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

"Howard J. Rogers" <hjr_at_dizwell.com> wrote in message news:3f85e4d1$0$28120$afc38c87_at_news.optusnet.com.au...

> 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.

6 is the key.

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

Hey, what the heck! Search on google for the words "secular government". 1,970,000 hits. I guess it's a quite popular concept. Put quotes around them to get the exact expression and you *still* get 21200.
If that is a "neck of the woods", I'm OK with it. :)

> 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.

Disagree.

> 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.

Exactly.

> > 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.

Wasn't even talking about that one.

> 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....??

Dunno, you're the one that brought Nixon and his politics to it. I just claimed the war stopped because of the constant and strong protests. In the context that social protest does indeed change the way governments and economies are run. To which I stick.

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

Why bring it in then? Go back to the thread: I did NOT bring Nixon to the equation, you did. My claim had NOTHING to do with him.

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

That "re-writing" history? Anyways, as a simple test, I just typed "18th century secularism" (sic) into google and got this: http://www.uiowa.edu/~english/specialties/religion.html amongst 6050 others. From a university, no less. What can I say, for an "invention of history" it's remarkably popular...

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

Correction: I do NOT believe! As for the texts, I don't have a problem with them making their arguments. It's up to me to accept them or not, given my relative level of agreement. That's all. Let's not lose sight that we're talking history and soci-economic texts, not mathematics and proven theorems. Interpretation is subjective.

> *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?

Of course. I did not claim that there weren't ANY services back in the 18th century. I do dispute however that they were such a force in economics that Adam Smith or anyone else of the same period would ever have taken them into consideration. In fact, there are no references to "services society" in economic texts anywhere before the second half of the 20th century. Why?

-- 
Cheers
Nuno Souto
wizofoz2k_at_yahoo.com.au.nospam