The left and right do indeed both argue that illegal immigrants take jobs that American's won't (for that price). The difference is that the left also claim to be in favor or workers rights, i.e. preventing legal Americans from working for lower wages or worse conditions. Hence the hypocrisy.
Other people questioned whether the left really do support illegal immigration. The fact that they use words like "disaster for the economy", to describe the effect of eliminating illegal immigration suggests they do. Or at the very least they have to explain why things like the minimum wages are not also a disaster for the economy.
It is a fair basis for exposing the hypcrisy of the left. They claim that illegal immigrants are essential to the economy because they are willing to work for much lower wages. And yet they oppose measures that would lower working conditions of legal Americans.
Why is it that when illegal immigrants work for less than minimum wage, it is "essential to the economy" but micro-gigging is a threat to workers rights?
I've seen studies that show beneficial effects of speed limit reductions, and since tickets are one of the main reasons people follow the speed limit (or within 5-10mph of it), it follows that speed tickets to have a benefit. It's just that the benefit is hard to observe because it comes from everyone driving slower out of fear of getting a ticket.
I agree that it makes no sense to focus on speeding rather than these other behaviors. The most ridiculous thing I see is people tailgating rather than using the carpool lane. Why should using a carpool lane illegally be a worse offense than tailgating?
This was a great article. It covered all the angles: under what conditions free meals at work are taxable, whether free meals at tech companies satisfy these requirements, the basic economics of taxation, and whether this loophole is big enough to justify any investigation. And best of all, no snarky comments that imply "nerds" have no right to earn big salaries (these are actually wedgie triggers as I've mentioned before).
My take is that *any* benefit you receive from your employer is fair game for taxation. The exceptions in the law that the article discussed are very reasonable: they allow for cases where the meals, even though the employee benefits from them, are not being intentionally used as a substitute for cash pay. The professors wording could have been a bit better: it would have been simpler to say that he pays for his lunch with after tax dollars, so Google employees should pay the equivalent amount of tax.
Two things: first, the tax is on the value of the food, not the cost of the ingredients e.g. what that food would cost in a restaurant. Second, the article gives a figure of $4000 to $5000 taxable income a year, not $4000 to $5000 more tax a year.
It makes no difference. According to the fanatic who replied to you, you are a racist because you believe that "cracker" is a racial slur.
It makes no difference to him or her that "cracker" is currently used as a racial slur. He/she pretends that "cracker" still retains its original meaning (assuming that "Cracker" really did orginate as Floridan term for a cowboy). Even if you were wrong about "cracker" being a racial slur, I can't see how that would make you a bigot anyway. But that's the thing, many so called "anti-racists" are just fanatics who love to scream "bigot" at every opportunity.
Here's what they actually do according to the paper:
The problem is to construct a control system such that the robot scalpel (controlled by a person by a force-feedback device) will not exit some pre-defined boundaries. E.g. boundaries that prevent the scalpel cutting a nerve. The preivous system was flawed as it didn't take into account delays in the reponse of the scalpel. By creating a more accurate model, and using methods that are able to prove things about the dynamic system, they prove that using their new control algorithm no matter what the human operator does, the scalpel will always remain in the boundaries.
It's not clear to me whether the lack of safety in the original control algorithm was a real problem. After all, it's not like the operation will be perfectly safe and a success as long as the scalpel never leaves the boundary. So it's not necessarily worth spending a huge amount of effort to go from "X happens with probability 1e-6" to "X never happens" if there are other more important risks.
I had beamer slides in mind when I wrote this. I use LyX for everything else. Even given everything you said, matching dollars and braces are still an issue. I think about it like looking for missing semi-colons in C++ (before LLVM based error messages that find them for you): why would you put yourself through that kind of thing unless you absolutely had to?
It's really hard to imagine, given the state of tech today, something that was both light enough for the conductor to hold like a baton, and gave adquate round trip latency. While humans have pretty high latency, in this case it might be close to zero, since there are visual signals that precede the acual signal to start.
That is true, although it doesn't mean it's easy to find a missing brace in an entire document when you don't know where to look. Actually the worse problem is finding things like \end{enumerate} etc.
I use TexShop and it isn't obvious at all. Which editors are you referring to? Emacs and Vim come with their own learning curve. Can you suggest an editor which is easy to use, has syntax highlighting for tex, and has built in tex support? If not, I think LyX is a better solution for most people.
I agree, the need to compile is a big time sink. Hunting for a missing brace or dollar is just horrible. I and many people I know (all long time users of LaTeX) switched to using LyX and only exporting to LaTeX for the final formatting (e.g. using a journal's style guide). Unfortunately there is no quick fix for LaTeX: the power of the language means that gui's like LyX can only deal with a subset of the language, and yet this power is necessary in order to allow for all the packages that LaTeX supports (and especially to support existing packages).
I would probably refuse to sign anything when leaving a company. What right to they have to impose any conditions on you, since you are free to leave any time anyway? But the rules I had in mind were when a company decides not to let its own employees contact their former colleagues on its behalf. This is a form of non-poach agreement, but for the reasons I gave, I don't think it's necessarily wrong.
That is an unfair criticism given that I also said that a masters degree should be a minimum. Also, why should I be specific, it's not like my slashdot post will be the basis for legislation. Do you seriously think I'm trying to create some wiggle room for myself so I can't be held accountable for my Slashdot post later on, when I propose very weak restrictions on H-1B visas? Or are you just trying to score a cheap shot instead of addressing my actual arguments? Perhaps you are more suited to politics.
The hospital may also be committing a serious crime.
That was my point:-) There is a double standard where these companies get a slap on the wrist in a civil court, while if this guy did exactly the same thing back, he would get criminal charges. But as you say, even without this double standard it would not make any sense to respond by hacking the hospital.
No poach agreements are just another form of price fixing. While companies may be on friendly or less than friendly terms, as long as they are separate companies, they have no right to enter into price fixing agreements. These agreements keep wages below market rates. Someone who might earn $300,000 a year in a free market might only earn $250,000 because other companies won't make competing offers with their current offer.
While losing employees causes a lot of disruption to a company, potential loss of IP, etc. this is just part of the game. All monopolies and cartels can offer plausible sounding reasons why the "order" that they impose on the market is better than competition, but as a society we decided long ago that the free market works better. So it doesn't matter what other benefits these companies claim no-poach agreements have, they are still illegal price fixing.
The only exception I can think of is a prohibition on people who move from company A to company B, contacting their co-workers in company A, in their capacity as an employee of company B. This could be considered in improper use of that person's professional contacts at company A. However a recruiter using public information to contact an employee at another company should always be not only allowed, but encouraged.
I was complaining about the title of this article, in particular its sneering tone, and the implicit assumption in this and many other submissions that everyone on this site is American. I don't like the assumption that jobs for American IT workers are good, when many readers are IT workers outside the US, and therefore competing with Americans for those jobs. While it's not for non-Americans to decide what visa rules of the US should be, I object to this site taking the position that whatever is good for American IT workers (and possibly bad for non-American IT workers) is good, and whatever is bad for American IT workers is bad.
I already explained my position on H-1B's (which is the position almost any orthodox economist would take): they are indeed bad for US IT workers, but they may be good for the US as a whole. But if a person wanted to use what I consider to be incorrect economic reasoning to argue that H-1B visas harmed the economy because they lowered wages, then I'm not going to call the xenophobic.
Maybe it's time to clarify what kind of a site Slashdot is? It claims to be "News for Nerds" but there are a lot of nerds who have H-1B visas, or live outside the US.
This article's title is just plain nasty. There is room for debate on these issues, and I personally think the numbers of H-1B visas are excessive (or better put, the requirements for getting one are too lenient), but the idea that people applying for H-1B's are to be despised is very offputting to potential users of this site. Unless, of course, Slashdot isn't really for these people in which case you should be more explicit about that.
On the issue of H-1B's themselves, it is necessary to separate out generic issues of free trade, from issues that are specific to trade in human labor. Any valuable commidity will benefit country that imports it. If there were a ban on importing rare earth metals to the US, and suddently this was lifted, it would benefit companies that utilize these metals (and ultimately consumers) and harm producers of rare earth metals. However the net benefit would be positive, this is standard economic theory. Now I imagine that when the ban is lifted, the rare earth producers would say "there is no shortage of rare earth metals, people just aren't willing to pay a fair price. If people paid more, we could mine previously uneconomic deposits, etc.". This would be a mistaken interpretation, again because economic theory says that the welfare of society is maximized under free trade.
Now this theory breaks down when it applies to people, but only because of externalities. That is, people who come to the US on H-1B visas may have a negative influence on the US apart from their impact on the labor force. Some of these are simply because a person in the US temporarily will be less engaged with the community and civil society. Also many Americans prefer that the US retain its cultural and ethinc composition, and so these people may be negatively affected.
So there are many valid arguments against H-1B visas, although most of the economic arguments are wrong. I think the criteria should be stricter so that only the people who add the most value to the economy can get one. This way, the US would get the maximum benefit for the minimum number of people. A masters degree should be a minimum.
Anyway that is my view on H-1B visas but can we please keep personal animosity towards people on H-1B's out of it?
I tried switching to Python + Numpy/Scipy from Matlab. In the end I switched back to Matlab. I'm already familiar with python, and have done a lot of C++ programming so slight langauge differences were not the issue. Here are some of the reasons I switched back to Matlab:
IDE Matlab comes with a ready to use IDE.
Value semantics Matlab treats Matrices (and all classes that are not derived from "handle") using value semantics, so you know that Y=f(X) won't change X, if X is a matrix. However it also uses copy-on-write so that calling f won't make an unnecessary copy of X. This makes life a lot easier than trying to figure out how to make deep copies of everything.
Simpler syntax for math Matlab generally has simpler syntax for mathematical operations, which makes sense since that is what it was designed for. Python is a general purpose programming language, so it doesn't have the syntatic sugar for dealing with matrices and arrays that matlab does.
Faster out of the box Even when I installed ATLAS, numpy was still slower than matlab. Tuning ATLAS to your own system would probably result in equal speeds, but that is a lot of extra work.
On the other hand, the python route does have many advantages: more sensible and standard approaches to namespace / filesystem and OO programming, no license issues (say if you want to set up a cluster), easier to integrate with other languages, and access to wide range of non-math related libraries (although generally this is not a real advantage because you can, and should, do data processing in python and only do the actual math in mathalb). As to extra cost, I think that compared to the value of the student/researcher's time the cost is not very great. The only toolboxes most researchers need are the Optimization toobox and the Statistics toolbox.
On multiplication, the issue is efficiency, not whether it can be done. Recall my original claim was
A typical problem is multiplying two large matrices together. MapReduce cannot do this kind of problem efficiently.
You seem to have ignored the questions I raised about the efficiency (in terms of big O running time, and overhead) of the MapReduce implementation.
I saw the IEEE paper on finite element analysis and MapReduce, it was completely contentless (maybe Google wasn't being such a good friend to you as you thought).
HAMA is interestin. Technically it isn't a Map Reduce framework, which confirms my point about the limitations of MapReduce (in fact it was designed to get around these limitations). While I was correct in what I said about MapReduce, HAMA does show that it is possible to do supercomputer like calculations on commodity clusters, but only by dumping the restrictions of MapReduce.
Everything you said about linpack and hadoop is nonsense.
Slashdot Mirror
Other people questioned whether the left really do support illegal immigration. The fact that they use words like "disaster for the economy", to describe the effect of eliminating illegal immigration suggests they do. Or at the very least they have to explain why things like the minimum wages are not also a disaster for the economy.
It is a fair basis for exposing the hypcrisy of the left. They claim that illegal immigrants are essential to the economy because they are willing to work for much lower wages. And yet they oppose measures that would lower working conditions of legal Americans.
Why is it that when illegal immigrants work for less than minimum wage, it is "essential to the economy" but micro-gigging is a threat to workers rights?
Just more xenophobic alarmism. I'm surprised they didn't mention Israel's spying on the US, since crazy xenophobes also tend to be antisemitic too.
I've seen studies that show beneficial effects of speed limit reductions, and since tickets are one of the main reasons people follow the speed limit (or within 5-10mph of it), it follows that speed tickets to have a benefit. It's just that the benefit is hard to observe because it comes from everyone driving slower out of fear of getting a ticket.
I agree that it makes no sense to focus on speeding rather than these other behaviors. The most ridiculous thing I see is people tailgating rather than using the carpool lane. Why should using a carpool lane illegally be a worse offense than tailgating?
This was a great article. It covered all the angles: under what conditions free meals at work are taxable, whether free meals at tech companies satisfy these requirements, the basic economics of taxation, and whether this loophole is big enough to justify any investigation. And best of all, no snarky comments that imply "nerds" have no right to earn big salaries (these are actually wedgie triggers as I've mentioned before).
My take is that *any* benefit you receive from your employer is fair game for taxation. The exceptions in the law that the article discussed are very reasonable: they allow for cases where the meals, even though the employee benefits from them, are not being intentionally used as a substitute for cash pay. The professors wording could have been a bit better: it would have been simpler to say that he pays for his lunch with after tax dollars, so Google employees should pay the equivalent amount of tax.
Two things: first, the tax is on the value of the food, not the cost of the ingredients e.g. what that food would cost in a restaurant. Second, the article gives a figure of $4000 to $5000 taxable income a year, not $4000 to $5000 more tax a year.
It makes no difference. According to the fanatic who replied to you, you are a racist because you believe that "cracker" is a racial slur.
It makes no difference to him or her that "cracker" is currently used as a racial slur. He/she pretends that "cracker" still retains its original meaning (assuming that "Cracker" really did orginate as Floridan term for a cowboy). Even if you were wrong about "cracker" being a racial slur, I can't see how that would make you a bigot anyway. But that's the thing, many so called "anti-racists" are just fanatics who love to scream "bigot" at every opportunity.
The problem is to construct a control system such that the robot scalpel (controlled by a person by a force-feedback device) will not exit some pre-defined boundaries. E.g. boundaries that prevent the scalpel cutting a nerve. The preivous system was flawed as it didn't take into account delays in the reponse of the scalpel. By creating a more accurate model, and using methods that are able to prove things about the dynamic system, they prove that using their new control algorithm no matter what the human operator does, the scalpel will always remain in the boundaries.
It's not clear to me whether the lack of safety in the original control algorithm was a real problem. After all, it's not like the operation will be perfectly safe and a success as long as the scalpel never leaves the boundary. So it's not necessarily worth spending a huge amount of effort to go from "X happens with probability 1e-6" to "X never happens" if there are other more important risks.
I had beamer slides in mind when I wrote this. I use LyX for everything else. Even given everything you said, matching dollars and braces are still an issue. I think about it like looking for missing semi-colons in C++ (before LLVM based error messages that find them for you): why would you put yourself through that kind of thing unless you absolutely had to?
This seems like the best solution.
It's really hard to imagine, given the state of tech today, something that was both light enough for the conductor to hold like a baton, and gave adquate round trip latency. While humans have pretty high latency, in this case it might be close to zero, since there are visual signals that precede the acual signal to start.
That is true, although it doesn't mean it's easy to find a missing brace in an entire document when you don't know where to look. Actually the worse problem is finding things like \end{enumerate} etc.
I use TexShop and it isn't obvious at all. Which editors are you referring to? Emacs and Vim come with their own learning curve. Can you suggest an editor which is easy to use, has syntax highlighting for tex, and has built in tex support? If not, I think LyX is a better solution for most people.
I agree, the need to compile is a big time sink. Hunting for a missing brace or dollar is just horrible. I and many people I know (all long time users of LaTeX) switched to using LyX and only exporting to LaTeX for the final formatting (e.g. using a journal's style guide). Unfortunately there is no quick fix for LaTeX: the power of the language means that gui's like LyX can only deal with a subset of the language, and yet this power is necessary in order to allow for all the packages that LaTeX supports (and especially to support existing packages).
Python needs to support larger dongles.
I would probably refuse to sign anything when leaving a company. What right to they have to impose any conditions on you, since you are free to leave any time anyway? But the rules I had in mind were when a company decides not to let its own employees contact their former colleagues on its behalf. This is a form of non-poach agreement, but for the reasons I gave, I don't think it's necessarily wrong.
That is an unfair criticism given that I also said that a masters degree should be a minimum. Also, why should I be specific, it's not like my slashdot post will be the basis for legislation. Do you seriously think I'm trying to create some wiggle room for myself so I can't be held accountable for my Slashdot post later on, when I propose very weak restrictions on H-1B visas? Or are you just trying to score a cheap shot instead of addressing my actual arguments? Perhaps you are more suited to politics.
The hospital may also be committing a serious crime.
That was my point :-) There is a double standard where these companies get a slap on the wrist in a civil court, while if this guy did exactly the same thing back, he would get criminal charges. But as you say, even without this double standard it would not make any sense to respond by hacking the hospital.
That would be responding to a company whose only fault is having a bad policy and poor training, by committing a serious crime!
No poach agreements are just another form of price fixing. While companies may be on friendly or less than friendly terms, as long as they are separate companies, they have no right to enter into price fixing agreements. These agreements keep wages below market rates. Someone who might earn $300,000 a year in a free market might only earn $250,000 because other companies won't make competing offers with their current offer.
While losing employees causes a lot of disruption to a company, potential loss of IP, etc. this is just part of the game. All monopolies and cartels can offer plausible sounding reasons why the "order" that they impose on the market is better than competition, but as a society we decided long ago that the free market works better. So it doesn't matter what other benefits these companies claim no-poach agreements have, they are still illegal price fixing.
The only exception I can think of is a prohibition on people who move from company A to company B, contacting their co-workers in company A, in their capacity as an employee of company B. This could be considered in improper use of that person's professional contacts at company A. However a recruiter using public information to contact an employee at another company should always be not only allowed, but encouraged.
I was complaining about the title of this article, in particular its sneering tone, and the implicit assumption in this and many other submissions that everyone on this site is American. I don't like the assumption that jobs for American IT workers are good, when many readers are IT workers outside the US, and therefore competing with Americans for those jobs. While it's not for non-Americans to decide what visa rules of the US should be, I object to this site taking the position that whatever is good for American IT workers (and possibly bad for non-American IT workers) is good, and whatever is bad for American IT workers is bad.
I already explained my position on H-1B's (which is the position almost any orthodox economist would take): they are indeed bad for US IT workers, but they may be good for the US as a whole. But if a person wanted to use what I consider to be incorrect economic reasoning to argue that H-1B visas harmed the economy because they lowered wages, then I'm not going to call the xenophobic.
Maybe it's time to clarify what kind of a site Slashdot is? It claims to be "News for Nerds" but there are a lot of nerds who have H-1B visas, or live outside the US.
This article's title is just plain nasty. There is room for debate on these issues, and I personally think the numbers of H-1B visas are excessive (or better put, the requirements for getting one are too lenient), but the idea that people applying for H-1B's are to be despised is very offputting to potential users of this site. Unless, of course, Slashdot isn't really for these people in which case you should be more explicit about that.
On the issue of H-1B's themselves, it is necessary to separate out generic issues of free trade, from issues that are specific to trade in human labor. Any valuable commidity will benefit country that imports it. If there were a ban on importing rare earth metals to the US, and suddently this was lifted, it would benefit companies that utilize these metals (and ultimately consumers) and harm producers of rare earth metals. However the net benefit would be positive, this is standard economic theory. Now I imagine that when the ban is lifted, the rare earth producers would say "there is no shortage of rare earth metals, people just aren't willing to pay a fair price. If people paid more, we could mine previously uneconomic deposits, etc.". This would be a mistaken interpretation, again because economic theory says that the welfare of society is maximized under free trade.
Now this theory breaks down when it applies to people, but only because of externalities. That is, people who come to the US on H-1B visas may have a negative influence on the US apart from their impact on the labor force. Some of these are simply because a person in the US temporarily will be less engaged with the community and civil society. Also many Americans prefer that the US retain its cultural and ethinc composition, and so these people may be negatively affected.
So there are many valid arguments against H-1B visas, although most of the economic arguments are wrong. I think the criteria should be stricter so that only the people who add the most value to the economy can get one. This way, the US would get the maximum benefit for the minimum number of people. A masters degree should be a minimum.
Anyway that is my view on H-1B visas but can we please keep personal animosity towards people on H-1B's out of it?
I tried switching to Python + Numpy/Scipy from Matlab. In the end I switched back to Matlab. I'm already familiar with python, and have done a lot of C++ programming so slight langauge differences were not the issue. Here are some of the reasons I switched back to Matlab:
IDE Matlab comes with a ready to use IDE.
Value semantics Matlab treats Matrices (and all classes that are not derived from "handle") using value semantics, so you know that Y=f(X) won't change X, if X is a matrix. However it also uses copy-on-write so that calling f won't make an unnecessary copy of X. This makes life a lot easier than trying to figure out how to make deep copies of everything.
Simpler syntax for math Matlab generally has simpler syntax for mathematical operations, which makes sense since that is what it was designed for. Python is a general purpose programming language, so it doesn't have the syntatic sugar for dealing with matrices and arrays that matlab does.
Faster out of the box Even when I installed ATLAS, numpy was still slower than matlab. Tuning ATLAS to your own system would probably result in equal speeds, but that is a lot of extra work.
On the other hand, the python route does have many advantages: more sensible and standard approaches to namespace / filesystem and OO programming, no license issues (say if you want to set up a cluster), easier to integrate with other languages, and access to wide range of non-math related libraries (although generally this is not a real advantage because you can, and should, do data processing in python and only do the actual math in mathalb). As to extra cost, I think that compared to the value of the student/researcher's time the cost is not very great. The only toolboxes most researchers need are the Optimization toobox and the Statistics toolbox.
This.
On multiplication, the issue is efficiency, not whether it can be done. Recall my original claim was
You seem to have ignored the questions I raised about the efficiency (in terms of big O running time, and overhead) of the MapReduce implementation.
I saw the IEEE paper on finite element analysis and MapReduce, it was completely contentless (maybe Google wasn't being such a good friend to you as you thought).
HAMA is interestin. Technically it isn't a Map Reduce framework, which confirms my point about the limitations of MapReduce (in fact it was designed to get around these limitations). While I was correct in what I said about MapReduce, HAMA does show that it is possible to do supercomputer like calculations on commodity clusters, but only by dumping the restrictions of MapReduce.
Everything you said about linpack and hadoop is nonsense.