The big operators during the inflationary period were the folks at the Fed--who were steadily expanding the money supply during this period. Also, the inflation had been going on for a while-since 1950 at least(it just sped up notably in the 70's). There is a whole literature on this topic. The basic contention of monetarists like Friedman is that with a stable money supply, you can't have general inflation just because one product goes up in price(i.e. the price of something else will have to come down).
You need to look at some other polls-we are talking a lot more than 16% of the population in the US opposing NAFTA. I couldn't find any good Mexican polls-but certainly there was strong resistance in Mexico to NAFTA among certain groups. "In Mexico, NAFTA's approval was quickly followed by an uprising amongst indigenous people led by the Zapatistas, and tension between them and the Mexican government remains a major issue".
Besides, the current law of US is that it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of stuff like nationality or race in employing folks(or even creating a church or other association). This isn't anything "voluntary"-your only choice is to leave the US.
More precisely, 55% of the American public in this poll indicated a desire for lower levels of legal immigration vs 81% of "leaders" wanting the same or higher levels. The reasons here are simple: a few people make a lot of money(or get increased political/social status) by a heavy flow of immigration. However, a lot of folks don't benefit or are harmed.
Now, if you want an example of critically analyzing the effects of immigration, look at this piece I did a while back.
There is a fundamental question here: should small, powerful interests be able to shape policy against the will of the public? I don't think that is a good idea-but that is the case with immigration policy in the US.
This poll is in no way misleading. It is a simple question. A clear majority of the US public want _less_ _legal_ immigration-81% of "leaders" want the present levels or more.
There _is_ corporate welfare here because the chance at a green card is being used instead of other compensation. If there were a temp worker program that really had strong guarentees that the temp worker would have to return, compensation for that program would be substantially higher. Lots of folks come as guest workers or illegal immigrants because they know that if they stick it out, they can get a green card-and the green card confers advantages. When employment for a company facilitates illegal immigration or when employment for a company gives a shot at a green card, the company can extract work from the immigrant employees they couldn't otherwise expect.
Now, you can say that social welfare programs and immigration restrictions should never exist, but they do, and preferentially giving certain companies ability to override those rules (which is what is happening now) confers specific advantage to those companies-which is what corporate welfare is about.
Database independence layers like ODBC and DBI work for quite a few applications. They don't work for performance intensive applications-but those are a small fraction of what folks need on a day to day basis.
Just FYI, kind of my point is this:the _last_ folks I expect will get all the features they are used to are the DBA's. The first agenda will be to enable people to make small applications that can be moved between databases. That way folks know that if for some reason they really do need the VLDB features oracle has-they can move. Now my sense is that the reason folks buy Oracle at this point more than the VLDB features, is the presence of large numbers of financial packages(both from Oracle and third parties). The next step in making Open Source databases really take off will be making an open source database compatible with those. However, again, this is a much smaller task than messing with windows-because the database interfaces those applications use are _documented_.
The big thing I'd add here: frontiers. If you have a viable frontier, immigration can be much more beneficial. If you have immigration without a frontier, and with a social welfare state, you have a giant contradiction. The US elites have turned their back on frontiers-and have as you pointed out fallen in love with imperialism and slavery.
I suggest you look at this piece I helped do. There is a statistical correlation between economic problems and high levels of immigration if you look on a state by state basis.
Take this one up to the basic economic theorists. A single item going up because of market trends is not general inflation-even if that item is an important commodity. You _always_ expect some items to go up and others down in a market economy. Inflation is a _general_ increase in prices. The oil price rise and the inflation of the seventies were connected-the inflation was largely a desperate gambit on the part of the government to avoid paying its bills after the oil price rise wammied the US economy.
Look at what NAFTA did to the rural Mexican economy-it pretty much destroyed it. NAFTA was pushed by much the same economic interests as benefited from illegal immigration in the US. This may not be formal coercion(i.e. rounding of slaves)-but it is isn't exactly "voluntary" or "democratic" either.
The grand prize is a green card. If the Green Card didn't confer real benefits(i.e. access to social services), interest it it would be much more minimal. Now, you can wish the US was a libertarian utopia-but it isn't-and no such country has sustained itself for long.
Inflation involves an increase in money supply and decrease in money demand. Switching away from the dollars as a global reserve currency will massively inflate the local money supply in the US(increase supply) _and_ will decrease overall demand for dollars. It won't just be foreign goods that will get expensive but _anything_ that can be potentially exported. Now, those of us that can get jobs overseas(say in the EU) may be able to do an overseas stint and pay our mortgages with cheap dollars.
It isn't just job export-it is uncontrolled immigration-which basically lets companies give immigrants a shot at a share of public assets(i.e. access to social welfare programs, access to infrastructure) instead of paying compensation. Current US immigration policy is a corporate welfare program-and another de facto liquidation of assets.
I'm troubled by what I read of this book. Basically little thought seems to have gone into looking at what it means to have a world economy driven by a military superpower with $500 Billion annual trade deficit. Measures of productivity comparing countries have little meaning the context of that kind of enormous liquidation of assets.
I was thinking more the overhead on programmers than the performance issues. What I've seen is that folks used to older languages like Cobol tend to find Python much easier to relate to than stuff like C# or Java. In Python, one can write short programs for doing just the sort of stuff these folks are used to.
One of the nice things about python is it works well both with web applications and as another reader pointed out with various libraries for client server development.
Your position is an extreme minority position according to every poll I've ever seen-the problem is that it is a position supported by wealthy and politically influential elites. If liberal immigration policy really benefits people outside those elites, why do we see this difference in opinion?
I think you are underestimating how small a subset of Oracle features most client applications use. The real question here: what needs to be done to start weaning a significant fraction of Oracle customers away from Oracle? MySQL and Postgresql are _already_ doing that because porting web applications done with Perl or Python is pretty straightforward(if the web applications use a standard interface like DBI and don't use Oracle specific SQL features). My point is that another chunk of work will grab another big chunk of applications. Just getting a PL-SQL (Oracle's SQL variant) layer for Postgresql would do quite a bit. Duplicating a subset of the Oracle C interface would do some more.
The reason why this works better than with windows: Many Windows applications are "black boxes"--and Microsoft controls a big chunk of the black box with their control over languages. A larger portion of Oracle applications are customer controlled. Now getting that last 1% of Oracle applications to port cleanly is going to be hard-but 90%+ of the user controlled Oracle applications use only a small subset of Oracle features-and many arent' even tied to stuff like Oracle Forms(an Oracle proprietary language).
Rossi and Gregoire are both rather weak, divisive candidates. The problem is the first-past-the-post system tends to produce such candidates. Alternative voting systems like approval voting or Condorcet Voting would get around much of this problem
If you are a smallish shop used to some of the older technologies, I suspect you'll be annoyed by the overhead in both C# and Java. I would take a serious look at Python. Python can be run under the JVM,.NET CLR or native-it is also a nice, accessible language for a team of your size.
I contributed in a very small way to Wine (the windows replacement) development early on. In retrospect, I think that database products like Postgresql are going to be the next big open source wave. Licenses for stuff like Oracle can be very expensive. Also, it simply isn't going to take nearly as much to develop products that are highly SQL language and library call compliant with products like Oracle and SQL Server compared to the effort that has gone into Wine. The next big wave after databases are really done well will be I think the various accounting packages. This is an area where lots of shops want a degree of customization/tailoring.
I think you missed the project success criterea here. If the objective of the project was to commit fraud, they've done a pretty decent job. I tend to think computers _are_ good for data processing jobs like election-computers are also very helpful devices for commiting fraud-particularly when the mangement team of the organization being attacked itn't tech savvy.
When I look at the fundamentals of the Diebold design, I can't see any fundamental purpose of the design of these machines other than to facilitate fraud. No strong authentication. No basic mean of tracking tampering. Closed source. No paper trail. Even places like India and Bulgaria allegedly have more secure voting machines. What does it say about the Democrats that they would also something like this to pass through unchallenged? I think part of it was that there just wasn't any decent technical review here. All the Diebold folks had to do is throw some money around.
I think this is a good point. I would add to this in the case of Diebold, that all intellectual property of the corporation should be placed under an Open Source license.
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The big operators during the inflationary period were the folks at the Fed--who were steadily expanding the money supply during this period. Also, the inflation had been going on for a while-since 1950 at least(it just sped up notably in the 70's). There is a whole literature on this topic. The basic contention of monetarists like Friedman is that with a stable money supply, you can't have general inflation just because one product goes up in price(i.e. the price of something else will have to come down).
I couldn't find any good Mexican polls-but certainly there was strong resistance in Mexico to NAFTA among certain groups. "In Mexico, NAFTA's approval was quickly followed by an uprising amongst indigenous people led by the Zapatistas, and tension between them and the Mexican government remains a major issue".
Besides, the current law of US is that it is illegal to discriminate on the basis of stuff like nationality or race in employing folks(or even creating a church or other association). This isn't anything "voluntary"-your only choice is to leave the US.
Now, if you want an example of critically analyzing the effects of immigration, look at this piece I did a while back.
There is a fundamental question here: should small, powerful interests be able to shape policy against the will of the public? I don't think that is a good idea-but that is the case with immigration policy in the US.
This poll is in no way misleading. It is a simple question. A clear majority of the US public want _less_ _legal_ immigration-81% of "leaders" want the present levels or more.
Now, you can say that social welfare programs and immigration restrictions should never exist, but they do, and preferentially giving certain companies ability to override those rules (which is what is happening now) confers specific advantage to those companies-which is what corporate welfare is about.
Database independence layers like ODBC and DBI work for quite a few applications. They don't work for performance intensive applications-but those are a small fraction of what folks need on a day to day basis.
Just FYI, kind of my point is this:the _last_ folks I expect will get all the features they are used to are the DBA's. The first agenda will be to enable people to make small applications that can be moved between databases. That way folks know that if for some reason they really do need the VLDB features oracle has-they can move. Now my sense is that the reason folks buy Oracle at this point more than the VLDB features, is the presence of large numbers of financial packages(both from Oracle and third parties). The next step in making Open Source databases really take off will be making an open source database compatible with those. However, again, this is a much smaller task than messing with windows-because the database interfaces those applications use are _documented_.
The big thing I'd add here:
frontiers. If you have a viable frontier, immigration can be much more beneficial. If you have immigration without a frontier, and with a social welfare state, you have a giant contradiction.
The US elites have turned their back on frontiers-and have as you pointed out fallen in love with imperialism and slavery.
I would suggest you read De Tocqueville on the issue of slavery. You may want to also look the differences between elite and public opinion on the topic.
Take this one up to the basic economic theorists. A single item going up because of market trends is not general inflation-even if that item is an important commodity. You _always_ expect some items to go up and others down in a market economy. Inflation is a _general_ increase in prices. The oil price rise and the inflation of the seventies were connected-the inflation was largely a desperate gambit on the part of the government to avoid paying its bills after the oil price rise wammied the US economy.
Look at what NAFTA did to the rural Mexican economy-it pretty much destroyed it. NAFTA was pushed by much the same economic interests as benefited from illegal immigration in the US. This may not be formal coercion(i.e. rounding of slaves)-but it is isn't exactly "voluntary" or "democratic" either.
The grand prize is a green card. If the Green Card didn't confer real benefits(i.e. access to social services), interest it it would be much more minimal. Now, you can wish the US was a libertarian utopia-but it isn't-and no such country has sustained itself for long.
Inflation involves an increase in money supply and decrease in money demand. Switching away from the dollars as a global reserve currency will massively inflate the local money supply in the US(increase supply) _and_ will decrease overall demand for dollars. It won't just be foreign goods that will get expensive but _anything_ that can be potentially exported. Now, those of us that can get jobs overseas(say in the EU) may be able to do an overseas stint and pay our mortgages with cheap dollars.
It isn't just job export-it is uncontrolled immigration-which basically lets companies give immigrants a shot at a share of public assets(i.e. access to social welfare programs, access to infrastructure) instead of paying compensation. Current US immigration policy is a corporate welfare program-and another de facto liquidation of assets.
I'm troubled by what I read of this book. Basically little thought seems to have gone into looking at what it means to have a world economy driven by a military superpower with $500 Billion annual trade deficit. Measures of productivity comparing countries have little meaning the context of that kind of enormous liquidation of assets.
I was thinking more the overhead on programmers than the performance issues. What I've seen is that folks used to older languages like Cobol tend to find Python much easier to relate to than stuff like C# or Java. In Python, one can write short programs for doing just the sort of stuff these folks are used to.
One of the nice things about python is it works well both with web applications and as another reader pointed out with various libraries for client server development.
Your position is an extreme minority position according to every poll I've ever seen-the problem is that it is a position supported by wealthy and politically influential elites. If liberal immigration policy really benefits people outside those elites, why do we see this difference in opinion?
The reason why this works better than with windows: Many Windows applications are "black boxes"--and Microsoft controls a big chunk of the black box with their control over languages. A larger portion of Oracle applications are customer controlled. Now getting that last 1% of Oracle applications to port cleanly is going to be hard-but 90%+ of the user controlled Oracle applications use only a small subset of Oracle features-and many arent' even tied to stuff like Oracle Forms(an Oracle proprietary language).
Rossi and Gregoire are both rather weak, divisive candidates. The problem is the first-past-the-post system tends to produce such candidates. Alternative voting systems like approval voting or Condorcet Voting would get around much of this problem
If you are a smallish shop used to some of the older technologies, I suspect you'll be annoyed by the overhead in both C# and Java. I would take a serious look at Python. Python can be run under the JVM, .NET CLR or native-it is also a nice, accessible language for a team of your size.
I contributed in a very small way to Wine (the windows replacement) development early on. In retrospect, I think that database products like Postgresql are going to be the next big open source wave. Licenses for stuff like Oracle can be very expensive. Also, it simply isn't going to take nearly as much to develop products that are highly SQL language and library call compliant with products like Oracle and SQL Server compared to the effort that has gone into Wine. The next big wave after databases are really done well will be I think the various accounting packages. This is an area where lots of shops want a degree of customization/tailoring.
I think you missed the project success criterea here. If the objective of the project was to commit fraud, they've done a pretty decent job. I tend to think computers _are_ good for data processing jobs like election-computers are also very helpful devices for commiting fraud-particularly when the mangement team of the organization being attacked itn't tech savvy.
When I look at the fundamentals of the Diebold design, I can't see any fundamental purpose of the design of these machines other than to facilitate fraud. No strong authentication. No basic mean of tracking tampering. Closed source. No paper trail. Even places like India and Bulgaria allegedly have more secure voting machines. What does it say about the Democrats that they would also something like this to pass through unchallenged? I think part of it was that there just wasn't any decent technical review here. All the Diebold folks had to do is throw some money around.
I think this is a good point. I would add to this in the case of Diebold, that all intellectual property of the corporation should be placed under an Open Source license.