In India the most common car is a 800 cc car outputting 54 bhp and it is perfectly fine for city travel (which is 90% of travel). 1.4 l cars are considered big and wastefull
Also the fact being the US was founded by farmers and frontiersmen means at heart Americans are simple people who want to lead a simple life. Complexity turns them off. Also the reason why America has never sustained a colonial empire- farmers are simply not interested in sending off their boys to die in foreign lands for the profit of the elite. Both Europe and Japan have fought extremely bloody wars for the glory of the elite. On the other hand the very size of America and its distance from the seat of civilization tends to make Americans very insular and gives them a huge case of "Not invented here syndrome"
So bombing Las Vegas would now be a legitimate target since enemy combatants are spending their rest hour in Las Vegas. No different than bombing a Taliban camp in Afghanistan. Seriously why are the guys caught trying to attack the fort in New York being charged with a crime instead of being held as POW's. As the president says there is a war on and in a war anything goes so whats with the big hullabaloo about 9/11 not being a legitimate target - it was the financial nerve center of the US economy definitely a more legit target than a car factory in Serbia or a aspirin factory in Sudan. (And Cruise Missiles and planes are not that different . They both fly and they both have jet engines)
Given that Facebook started out in colleges and only slowly let the proles in there is a certain snob value to being on facebook as opposed to myspace. Besides Platform really rocks. Its the first time I have been tempted to spend my own time to create software for free.
The Taj Mahal has had a bigger impact on the history of the world than anything else. If Shah Jahan had not almost bankrupted the Mughal treasury and abolished the Mughal navy to pay for the Taj Mahal than no way could a bunch of merchants from a piddly Island have taken over what at the time was the richest country in the world. Shah Jahan's stupidity weakened the Mughal empire and it never recovered and the East India company exploited the weakness. Now without India the British empire is just a bunch of loss making coaling stations. No colony other than India ever made a profit for the British so no India no British empire. No British empire and English doesnt become the language of international commerce. Had the Mughal empire survived the language of international commerce and by extnsion that of Slashdot very well could have been Urdu
Well my comment got a little mangled. Thats what happens posting at night. I was thinking more of places like the Indian Punjab where people are rich enough to afford ultrasounds but still dont want girls. Agree whole heartedly with your newborn comment;)
Also there were ways - not very accurate - but still ways like how the women carried the baby (high for girls , low for boys) which still statistically gave an idea even before ultrasounds as to whether the woman was carrying a boy or a girl
Another factor is that males are more delicate biologically in the womb and if the mother faced hardships like hunger male foeteses would miscarry with a higher frequency and as the rich generally are mot hungry during pregnancy thay would carry a larger number of male foeteses to term.
Throughout history the wealthy have had more sons because they have had more education and access to abortificents like nightroot , pineapple extract etc and in traditional society it always made good economic sense to have sons so those who had the ability aborted as many daughters as they could and those who were not educated enough to to so had daughters and as a result the families stayed poor and uneducated. The article doesnt want to mention this as it it is controversial so they just punt by saying they dont know what is the reason for the wealthy having more sons
3 digits are a thousand codes. Say each website allows turns before freezing. Just trying out 200 charities will give them the cvv2. we need public key encryption
Whats with the India comment? I used to work for the company which provides the software which runs he Sprint call centers and I know for a fact the call centers are located in Kansas City as thats where we install the software and train the CSRs so whats with the India comment? Besides the same software runs AT&T , Verizon, Nextel and TMobile. Only Alltel does not use the software. So you cant blame the software for your problems. Further US cell companies run on such small margins if more than 5 calls get made to a call center in a month the profit for the month is gone so I dont blame Sprint for just choosing to drop problem customers. This is not so dissimilar from authorizing each CSR with upto 50 dollars of credit every day so for any complicated problem they can just credit the customer instead of trying to figure it out (afte all people with good problem solving skills dont take CSR jobs in the US)
The success of the Opteron came out of the DEC Alpha teams AMD hired away from Compaq. Now AMD is going to get the Transmeta innovations. Intel spends gobs of money on internal research to come up with new innovations. AMD being smaller cant spend the same so it is constantly on the prowl for talented researchers working at companies going down the drain and buys up the innovations at bargain basement prices and in this way manages to match Intel in the innovation game. Expect something as big as the Opteron was to come out in 2 years time.
I am not complaining. My point is that we are training a new generation of terrorists - terrorists who we will send into Iran to blow up stuff like the older generation is doing now. After all USA-UK invented terrorism as a method of war during the second world war - remember French Resistance. When you are the weaker side you always use terrorism;morality be damned; In 41-43 period the allies were pretty much beat and only kept the Germans at bay by employing terrorism on a large scale by airdropping explosives to terrorist cells in Europe. Now the US is the strong opponent so its not surprising the middle east is fighting back the only way they can- using terrorism. It is kind of disingenous to claim moral outrage at 9/11. Sadness yes. Regret that our systems failed to stop the terrorists yes but moral outrage is hypocritical. Of course the comparison to Pearl Harbour still works as the USA provoked Japan into attacking by embargoing them on Oil when they needed the oil to fight their Chinese war and sending American pilots to fly the Chinese airforce. Basically Roosevelt needed the Japanese to attack first as he had promised the American people he would remain neutral but really wanted to be a war president. So both 9/11 and Pearl Harbour were provoked events and not suited to moral outrage - regret and sorrow yes outrage no.
Re:Because mining explosives are different?
on
Explosives Camp
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· Score: 1
My point exactly. Other countries have a need for mining engineers too and if they want to send students to learn the same in the US why are they prevented from doing so ? its not like they will be competing with Americans for jobs they will be going back to mines in their own countries
The Sunni Shite hatreds are no worse than the Black White divide. Teaching American students how to use explosives is no better. I am pretty sure if ever USA got invaded and lost its central government blacks killing whites and whites killing blacks would make Baghdad today look like a picnic in the park
Re:What's good for the goose...
on
Explosives Camp
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· Score: 1
The fact remains that if iraq really had WMD , USA would have never dared invade Iraq regardless of what Saddam did. The Iraq war is the perfect reason for Iran and North Korea and any other country on USA's target list to get their own nukes. If not wht happened to Iraq could happen to you. Doesnt really matter if today you are an US ally - US alliance can change very fast. Again the example is Saddam who fought America's and Saudi's war against the Iranians with the understanding the Saudis and Kuwaitis would fund him with loans which noone expected would be paid back but at the end of the war Kuwait demanded repayment and wanted Iraq's best oilfields as payment (these are on the Iraq Kuwait border and before the first gulf war Iraq and Kuwait shared production. Kuwait wanted exclusive pumping rights as repayment of the war loans and after the American invasion got the fields) Of course Saddam was outraged and wanted to teach the Kuwaitis a lesson and he thought he had the go ahead from USA and Saudi to teach the Kuwaitis humility. He was wrong and died for his mistake. Similar miscalculations could happen to other nations and if and when they do their only insurance against the wrath of Uncle Sam are nukes.
I agree with you that the US has been playing global cop pretty well but the fact is the only reason it can afford to do so is that it can fund it by printing as many dollars it needs while not having to worry about inflation as these dollars are sucked out by the global economy which runs on US dollars. In a way the entire world has been subsidizing the US economy for playing global cop. (Actually till the cold war ended there were two global cops - one was subsidized by countries using the dollar for trade and the other by countries using the ruble for trade). But the point remains this blank cheque to write dollars works only as long as the US is tightly integrated to the world economy so isolationism cannot work in this scenario. Further when standards of living equalize no more will countries be exporting like crazy to the US and taking paper dollars in return as they will have domestic consumers to sell to and those consumers pay real money not paper dollars. When this happens again the US wont be able to fund deficits using paper dollars as the demand for paper dollars will go down so the US will not be able to afford to play global cop (by spending more than 50% of the total world spending on military). But that might not be such a bad thing. In a world with pretty much equal standards of living there is very little motivation for fighting and little need for a global cop. e.g. If the standard of living in Arab countries was just as high as Israel the Palestinian refugees would still not be fighting after 60 years to come back to their homes in Israel; they would just make equally comfortable lives in other countries.
Already companies have to pay the same or more as US programmers to get H1Bs and on top of that they have to pay for Lawyers fees, vis application fees and international relocation. This adds on about 25% to a yearly salary so even spread across 3 years its still 10% more. So H1Bs are already 10% more expensive so no company actually will hire H1Bs if it can get Americans at the same price. The problem seems to be that a vast majority of American programmers entered the industry during the boom and expect a lot more than what the work is worth to the companies . They think if there is a shortage the price will go up but they dont understand one fact - that unlike dcotors or lawyers the work of programmers can be done remotely so if there is a shortage salaries will rise only to a certain extent before the job is sent overseas. it is in the best interests of American programmers to have H1Bs work in the US so that the company does not outsource the entire group. At the same time outsourcing firms should not be given H1Bs. If they need people to come on site for short periods of time for client contact and knowledge transfer they can come on B1 business visas. H1Bs should be given to genuine American companies like Microsoft who face genuine shortages and are not able to recruit the people they need as all the visas are used up by outsourcing firms. In fact some firms have started the practice of just applying for H1Bs for all their employees who could conceivably travel to US the next year and quite a lot of these H1Bs never get used as project plans change but since the quota is used up companies like Microsoft are unable to recruit the people they really need. The outsourcing firms see the visa fees as a cost of business and even if the H1B is never used by using up the quota they ensure that US companies cant hire the people they need and are forced to outsource the work which leads to more revenue to the outsourcing firms.
Actually the world will reach a happy medium. No way is the standard of American living sustainable. if everyone in the world started living at an American standard of life we would need 5 earths to provide the resources. The choice is for Americans to come down to a sustainable level while the rest of the world rises to the same level or to be a pocket of hyperconsumption in which case the jobs will shift to the countries where everyone does not insist on having a 4000 square feet house and 2 SUVs in the driveway even if they work as a checkout clerk at Walmart.
Immigration does have something to do with it. This year the H1B quota finished in 1 day and that for Masters students finished April 30 before most students graduated in May. These students have joined MS on OPT (which allows them to work a year in the US after graduation without visas) but they will be out of status next May as they cant get H1Bs till next October. As MS recruits MS/PhD students in a big way for MSR it needs a place to put them. Canada does not put any hurdles in the way of qualified people like quantative quotas so it makes perfect sense to put these newly recruited foreign graduates of US universities in Canada. Thing is once they settle in Canada very few will want to come to US again. So when these freshers gain some experience and start new projects these projects will be run out of Vancouver and MS will put the next generation of freshers including US citizens in Vancouver. At that point US graduates will have a choice - go to a foreign country for better opportunities or take lesser opportunities in the US.
If you allow free movement of labor pretty soon you will not need 70000 to live in US. As more doctors, lawyers and plumbers come in the cost of living should go down to a healthy medium so you could live a perfectly comfortable life on 30000 . In the meantime as doctors,lawyers and plumbers leave the developing countries cost of living will go up there and salaries will have to go up to 30000. At that point it becomes competition on skills not location for a job. But if this happens the US government will stop having the huge amount of money to spend on military hardware and lose its overseas empire so the govt does not let it happen by creating immigration laws.
Maybe because the vast majority of time when man is not killing man its the normal state and is not mentioned in the history books. As they say bad news is news while good news is no news. So since you would only mention and record things out of the ordinary basically all history consists of the exceptional cases. Recently historians have been trying to introduce more of the normal mans life into history education but they are having a hard time as noone bothered to record the boring everyday things in the past.
Iranian terrorists
on
Explosives Camp
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Now we where the people making all the trains and planes in Iran going boom got their training. No wonder theres a shortage of mining engineers. The CIA pays much better wages than any mining company.
Slashdot Mirror
In India the most common car is a 800 cc car outputting 54 bhp and it is perfectly fine for city travel (which is 90% of travel). 1.4 l cars are considered big and wastefull
Also the fact being the US was founded by farmers and frontiersmen means at heart Americans are simple people who want to lead a simple life. Complexity turns them off. Also the reason why America has never sustained a colonial empire- farmers are simply not interested in sending off their boys to die in foreign lands for the profit of the elite. Both Europe and Japan have fought extremely bloody wars for the glory of the elite. On the other hand the very size of America and its distance from the seat of civilization tends to make Americans very insular and gives them a huge case of "Not invented here syndrome"
As far as cellphone network quality is concerned the so called third world has always has had better quality than the US. Sad but true.
So bombing Las Vegas would now be a legitimate target since enemy combatants are spending their rest hour in Las Vegas. No different than bombing a Taliban camp in Afghanistan. Seriously why are the guys caught trying to attack the fort in New York being charged with a crime instead of being held as POW's. As the president says there is a war on and in a war anything goes so whats with the big hullabaloo about 9/11 not being a legitimate target - it was the financial nerve center of the US economy definitely a more legit target than a car factory in Serbia or a aspirin factory in Sudan. (And Cruise Missiles and planes are not that different . They both fly and they both have jet engines)
Given that Facebook started out in colleges and only slowly let the proles in there is a certain snob value to being on facebook as opposed to myspace. Besides Platform really rocks. Its the first time I have been tempted to spend my own time to create software for free.
The Taj Mahal has had a bigger impact on the history of the world than anything else. If Shah Jahan had not almost bankrupted the Mughal treasury and abolished the Mughal navy to pay for the Taj Mahal than no way could a bunch of merchants from a piddly Island have taken over what at the time was the richest country in the world. Shah Jahan's stupidity weakened the Mughal empire and it never recovered and the East India company exploited the weakness. Now without India the British empire is just a bunch of loss making coaling stations. No colony other than India ever made a profit for the British so no India no British empire. No British empire and English doesnt become the language of international commerce. Had the Mughal empire survived the language of international commerce and by extnsion that of Slashdot very well could have been Urdu
Well my comment got a little mangled. Thats what happens posting at night. I was thinking more of places like the Indian Punjab where people are rich enough to afford ultrasounds but still dont want girls. Agree whole heartedly with your newborn comment ;)
Also there were ways - not very accurate - but still ways like how the women carried the baby (high for girls , low for boys) which still statistically gave an idea even before ultrasounds as to whether the woman was carrying a boy or a girl
Another factor is that males are more delicate biologically in the womb and if the mother faced hardships like hunger male foeteses would miscarry with a higher frequency and as the rich generally are mot hungry during pregnancy thay would carry a larger number of male foeteses to term.
Throughout history the wealthy have had more sons because they have had more education and access to abortificents like nightroot , pineapple extract etc and in traditional society it always made good economic sense to have sons so those who had the ability aborted as many daughters as they could and those who were not educated enough to to so had daughters and as a result the families stayed poor and uneducated. The article doesnt want to mention this as it it is controversial so they just punt by saying they dont know what is the reason for the wealthy having more sons
3 digits are a thousand codes. Say each website allows turns before freezing. Just trying out 200 charities will give them the cvv2. we need public key encryption
We could just put them to work on sugarcane plantations to grow ethanol like they do in Brazil. Much more productive than debtors prison
Why reverse the charges? The credit card companies make enough from usurious interest rates to absorb the small payments to charity
Whats with the India comment? I used to work for the company which provides the software which runs he Sprint call centers and I know for a fact the call centers are located in Kansas City as thats where we install the software and train the CSRs so whats with the India comment? Besides the same software runs AT&T , Verizon, Nextel and TMobile. Only Alltel does not use the software. So you cant blame the software for your problems.
Further US cell companies run on such small margins if more than 5 calls get made to a call center in a month the profit for the month is gone so I dont blame Sprint for just choosing to drop problem customers. This is not so dissimilar from authorizing each CSR with upto 50 dollars of credit every day so for any complicated problem they can just credit the customer instead of trying to figure it out (afte all people with good problem solving skills dont take CSR jobs in the US)
The success of the Opteron came out of the DEC Alpha teams AMD hired away from Compaq. Now AMD is going to get the Transmeta innovations. Intel spends gobs of money on internal research to come up with new innovations. AMD being smaller cant spend the same so it is constantly on the prowl for talented researchers working at companies going down the drain and buys up the innovations at bargain basement prices and in this way manages to match Intel in the innovation game. Expect something as big as the Opteron was to come out in 2 years time.
I am not complaining. My point is that we are training a new generation of terrorists - terrorists who we will send into Iran to blow up stuff like the older generation is doing now. After all USA-UK invented terrorism as a method of war during the second world war - remember French Resistance. When you are the weaker side you always use terrorism ;morality be damned; In 41-43 period the allies were pretty much beat and only kept the Germans at bay by employing terrorism on a large scale by airdropping explosives to terrorist cells in Europe. Now the US is the strong opponent so its not surprising the middle east is fighting back the only way they can- using terrorism. It is kind of disingenous to claim moral outrage at 9/11. Sadness yes. Regret that our systems failed to stop the terrorists yes but moral outrage is hypocritical. Of course the comparison to Pearl Harbour still works as the USA provoked Japan into attacking by embargoing them on Oil when they needed the oil to fight their Chinese war and sending American pilots to fly the Chinese airforce. Basically Roosevelt needed the Japanese to attack first as he had promised the American people he would remain neutral but really wanted to be a war president. So both 9/11 and Pearl Harbour were provoked events and not suited to moral outrage - regret and sorrow yes outrage no.
My point exactly. Other countries have a need for mining engineers too and if they want to send students to learn the same in the US why are they prevented from doing so ? its not like they will be competing with Americans for jobs they will be going back to mines in their own countries
The Sunni Shite hatreds are no worse than the Black White divide. Teaching American students how to use explosives is no better. I am pretty sure if ever USA got invaded and lost its central government blacks killing whites and whites killing blacks would make Baghdad today look like a picnic in the park
The fact remains that if iraq really had WMD , USA would have never dared invade Iraq regardless of what Saddam did. The Iraq war is the perfect reason for Iran and North Korea and any other country on USA's target list to get their own nukes. If not wht happened to Iraq could happen to you. Doesnt really matter if today you are an US ally - US alliance can change very fast. Again the example is Saddam who fought America's and Saudi's war against the Iranians with the understanding the Saudis and Kuwaitis would fund him with loans which noone expected would be paid back but at the end of the war Kuwait demanded repayment and wanted Iraq's best oilfields as payment (these are on the Iraq Kuwait border and before the first gulf war Iraq and Kuwait shared production. Kuwait wanted exclusive pumping rights as repayment of the war loans and after the American invasion got the fields) Of course Saddam was outraged and wanted to teach the Kuwaitis a lesson and he thought he had the go ahead from USA and Saudi to teach the Kuwaitis humility. He was wrong and died for his mistake. Similar miscalculations could happen to other nations and if and when they do their only insurance against the wrath of Uncle Sam are nukes.
I agree with you that the US has been playing global cop pretty well but the fact is the only reason it can afford to do so is that it can fund it by printing as many dollars it needs while not having to worry about inflation as these dollars are sucked out by the global economy which runs on US dollars. In a way the entire world has been subsidizing the US economy for playing global cop. (Actually till the cold war ended there were two global cops - one was subsidized by countries using the dollar for trade and the other by countries using the ruble for trade).
But the point remains this blank cheque to write dollars works only as long as the US is tightly integrated to the world economy so isolationism cannot work in this scenario. Further when standards of living equalize no more will countries be exporting like crazy to the US and taking paper dollars in return as they will have domestic consumers to sell to and those consumers pay real money not paper dollars. When this happens again the US wont be able to fund deficits using paper dollars as the demand for paper dollars will go down so the US will not be able to afford to play global cop (by spending more than 50% of the total world spending on military). But that might not be such a bad thing. In a world with pretty much equal standards of living there is very little motivation for fighting and little need for a global cop. e.g. If the standard of living in Arab countries was just as high as Israel the Palestinian refugees would still not be fighting after 60 years to come back to their homes in Israel; they would just make equally comfortable lives in other countries.
Already companies have to pay the same or more as US programmers to get H1Bs and on top of that they have to pay for Lawyers fees, vis application fees and international relocation. This adds on about 25% to a yearly salary so even spread across 3 years its still 10% more. So H1Bs are already 10% more expensive so no company actually will hire H1Bs if it can get Americans at the same price. The problem seems to be that a vast majority of American programmers entered the industry during the boom and expect a lot more than what the work is worth to the companies . They think if there is a shortage the price will go up but they dont understand one fact - that unlike dcotors or lawyers the work of programmers can be done remotely so if there is a shortage salaries will rise only to a certain extent before the job is sent overseas. it is in the best interests of American programmers to have H1Bs work in the US so that the company does not outsource the entire group. At the same time outsourcing firms should not be given H1Bs. If they need people to come on site for short periods of time for client contact and knowledge transfer they can come on B1 business visas. H1Bs should be given to genuine American companies like Microsoft who face genuine shortages and are not able to recruit the people they need as all the visas are used up by outsourcing firms. In fact some firms have started the practice of just applying for H1Bs for all their employees who could conceivably travel to US the next year and quite a lot of these H1Bs never get used as project plans change but since the quota is used up companies like Microsoft are unable to recruit the people they really need. The outsourcing firms see the visa fees as a cost of business and even if the H1B is never used by using up the quota they ensure that US companies cant hire the people they need and are forced to outsource the work which leads to more revenue to the outsourcing firms.
Actually the world will reach a happy medium. No way is the standard of American living sustainable. if everyone in the world started living at an American standard of life we would need 5 earths to provide the resources. The choice is for Americans to come down to a sustainable level while the rest of the world rises to the same level or to be a pocket of hyperconsumption in which case the jobs will shift to the countries where everyone does not insist on having a 4000 square feet house and 2 SUVs in the driveway even if they work as a checkout clerk at Walmart.
Immigration does have something to do with it. This year the H1B quota finished in 1 day and that for Masters students finished April 30 before most students graduated in May. These students have joined MS on OPT (which allows them to work a year in the US after graduation without visas) but they will be out of status next May as they cant get H1Bs till next October. As MS recruits MS/PhD students in a big way for MSR it needs a place to put them. Canada does not put any hurdles in the way of qualified people like quantative quotas so it makes perfect sense to put these newly recruited foreign graduates of US universities in Canada. Thing is once they settle in Canada very few will want to come to US again. So when these freshers gain some experience and start new projects these projects will be run out of Vancouver and MS will put the next generation of freshers including US citizens in Vancouver. At that point US graduates will have a choice - go to a foreign country for better opportunities or take lesser opportunities in the US.
If you allow free movement of labor pretty soon you will not need 70000 to live in US. As more doctors, lawyers and plumbers come in the cost of living should go down to a healthy medium so you could live a perfectly comfortable life on 30000 . In the meantime as doctors,lawyers and plumbers leave the developing countries cost of living will go up there and salaries will have to go up to 30000. At that point it becomes competition on skills not location for a job. But if this happens the US government will stop having the huge amount of money to spend on military hardware and lose its overseas empire so the govt does not let it happen by creating immigration laws.
The backlog is for immigration. There is no backlog for work permits. Canada does not have artificial quotas for skilled workers
Maybe because the vast majority of time when man is not killing man its the normal state and is not mentioned in the history books. As they say bad news is news while good news is no news. So since you would only mention and record things out of the ordinary basically all history consists of the exceptional cases. Recently historians have been trying to introduce more of the normal mans life into history education but they are having a hard time as noone bothered to record the boring everyday things in the past.
Now we where the people making all the trains and planes in Iran going boom got their training. No wonder theres a shortage of mining engineers. The CIA pays much better wages than any mining company.