Here is a bit of history that is pretty interesting. The odd part of it is that at one time, those coming to the US legally with the 'branchero' program were not permitted to leave the US and go home without their employer's ok.
I have not found any evidence of wage depression happening with big influxes of the illegals, but that doesn't mean it isn't so. Do you have any graph of wages over time? Closest I could find is http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/issueguides_minwage. Even if it does depress the wages, it does keep costs down, increasing the purchasing power of those depressed wages.
The self replicating robots that could do anything was spoofed by Al Capp : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shmoo Anyway, the self replecating robots that are general purpose laborers are called humans now.
Give them visas to work here, FORCE employers to pay them a competitive wage, TAX them appropriately... and then see how long illegal immigration lasts.
That is what I'm advocating. Just be prepared to have to sacrifice. Nothing wrong with that.
Prove that. I don't accept "they seem to...", and neither should you, even if it appears to support your position.
I've worked in kitchens in California and I've worked in kitchens in the midwest. Wanna take 3 guesses as to what I've seen regarding the industriousness gap? I withdraw this point as I can only offer what I've experienced.
I'm not willing to sell my fellow Americans short, or sell them out.
I have little respect for borders, tribalism, patriotism, centralized control and unquestioning obedience. I don't want my tax dollars used to print money. That being said, the border shenanigans done by both sides of this issue are unfair, and either making a real border or allowing the migrants' working activity to be legal (and brought into the light, taxed, etc) is required to ensure human dignity.
The cost of food and services will go up when the illegal worker force is dealt with one way or another.
And you know what? We were well-enough fed before illegal immigration reared its ugly head, and we'll survive whatever happens if it goes away.
What are you smoking, man? What, when slavery was around? Before minimum wage? We've had the migrant workers before suddenly they couldn't cross the border (or the border moved across them). Check your history.
My experiences with windows AV is pretty lame. At one job, I had to deal with huge numbers of reads and writes to the disk. The anti-virus software (Symantec I think) would bog things down, trying to check all these writes until the drive plain died. We did not reinstall it when the new drive arrived and there were no problems.
That sort of cemented my idea that AV software was mostly worthless. Even with updates, it was still out of date where it mattered, and is such a resource hog as to make using windows unpleasant. Maybe things have changed somewhat, but I doubt it.
If you are a windows user, just browse smart, don't open up any unneeded services and get your ass behind a firewall. Oh, and backup your stuff periodically.
Shh... don't mention those. Nobody wants to hear them because then they'd have to make some hard decisions.
The truth is, we've not been hit hard enough (yet). When we are, the GP and people like him will be crying out for "something to be done".
Yes, there are hard decisions to make. The cost of food and services will go up when the illegal worker force is dealt with one way or another. That's probably why politicians shy away from doing anything significant about it one way or another. *Everyone* is going to whine and complain then. Should something be done? Absolutely!
The right thing requires sacrifice and most of the US public's gotten out of that habit.
You left out the key work ILLEGAL immigrant. They should not have been here in the first place....so, they pay the penalty and get sent home.
There are worse things in the world than the illegals. Sure they got around the law, but maybe they've paid their dues. Don't act like they are dirty, filthy people.
* speeding (who cares)
* working under the table for cash for a short term proposition (ho hum)
* not declaring gambling wins on your taxes (ehhh)
* dash across the boarder to earn some money for a few months/years and bop back home (oh my god, its the worst thing in the world)
Seriously though... you want to push for drug legalization, that's fine. But you CAN NOT tell me that drug gangs who commit all sorts of crimes (including kidnap and murder) and deliberately get people hooked on these things are somehow simply practicing "civil disobedience" by "not following the law."
There's a big difference between a 75-year-old granny with cancer who grows a couple marijuana plants so she can puff on the leaves and bake marijuana-butter brownies to keep her appetite up, and organized groups that engage in rape, murder, racketeering, smuggling, and turf wars with a side order of drug sales.
And you haven't addressed the damage caused by wage depression, theft of services, and damage to the school system caused by illegal immigration and human smuggling (which gets back to the rape/prostitution rings run by the gangs too) either.
The assumption is that the illegality of the drugs causes the violence.
Datapoint. Prohibition. Alcohol was illegal. People murdered over the control of the illicit trade. It's not illegal now, and people are not killing each other to supply it. Alcohol cost much more due to the articial scaricity.
There are people today who rob to get their alcohol to feed their addictions, but you don't hear too often about liquor store owners doing drive by shootings against their liquor store rivals.
It boils down to this : people on drugs may be dangerous depending on the drug. Drunks can be dangerous, too. We've survived the drunks. We can survive the potheads.
As for immigrants, they seem to be the hardest workers around. I think that is why people don't like them; with them, people are expected to work harder. Why, just being American means prosperity without working hard is a birthright, right?
Just allow work visas that don't guarantee a path to citizenship. That way labor laws can be enforced sensibly and taxes be collected. Like it or not, the illegals contribute a huge amount to the economy.
We should do the right thing (either crack down on illegal employment or legalize it with fair wage), and that will require us to sacrifice (oh noes) by having much higher food prices.
If you think ANY field is "unrelated" to politics, you arn't paying attention.
Yes, everything can be related to politics. But Obama's political spectrum and priorities far outweigh any relation an internet engineer could bring to the table. Seriously, if the fact that this dude is endorsing Obama ends up swaying a voter, then I think it can only be qualified as laughable -- not newsworthy.
Whatever happened to arguments swaying voters? I'm assuming this engineer has some amount of intelligence and is able to use it outside of a narrow field.
Your points are taken. I'd even like to add that I think Virgin Galactic and other private spaceflight will make it big one day. I will add the internet to the list of success stories.
I have to note, however, that the Great Northern Railroad did not happen before government got around to creating a railroad system and network. Nor did Virgin Galactic predate NASA. Nor did the privatization of the internet precede the DARPA development of the internet.
Private industry is very rarely going to be the vanguard for huge scale, high risk projects. Even large scale projects that most industry embarks upon have some amount of government subsidies and other support.
Look to the legend of John Smith and the Virginia colonies. The colony was heading for starvation and people were screwing around trying to find gold. He unfairly stole away their liberty and time, forcing them to farm four hours a day. This anti-capitalist governance in this highly capitalist endevor did allow them to live.
Just have to wonder if empires start to fall when the population takes their prosperity as a birthright and a fact they don't have to put effort into to keep.
The only thing that might make the US different is the influx of immigrants who have a gut feeling that education will help their children not have to do horrible jobs for tiny wages.
Very nice in theory, but the risk to reward calculation does not justify private roads. It would be regarded as a very risky investment with dubious returns.
Why would a government step in? Because people think roads should be there, and no one is stepping forward to make them. Even "private" train lines would not have happened without the government seizing peoples' land.
The model you are uses breaks down for things like this. It's all right, your model is very good for the most part. So is the ideal gas law, but the ideal gas law isn't all that accurate either.
tobacco? I really don't want to support someone's pack a day habit. Go to a bombed out area of a city and you won't see grocery stores, but will see alcohol and tobacco stores. They still make money off of the addicted poor.
That being said, treating people like criminals and subjecting them to drug tests probably isn't the way to go. I think I can flush that idea down my mind's toilet.
Your letter is a bit long winded though; I wonder if the attention span of the legislators will get past the first few sentences.
They say redwood seedlings need a fire to germinate, and the forest needs the saplings to grow to be healthy. Maybe the financial markets are the same.
Excellent point! Get into a field because you have passion for it, college bound!
I think the people flooding in droves to on faddy field or the next are doing it because they have to do ~something~ and preferably something where they make lots of money. If they have little passion for it, they won't be very successful. 10 bucks says they will turn out to be the annoying class of coworkers.
1) You cannot force people to change. Fascist techniques like forced rehab are good at costing a lot of people a lot of money, but do not have good success rates at actually enacting change. The bald assumption that throwing someone into rehab will magically make them change their life is stark ignorance at best.
Imagining... Welfare assistance now comes with a drug test. You test positive for drugs (including tobacco, alcohol) at a level that indicates the usage was recent, no check for you this month and better luck next month.
One problem is that we would still need drug enforcement to ensure that people purchase it from legally sanctioned businesses.
The drugs could be taxed and regulated, or simply decriminalized.
It would take a long time to unravel the illicit-tax-exempt unlicensed dealer structure.
The government just goes to the source, buys the lot of drugs and then sets up govt run drugstores (just like the liquor stores in Pennsylvania). That would unravel things pretty quickly. (I'm kinda joking about this, though)
Also it doesn't include the costs of rehabilitation and abuse. Which would probably be lower than incarceration but still not free.
If drugs are taxed, the taxes go to rehabilitation.
The huge amount spent on enforcing drugs laws and circumventing drugs laws will be gone.
This means that not only will the drugs cost less, the absence of the anti-drugs programmes will cause the government to spend less (maybe lowering taxes?)
Coca is not suited for growth in the U.S. If cocaine was legalized for example, the Columbian Government would find a great deal of their funding cut off, as it is provided by the U.S. What would result is that yes, the price of production would drop. However, if the production is still done in other countries, then this does not benefit the U.S.
Also, producing Cocaine is a pretty intense process that requires lots of Coca; if legalized it would still be much more expensive than aspirin for that reason.
I would bet the distribution costs far far outweigh the cost of production for the banned drugs.
The only thing that is going to really combat drugs is social pressure.
I do like to make a distinction between those who have started the business (or with the business) and those who hire into it later, just smelling success. Steve Jobs has a passion for the products Apple makes. Maybe passion is what separates out the hacks from the greats in this case. I don't mean a passion for money here.
Sure, but he's creeping into the debate. Republicans are tying to cast themselves as new Ronnies.
Here is what Reagan did for America: He restored a sense of pride in the country. He made many people feel good and he listened. He was a very important President.
He also instilled in the patriotic that America could do no wrong, no matter what she may do. Free markets will always strengthen if you don't regulate them and that wealth 'trickles down'. God gave America these natural resources and it would be a sin not to use them up as rapidly as possible. He made is fashionable to blame the destitute and mentally ill for their condition. He was the first king of deficit spending.
It's said he brought down the 'Evil Empire'. He may have contributed, but what really hurt the world's largest oil producer was the price of oil plummeting in the 80s.
Slashdot Mirror
Here is a bit of history that is pretty interesting. The odd part of it is that at one time, those coming to the US legally with the 'branchero' program were not permitted to leave the US and go home without their employer's ok.
http://www.pbs.org/kpbs/theborder/history/timeline/17.html
I have not found any evidence of wage depression happening with big influxes of the illegals, but that doesn't mean it isn't so. Do you have any graph of wages over time? Closest I could find is
http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/issueguides_minwage.
Even if it does depress the wages, it does keep costs down, increasing the purchasing power of those depressed wages.
The self replicating robots that could do anything was spoofed by Al Capp : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shmoo
Anyway, the self replecating robots that are general purpose laborers are called humans now.
Give them visas to work here, FORCE employers to pay them a competitive wage, TAX them appropriately ... and then see how long illegal immigration lasts.
That is what I'm advocating. Just be prepared to have to sacrifice. Nothing wrong with that.
Prove that. I don't accept "they seem to ...", and neither should you, even if it appears to support your position.
I've worked in kitchens in California and I've worked in kitchens in the midwest. Wanna take 3 guesses as to what I've seen regarding the industriousness gap? I withdraw this point as I can only offer what I've experienced.
I'm not willing to sell my fellow Americans short, or sell them out.
I have little respect for borders, tribalism, patriotism, centralized control and unquestioning obedience. I don't want my tax dollars used to print money.
That being said, the border shenanigans done by both sides of this issue are unfair, and either making a real border or allowing the migrants' working activity to be legal (and brought into the light, taxed, etc) is required to ensure human dignity.
The cost of food and services will go up when the illegal worker force is dealt with one way or another.
And you know what? We were well-enough fed before illegal immigration reared its ugly head, and we'll survive whatever happens if it goes away.
What are you smoking, man? What, when slavery was around? Before minimum wage? We've had the migrant workers before suddenly they couldn't cross the border (or the border moved across them). Check your history.
My experiences with windows AV is pretty lame. At one job, I had to deal with huge numbers of reads and writes to the disk. The anti-virus software (Symantec I think) would bog things down, trying to check all these writes until the drive plain died.
We did not reinstall it when the new drive arrived and there were no problems.
That sort of cemented my idea that AV software was mostly worthless. Even with updates, it was still out of date where it mattered, and is such a resource hog as to make using windows unpleasant. Maybe things have changed somewhat, but I doubt it.
If you are a windows user, just browse smart, don't open up any unneeded services and get your ass behind a firewall. Oh, and backup your stuff periodically.
Shh ... don't mention those. Nobody wants to hear them because then they'd have to make some hard decisions.
The truth is, we've not been hit hard enough (yet). When we are, the GP and people like him will be crying out for "something to be done".
Yes, there are hard decisions to make. The cost of food and services will go up when the illegal worker force is dealt with one way or another. That's probably why politicians shy away from doing anything significant about it one way or another. *Everyone* is going to whine and complain then. Should something be done? Absolutely!
The right thing requires sacrifice and most of the US public's gotten out of that habit.
You left out the key work ILLEGAL immigrant. They should not have been here in the first place....so, they pay the penalty and get sent home.
There are worse things in the world than the illegals. Sure they got around the law, but maybe they've paid their dues. Don't act like they are dirty, filthy people.
* speeding (who cares)
* working under the table for cash for a short term proposition (ho hum)
* not declaring gambling wins on your taxes (ehhh)
* dash across the boarder to earn some money for a few months/years and bop back home (oh my god, its the worst thing in the world)
I think we have a Ron Paul supporter.
Seriously though... you want to push for drug legalization, that's fine. But you CAN NOT tell me that drug gangs who commit all sorts of crimes (including kidnap and murder) and deliberately get people hooked on these things are somehow simply practicing "civil disobedience" by "not following the law."
There's a big difference between a 75-year-old granny with cancer who grows a couple marijuana plants so she can puff on the leaves and bake marijuana-butter brownies to keep her appetite up, and organized groups that engage in rape, murder, racketeering, smuggling, and turf wars with a side order of drug sales.
And you haven't addressed the damage caused by wage depression, theft of services, and damage to the school system caused by illegal immigration and human smuggling (which gets back to the rape/prostitution rings run by the gangs too) either.
The assumption is that the illegality of the drugs causes the violence.
Datapoint. Prohibition. Alcohol was illegal. People murdered over the control of the illicit trade. It's not illegal now, and people are not killing each other to supply it. Alcohol cost much more due to the articial scaricity.
There are people today who rob to get their alcohol to feed their addictions, but you don't hear too often about liquor store owners doing drive by shootings against their liquor store rivals.
It boils down to this : people on drugs may be dangerous depending on the drug. Drunks can be dangerous, too. We've survived the drunks. We can survive the potheads.
As for immigrants, they seem to be the hardest workers around. I think that is why people don't like them; with them, people are expected to work harder. Why, just being American means prosperity without working hard is a birthright, right?
Just allow work visas that don't guarantee a path to citizenship. That way labor laws can be enforced sensibly and taxes be collected. Like it or not, the illegals contribute a huge amount to the economy.
We should do the right thing (either crack down on illegal employment or legalize it with fair wage), and that will require us to sacrifice (oh noes) by having much higher food prices.
If you think ANY field is "unrelated" to politics, you arn't paying attention.
Yes, everything can be related to politics. But Obama's political spectrum and priorities far outweigh any relation an internet engineer could bring to the table. Seriously, if the fact that this dude is endorsing Obama ends up swaying a voter, then I think it can only be qualified as laughable -- not newsworthy.
Whatever happened to arguments swaying voters? I'm assuming this engineer has some amount of intelligence and is able to use it outside of a narrow field.
Mod Parent up! Love the analogy.
I'll never misunderestimate Ronald again.
its been known for a while
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29523
Your points are taken. I'd even like to add that I think Virgin Galactic and other private spaceflight will make it big one day.
I will add the internet to the list of success stories.
I have to note, however, that the Great Northern Railroad did not happen before government got around to creating a railroad system and network.
Nor did Virgin Galactic predate NASA.
Nor did the privatization of the internet precede the DARPA development of the internet.
Private industry is very rarely going to be the vanguard for huge scale, high risk projects. Even large scale projects that most industry embarks upon have some amount of government subsidies and other support.
Look to the legend of John Smith and the Virginia colonies. The colony was heading for starvation and people were screwing around trying to find gold. He unfairly stole away their liberty and time, forcing them to farm four hours a day. This anti-capitalist governance in this highly capitalist endevor did allow them to live.
Just have to wonder if empires start to fall when the population takes their prosperity as a birthright and a fact they don't have to put effort into to keep.
The only thing that might make the US different is the influx of immigrants who have a gut feeling that education will help their children not have to do horrible jobs for tiny wages.
was that you can apply it and remove it as many times as you like. Removing it doesn't damage the tape. It is more like a velcro than a glue.
Very nice in theory, but the risk to reward calculation does not justify private roads. It would be regarded as a very risky investment with dubious returns.
Why would a government step in? Because people think roads should be there, and no one is stepping forward to make them. Even "private" train lines would not have happened without the government seizing peoples' land.
The model you are uses breaks down for things like this. It's all right, your model is very good for the most part. So is the ideal gas law, but the ideal gas law isn't all that accurate either.
government sponsored theft of your property. fuck that.
Taxes?
No Highway for you!
tobacco? I really don't want to support someone's pack a day habit. Go to a bombed out area of a city and you won't see grocery stores, but will see alcohol and tobacco stores. They still make money off of the addicted poor.
That being said, treating people like criminals and subjecting them to drug tests probably isn't the way to go. I think I can flush that idea down my mind's toilet.
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up.
Your letter is a bit long winded though; I wonder if the attention span of the legislators will get past the first few sentences.
They say redwood seedlings need a fire to germinate, and the forest needs the saplings to grow to be healthy. Maybe the financial markets are the same.
Excellent point! Get into a field because you have passion for it, college bound!
I think the people flooding in droves to on faddy field or the next are doing it because they have to do ~something~ and preferably something where they make lots of money. If they have little passion for it, they won't be very successful. 10 bucks says they will turn out to be the annoying class of coworkers.
Very nice post by the way.
1) You cannot force people to change. Fascist techniques like forced rehab are good at costing a lot of people a lot of money, but do not have good success rates at actually enacting change. The bald assumption that throwing someone into rehab will magically make them change their life is stark ignorance at best.
Imagining...
Welfare assistance now comes with a drug test. You test positive for drugs (including tobacco, alcohol) at a level that indicates the usage was recent, no check for you this month and better luck next month.
One problem is that we would still need drug enforcement to ensure that people purchase it from legally sanctioned businesses.
The drugs could be taxed and regulated, or simply decriminalized.
It would take a long time to unravel the illicit-tax-exempt unlicensed dealer structure.
The government just goes to the source, buys the lot of drugs and then sets up govt run drugstores (just like the liquor stores in Pennsylvania). That would unravel things pretty quickly. (I'm kinda joking about this, though)
Also it doesn't include the costs of rehabilitation and abuse. Which would probably be lower than incarceration but still not free.
If drugs are taxed, the taxes go to rehabilitation.
The huge amount spent on enforcing drugs laws and circumventing drugs laws will be gone.
This means that not only will the drugs cost less, the absence of the anti-drugs programmes will cause the government to spend less (maybe lowering taxes?)
Coca is not suited for growth in the U.S. If cocaine was legalized for example, the Columbian Government would find a great deal of their funding cut off, as it is provided by the U.S. What would result is that yes, the price of production would drop. However, if the production is still done in other countries, then this does not benefit the U.S.
Also, producing Cocaine is a pretty intense process that requires lots of Coca; if legalized it would still be much more expensive than aspirin for that reason.
I would bet the distribution costs far far outweigh the cost of production for the banned drugs.
The only thing that is going to really combat drugs is social pressure.
I do like to make a distinction between those who have started the business (or with the business) and those who hire into it later, just smelling success. Steve Jobs has a passion for the products Apple makes. Maybe passion is what separates out the hacks from the greats in this case. I don't mean a passion for money here.
Sure, but he's creeping into the debate. Republicans are tying to cast themselves as new Ronnies.
Here is what Reagan did for America: He restored a sense of pride in the country. He made many people feel good and he listened. He was a very important President.
He also instilled in the patriotic that America could do no wrong, no matter what she may do. Free markets will always strengthen if you don't regulate them and that wealth 'trickles down'. God gave America these natural resources and it would be a sin not to use them up as rapidly as possible. He made is fashionable to blame the destitute and mentally ill for their condition. He was the first king of deficit spending.
It's said he brought down the 'Evil Empire'. He may have contributed, but what really hurt the world's largest oil producer was the price of oil plummeting in the 80s.
Easily impressed?