
>
>For too long, the industrialized countries have enjoy the power of
>their competitiveness and technical inovation while, at the same time,
>they have been protecting their less competitive sectors such as
>agriculture and labor intensive jobs. But this situation led to a club
>of rich nations isolated from a mass of third world countries, whose
>primary products weren't allowed to enter the rich markets due to very
>rigid policy of subsidies and trade barriers.
>
>But how can IBM, Microsoft, HP, and all those monsters keep on growing
>without selling to the so called "emerging markets"? By trading with
>Mars?
>If the rich want to get richer, sooner or later they will have to even
>the field, allowing others to rise from missery in order to
>incorporate them to the consumption society.

That's true.  And generally understood.  Which is perhaps why the IBMs
and Microsofts tend to play an important and productive role in
accomplishing just that.  Enlightened self interest at work.

OK. So this all sounds, big picture, like win/win developments, though
with some inevitable displacement effecting some real human beings.

But what I haven't been quite able to grasp is the basis for the
sentiment of "Globalization" as a dirty word, with the U.S. (and its
evil corporations - as if corporations were something other than an
organizational structure for goal oriented human endeavor) assigned
the role of the heavy. In the more extreme forms of this viewpoint,
"the heavy" being a considerable understatement for the role assigned
the U.S. and its evil lackey corporations.

I don't think, for example, the U.S. is aggressive at all in
protecting its markets with subsidies or trade barriers.  If anything
there is the argument that the U.S. should perhaps be doing more in
protecting its markets from goods being produced overseas at
artificially low costs as a result of implicit or explicit subsidies
being provided in the originating country.  But being generally
liberal on these kinds of issues seems, at this time, to set the right
leadership tone, and seems to be working - so there is generally a
let-it-be attitude.

The U.S. in anything but the heavy in *my* story. 

Is it just that I am a neo-Dadaist PolyAnna?

Art