Cubans Allowed To Export Software and Software Services To the US 166
lpress writes In an effort to support Cuba's nascent private sector, the Treasury Department announced on Friday that Americans can now import goods and services produced by "independent Cuban entrepreneurs." Will the Cuban government allow that? Cuba is a communist nation, but they have a list of 201 job categories in which self-employment is permitted. Most of those jobs are goofy things like magician and pedal-taxi driver, but one is not – computer programmer. Will the Castro regime let private individuals and organizations export software and software services to the United States and the rest of the world?
Cigar Prices (Score:2)
Within a year or two (or maybe sooner), the price of a cuban cigar in the US will drop like a rock. I have friends who bring them in from Europe all the time.
Now... What's all this about cuban software? They have computers?
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You've got it wrong. Even in Europe where they're legal, a good cuban cigar can go for upwards of $10 a stick.[1]
Good cigars take years to manufacture (mainly due to the fact that you have to cure the tobacco for years). Even though the cuban government might (and has been known to) rush out cigars that have not properly cured, people who smoke cigars will generally still want ones that are properly aged (unless you're aging them yourself). And I should add that cigars that have not been cured long enoug
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All of this not taking into account the rather large decline of smoking in general in the US since the cold war.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... [huffingtonpost.com]
Though it seems it's highest among those living in poverty (and among homosexuals, for reasons I am in no position to guess) which means that not many of those few that do smoke are likely able to fork out the money.
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Smoking Cigarettes and Smoking Cigars are not equivalent.
Cigarettes are highly addictive and yes the lower class and poor do seem to be disproportionately affected.
Cigars are something enjoyed by the upper class, and generally people don't smoke a pack a day. You have one or two for a special occasion.
It's two completely different things. If you don't believe me try bringing back a box of expensive Cuban cigars and handing them out. Plenty of people who don't smoke will take one because they enjoy experi
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And then puke because it absolutely smells disgusting.
Even with quality cigars and even when smoking properly (i.e. not like cigarettes or joints).
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May be you've never had a good cigar then as the aroma of a good cigar is nothing short of heavenly.
The funny thing about cigar smoking is a lot of people try something cheap, because they don't want to spend a lot of money on something they're not going to enjoy.
But as the high end cigars are more likely to be tasty (it's hard to find anything tasty for less than $10 a stick), you may have a better experience with a better stick.
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It's just not my taste.
My father in law is a cigar nerd : I tried Cohiba and Montecristo from his humedor, it just tasted awful.
Maybe it's just me, I cannot drink a single drop of good whisky either.
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I feel sorry for you that you'll never get to experience one of the great pleasures in life.
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To each his own. It might come later. :D
It took me a while to enjoy wines and olives.
Anyway, weed, guitar, anal sex and skateboarding are my great pleasures in life right now, and I don't feel like I'm missing anything
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Interesting comments. I'm basing supply on "serious cigar" guys I know who bring a few back from Europe on military jets now and then.
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Yeah it may very well be that long term (like over 10 years) cigar manufacturing goes bonkers and prices go down.
But short term supply is inelastic (because cigars take so long to make) and prices will go up with an increase in demand.
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They're only illegal in the US. Drive North to Canada, or South to Mexico, and you can buy them.
Getting them back is the tricky part. While anyone who has been through a border crossing can tell you it's pretty unlikely you get searched, the penalty is quite severe (something like $50k per incident). And while customs generally won't throw the book at you for a box of cigars, to make it worth while to drive to mexico you'd need to buy an awful lot of boxes.
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The answer is likely yes. Well, to a point.
The US embargo was the US and US companies only. Other countries ignored it Cubans went to other countries to become educated and Cuba imported educators as well. That being said, only a small portion of the population will have access to computers. It will not be like other countries but possabilities beyond ancient soviet tech will exist.
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I'm sure that at the high levels, computers are quite good. Lower down, we are probably talking 486 or even 386.
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RMS in Cuba
http://slashdot.org/story/07/0... [slashdot.org]
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Re:Helping Castro (Score:5, Insightful)
Thus doing what little they can to help finance Castro's regime. Good job!
Perhaps I have fewer problems with Castro than the unrealistic and venomous wing-nut expats in Miami (where I lived for a few years before the hurricane took out Homestead AFB...).
If you want to keep living in the 1960's or the "Cold War", not much anyone can do. But many people have moved on and are looking for actual real solutions that lead to peace and normal relations.
Homestead AFB Hurricane example of fast change (Score:2)
that no one expected: http://www.homestead.afrc.af.m... [af.mil]
"For the individuals laying eyes on the base for the first time since the storm, reconciling what they were seeing seemed impossible.
"Those things that have been a part of your life for so long, I guess you take for granted that they're always going to be there," said Mr. Tom Miller, currently with the 482nd Maintenance Squadron and during Hurricane Andrew was the electrical shop chief with the 482nd Maintenance Squadron as an Air Reserve
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long story short though, having an embargo and pretty much going "bla bla bla im not listening to you" is what we have done for 60 years and what has that done for either us or them???? nothing at all
this embargo should have fell when the berlin wall fell
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'BUT' the Mafia wanted their casinos back and guess who had a significant role in running the US government.
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We trade with many countries with worse records than cuba (and i dont know the record since fidel died if his brother/son whatever is any better) like saudi arabia and china so why not lift the embargo???
the question to ask is simple. will lifting the embargo hurt americans? If the answer is no, lift it. if the answer is yes, explain it
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I still think they are not as bad as some countries we consider allies, as such the embargo should be lifted.
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And who would that be? I can only think of North Korea, who are worse than Cuba...
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Nah, old Bolsheviks can't die, Lenin is alive and well...well embalmed...now we just call him Putin. Ever notice how Putin's a bit on the pasty side, he should be for a man over 150 years old.
Re:Helping Castro (Score:5, Informative)
And who would that be? I can only think of North Korea, who are worse than Cuba...
Countries worse then Cuba? Most Arab allies is a good start. Cuba is a far better place to live than Saudi Arabia humans rights wise, to give one obvious example. The US has had close ties to countries and dictators far worse or equal to Cuba - historically, the US has supported some pretty bad dictators in Latin America.
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there's plenty of countries that are ran worse than Cuba.
some of them are pretty near Cuba as well, some of them in the middle east and so forth..
If you seriously think Cuba is worse than Syria you're pretty unconventional or Burma and Laos for most part of their history - or even Sri Lanka. Cuba hasn't been doing wholesale genociding or discriminating at all, unlike many countries USA is giving war support.
it's just the "OMG COMMIES on our doorstep" that kept it on the embargo...
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How about Saudi Arabia ?
What about China ?
Actually... the list of US allies who have human rights records FAR worse than Cuba (including ongoing violations) is massive.
Cuba isn't actually even in the top-10, it may not be in the top-50.
The only reason you refuse to believe that is because they have a communist economy - which frankly has no BEARING on what their human rights record is. Capitalist human rights violators are NOT better.
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And who would that be? I can only think of North Korea, who are worse than Cuba...
Well how about Iraq, Chili, Iran, Saudi Arabia. I bet all of them have done much more bad stuff in the past, or at least comparable. And North Korea is not an ally!
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Argentina, where the President just had someone assassinated?
Pakistan, where there is still a major Taliban presence?
Israel, which used calorie counts to calculate precisely how much food aid to allow through to Gaza to keep Palestinians in a borderline starvation situation? Food too calorific? Not allowed in.
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Nope. False — because you can leave them.
Immigrating to Saudi Arabia is the proverbial light at the end of tunnel for many, even though there is no hope of citizenship for such immigrants. When the moronic Palestinians supported Saddam Hussein in 1990-ies, Saud's response was immediate deportation of them all — as a punishment.
You would
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Seriously??! Argentine, where a recently-elected President has just been publicly indicted over one assassination, is, in your opinion, worse than Cuba, where the decades-long dictator an his secret police have been assassinating and imprisoning hundreds for all of those decades — without any publicly-expressed disapproval?
So?..
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Not a very nice country, but still in a completely different league from Cuba.
Yes, they now have a major scandal with President accused of killing a prosecutor.
Now, can you even imagine Fidel Castro being indicted in Cuba today? Or do you not think, Fidel has ordered enough assassinations during his decades of being the Dear Leader?
Re: Helping Castro (Score:3)
Saudi Arabia also requires exit visas to leave the country - which can only be obtained with permission from your employer. For many foreign nationals in the country, a large fraction of whom are domestic servants, it is essentially impossible to leave as a result. It's made even worse by the fact that work visas are also specific to the employer, so they can't switch jobs either. This is a country that didn't even officially outlaw slavery until after Castro's revolution, but even so they've kept slave
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You don't cite any sources, so I had to look things up myself. Yes, one needs an exit visa [angloinfo.com], but only if the leaving is permanent. Which means, you don't need it to escape a repressive regime. On the contrary, Saudi Arabia remain a very attractive destination for millions of people — and has the luxury of using deportation as punishment.
Only if you weren't a citizen and entered the cou
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Then, if you travel back in time, you have despicable regimes in Iran, Chile, and Argentina.
Trade is ultimately for more powerful in making positive changes in these societies.
My guess is that you
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You mean seizing mobsters property who were destroying the country?
The US doesn't do that?
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A remarkably self-serving attitude. With such an approach, I can point at some other laws ripe for abolishing. Like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act [wikipedia.org] — why should American corporations be enjoined from using bribery to win foreign contracts? If the sophisticated Europeans and the even more sophisticated Chinese are free to use the tool to gain valuable business, why should America keep itself at disadvantage?
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Most European countries forbid bribery of foreign officials. As an example there's a recent case in the UK where two company directors have been convicted and sent to prison for bribing foreign officials.
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the situation in cuba only happened because of the USSR. an embargo made sense when the ussr was trying to smuggle nukes to cuba to use against us.
The situation in cuba only happened because of the USA. The USSR had to smuggle in nukes to use against the USA because the USA had positioned nukes in Turkey, targeting Moskow. Doing the embargo against cuba was a move driven by domestic politics; it ignored cause and effect.
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The IRBMs also weren't at all smuggled - they were shipped there on the decks of freighters and installed in plain sight, there was no attempt to pretend that there weren't IRBMs being installed.
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As far as I noticed, the embargo is making the people of Cuba even poorer. I doubt Castro family and cronies are much affected by it, money buys everything.
Exactly. Ever notice that in the countries where starvation is rampant, the leaders are all still fat?
I believe in the corrupting influence of prosperity. When the Cuban people (or any people) have nothing and nothing to look forward to, then they accept their lot. You have, in fact, what communism promotes - total financial equality. And, like pretty much every real-world communist worker's paradise, that means equally poor, except for the leaders, who aren't hurting at all.
On the other hand, when money st
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Just like in the US now! Well, except we tend to blame unions and illegal immigrants for it.
Meanwhile the thieves at the top keep on being more equal than others.
Equality is for Communists. Bow before your Masters, peasant!
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Thus doing what little they can to help finance Castro's regime. Good job!
You're probably typing this from a PC made in China. Financing the Chinese regime... the biggest threat to America. Why do you hate America?
Re:Helping Castro (Score:5, Insightful)
And every time you fill up the tank of your car, you help finance the Saudi Arabian theocratic dictatorship Good job!
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Thus doing what little they can to help finance Castro's regime. Good job!
Yeah, we shouldn't finance dictatorships such as Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait... Oh wait, I should have stopped that list after Cuba.
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1. wide embargos rarely hurt the regime, just the people.
2. We actively trade with worse. We have "most favored nation" status with China as far as trade, and guess where most of your clothes, electronics are made, in terrible conditions mind you. That gasoline in your car most likely comes from Saudi Arabia, and we are openly allies with other Gulf Arab states. There never was an ounce of "human rights" in the embargo, and its fairly obvious to anyone who's taken m
Re:Helping Castro (Score:5, Informative)
That gasoline in your car most likely comes from Saudi Arabia, and we are openly allies with other Gulf Arab states.
I've seen this repeated a bunch of times, but it's simply not true. Canada was far and away the largest source of foreign oil to the United States. In November 2014, the USA imported an average of 3.443 million barrels per day from Canada, and only imported 1.014 million barrels from Saudi Arabia. If you add up all the gulf states, and other less friendly nations, that the total imports to the US total 2.630 Mbpd (I totalled Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Iraq, Angola, Russia, Kuwait, and Algeria in that). Additionally, the United States extracts 9.020 Million barrels per day of crude.
The long and short of this is that the gasoline in your car most likely came from domestic crude, followed by Canadian crude, or crude from other friendly nations, and not from Saudi Arabia, or other less friendly nations.
Sources:
http://www.eia.gov/petroleum/i... [eia.gov]
http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pe... [eia.gov]
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Except of course for the bit where the major share-holders in most US energy companies, indeed some of their largest investors, are Saudi royals.
There's a reason the Bush family consider the Saudi royal family to be "members of the family".
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The production cost of oil in SA is about 6-10 dollar, in Canada it is much higher due to the nature of oil extraction. The profit margin is much higher for the Saudis and its 100% staterun as well. It wouldnt suprise me if the net profit for the Saudis is higher then the Canadians
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Why not just say it out loud? (Score:5, Insightful)
... call centre.
You hit the nail on the head... (Score:3)
Why not just say it out loud? Call center...
Not a bad way to get the average Cuban into the 21st Century.
It worked for India, first call centers, now they OWN the US development market.
We will start seeing an influx of Cubans up here in Washington State on the Microsoft campas as soon as they can swing the politics...
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Sure, but India had two things going for it that Cuba doesn't: they speak English...
Cuba is 90 miles from Miami. Many Cubans have relatives in the US. You don't think they have English speakers?
Re:You hit the nail on the head... (Score:4, Informative)
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Cuba is 90 miles from Miami. Many Cubans have relatives in the US. You don't think they have English speakers?
by the looks of it no, none of their relatives in the states seem to know it
A racist ill-informed comment made by an idiot.
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Re:You hit the nail on the head... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Sure, but India had two things going for it that Cuba doesn't: they speak English...
Cuba is 90 miles from Miami. Many Cubans have relatives in the US. You don't think they have English speakers?
The relatives in America speak English, but how would that cause the Cubans to learn it when their relatives in America can still speak Spanish?
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Expect they speak Spanish and not English. I work at one right now and our Spanish operations in Panama could probably do it for just as cheap there and unlike Cuba they have these things called fiber OC and T3 wan connections for traffic and voice which I doubt exist in Cuba currently.
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Great for Cuba (Score:2)
Bad for Americans.
I have to say this? I am in Desktop and some server support now and I deeply regret following the advice of do not code as only Indians will do it by 2010 or so. Kicking myself!
Why? College grads make $60,000 with 0 experience in the US?? I know this opinion is unpopular on Slashdot but it does add credence to maybe their is a shortage of good developers as only MBAs make this out of school.
If Cubans can do it cheaper and add freedom and prosperity to end tyranny like what happened in Chin
Re:Great for Cuba (Score:5, Interesting)
$60,000 is $28 US an hour salary. Here in Australia thats what we pay kids shifting boxes in supermarkets. As a programmer I wouldn't get out of bed for a wage that low.
Trust me, if your country is uncompetitive, its not wages.
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$60,000 is $28 US an hour salary. Here in Australia thats what we pay kids shifting boxes in supermarkets.
You can not make that kind of comparison without taking into account something called "cost of living". There are many civilized places where my wages are very nice indeed in comparison with the locals, but guess what? The cost of living is different.
Why do you think so many Americans retire to Costa Rica or other similar places? Because for the SAME level of "quality of life", it is less expensive.
But given the right-wing politics and level of personal freedom in Australia, I wouldn't live there if I were
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Sydney is very expensive but so are San Fransisco and New York which are for worse.
I find the GP statement not true unless the kid is a manger at the local super market in Australia or they have very high food costs :-)
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A million dollars wouldn't buy you much, sadly. Sydney, where many of the senior government politicians hail from, has one of the most overvalued property markets in the world.
Costa Rica, eh? I was thinking Chile or Uruguay...
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I'm a computer scientist who moved from Cincinnati to Melbourne and worked for a year there. Even with the cost-of-living, I worked a contract for $75k/year and could live very comfortable in Melbourne. I even left with more money than I arrived with (and I didn't even work the entire time; really only about 4 months total with some remote work still coming in from the US).
Minimum wage is Victoria was $14 an hour. Oh yea, and citizens got free medicare.
Don't confuse cost of living with cost of cheap electro
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Well I knew college kids who got $13/hr and were grateful to have a job here.
Seems 28 is way too high
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Our dollar has crashed, so bare in mind that $AU28 is now $US21.78 :)
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"$60,000 is $28 US an hour salary. Here in Australia thats what we pay kids shifting boxes in supermarkets."
No we don't. That's a night filler position, current award pay rates:
Casual: $23.15/h (At current exchange rates: US$18/h)
Casual Saturday: $25.01/h
Casual Sunday: $37.05/h
Casual Public Holiday: $50.94/h
Part-time/Full-time: $18.52/h (At current exchange rates: US$14.40/h)
Part-time/Full-time Saturday: $23.15/h (Some types of retail excluded and get base rate)
Part-time/Full-time Sunday: $37.05/h
Par
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$60,000 is $28 US an hour salary. Here in Australia thats what we pay kids shifting boxes in supermarkets. As a programmer I wouldn't get out of bed for a wage that low.
The US doesn't have such a generous welfare system as in Australia. If you did that kind of thing in the US, you'd be out on the streets and homeless in no time.
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Have you seen how much it costs to become a graduate of anything in the US?
Perhaps the High tech companies should start training people. Even starbucks can train people to make coffee. Coding to the standard these companies seem to want is not that expensive and they may earn some loyalty.
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Have you seen how much it costs to become a graduate of anything in the US?
Perhaps the High tech companies should start training people. Even starbucks can train people to make coffee. Coding to the standard these companies seem to want is not that expensive and they may earn some loyalty.
How do you know that barista will be a great coder when done? What will stop her for leaving as soon as training is finished?
Training should be up to the employee since they leave all the time. Working for the same company for 30 years is not true anymore. Times have changed so employers do not expect people to stay for more than 2 years anyway as they lay off when the stock price is too low.
Under these conditions even at higher prices it does not make economic sense to train but to outsource to get the wor
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If all, or even most, tech companies trained employees instead of requiring college degrees, they could pay those people less. If those people leave, who cares? Just pick up someone trained by some other company instead. The point is that it doesn't take long to train an employee at most tech jobs, it's significantly cheaper than college and the costs to the company are recouped by lower salaries. It should be a big win for everyone except the poor universities.
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What about productivity costs? People want things done NOW! If you have a team which all they do is train 50% of the time your productivity is cut in half.
As soon as they gain experience they can earn $60,000 a year and will dump you.
Yes there is a shortage of highly skilled IT developers and this may piss slashdotters off acting in their own interests but only the medical field is this common. Most college grads are happy they make $30,000 a year and that is considered a good job believe it or not for them
If they don't allow it... (Score:3)
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That said, open source is probably the closest the world has ever gotten to true communism.
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That said, open source is probably the closest the world has ever gotten to true communism.
Communism is centralized control of production. Free Software and Open Source are exactly the opposite. Patents and copyrights are much closer to Communism, as the Government issues directions for who gets to produce stuff.
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Communism is shared ownership of resources. It has nothing to do with who is making the decisions, though there is an assumption that each owner has a say.
Free/Open Source software is fairly close. Each contributor owns his piece. Some projects require copyright assignment, and those have no Communistic features.
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Communism is centralized control of production.
Nah, that's going too far. Communism is workers controlling the means of production. The Soviet Union (and others) attempted to achieve this by centralizing the control of production, but that's not necessary.
Europe (Score:2)
LOL That's "funny". So as of 2015 it is easier to sell software from Cuba to the US than it is to sell software from the EU to the EU. Praise the lord....
http://www.belastingdienst.nl/... [belastingdienst.nl]
Re:what do they have to offer (Score:5, Insightful)
Low wages?
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Do they have schools to train programmers?
Serious question, with severely limited internet, is there any good programmers in Cuba? Are they up on training in security, encryption, VPN's, large enterprise anything such as server clusters, managed switches, VOIP, etc.
With limited communication and access, I presume the opportunities are limited to hone skills.
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is there any good programmers in Cuba
s/is/are/
Access to schools that teach English are rare too, apparently
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Cuba actually has one of the best health care systems in the world, for their income, and a pretty good system even without correcting for income. The New England Journal of Medicine had several articles about that. American doctors who go to Cuba rate them highly.
They sent their doctors to Sweden for training. The Cubans established their own medical school, Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina (ELAM), which is the largest medical school in the world and trains doctors from Latin America and all over the wo
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Did they? Some were in foreign missions doing highly qualified medical field work for peanuts in nasty and/or poor countries, and did not leave/defect out of the fear of having family back home.
The U.S. probably has more doctors who are motivated primarily by money than anyplace else in the world.
In Cuba, medical school is free. The government tells them that they will get a free education, and in exchange they will serve the people. There are a a lot of people in Cuba, and around the world, who are willing to accept that deal. They have students from low-income areas in the U.S., like The Bronx and Mississippi, who want to go back and serve the people they grew up with. There are doctors who actu