What I don't understand is why the same people that look with despair upon our president and congress want our government doing so much to begin with (like expanding its involvement in health care one one side of the political spectrum or deporting hard working people because they were born to the wrong parents at the wrong latitude/longitude on the other). We do have a pretty good country over all, but its the people that make it that way and our elected officials either spend their time pointing fingers at each other or writing laws that take away our rights.
And all of those can be virtually eliminated by allowed open gate policies that allow Mexican citizens to live and work here legally using just their passports.
but a lot want controlled, slow, legal immigration but NO illegals.
Wanting slow immigration is basically the same thing as xenophobia. True freedom lovers abhor restrictions on people freely working and living with one another.
Topically enough, this month's issue of CrossTalk, "The Journal of Defense Software Engineering", is on the subject of COTS Integration. Well worth a read if you're interested in this kind of thing.
Bah Humbug. You don't know what Tolkien thinks (er would be thinking if he were alive). He wrote books. These books were meant for entertainment not as pure chronicals of history. He sold those books. And he changed the *content* of one of those books, "The Hobbit", after it was published to make a new story "The Lord of the Rings" work out better. So, by derivation, he probably would have approved of selling a well made game of entertainment set in the imaginary world he created as long as he was properly compensated.
I was more thinking along the lines of either massively increasing the number of greencards awarded each year so legal immigration can replace illegal... or better yet forming an Economic Zone with Mexico and Canada (similar to the EU) where a citizen of any member country is free to live, work and own land in the other countries. More freedom seems like it would be beneficial to all of us (well, most of us anyway).
I don't really see someone picking our crops at low wages as bad, even if they're not born in the same geographic location as I was and they disobeyed some outdated protectionism law to get here to find employment. But if they are here I DO want them to live under our system out of the shadows - with rights (ability to report exploitave employers, unsafe working conditions, pay below minimum wage, etcetera without risking deportation) and responsibilities (paying taxes, mandatory auto insurance, etc..) like the rest of us.
Some of the illegals crossed miles and miles of desert risking dehydration and heat stroke just to pick crops all day long so they could make some money to support their families. Certainly they deserve rights at least as much as a person who just happened to be born to the right parents.
Are you for increasing the number of green cards to at least the number of illegal + legal immigrants per year? Because I think thats where the real debate is. Many people are afraid of what all those Mexicans would do if they came here legally instead of illegally. I don't know why. Some kind of deep rooted racism (although not quite exactly since ones already legally here seem to be ok) or psychological thing that is making them fear increased legal numbers.
will hardware vendors stop releasing 32-bit chips?
Who cares? That's not relevant. Hardware companies still produce 16-bit chips but that doesn't mean most people are still using 16-bit desktop computers.
When you become a CEO and tell your share holders that you decided to make less profit on purpose, let us know. In the mean time, look up the concept of Fiduciary Duty.
Actually, if I had to vote in the "other team's" primary, I wouldn't vote for the weakest canidate. I'd vote for the canidate that shared my views more than the others. That way, even if he or she won the general election, I'd still get at least some of what I wanted.
LoL, NAFTA and Immigration reform. I thought it was funny you picked those two particular issues. If all the jobs are going to Mexico because of NAFTA, why are all the Mexicans comming here to work?
Interesting comment. One can analyze the economics of such a decision by comparing ones expected return on investment (savings) of the energy saving device with the expected return if that money were someplace else (stocks, bonds, etc...). One problem is that most of these devices don't have an infinite lifespan. Another problem is once the up front money is spent, it's gone. You can't use it for anything else, including future cheaper and better energy saving devices. For most people it is still cheaper (and more rational) to pay the electric company to deliver power to them than it is to make it themselves. This situation is likely to change over time as technology improves and non-renewable energy sources become more expensive.
So far, the bank has 1 customer, you. Banks will pass all of their new card, IT systems, employee training, legal overhead, costs onto you.
First of all they will have more than one customer. 2nd of all, the only additional cost the banks have is the card itself. Which, given that it's only 10x the cost of plastic (your estimate), isn't that expensive... especially considering the banks and merchants would have to cover the cost of unauthorized less secure transactions anyway. VeriSign is the one running the IT systems, employee training, legal overhead, etc... RTFA.
1. The cost of producing these cards is extremely high relative to the plastic most users have. On order of 10x.
10x cheap still isn't expensive for those willing to pay the extra few bucks for increased security.
2. The costs of integrating a new kind of card into banking/CRM infrastructure is another huge cost center.
The producers are VeriSign. Reasonable speculation follows: This feature is intended to help secure web transactions, not the kind where you must be physically present. The back end and front end software will be developed by VeriSign and it will be optional. VeriSign will price the service cheap enough that web merchants will sign up for it to give their customers piece of mind or they will integrate it with their web-merchant tools to provide a distinguishing feature to set themselves apart from their competition.
3. The banks can't shift the costs of this new-fangled card off to the merchants. FYI: The merchants shift the cost of accepting bank cards and paying for fraudulent transactions to all consumers.
The banks can shift this cost to the card holders directly. Many people would be willing to pay for increased security for their credit cards as long as it could be done relatively cheaply.
Part of the problem is our concentration of power in one place. You may not think of it this way, but could you imagine how much more your vote would be felt if local government's (counties, cities, school districts, etc...) percent of total taxes was swapped with the Federal government's percentage of total taxes? Now the downside is you'd have less influence on laws and spending for someone in another geographical area (assuming laws backed by funding are more powerful than laws that aren't) and this *may* have a negative effect on areas that have emergency situations like NY and New Orleans (*hopefully* the now richer local governmets would band together to help out regardless). But since cities and counties rarely invade other nations it would benefit those against foreign wars... the resources could be spent on much cooler things like transportation and education.
I challenge you to list 5 famous, successful inventors who's primary focus was reaping profits as they designed their inventions.
Bell, Westinghouse, Eastman, Eddison and the Wright Brothers. And many people working for companies that file patents primarily for profit that wouldn't have done the research if they weren't being paid for it.
The cost of developing drugs is plumeting to the point where anyone with access to a few computers can come up with a dozen candidate drugs in a few weeks. It is the safety testing which still costs some money, but even this is much less than it used to be because there are plenty of poor people in the world which will take experimental drugs for a few $ a week.
You are more than welcome to start your own company if this is the case. I'm sure you'd get plenty of investors too if you had a solid line up of researchers working for you. My view is I don't know jack about making medications, so I let the professionals do it on their terms. And, btw, its not the patents holding back selling drugs to the poor. It's rich countries' health care systems negotiating with the pharma companies that say you must sell it to us as cheap as you sell it to anyone else. Therefore, in order to maximize profits, they have to have a certain base price. If they were allowed to tier their pricing according to ability to pay, they *would* sell cheaply to certain areas.
Would you be willing to risk everything you own to find out if something can or can not make a fire? Researching new drugs costs a LOT of money. Especially when you incorporate all the FAILED attempts to come up with something better. No reasonable person/company is going to bother with that kind of research if they are guaranteed to lose money on it. If they discover something that doesn't work, they lose their investment without getting anything in return. If they discover something that DOES work, someone else takes it and gives it away and they still lose their investment without getting anything in return.
Slashdot Mirror
What I don't understand is why the same people that look with despair upon our president and congress want our government doing so much to begin with (like expanding its involvement in health care one one side of the political spectrum or deporting hard working people because they were born to the wrong parents at the wrong latitude/longitude on the other). We do have a pretty good country over all, but its the people that make it that way and our elected officials either spend their time pointing fingers at each other or writing laws that take away our rights.
People can move freely between states, even though some states are a LOT better off economically than others. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
And this is why I support an open borders policy. We do NOT need the government getting in the way of peaceful consensual free market exchanges.
And all of those can be virtually eliminated by allowed open gate policies that allow Mexican citizens to live and work here legally using just their passports.
Nice post, imo.
Wanting slow immigration is basically the same thing as xenophobia. True freedom lovers abhor restrictions on people freely working and living with one another.
Topically enough, this month's issue of CrossTalk , "The Journal of Defense Software Engineering", is on the subject of COTS Integration. Well worth a read if you're interested in this kind of thing.
Bah Humbug. You don't know what Tolkien thinks (er would be thinking if he were alive). He wrote books. These books were meant for entertainment not as pure chronicals of history. He sold those books. And he changed the *content* of one of those books, "The Hobbit", after it was published to make a new story "The Lord of the Rings" work out better. So, by derivation, he probably would have approved of selling a well made game of entertainment set in the imaginary world he created as long as he was properly compensated.
I was more thinking along the lines of either massively increasing the number of greencards awarded each year so legal immigration can replace illegal... or better yet forming an Economic Zone with Mexico and Canada (similar to the EU) where a citizen of any member country is free to live, work and own land in the other countries. More freedom seems like it would be beneficial to all of us (well, most of us anyway). I don't really see someone picking our crops at low wages as bad, even if they're not born in the same geographic location as I was and they disobeyed some outdated protectionism law to get here to find employment. But if they are here I DO want them to live under our system out of the shadows - with rights (ability to report exploitave employers, unsafe working conditions, pay below minimum wage, etcetera without risking deportation) and responsibilities (paying taxes, mandatory auto insurance, etc..) like the rest of us.
Some of the illegals crossed miles and miles of desert risking dehydration and heat stroke just to pick crops all day long so they could make some money to support their families. Certainly they deserve rights at least as much as a person who just happened to be born to the right parents.
Are you for increasing the number of green cards to at least the number of illegal + legal immigrants per year? Because I think thats where the real debate is. Many people are afraid of what all those Mexicans would do if they came here legally instead of illegally. I don't know why. Some kind of deep rooted racism (although not quite exactly since ones already legally here seem to be ok) or psychological thing that is making them fear increased legal numbers.
You realize all of these problems go away if the illegals are made legitimate/legal right?
My logic is all illegal immigrants should be made legal, that way they get to pay taxes like we do.
Who cares? That's not relevant. Hardware companies still produce 16-bit chips but that doesn't mean most people are still using 16-bit desktop computers.
When you become a CEO and tell your share holders that you decided to make less profit on purpose, let us know. In the mean time, look up the concept of Fiduciary Duty.
Actually, if I had to vote in the "other team's" primary, I wouldn't vote for the weakest canidate. I'd vote for the canidate that shared my views more than the others. That way, even if he or she won the general election, I'd still get at least some of what I wanted.
LoL, NAFTA and Immigration reform. I thought it was funny you picked those two particular issues. If all the jobs are going to Mexico because of NAFTA, why are all the Mexicans comming here to work?
Interesting comment. One can analyze the economics of such a decision by comparing ones expected return on investment (savings) of the energy saving device with the expected return if that money were someplace else (stocks, bonds, etc...). One problem is that most of these devices don't have an infinite lifespan. Another problem is once the up front money is spent, it's gone. You can't use it for anything else, including future cheaper and better energy saving devices. For most people it is still cheaper (and more rational) to pay the electric company to deliver power to them than it is to make it themselves. This situation is likely to change over time as technology improves and non-renewable energy sources become more expensive.
Would this not describe an analog computer?
Part of the problem is our concentration of power in one place. You may not think of it this way, but could you imagine how much more your vote would be felt if local government's (counties, cities, school districts, etc...) percent of total taxes was swapped with the Federal government's percentage of total taxes? Now the downside is you'd have less influence on laws and spending for someone in another geographical area (assuming laws backed by funding are more powerful than laws that aren't) and this *may* have a negative effect on areas that have emergency situations like NY and New Orleans (*hopefully* the now richer local governmets would band together to help out regardless). But since cities and counties rarely invade other nations it would benefit those against foreign wars... the resources could be spent on much cooler things like transportation and education.
Would you be willing to risk everything you own to find out if something can or can not make a fire? Researching new drugs costs a LOT of money. Especially when you incorporate all the FAILED attempts to come up with something better. No reasonable person/company is going to bother with that kind of research if they are guaranteed to lose money on it. If they discover something that doesn't work, they lose their investment without getting anything in return. If they discover something that DOES work, someone else takes it and gives it away and they still lose their investment without getting anything in return.