Re: Re:(OT) Outsourcing developer to India and China - As an Oracle developer I am miffed

Noons wrote:

> "Howard J. Rogers" <hjr_at_dizwell.com> wrote in message
> news:3f858e00$0$28122$afc38c87_at_news.optusnet.com.au...
>
>> Sorry Noons. That's not what the word means. You can throw in the phrase
>> 'non-religious' to get close, but it has none of the implications of
>> non-elected, rigid or absolutist you wish to imbue it with.
>
> I guess that is why it's commonly used to signify
> precisely monarchies with their on-going, non-elected,
> family inherited power structure, ie, secularity...
> Macq dict is on-line. ;)

Maybe commonly in your neck of the woods, Noons. But not by the rest of the English-speaking world.

Secularity: The condition or quality of being secular. Secular: Worldly rather than spiritual; Not specifically relating to religion or to a religious body; relating to or advocating secularism; Not bound by monastic restrictions, especially not belonging to a religious order. Used of the clergy; Occuring or observed once in an age or century; Lasting from century to century

And since you mentioned the Macquarie Dictionary specifically, here's their online definition:

adjective 1. of or relating to the world, or to things not religious, sacred, or spiritual; temporal; worldly. 2. not relating to or connected with religion, as literature, music, etc. 3. dealing with non-religious subjects, or, especially, excluding religious instruction, as education, etc. 4. (of members of the clergy) not belonging to a religious order (opposed to regular). 5. occurring or celebrated once in an age or century: the secular games of Rome. 6. going on from age to age; continuing through long ages.
--noun 7. layperson. 8. one of the secular clergy. [Late Latin saecularis worldly, from Latin: belonging to an age; replacing Middle English seculer, from Old French]

I see a lot of religion. I don't see a lot of family-inherited power structures.

>
>
>> I don't know where you're getting this stuff from, but it's simply not
>> true (and I have a thesis on economic history of the 18th century you can
>> read if you like). So we aren't going to get anywhere with this.
>
> Are you trying to tell me that in 1700-1799 (18th century)
> democracy was rampant and widespread and there was no social
> inequality whatsoever and the economy was ruled by free market
> forces? So, all that french revolution stuff and Marx jazz
> was because of what, gardening?

I'm trying to tell you that services were provided a-plenty, that they had to paid for, and that market forces were very much in force, tempered as ever by the protectionist and mercantilist insticts of a meddling government. And if it wasn't clear before, I was referring to England (since, although a Scot, that's where Mr Adam Smith did his work). Marx didn't write the Communist Manifesto until 1848, which puts him outside of your self-chosen time-frame. And Das Kapital wasn't published until 1887.

>
>
>> Again, define succeeded. The war was going full-pelt by 1965. It ended in
>> 1973. So just how that counts as success, I can't fathom.
>
> And the strongest protests were in 1970-71. I don't call a stop in
> 1973 exactly a failure of the said...

Never let the facts get in the way of a good argument, huh? Kent State was a protest specifically about the bombing of Cambodia.

>
>> Noons, you'll have to brush up on your history. Nixon wasn't impeached:
>> he resigned before it got to that point.
>
> So what?

So What? Those are the facts, Noons. Awkward, I realise.

>You're splitting hairs.

No, I'm sticking to the facts.

>The guy got out
> because he was dishonest. That is the point.

He was dishonest about wanting to cover up a burglary of an office of his political rivals, largely because of his own deep insecurities about the narrow loss he'd experienced in 1960 (when the election was bought by Kennedy) and the narrow win he'd experienced in 1968. He wanted to make sure he'd have a clear mandate to govern, and he saw nothing wrong with adopting extra-legal tactics to make it happen, as his two predecessors (or so he felt) had done to him. And the relevance of the Vietnam War to all of that is....??

>The
> technicalities of how or where or who are irrelevant.
> As much as he was to the outcome of the war.

If you argued that the Pentagon Papers and the Kissinger taps, which did arise directly out of the Vietnam War, gave rise to a culture within the White House of the Plumbers and the easy resort to illegality, which itself made Watergate plausible and possible, you might have a point. But you didn't. So I won't need to go on to refute the idea that Watergate is causally-related to the Pentagon Papers or the Kissinger taps; or to suggest that all three were a manifestation of the culture of protest which characterised the late 1960's, and which would most like have manifested itself in much the same way whether the Vietnam War happened or not; or to re-iterate that Watergate was a product of a very insecure President's manic desire to be popularly re-elected by a landslide.

Vietnam = Watergate = Impeachment, even on the mere facts, isn't an equation that works.

>
>
>> And in any case, you might recall a
>> certain burglary had rather more to do with the near-impeachment than the
>> Vietnam War
>
>
> I didn't say the Nam war protests were the cause of him leaving.
> What I said is that Nixon was irrelevant to the outcome
> of the protests. Which was the stoppage of the war.
>
>> Cambodia was one of the weakest of the proposed articles). And 4 years
>> isn't an 'abberation' in any case (and I have a masters thesis on the
>> Vietnam war, too, if you're interested).
>
> 'sOK, I just lived through it.
>

Snap.  

>> You are welcome to believe all this stuff Noons, but I can't discuss it
>> with you when you invent history,
>
> Where?

See above. 18th Century "secularism". Nixon's "impeachment".

>
>> ignore 2 centuries of economic thought,
>
> I didn't say I ignore it. I just do not believe it is the
> be all and end all of everything to do with economic theory.
> There is a difference.

Got it in a nutshell. You "believe"; I prefer to rely on the texts themselves to make their arguments.

>
>> invest
>> words with meanings they never had before
>
> Like I said: it's in the dictionary.
>

Like I said, see the above, which is a cut and paste from the very online source you directed me to: It isn't in the dictionary.

>> and make demonstrably hazy claims
>> like 'they had no services in the 18th century'.
>
> Mostly crafts. Not services in a free market. Which
> is the presupposed environment for supply and demand laws.

*Mostly* crafts? Even if I accepted that, which I don't, the word "mostly" implies that some of them weren't crafts. Would that be a concession on your part, then?

Regards
HJR

-- 
--------------------------------------------
See my brand new website, soon to be full of 
new articles: www.dizwell.com.
Nothing much there yet, but give it time!!
--------------------------------------------