That is why I have suggested the fees on corporate sponsored H-1b visas-to the extent any such visas exist-should be raised considerably, say to $225,000 per visa(which is roughtly the value of lifetime benefits to oneself and descendents US citizenship confers compared to Indian citizenship). Companies recruiting exceptional talent could still afford to pay those kinds of rates. The revenues could be devoted to developing and expanding opportunities for US based talent. Now, I don't think Gates is sincere about really wanting more visas on a basis that doesn't hurt competive US citizens.
What is especially interesting here: despite the fact that Torvalds arrived in the US on an H-1b visa, on average, open source companies are much less likely to use that program than Microsoft and its allies. Why does Gates need that program so much when his strongest competitor doesn't? Personally, I think the program as it is now structured is corporate welfare-and subsidization of incompetence. If H-1b were curtailed significantly, Linux would be moving onto the desktop faster.
Rigging an election via tampering with voting machines has limits in a country that takes itself seriously as a Democracy. Basically it means someone can dicker with elections to the degree that polls have errors. If they get too far out of line, it gets obvious--and there will be hell to pay.
Personally, I see no other purpose in the design of Diebold voting systems other than to facilitate fraud. Seriously, there just aren't any really good protections built into the whole device.
Now, that it appears very likely that in 2008, Democrats will control both houses of congress and the presidency,I can understand why the folks at Diebold are worried about things like future investigations of their business. I really can believe it might make business sense for the Diebold management to dump their voting machines business at a loss-and let somebody else hold that hot potatoe. I would also expect some substantial managerial turnover is in order too.
Now, the problem is that Diebold is just the most visible of several corrupt companies here. I wouldn't forget about ES&S--which is another major player in the market-and which has similar problems.
The real question is what would be a better way to reward inventors than intellectual property arrangements. IP doesn't reward creation of an invention-but its restriction. It is clear that major corporate interests have abuse IP protection in various ways. The problem is that an alternative system isn't exactly obvious. The economist Henry George proposed replacing the system of patents and copyrights with a system of prize awards over 100 years ago. However, determining what inventions should be rewarded is still going to be difficult.
What I think makes this article interesting is the history of religious warfare we've seen in Russia over the years. It sounds like things are heating up there again.
I would suggest reading the following from Paul Craig Roberts of Hoover Institute:
Software engineers and information technology workers have been especially hard hit. Jobs offshoring, which began with call centers and back-office operations, is rapidly moving up the value chain. Business Week's Michael Mandel (September 15, 2005: ) compared starting salaries in 2005 with those in 2001. He found a 12.7% decline in computer science pay, a 12% decline in computer engineering pay, and a 10.2% decline in electrical engineering pay. Marketing salaries experienced a 6.5% decline and business administration salaries fell 5.7%. Despite Sarbanes-Oxley, a make-work law for accountants, even accounting majors were offered 2.3% less.
Using the same sources as the Business Week article (salary data from the National Association of Colleges and Employers and BLS data for inflation adjustment), Professor Norm Matloff at the University of California, Davis, made the same comparison for master degree graduates. He found that between 2001 and 2005 starting pay for master degrees in computer science, computer engineering and electrical engineering fell 6.6%, 13.7%, and 9.4% respectively.
As it is, where immigration is restricted, pay packets right *now* are unnaturally elevated. Programmers and plenty of other occupations have become accustomed to being paid more for their skills than their skills properly command. Programmers have had their incomes plummet in recent years due to H-1b/L-1 expansion. On the other hand those that own property have made out like bandits. Perhaps it is the holders of substantial concentration of wealth that are getting more than their skills "rightfully" command here. There is a lot ot be said for Nader's suggestion of a tax on estates over $5 Million-and removing _all_ taxes on income under $100,000.
I have less objection to income that comes from immigration protection because it is broadly distributed. The big problem in the the US is 1% of the population control over 30% of all assets.
The thing is Cresanti is pursuing a classic corporate welfare strategy. I discuss this in my articles here. These visas have a market value of about $100,000 each. They cost companies a fraction of that amount. If the visas were prices appropriately, there would be no shortage--and US wages would adjust somewhat.
There never will be enough IT workers when that profession gets corporate welfare visas like H-1 and L-1 at low rates. Businesses in competive economies like Singapore pay competitive prices for their visas.
People at a site like Slashdot lean a little left and think of the real US as the nation created by the founders in the late 1700s, but a far greater number are the ethical and intellectual descendants of the deliberately ignorant Puritans who came here in the 1600s.
Keep in mind, the religious denominations that trace their heritage to the Puritans are the Unitarians and Congregationalists. Those aren't exactly among the most conservative denominations out there.
The original Plymouth colony was extremely well educated by the standards of its day. Fundamentalism in the US has little connection to the Plymouth colony or the folks with heritage in that venture. See "Albion's Seed" by Prof. Fisher of Brandeis University for more on this.
Now, I tend to agree there are some real problems with the US attitude towards science and education. The founders of the US were trying to create a different kind of "nobility" with the system of invention Patents in the US(remember, the original patents were patents of nobility). It wasn't that long ago, that a lot of the uber rich in america made their money largely through stuff like inventions. Franklin and Jefferson were both noted inventors.
What I find sadder personally is that the US government has degenerated largely into rule by lawyers and financial elites.
Well, quite a few folks have been writing about this stuff.
I understand the official policy is that pure fusion devices don't exist. The big thing to get though is that pure fusion devices were considered by the Orion team as the key to getting their stuff to work-and they fully expected pure fusion devices to be created.
Here's the thing, creating significant orbital infrastructure would be greatly faciliated by a source of raw materials, oxygen, iron and others needed. The moon might not have everything you'd need-but it would have quite a bit. There is _serious_ value in having cheap materials orbit. If nothing else, folks could build shielding for satellites-but I expect the market would evolve rapidly here. What would it be worth to get oxygen from moon rocks instead hauling it to orbit(say for the international space station or other ventures)? A great deal I expect.
It is theoretically far cheaper to move things from the moon to earth orbit than from the earths surface to that same orbit. The main problem is this kind of infrastructure doesnt exist.
actually, there _was_ a proposal to use fission-free hydrogen bomb-which wouldn't have _nearly_ the negative environmental impact as the original orion proposal. Now, that whole area of research is _VERY_ classified. The problem is the same technology that lets you build a fission free device also might let you build a _REALLY_ small suitcase nuke--and that is a technology a lot of folks are scared to release into the world.
The question isn't one of cost-but costs versus return on investment--at least for private businesses.
The amount of cargo necessary to get this started isn't hugely different from apollo from what I can see-and the potential return is much greater.
What is it worth to have the ability to get large amounts of raw materials inexpensively into orbit? That opens options for stuff like building rather substantial orbital structures. That strikes me as a rather important type of infrastructure.
What puzzles me is why there hasn't been a bigger push for creation of a Lunar Space Elevator. A lunar space elevator could be built with existing materials--though the launch costs would be significant.
We'd learn a lot from this kind of practical project--and raw getting materials into orbit for a variety of purposes would get much less expensive.
First off, in the era of the internet, quarentine would be _VERY_ different than in previous eras(I'm assuming that if autism were found to be infectious, a lot of family members like myself would also wind up quarentined).
Also you use the term _we_ here. I don't see anything in any of your writings indicating that you have any real direct experience with the more severe types of autism.
Frankly, I find the kind of writing I saw here as seriously getting in the way of serious scientific investigation, prevention and cure.
I happen to be a parent/caregiver to an autistic child. Folks that aren't in that position really don't understand very well what this means. The problem is that without physical tests of a physical disease, you can't really say you understand the phenomena well enough to make a really good stab at prevention/treatment. You really need those tests to have a good scientific foundation for further investigation. If autism is caused by an infectious disease, I would be prefectly willing to be quarentined.
The sad fact is that a lot of autistic kids already are being shunned/locked up-and their only real hope is for research that will help improve their situation.
Once you have a good biological test for the existance of autism, you can start to look at developing good tests for predicting _vulnerability_ to autism. _Some_ of that vulnerability might be genetic--but there are inherent limits in that direction. I can easily imagine that a good test for prediciting vulnerability to autism might help a great deal with prevention. Right now that best such physical predictors of which I'm aware is : male, type A blood type. There are some other risk factors(i.e. older mother under high stress during pregnancy).
Until Bernard Rimland's work, the medical community thought of autism as a _personality disorder_. Rimland proved fairly conclusively that autism is not caused by stuff like "refrigerator mothers". However the real question here is what _does_ cause autism. Genes alone cannot _cause_ autism. We know that 5% of identical twins that are autistic have a twin that isn't autistic. Folks have spent a lot of time researching possible environmental factors-but that is impeded by the fact that the behavioral tests are both expensive to conduct, relatively expensive and may be clustering stuff together that is really caused by rather different things. Once you have a set of physical tests, then you've gotten a handle on the basic science here. Right now, it is really problematic. We know that lead and mercury exposure can cause increased autism rates in some populations-but we don't necessarily know what those populations are--or which cases of autism are being caused by that risk factor. Just doing the physical tests will break things down a lot. Fudenberg/Singh had at least 6 distinct tests the last I spoke with them-and i think those could accurately identify 97% or so of autistic kids with fairly few false positives. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if different genetic vulnerabilities an environmental factors are involved for each one of the 6(most of these were viral exposures--plus mercury). Once you break things down though, other stuff might be done on the epidemiology of autism-spectrum disorders.
What Fudenberg and Singh are doing is real science-but unfortunately isn't getting a lot of recognition or attention. Baron-Cohen strikes me as more a media phenonmena. This stuff just isn't very useful-or good science.
Even the inclusion of the "Kanner kids" with the newer autistic populations is pretty questionable. The "Kanner kids" are in various ways rather different than the newer autistic populations we've seen in recent years(i.e. a lot of the kids from newer population are more affectionate for example).
Professor Baron-Cohen said the rise in autism may be linked to the fact that it has become easier for systemizers to meet each other, with the advent of international conferences, greater job opportunities and more women working in these fields.
Byrna Seigal at UCSF said the same thing years ago. Neither one had any real data to back up their claim-because there isn't any. Autism rose in places like Silicon Valley rather rapidly. Changes in mating patterns tend to be more gradual. Also, the changes in mating patterns that were going on in the hotspots were places where there was more stuff going on like marriage of folks from rather different parts of the world(i.e. a big chunk of white male Silicon Valley engineers are married to Asian or Hispanic women).
Here's the basic problem: at this point, there is no reliable _physical_ test for autism.
All diagnosis of autism has to be done using behavioral analysis--and the criteria very greatly accross legal jurisdictions(i.e. what is "autistic" in california may not be in Wyoming).
The genetic line of reasoning is also rather questionable. There are clearly genetic risk factors(about 90% of autistic are type A blood type and male for example)--however the percentage of Type A kids that are autistic varies a _lot_ in various areas. Even among identical twins, raised together, about 5% of those autistics have a twin that isn't that may go down further if you change the line to explude milder lines of autism)--and there are lines of research that claim there are risk factors that aren't genetic that all twins would share.
What I think we need most urgently here: a good, biological test that can sort out autistic from non-autistic kids reliably. The closest thing I've seen to this is the work of V.K. Singh at Utah State and Hugh Fudenberg(formerly of UCSF).
I expect we are seeing several different viral and environmental causes of autism spectrum disorders. There may genetic susceptability--just like populations differ in how much they are impacted by various infectious diseases. However claiming that stuff like assortive mating and genetics is causing autism just isn't good scientific method.
What bothers me here: It would be pretty simple to ship the ipod with a feature that would allow a parent to set the device so it _couldn't_ be played loudly. It is one thing to say that competent adults are making bad decisions here-but there are a lot of children or disabled folks that use these devices. It just wouldn't take much to give greater parental control here.
I don't have a problem with the death penalty for serious fraud. I _do_ have a serious problem about systematic torture in the US prison system. Execs don't get that treatment even if they wind up in prison-they are generally too old for the tastes of rapists-and usually smart enough to have at least a little money someplace to buy protection.
Think about what you are advocating here when you advocate use of torture(administered by felons) as punishment.
Slashdot Mirror
That is why I have suggested the fees on corporate sponsored H-1b visas-to the extent any such visas exist-should be raised considerably, say to $225,000 per visa(which is roughtly the value of lifetime benefits to oneself and descendents US citizenship confers compared to Indian citizenship). Companies recruiting exceptional talent could still afford to pay those kinds of rates. The revenues could be devoted to developing and expanding opportunities for US based talent. Now, I don't think Gates is sincere about really wanting more visas on a basis that doesn't hurt competive US citizens.
What do you expect from a state where dead people voting is a cherished local tradition?
What is especially interesting here: despite the fact that Torvalds arrived in the US on an H-1b visa, on average, open source companies are much less likely to use that program than Microsoft and its allies. Why does Gates need that program so much when his strongest competitor doesn't? Personally, I think the program as it is now structured is corporate welfare-and subsidization of incompetence. If H-1b were curtailed significantly, Linux would be moving onto the desktop faster.
Rigging an election via tampering with voting machines has limits in a country that takes itself seriously as a Democracy. Basically it means someone can dicker with elections to the degree that polls have errors. If they get too far out of line, it gets obvious--and there will be hell to pay.
Personally, I see no other purpose in the design of Diebold voting systems other than to facilitate fraud. Seriously, there just aren't any really good protections built into the whole device.
Now, that it appears very likely that in 2008, Democrats will control both houses of congress and the presidency,I can understand why the folks at Diebold are worried about things like future investigations of their business. I really can believe it might make business sense for the Diebold management to dump their voting machines business at a loss-and let somebody else hold that hot potatoe. I would also expect some substantial managerial turnover is in order too.
Now, the problem is that Diebold is just the most visible of several corrupt companies here. I wouldn't forget about ES&S--which is another major player in the market-and which has similar problems.
The real question is what would be a better way to reward inventors than intellectual property arrangements. IP doesn't reward creation of an invention-but its restriction. It is clear that major corporate interests have abuse IP protection in various ways. The problem is that an alternative system isn't exactly obvious. The economist Henry George proposed replacing the system of patents and copyrights with a system of prize awards over 100 years ago. However, determining what inventions should be rewarded is still going to be difficult.
What I think makes this article interesting is the history of religious warfare we've seen in Russia over the years. It sounds like things are heating up there again.
I would suggest reading the following from Paul Craig Roberts of Hoover Institute:
Software engineers and information technology workers have been especially hard hit. Jobs offshoring, which began with call centers and back-office operations, is rapidly moving up the value chain. Business Week's Michael Mandel (September 15, 2005: ) compared starting salaries in 2005 with those in 2001. He found a 12.7% decline in computer science pay, a 12% decline in computer engineering pay, and a 10.2% decline in electrical engineering pay. Marketing salaries experienced a 6.5% decline and business administration salaries fell 5.7%. Despite Sarbanes-Oxley, a make-work law for accountants, even accounting majors were offered 2.3% less.
Using the same sources as the Business Week article (salary data from the National Association of Colleges and Employers and BLS data for inflation adjustment), Professor Norm Matloff at the University of California, Davis, made the same comparison for master degree graduates. He found that between 2001 and 2005 starting pay for master degrees in computer science, computer engineering and electrical engineering fell 6.6%, 13.7%, and 9.4% respectively.
As it is, where immigration is restricted, pay packets right *now* are unnaturally elevated. Programmers and plenty of other occupations have become accustomed to being paid more for their skills than their skills properly command.
Programmers have had their incomes plummet in recent years due to H-1b/L-1 expansion. On the other hand those that own property have made out like bandits. Perhaps it is the holders of substantial concentration of wealth that are getting more than their skills "rightfully" command here. There is a lot ot be said for Nader's suggestion of a tax on estates over $5 Million-and removing _all_ taxes on income under $100,000.
I have less objection to income that comes from immigration protection because it is broadly distributed. The big problem in the the US is 1% of the population control over 30% of all assets.
The thing is Cresanti is pursuing a classic corporate welfare strategy. I discuss this in my articles here. These visas have a market value of about $100,000 each. They cost companies a fraction of that amount. If the visas were prices appropriately, there would be no shortage--and US wages would adjust somewhat.
There never will be enough IT workers when that profession gets corporate welfare visas like H-1 and L-1 at low rates. Businesses in competive economies like Singapore pay competitive prices for their visas.
People at a site like Slashdot lean a little left and think of the real US as the nation created by the founders in the late 1700s, but a far greater number are the ethical and intellectual descendants of the deliberately ignorant Puritans who came here in the 1600s. Keep in mind, the religious denominations that trace their heritage to the Puritans are the Unitarians and Congregationalists. Those aren't exactly among the most conservative denominations out there. The original Plymouth colony was extremely well educated by the standards of its day. Fundamentalism in the US has little connection to the Plymouth colony or the folks with heritage in that venture. See "Albion's Seed" by Prof. Fisher of Brandeis University for more on this. Now, I tend to agree there are some real problems with the US attitude towards science and education. The founders of the US were trying to create a different kind of "nobility" with the system of invention Patents in the US(remember, the original patents were patents of nobility). It wasn't that long ago, that a lot of the uber rich in america made their money largely through stuff like inventions. Franklin and Jefferson were both noted inventors. What I find sadder personally is that the US government has degenerated largely into rule by lawyers and financial elites.
Well, quite a few folks have been writing about this stuff.
I understand the official policy is that pure fusion devices don't exist. The big thing to get though is that pure fusion devices were considered by the Orion team as the key to getting their stuff to work-and they fully expected pure fusion devices to be created.
Here's the thing, creating significant orbital infrastructure would be greatly faciliated by a source of raw materials, oxygen, iron and others needed. The moon might not have everything you'd need-but it would have quite a bit. There is _serious_ value in having cheap materials orbit. If nothing else, folks could build shielding for satellites-but I expect the market would evolve rapidly here. What would it be worth to get oxygen from moon rocks instead hauling it to orbit(say for the international space station or other ventures)? A great deal I expect.
It is theoretically far cheaper to move things from the moon to earth orbit than from the earths surface to that same orbit. The main problem is this kind of infrastructure doesnt exist.
actually, there _was_ a proposal to use fission-free hydrogen bomb-which wouldn't have _nearly_ the negative environmental impact as the original orion proposal. Now, that whole area of research is _VERY_ classified. The problem is the same technology that lets you build a fission free device also might let you build a _REALLY_ small suitcase nuke--and that is a technology a lot of folks are scared to release into the world.
The question isn't one of cost-but costs versus return on investment--at least for private businesses.
The amount of cargo necessary to get this started isn't hugely different from apollo from what I can see-and the potential return is much greater.
What is it worth to have the ability to get large amounts of raw materials inexpensively into orbit? That opens options for stuff like building rather substantial orbital structures. That strikes me as a rather important type of infrastructure.
What puzzles me is why there hasn't been a bigger push for creation of a Lunar Space Elevator. A lunar space elevator could be built with existing materials--though the launch costs would be significant. We'd learn a lot from this kind of practical project--and raw getting materials into orbit for a variety of purposes would get much less expensive.
First off, in the era of the internet, quarentine would be _VERY_ different than in previous eras(I'm assuming that if autism were found to be infectious, a lot of family members like myself would also wind up quarentined).
Also you use the term _we_ here. I don't see anything in any of your writings indicating that you have any real direct experience with the more severe types of autism.
Frankly, I find the kind of writing I saw here as seriously getting in the way of serious scientific investigation, prevention and cure.
I happen to be a parent/caregiver to an autistic child. Folks that aren't in that position really don't understand very well what this means. The problem is that without physical tests of a physical disease, you can't really say you understand the phenomena well enough to make a really good stab at prevention/treatment. You really need those tests to have a good scientific foundation for further investigation. If autism is caused by an infectious disease, I would be prefectly willing to be quarentined.
The sad fact is that a lot of autistic kids already are being shunned/locked up-and their only real hope is for research that will help improve their situation.
Once you have a good biological test for the existance of autism, you can start to look at developing good tests for predicting _vulnerability_ to autism. _Some_ of that vulnerability might be genetic--but there are inherent limits in that direction. I can easily imagine that a good test for prediciting vulnerability to autism might help a great deal with prevention. Right now that best such physical predictors of which I'm aware is : male, type A blood type. There are some other risk factors(i.e. older mother under high stress during pregnancy).
both expensive to conduct, relatively expensive and may be clustering stuff together that is really caused by rather different things. Once you have a set of physical tests, then you've gotten a handle on the basic science here. Right now, it is really problematic. We know that lead and mercury exposure can cause increased autism rates in some populations-but we don't necessarily know what those populations are--or which cases of autism are being caused by that risk factor. Just doing the physical tests will break things down a lot. Fudenberg/Singh had at least 6 distinct tests the last I spoke with them-and i think those could accurately identify 97% or so of autistic kids with fairly few false positives. Now, I wouldn't be surprised if different genetic vulnerabilities an environmental factors are involved for each one of the 6(most of these were viral exposures--plus mercury). Once you break things down though, other stuff might be done on the epidemiology of autism-spectrum disorders.
What Fudenberg and Singh are doing is real science-but unfortunately isn't getting a lot of recognition or attention. Baron-Cohen strikes me as more a media phenonmena. This stuff just isn't very useful-or good science.
Even the inclusion of the "Kanner kids" with the newer autistic populations is pretty questionable. The "Kanner kids" are in various ways rather different than the newer autistic populations we've seen in recent years(i.e. a lot of the kids from newer population are more affectionate for example).
Byrna Seigal at UCSF said the same thing years ago. Neither one had any real data to back up their claim-because there isn't any. Autism rose in places like Silicon Valley rather rapidly. Changes in mating patterns tend to be more gradual. Also, the changes in mating patterns that were going on in the hotspots were places where there was more stuff going on like marriage of folks from rather different parts of the world(i.e. a big chunk of white male Silicon Valley engineers are married to Asian or Hispanic women).
This theory belongs right up there with the "refrigerator mother" hypothesis.
Here's the basic problem:
at this point, there is no reliable _physical_ test for autism.
All diagnosis of autism has to be done using behavioral analysis--and the criteria very greatly accross legal jurisdictions(i.e. what is "autistic" in california may not be in Wyoming).
The genetic line of reasoning is also rather questionable. There are clearly genetic risk factors(about 90% of autistic are type A blood type and male for example)--however the percentage of Type A kids that are autistic varies a _lot_ in various areas. Even among identical twins, raised together, about 5% of those autistics have a twin that isn't that may go down further if you change the line to explude milder lines of autism)--and there are lines of research that claim there are risk factors that aren't genetic that all twins would share.
What I think we need most urgently here:
a good, biological test that can sort out autistic from non-autistic kids reliably. The closest thing I've seen to this is the work of V.K. Singh at Utah State and Hugh Fudenberg(formerly of UCSF).
I expect we are seeing several different viral and environmental causes of autism spectrum disorders. There may genetic susceptability--just like populations differ in how much they are impacted by various infectious diseases. However claiming that stuff like assortive mating and genetics is causing autism just isn't good scientific method.
What bothers me here:
It would be pretty simple to ship the ipod with a feature that would allow a parent to set the device so it _couldn't_ be played loudly. It is one thing to say that competent adults are making bad decisions here-but there are a lot of children or disabled folks that use these devices. It just wouldn't take much to give greater parental control here.
I don't have a problem with the death penalty for serious fraud. I _do_ have a serious problem about systematic torture in the US prison system. Execs don't get that treatment even if they wind up in prison-they are generally too old for the tastes of rapists-and usually smart enough to have at least a little money someplace to buy protection.
Think about what you are advocating here when you advocate use of torture(administered by felons) as punishment.