But to think that the society of the US is any free'er than that of China (it may be for a privileged group but that's about it) is almost absurd.
This is absolutely not correct. In the US, there is indeed constant propaganda that overwhelms our senses, but there are multiple, conflicting streams from a diverse range of sources covering the entire spectrum, and many of those streams directly attack and criticize the government and specific leaders with impunity. This situation does not exist in China. The actual set of ideas that flow through the US system may not be any more true or desirable than the in the Chinese system, but the US is absolutely much more free than the Chinese system solely due to the practical ability of anyone to inject their two-cent's worth of opinions and have those opinions reach the masses.
Your average corporate mid-level manager in the US makes what? 4-8x what a grunt worker would? 30k vs 120k?
Imagine that your mid-level managers in all of those factories make 100x what a farmer only 40min away makes. Or 10-20x what the technician who travels 40 min a day (one way) makes. That's a level of wealth disparity that's common place in every street in Chinese cities but pretty rare in the US.
Unfortunately, here in Silicon Valley, 10-20x income disparities are not uncommon at all.:(
I said Shenzhen. Not China. The thing people even in the US can't grasp is just how *vast* China's population is.
Fair enough. China does have more people, but Americans are also well acquainted with income disparities.:)
So, looking at average annual wages for manufacturing jobs in Shenzhen vs. the US (assuming a 6.76 RMB to USD exchange rate), the US wages are about $61k compared to $15.5k in Shenzhen or about 4x. Perhaps if you compare the high-end tail in Shenzhen to the low-end tail in the US, the wages might start being comparable.
Want to know why people locate to Shenzhen? Go there. The actual wages there are pretty damn high actually and the cost of living rivals most of the US. But if you have an idea for a gadget or product, you're up and running in easily 1/10th of the time it takes in the US and to ramp up production to the millions? That ain't happening anywhere in the US.
I don't believe that wages and costs of living are even close to parity. This US government site says that even though Chinese wages are indeed increasingly much faster than in the US, US wages would still be 4 times higher even three years from now, i.e., there is currently about an order of magnitude difference in wages. Costs of living comparisons from just about any online cost of living website show that living costs in Shenzhen are about half of the costs in the cheapest US cities.
There is probably some truth in the idea that China sometimes offers fewer regulatory barrier to manufacturing. However, some significant part of those lower barriers is based in turning a blind eye to abuses of working conditions, the environment, product quality/safety, etc.
that the political family connections he had tipped him off so he could get out of the market before it crashed. But hey, the shoe shine story sounds much happier and lets go on us pretend we're not an oligarchy where privilege and nepotism are weighted more than good sense. I suppose if I was going to pass a story down I'd pick it instead of "nepotism".
They story gets even better. Joe Kennedy gets rich on insider trading, then becomes the first SEC chairman and proceeds to outlaw the very trick that allowed him to become rich.
about the only thing worse than religions is outlawing religions.
Agnosticism and atheism are religions. It's just that they are more like the loosely organized religions and use different teminology. But some of their adherents can be just as mean and evangelical. Imposing and outlawing religion are similar in that both involve mind control and the outlawing of individual free thought.
Outlawing religion does not really help. Look at the Soviets: they basically did that and they still did the whole "opression in the name of ideology" thing.
Oppression is not a matter of religion but of personality. Mean people are mean, regardless of their religion, political persuasion, or other dimension of philosophical bent.
What do the distributions across entire national populations look like? Averages only convey a partial view of the true distribution. Does the distribution include all households or just those with internet access? I would like to see a metric like percentage of all households with access speeds above a given threshold, like 25Mbps. That distinction between high and low speeds is perhaps more practical than how much higher than 25Mps access speeds can reach. Alternatively, average ping times or percentage of households with ping times below some threshold would be interesting.
The problem with MAGA is that it implies that America stopped being great -- which isn't something most Americans believe.
Most Americans view the greatness of America in the context of the current quality of their own standard of living. Unfortunately over the last several years, many Americans have struggled to maintain their standard of living and for them, America (i.e., their perception of the part of America that they most clearly see) stopped being great. This economic struggle has been particularly challenging for many Americans who don't read slashdot and haven't necessarily benefited from the uptick in the tech industry.
People from China, and the rest of Asia, have been coming to North America for at least 150 years so I don't understand where you are saying this is the second and third generation. There were spikes in immigration for gold rushes and building of the Canadian railways (don't know about the American ones).
This is exactly my point. The latter generations of Chinese-Americans don't have European faces but otherwise "look" like Americans. They have American names, eat American food, play American sports, listen to American music, etc. It's the first generation that struggles to adopt the new culture, and this is true of all immigrants, even from Europe.
There have been three waves of Chinese immigration: a small wave around 1850 to 1882 (when Chinese immigration was legally outlawed), a second small wave from the 60's to 80's after the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the increase in the immigration quota from 105 people per year, and the current large wave of immigration that started in the 90's. My point is that the first two waves of Chinese have largely already integrated into American culture. However, a huge portion of the current Chinese-American population consists of the last wave of immigration, and it will take a few decades for them to adopt the American culture.
More and more this seems to really be a thing with the immigrant diasporas in the West, and it's going to bring multi-culturalism down hard. Multiculturalists like to say "well the Italians integrated you racist!!" Well, yes they did, but I also know virtually no descendants of Italian immigrants that actually think they're Italian, speak Italian and frankly give a shit what happens in Italy.
The main difference between the Chinese and Italian waves of immigration is 100 years. Look at Italian integration one or two decades after the mass immigration in the 1900's. That is the period that is comparable to the current Chinese cultural evolution. The slow waning of Italian identity took over half a century. I grew up in an Italian-American neighborhood in the 80's. Even then, Italian identity, including speaking Italian, eating Italian food, being proud of being Italian, was still strong.
The second and third generation Chinese are already "integrating" quickly. How quickly the overall Chinese-American population melds with average American culture will largely depend on the future trend of new Chinese immigration, the same as with all other immigrant populations, including all European immigrants.
If someone offends you, you should apologize to them because...
1: You took offense at something not intended to be offensive. 2: You took offense purely to start a fight. 3: You did something in the past to warrant being subject to offensive matter.
If none of the above apply, you should ignore the person and not feed the troll. Otherwise, apologize for your loss of control.
I look at this differently. In my mind, there is a huge difference between feeling offended and actions triggered by feelings of offense. There's nothing wrong with feeling offended. Those are simply feelings and internal thoughts. However, the targeting of feelings and thoughts as immoral or impermissible is an attempt at mind control and freedom of conscience and should be challenged.
This is what I try to teach my kids, that there's nothing wrong with feeling mad, frustrated, or offended. They are responsible for their actions and how they treat other people, but no one can tell them that their feelings are wrong.
I mean I know tastes are subjective but let's be honest: skim milk is vile.
Not only is taste subjective, there is also inertia in that subjectivity. I've switched from whole milk to skim and back a few times in my life, with each stint lasting a few years. Each time I switched, my immediate reaction was disgust, but that disgust always dissipated after a few weeks.
The only type of milk that I truly hated and never got used to was powdered milk. That was bad, even when mixed with non-powdered milk, and that distaste never went away.
both of these are easier if you have a compliant and/or corrupt government in the relevant countries.
Of course, the key "relevant" country is the home country, in this case, the US. It should be simple for the IRS to simply say that the accounting sleight of hand will not be recognized, as is often done for other tax sheltering strategies. However, the entrenchment of legal bribes throughout the legislative and executive branches of the government turn this simple solution into an impossibility. The true and only solution lies entirely with the US government, which lacks the will to deny legal bribes in the interests of the larger society. Accordingly the only politically feasible solution is a plan that favors the tax sheltering companies.
So how come current US residents were not a concern when allowing unrestricted white migration but becomes one when the migration is from brown or yellow countries?
Good question. My understanding of US history is that the current residents always put up restrictions on new immigrants that are demographically different. In this regard, the US is no different than most other countries in the world. Explicit restrictions targeted at a specific country are rare, e.g., the Chinese Exclusion Act. Much more common were indirect restrictions such as the idea of allowing future immigration based on national origins of the current residents. This latter exclusion was targeted at southern and eastern Europeans, who were the undesirables of the latter 1800's and early 1900's.
The current H1-B situation not only has this aspect of pushback against immigration that differs from the current resident demographics. It also has the added problem of being heavily dominated by a single country, to the detriment of potential immigrants from other countries.
Or why not remove Burger King from their search engine? A milder version would be pushing up a warning page when searching for Burger King or any of their trademarks...
Hmm, you want Google to punish a paying customer (i.e., Burger King) to protect the rights of non-paying non-customers?
tax returns on the side for friends since I like seeing what people make, I've noticed it's more about throwing money away on stupid stuff rather than lack of money that's the problem.
I think this idea is generally true, but less true at the extremes. If I'm making minimum wage, my discretionary income is very low, so my ability to save is very low, regardless of my actual spending decisions. At the other extreme, someone making $500k per year has much more discretionary income and can be very loose with spending decisions. Also, throughout my 20-year career, I have found that accumulating wealth is much more dependent on my income rather than my spending. I can believe that spending has a huge effect within a narrow income range, but for wider income disparities, income swamps spending choices.
And yet they don't refund the tickets for the people who don't show up. What other industry is allowed to sell commodities twice? Usually that is considered fraud....
It's not exactly the same, but how about doctors who charge you for being 15 minutes late and yet give no compensation (and often no apologies) for making you wait an hour.
In a way, it's a matter of an unequal relationship between producers and consumers. If all the producers have the same policy, then change is impossible through market mechanisms and instead requires outside movement by government or the mass media. Furthermore, the small percentage of impacted customers can be written off by the producers as statistical noise, even though the causal impact can be tremendous for that particular customer.
It's also interesting that the airlines in this case have actually "convinced" ( out of an overabundance of logic, of course ) the government to place a maximum on compensation for being bumped from a flight. That's obviously a favor to the airlines, especially since the compensation is not mandated to be in cash but can be in vouchers for future flights with blackout dates and restrictions.
The US could easily sustain 5 million net immigration instead of 1 million - most of the Mountain west is pretty much empty forests even today and the midwest is open fields. There is no shortage of space in the US.
This is the crux of the problem, including the original H1-B issue of this thread. Yes, the US can sustain annual immigration in the 5 million range. In fact, if the criterion for a successful immigration policy is that no one dies as a result, then the US could sustain annual immigration in the hundreds of millions. However, severe economic hardship for the current US residents would ensue. That's why the current immigration is capped. And that's also why H1-B visas are capped. And that's also why many current US residents think the cap as currently used/abused is already too high. The US laws are structured to consider the impact on current US residents as more important than the impact on immigrants.
There is no proposal to hold any other country down . Just do it first applied first approved. Right now Indians are waiting 10 years while other country citizens re waiting months.
It's not just a proposal, it's the law right now. There is a quota for total immigration as well as a 7% quota per country. If the numbers for Mexicans, Chinese, and Indians go up, it will be at the expense of other countries. By law, it's a zero-sum game.
It's not a good situation for Indians, Chinese, or Mexicans. But there are only two ways to change the current situation: Change the law to increase the total immigration quota or increase the quota for one country at the expense of another.
My point exactly. There has been enough discrimination against Chinese and Indian immigrants. Time to get rid of the 7% cap to prevent artificially holding down immigration from these countries. USA is a nation of immigrants , about time it started behaving like one instead of behaving like a nation of white only immigrants.
It isn't a matter to allow immigration or not. It's a matter of which immigrants to admit. Admitting more Indians and Chinese (and Mexicans) means fewer immigrants from the rest of Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Here's a list of the top 10 countries for US immigration (based on 2014 numbers). Which of those countries should have its immigration restricted to allow more Indians and Chinese into the US?
Country 2014 % Mexico 134,052 13.2% India 77,908 7.7% China 76,089 7.5% Philippines 49,996 4.9% Cuba 46,679 4.6% Dominican Republic 44,577 4.4% Vietnam 30,283 3.0% South Korea 20,423 2.0% El Salvador 19,273 1.9% Iraq 19,153 1.9% Total 1,016,518 100.0%
The countrywise cap on GreenCards needs to be eliminated - currently the cap for a country with a billion people is the same as for a country with 50000 so the backlogs for India and China are by design. This would right a historical wrong where Indian and Chinese immigrants were denied citizenship before WW2 even if they had the same or better qualifications than European immigrants.
It only makes sense to eliminate country-based quotas on immigration if there is no limit on the total number of immigrants from anywhere. Otherwise, immigration privileges become perverted like the H1-B lottery by having certain countries swamp out others. The current law says that at most 7% of visas in a current year can be allotted to one country. Only India and China hit their 7% quotas. Well, Mexico also hits its quota, plus some.
(Before WW2 you did not need any qualifications to immigrate to the US other than getting on a ship. There were no visas. For becoming citizens however you had to be white so only the next generation could become citizens)
Well, sort of, aside from certain laws such as the Chinese Exclusive Act, various national origins laws, etc. It was much easier if you were white, and not Jewish or from southern or eastern Europe. If you were Asian, you weren't welcome. The Chinese Exclusion Act wasn't repealed until 1943, and national origins was only repealed in 1965.
ESPN by itself is crap. Way back in the day, it had a lot of actual games - I'm in the U.S., and used to love watching rugby or Australian rules football on ESPN in the middle of the night. But (at least as of three years ago, when I dumped that cable tier) they apparently spend all their budget to pay old retired athletes who sit on panel shows and offer bad "analysis" regarding the sports they used to play.
Most athletes seemingly have very little insight into the sports they excel at.
Well, it all depends on what you find interesting and of value. I imagine that most Americans don't watch ESPN for rugby or Australian rules football. Rather, they watch football, basketball, baseball, and other sports that are more popular in the US. For watching these sports, there is often no substitute for ESPN.
There are many Americans who don't care for the major American spectator sports. However, there are tens of millions who do and are willing to spend lots of money for TV subscriptions, tickets and travel, memorabilia, clothing, magazines, fantasy sports, etc.
BTW, I enjoyed watching Australian rules football back in the 80's. However, I wouldn't pay to watch it, but I would pay $150 bucks for a Celtics game or $20/month for a Sling TV subscription just to have ESPN. To each their own cup of tea.
and I couldn't justify the $80 a month for the basic package plus the $15 for some sports package plus $5 for some other package that gave me access to the games I want. So I just cancelled cable all together. I'd be happy to pay $15 or even $20 a month for just ESPN or some other pared down package that has sports and not the other crap. As it stands now they'd rather have none of my money than less of it.
This already exists. SlingTV offers ESPN/2/3 plus TBS/TNT for $20/month (or $14/month with T-Mobile for the first year), in addition to some other cable channels. This also grants access to live/replayed games on the website and phone app.
Face it. There are very few people who need desktop power. Email, web browser, word processing doesn't need much CPU. That's why Chromebooks are just fine for most people.
You're right that current low-end systems offer sufficient performance for many users. Of course, if I'm used to using a high-end system, then the slightly lower performance of the lesser system will noticeably bug me.
But more than performance, the real issue is features. The phone is crippled relative to the desktop due to screen space, input devices, OS/platform features, and application features. Of these, the screen space is the least important. Having a mouse and keyboard makes a huge difference in productivity. Having platform support for multiple windows, file explorers, etc. is nice. And having a non-dumbed down version of the desktop application is really nice.
As with most studied, the really interesting parts are hidden in the data.
A few things should be kept in mind. For example, there was a huge difference in two characteristics of the subpopulations. Non-drinkers and former drinkers had much higher incidence of diabetes and being socially deprived compared to moderate drinkers. This is mentioned in the research article but not the Time article. When adjustments for systolic blood pressure, diabetes status, body mass index, HDL-cholesterol, use of statins or blood pressure lowering medication, and whether offered dietary advice were made, the benefits for moderate drinkers decreased but still somewhat remained for some diseases.
However, there was no adjustment for social class. It would have been extremely interesting to see the results with adjustments for social class, or even better just to see the raw numbers for each social class. 30.6% of the non-drinkers were socially deprived ("Most deprived 5th of socioeconomic deprivation") compared to 15.7% of moderate drinkers. That looks like a significant disparity for a characteristic that would seem to correlate strongly with bad health.
Slashdot Mirror
But to think that the society of the US is any free'er than that of China (it may be for a privileged group but that's about it) is almost absurd.
This is absolutely not correct. In the US, there is indeed constant propaganda that overwhelms our senses, but there are multiple, conflicting streams from a diverse range of sources covering the entire spectrum, and many of those streams directly attack and criticize the government and specific leaders with impunity. This situation does not exist in China. The actual set of ideas that flow through the US system may not be any more true or desirable than the in the Chinese system, but the US is absolutely much more free than the Chinese system solely due to the practical ability of anyone to inject their two-cent's worth of opinions and have those opinions reach the masses.
Your average corporate mid-level manager in the US makes what? 4-8x what a grunt worker would? 30k vs 120k?
Imagine that your mid-level managers in all of those factories make 100x what a farmer only 40min away makes. Or 10-20x what the technician who travels 40 min a day (one way) makes. That's a level of wealth disparity that's common place in every street in Chinese cities but pretty rare in the US.
Unfortunately, here in Silicon Valley, 10-20x income disparities are not uncommon at all. :(
I said Shenzhen. Not China. The thing people even in the US can't grasp is just how *vast* China's population is.
Fair enough. China does have more people, but Americans are also well acquainted with income disparities. :)
So, looking at average annual wages for manufacturing jobs in Shenzhen vs. the US (assuming a 6.76 RMB to USD exchange rate), the US wages are about $61k compared to $15.5k in Shenzhen or about 4x. Perhaps if you compare the high-end tail in Shenzhen to the low-end tail in the US, the wages might start being comparable.
Want to know why people locate to Shenzhen? Go there. The actual wages there are pretty damn high actually and the cost of living rivals most of the US. But if you have an idea for a gadget or product, you're up and running in easily 1/10th of the time it takes in the US and to ramp up production to the millions? That ain't happening anywhere in the US.
I don't believe that wages and costs of living are even close to parity. This US government site says that even though Chinese wages are indeed increasingly much faster than in the US, US wages would still be 4 times higher even three years from now, i.e., there is currently about an order of magnitude difference in wages. Costs of living comparisons from just about any online cost of living website show that living costs in Shenzhen are about half of the costs in the cheapest US cities.
There is probably some truth in the idea that China sometimes offers fewer regulatory barrier to manufacturing. However, some significant part of those lower barriers is based in turning a blind eye to abuses of working conditions, the environment, product quality/safety, etc.
that the political family connections he had tipped him off so he could get out of the market before it crashed. But hey, the shoe shine story sounds much happier and lets go on us pretend we're not an oligarchy where privilege and nepotism are weighted more than good sense. I suppose if I was going to pass a story down I'd pick it instead of "nepotism".
They story gets even better. Joe Kennedy gets rich on insider trading, then becomes the first SEC chairman and proceeds to outlaw the very trick that allowed him to become rich.
about the only thing worse than religions is outlawing religions.
Agnosticism and atheism are religions. It's just that they are more like the loosely organized religions and use different teminology. But some of their adherents can be just as mean and evangelical. Imposing and outlawing religion are similar in that both involve mind control and the outlawing of individual free thought.
Outlawing religion does not really help. Look at the Soviets: they basically did that and they still did the whole "opression in the name of ideology" thing.
Oppression is not a matter of religion but of personality. Mean people are mean, regardless of their religion, political persuasion, or other dimension of philosophical bent.
What do the distributions across entire national populations look like? Averages only convey a partial view of the true distribution. Does the distribution include all households or just those with internet access? I would like to see a metric like percentage of all households with access speeds above a given threshold, like 25Mbps. That distinction between high and low speeds is perhaps more practical than how much higher than 25Mps access speeds can reach. Alternatively, average ping times or percentage of households with ping times below some threshold would be interesting.
The problem with MAGA is that it implies that America stopped being great -- which isn't something most Americans believe.
Most Americans view the greatness of America in the context of the current quality of their own standard of living. Unfortunately over the last several years, many Americans have struggled to maintain their standard of living and for them, America (i.e., their perception of the part of America that they most clearly see) stopped being great. This economic struggle has been particularly challenging for many Americans who don't read slashdot and haven't necessarily benefited from the uptick in the tech industry.
People from China, and the rest of Asia, have been coming to North America for at least 150 years so I don't understand where you are saying this is the second and third generation. There were spikes in immigration for gold rushes and building of the Canadian railways (don't know about the American ones).
This is exactly my point. The latter generations of Chinese-Americans don't have European faces but otherwise "look" like Americans. They have American names, eat American food, play American sports, listen to American music, etc. It's the first generation that struggles to adopt the new culture, and this is true of all immigrants, even from Europe.
There have been three waves of Chinese immigration: a small wave around 1850 to 1882 (when Chinese immigration was legally outlawed), a second small wave from the 60's to 80's after the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the increase in the immigration quota from 105 people per year, and the current large wave of immigration that started in the 90's. My point is that the first two waves of Chinese have largely already integrated into American culture. However, a huge portion of the current Chinese-American population consists of the last wave of immigration, and it will take a few decades for them to adopt the American culture.
More and more this seems to really be a thing with the immigrant diasporas in the West, and it's going to bring multi-culturalism down hard. Multiculturalists like to say "well the Italians integrated you racist!!" Well, yes they did, but I also know virtually no descendants of Italian immigrants that actually think they're Italian, speak Italian and frankly give a shit what happens in Italy.
The main difference between the Chinese and Italian waves of immigration is 100 years. Look at Italian integration one or two decades after the mass immigration in the 1900's. That is the period that is comparable to the current Chinese cultural evolution. The slow waning of Italian identity took over half a century. I grew up in an Italian-American neighborhood in the 80's. Even then, Italian identity, including speaking Italian, eating Italian food, being proud of being Italian, was still strong.
The second and third generation Chinese are already "integrating" quickly. How quickly the overall Chinese-American population melds with average American culture will largely depend on the future trend of new Chinese immigration, the same as with all other immigrant populations, including all European immigrants.
If someone offends you, you should apologize to them because...
1: You took offense at something not intended to be offensive.
2: You took offense purely to start a fight.
3: You did something in the past to warrant being subject to offensive matter.
If none of the above apply, you should ignore the person and not feed the troll. Otherwise, apologize for your loss of control.
I look at this differently. In my mind, there is a huge difference between feeling offended and actions triggered by feelings of offense. There's nothing wrong with feeling offended. Those are simply feelings and internal thoughts. However, the targeting of feelings and thoughts as immoral or impermissible is an attempt at mind control and freedom of conscience and should be challenged.
This is what I try to teach my kids, that there's nothing wrong with feeling mad, frustrated, or offended. They are responsible for their actions and how they treat other people, but no one can tell them that their feelings are wrong.
I mean I know tastes are subjective but let's be honest: skim milk is vile.
Not only is taste subjective, there is also inertia in that subjectivity. I've switched from whole milk to skim and back a few times in my life, with each stint lasting a few years. Each time I switched, my immediate reaction was disgust, but that disgust always dissipated after a few weeks.
The only type of milk that I truly hated and never got used to was powdered milk. That was bad, even when mixed with non-powdered milk, and that distaste never went away.
the transfer pricing scam.
both of these are easier if you have a compliant and/or corrupt government in the relevant countries.
Of course, the key "relevant" country is the home country, in this case, the US. It should be simple for the IRS to simply say that the accounting sleight of hand will not be recognized, as is often done for other tax sheltering strategies. However, the entrenchment of legal bribes throughout the legislative and executive branches of the government turn this simple solution into an impossibility. The true and only solution lies entirely with the US government, which lacks the will to deny legal bribes in the interests of the larger society. Accordingly the only politically feasible solution is a plan that favors the tax sheltering companies.
So how come current US residents were not a concern when allowing unrestricted white migration but becomes one when the migration is from brown or yellow countries?
Good question. My understanding of US history is that the current residents always put up restrictions on new immigrants that are demographically different. In this regard, the US is no different than most other countries in the world. Explicit restrictions targeted at a specific country are rare, e.g., the Chinese Exclusion Act. Much more common were indirect restrictions such as the idea of allowing future immigration based on national origins of the current residents. This latter exclusion was targeted at southern and eastern Europeans, who were the undesirables of the latter 1800's and early 1900's.
The current H1-B situation not only has this aspect of pushback against immigration that differs from the current resident demographics. It also has the added problem of being heavily dominated by a single country, to the detriment of potential immigrants from other countries.
Or why not remove Burger King from their search engine? A milder version would be pushing up a warning page when searching for Burger King or any of their trademarks...
Hmm, you want Google to punish a paying customer (i.e., Burger King) to protect the rights of non-paying non-customers?
tax returns on the side for friends since I like seeing what people make, I've noticed it's more about throwing money away on stupid stuff rather than lack of money that's the problem.
I think this idea is generally true, but less true at the extremes. If I'm making minimum wage, my discretionary income is very low, so my ability to save is very low, regardless of my actual spending decisions. At the other extreme, someone making $500k per year has much more discretionary income and can be very loose with spending decisions. Also, throughout my 20-year career, I have found that accumulating wealth is much more dependent on my income rather than my spending. I can believe that spending has a huge effect within a narrow income range, but for wider income disparities, income swamps spending choices.
And yet they don't refund the tickets for the people who don't show up. What other industry is allowed to sell commodities twice? Usually that is considered fraud....
It's not exactly the same, but how about doctors who charge you for being 15 minutes late and yet give no compensation (and often no apologies) for making you wait an hour.
In a way, it's a matter of an unequal relationship between producers and consumers. If all the producers have the same policy, then change is impossible through market mechanisms and instead requires outside movement by government or the mass media. Furthermore, the small percentage of impacted customers can be written off by the producers as statistical noise, even though the causal impact can be tremendous for that particular customer.
It's also interesting that the airlines in this case have actually "convinced" ( out of an overabundance of logic, of course ) the government to place a maximum on compensation for being bumped from a flight. That's obviously a favor to the airlines, especially since the compensation is not mandated to be in cash but can be in vouchers for future flights with blackout dates and restrictions.
The US could easily sustain 5 million net immigration instead of 1 million - most of the Mountain west is pretty much empty forests even today and the midwest is open fields. There is no shortage of space in the US.
This is the crux of the problem, including the original H1-B issue of this thread. Yes, the US can sustain annual immigration in the 5 million range. In fact, if the criterion for a successful immigration policy is that no one dies as a result, then the US could sustain annual immigration in the hundreds of millions. However, severe economic hardship for the current US residents would ensue. That's why the current immigration is capped. And that's also why H1-B visas are capped. And that's also why many current US residents think the cap as currently used/abused is already too high. The US laws are structured to consider the impact on current US residents as more important than the impact on immigrants.
There is no proposal to hold any other country down . Just do it first applied first approved. Right now Indians are waiting 10 years while other country citizens re waiting months.
It's not just a proposal, it's the law right now. There is a quota for total immigration as well as a 7% quota per country. If the numbers for Mexicans, Chinese, and Indians go up, it will be at the expense of other countries. By law, it's a zero-sum game.
It's not a good situation for Indians, Chinese, or Mexicans. But there are only two ways to change the current situation: Change the law to increase the total immigration quota or increase the quota for one country at the expense of another.
My point exactly. There has been enough discrimination against Chinese and Indian immigrants. Time to get rid of the 7% cap to prevent artificially holding down immigration from these countries. USA is a nation of immigrants , about time it started behaving like one instead of behaving like a nation of white only immigrants.
It isn't a matter to allow immigration or not. It's a matter of which immigrants to admit. Admitting more Indians and Chinese (and Mexicans) means fewer immigrants from the rest of Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Here's a list of the top 10 countries for US immigration (based on 2014 numbers). Which of those countries should have its immigration restricted to allow more Indians and Chinese into the US?
Country 2014 %
Mexico 134,052 13.2%
India 77,908 7.7%
China 76,089 7.5%
Philippines 49,996 4.9%
Cuba 46,679 4.6%
Dominican Republic 44,577 4.4%
Vietnam 30,283 3.0%
South Korea 20,423 2.0%
El Salvador 19,273 1.9%
Iraq 19,153 1.9%
Total 1,016,518 100.0%
The countrywise cap on GreenCards needs to be eliminated - currently the cap for a country with a billion people is the same as for a country with 50000 so the backlogs for India and China are by design. This would right a historical wrong where Indian and Chinese immigrants were denied citizenship before WW2 even if they had the same or better qualifications than European immigrants.
It only makes sense to eliminate country-based quotas on immigration if there is no limit on the total number of immigrants from anywhere. Otherwise, immigration privileges become perverted like the H1-B lottery by having certain countries swamp out others. The current law says that at most 7% of visas in a current year can be allotted to one country. Only India and China hit their 7% quotas. Well, Mexico also hits its quota, plus some.
(Before WW2 you did not need any qualifications to immigrate to the US other than getting on a ship. There were no visas. For becoming citizens however you had to be white so only the next generation could become citizens)
Well, sort of, aside from certain laws such as the Chinese Exclusive Act, various national origins laws, etc. It was much easier if you were white, and not Jewish or from southern or eastern Europe. If you were Asian, you weren't welcome. The Chinese Exclusion Act wasn't repealed until 1943, and national origins was only repealed in 1965.
ESPN by itself is crap. Way back in the day, it had a lot of actual games - I'm in the U.S., and used to love watching rugby or Australian rules football on ESPN in the middle of the night. But (at least as of three years ago, when I dumped that cable tier) they apparently spend all their budget to pay old retired athletes who sit on panel shows and offer bad "analysis" regarding the sports they used to play.
Most athletes seemingly have very little insight into the sports they excel at.
Well, it all depends on what you find interesting and of value. I imagine that most Americans don't watch ESPN for rugby or Australian rules football. Rather, they watch football, basketball, baseball, and other sports that are more popular in the US. For watching these sports, there is often no substitute for ESPN.
There are many Americans who don't care for the major American spectator sports. However, there are tens of millions who do and are willing to spend lots of money for TV subscriptions, tickets and travel, memorabilia, clothing, magazines, fantasy sports, etc.
BTW, I enjoyed watching Australian rules football back in the 80's. However, I wouldn't pay to watch it, but I would pay $150 bucks for a Celtics game or $20/month for a Sling TV subscription just to have ESPN. To each their own cup of tea.
and I couldn't justify the $80 a month for the basic package plus the $15 for some sports package plus $5 for some other package that gave me access to the games I want. So I just cancelled cable all together. I'd be happy to pay $15 or even $20 a month for just ESPN or some other pared down package that has sports and not the other crap. As it stands now they'd rather have none of my money than less of it.
This already exists. SlingTV offers ESPN/2/3 plus TBS/TNT for $20/month (or $14/month with T-Mobile for the first year), in addition to some other cable channels. This also grants access to live/replayed games on the website and phone app.
Face it. There are very few people who need desktop power. Email, web browser, word processing doesn't need much CPU. That's why Chromebooks are just fine for most people.
You're right that current low-end systems offer sufficient performance for many users. Of course, if I'm used to using a high-end system, then the slightly lower performance of the lesser system will noticeably bug me.
But more than performance, the real issue is features. The phone is crippled relative to the desktop due to screen space, input devices, OS/platform features, and application features. Of these, the screen space is the least important. Having a mouse and keyboard makes a huge difference in productivity. Having platform support for multiple windows, file explorers, etc. is nice. And having a non-dumbed down version of the desktop application is really nice.
As with most studied, the really interesting parts are hidden in the data.
A few things should be kept in mind. For example, there was a huge difference in two characteristics of the subpopulations. Non-drinkers and former drinkers had much higher incidence of diabetes and being socially deprived compared to moderate drinkers. This is mentioned in the research article but not the Time article. When adjustments for systolic blood pressure, diabetes status, body mass index, HDL-cholesterol, use of statins or blood pressure lowering medication, and whether offered dietary advice were made, the benefits for moderate drinkers decreased but still somewhat remained for some diseases.
However, there was no adjustment for social class. It would have been extremely interesting to see the results with adjustments for social class, or even better just to see the raw numbers for each social class. 30.6% of the non-drinkers were socially deprived ("Most deprived 5th of socioeconomic deprivation") compared to 15.7% of moderate drinkers. That looks like a significant disparity for a characteristic that would seem to correlate strongly with bad health.