They exist because the US is kind of xenophobic and hostile to immigrants.
to which the reply was aimed.
Sure, I wrote that. You wrote:
...dismissing the fact that they are basically brought in as scabs to undercut the position of all other workers...
Which would be fine if the only thing I had written was:
They exist because the US is kind of xenophobic and hostile to immigrants.
However, since I wrote more than just that, it's a little disingenuous to aim an attack (a least an attack that claims that I'm dismissing something that I was essentially addressed in a sentence to which the reply wasn't aimed) at just one sentence out of context.
Maybe. Sometimes I feel that way, then I listen to someone talking about how drugs, unemployment, crime, moral decay, etc. are all the fault of immigrants. Or I just hear the subject of the French come up.
There are ways to solve this problem. One of them is to simply refer such people to someone else. If we step outside that car analogy, that's not as easy when the client is your nominal boss. Sure, you can look for another job, but that's fairly drastic. As far as I can tell, the main way to get around this is to lie. If you're asked if it can be done quick and dirty to get something that works, you simply say no.
Well, it's a car analogy, so it's not an exact fit to the question at hand. Still, how about this: because their car breaks, the can't drive to work and get fired, and then their kids end up homeless and starving. Maybe I don't want that to happen. Also, there's such a thing as professional pride.
You're caught up on the fact that the visa holders are here legally and dismissing the fact that they are basically brought in as scabs to undercut the position of all other workers (native and immigrant, alike). It's this aspect of the visa holders that upsets natives, not the people, their culture, or the fact that they're immigrants.
Um, I'm the one who wrote:
H1-B visas are a method of creating an underclass of what are essentially indentured servants strung along with the carrot and stick.
Blaming and hating the workers for being here on those terms is irrational and stupid, however. The exploitive system is the problem.
Obama himself, however, has publicly embraced the moniker "ObamaCare" and has said he is proud of the name;
I suppose, if that's the case, it's fair. One would wonder why he would want his name attached to it though. That just makes it more of a target. It's already pretty clear that it's going to be dismantled on partisan grounds as soon as there's a shift in power. It's also a bit of an abomination anyway.
I have. I've lived in several countries in several continents/geographic regions and I am currently an immigrant to the US. I'm well aware that there are places that are far more xenophobic and hostile to immigrants than the US but let's just say that there's still plenty of room for improvement here.
Just curious, are you an immigrant? I am. I've been an immigrant to multiple countries. Trust me on this one, the US is a bit xenophobic. It's certainly not the worst, but it's far from the best either.
Also, the "underclass" I was describing was people here on legal work visas. If the people of the US are hostile to those visa holders, how exactly does that disprove my point?
If there's a real bond of trust between those doing the implementing and those they're implementing for such that explanations and warnings are not ignored, that's a different story. In my life I've run into too many management types who think that the important details aren't important. I've been made to listen to listen to recordings from business self-help gurus by some of these people who listen to that nonsense religiously and want to proselytize to others. It doesn't seem to occur to them that technicians aren't going to appreciate listening to someone frankly expound that technicians are just peons to be exploited and that everything they say should be ignored because they don't understand business. This is really what some of these people think.
So, when they demand that something be done fast, and you try to tell them that it can be done quick and dirty, but it's a terrible idea because of all the terrible things that could go wrong, they don't listen. Or, they may listen but, when you can't predict the future and tell them exactly what could go wrong and can only explain things in generalities (because, if you can say for certain that the quick and dirty solution will fail and how, you can either fix it so it won't, or you can flat out say that the quick and dirty solution isn't a solution). I suppose it would pay to be more dishonest to people like that. To never say "It can be done, but..." and rather say "it can't be done that way, we'll have to..." The problem with that solution is that they will then find someone else who will tell them what they want to hear.
The water pump about to break was not a "detail".....the make of the replacement belt is a detail.
Well, it was just a car analogy. They're very popular and they're sort of a meme around here. In any case, what I was trying to say was simply that if someone has absolutely no care about the details then they don't have a sufficient grounding in the problem to even know what's an important detail and what isn't. That's why it's very important to provide that information. Trouble is, it's sometimes not so easy to get people to believe you.
Of course, this is all based on my personal experience and observations. I'm not remotely in your weight class, so I imagine your voice carries quite a lot more authority than mine.
It's solving the problem that the customer demands be solved. It's the problem right in front of them, and they don't care about the details, so when the mechanic says: "We could just replace the belt but..." they don't listen to anything after the "but".
They don't care if it's big-endian, little-endian, Python, or Visual Basic; they just want their problem solved.
Sure, same thing applies when people go to a mechanic, or a plumber, etc. They go to a mechanic and the mechanic tells them that their car has broken a belt and that it's probably happening because of some belt-driven component failing and it will take some work to fix. The person demands that the problem just be fixed and that the belt be replaced. Mechanic replaces belt. Car works. Smug car owner congratulates themselves on their intelligence. A month later, their water pump fails completely and they crack their engine block, destroying the engine.
People scream: "Just make it work", and don't care about the details. Fine. Good for them. That doesn't make the details unimportant.
Its ok to have a concern about minorities and immigrants, but its got strangely out of kilter.
You have to understand that, while H1-B visas can be a way to immigrate, and can be a path to naturalization, they don't really exist due to concern for immigrants. They exist because the US is kind of xenophobic and hostile to immigrants. H1-B visas are a method of creating an underclass of what are essentially indentured servants strung along with the carrot and stick.
Is Obamacare the official name for this healthcare reform package? Somehow I don't think it is. It's not very good legislation. It's definitely not healthcare done right. But using the term "Obamacare" still seems to smack of bias, especially when you consider that main details of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act are implementations of the Heritage Foundation's plan that the Republicans were pushing back when the US was trying to get meaningful healthcare reform. US politics seems to be driven by short memories and nasty, hypocritical backstabbing.
Are you talking about the risk of being excluded from future jobs by employers who don't like being betrayed, or do you think this put him in actual danger somehow?
And it's worth noting that minimum wage prevents a lot of people from being employed simply because their labor is worth less than minimum wage at present.
The obvious issue there is that it's virtually impossible to live on minimum wage as it is. So, all these people who you seem to think would be able to get jobs if there were no minimum wage would be getting jobs where they earn starvation wages. Well, ok, they'll have plenty to eat as long as they don't waste their money on frivolous things like somewhere to live and clothes to wear.
I agree with you on the basic living wage idea. Not so much on getting rid of healthcare mandates, although I do agree that the US style ones are terrible.
All true, but not entirely fair to the Concorde since you're comparing modern airliners to a 35+ year old aircraft. Back then, the efficiency gap was much smaller. If development on supersonic passenger craft had kept up, the gap would have stayed smaller even though the advantage would always go to subsonic craft (until you start getting into the area of sub-orbital shuttles).
Fuel consumption also effects range. So, there is a reason the United States does not have any supersonic bombers.
Well, I would say that there is a reason and it's called missiles. I would say that, except for the B1-B. It's slower than a Concorde, but still supersonic, and it has a range of 7000+ miles.
The Concorde was both expensive and money-losing, and the side effects (sonic boom) were more than most people wanted to deal with.
The Concorde was expensive mainly because it didn't go into mass production. The sonic boom concerns were largely ridiculous. It was killed pretty much entirely by the one fatal crash and then 9/11.
Voyager has been underway for 36 years and is less than 0.002 light years from earth so it's 10,000+ generations away unless we can go much, much faster
Ion engines have been demonstrated to work. Solar sails may also be practical for acceleration in the inner solar system. Accelerating at a very conservative one ten/thousandth of standard gravity, a craft using some such constant acceleration system would be going faster than Voyager 1 in less than 7 months even without a gravity assist. After accelerating as long as Voyager has been, it would be travelling more than 60 times as fast relative to Earth. That would make for a trip of about 6500 years. That's still plenty of generations and is certainly a longer term project than anything humans have ever undertaken, but it's at least scraping the edge of the realm of possibility.
While seemingly true, this statement is misleading. Having found 3 habitable planets around a single star, it does not follow that all stars have 3 habitable planets. Or even that any other star has 3 habitable planets. I really hope this was just a statement made out of context...otherwise...it just makes me sad.
The point is that planets in the habitable zone are clearly not so rare (either that or we've gotten really, really lucky looking for them). I agree that it does not follow that all stars have three habitable planets. However it does make the odds vanishingly small that no other star has three habitable zone planets.
The problem is, we don't even have space shuttles any more. We're technologically regressing as far as air and space go. Still, if we ever manage to get our act together well enough to actually build something like a generation ship, 22 light years away is pretty close, relatively speaking.
150 years ago the thought of getting from N.Y to London in 8 hours was the stuff of fantasy. Today its an everyday thing.
Yeah, but 11 years ago getting from NY to London in less than 4 hours was an everyday thing (if pricier than other flights). Now it's unheard of. The only planes in service that have the speed and range don't regularly make that kind of trip and they don't take passengers. Modern enthusiasm for advances in technology seems to be limited mostly to whatever the latest smartphone is. Also, the people clamouring for those more advanced smartphones also typically have no clue whatsoever about the actual tech specs of them and are typically just being led around by the nose by marketing. Some of us are very pessimistic about the future of real technological development, at least in the short term.
You seem to be considerably more impressed by a degree in economics than most of us around here are. Also, you're making a pure appeal to authority here. Having an advanced degree doesn't free him from the need to provide some sort of evidence.
"Most" referred to pacific islands in general and is the correct term.
I thought "most" was part of the term "most carefully" implying that you put a lot of care into selecting the word marginal. Now you seem to be saying that you were using the word to refer to pacific islands in general. That doesn't even make any sense. Either you express yourself in really weird ways or it's just the poor memory for previous posts again.
Not by a long shot. Nauru has almost no freshwater, poor soils, and only a thin strip of fertile land.
Nauru has 2+ meters of rainfall a year. It has limited natural storage for that, of course, but that's still far better than nearly everywhere else in the world that isn't right next to a body of fresh water. The high phosphate levels that make the place so attractive to fertilizer companies can actually hurt the growth of various types of plants, but there are plenty of native plants that can grow there. Modern notions of what constitutes arable soil tend to be fairly biased. Just because it's not a great place to grow corn or wheat doesn't mean that it can't produce plenty of nutrition. Also, it only has a thin strip of arable land because of the mining that has destroyed most of the island. You're completely neglecting that the islands food resources used to include some very large bird colonies and that there's abundant fishing. I will re-iterate that people have lived there for millennia.
It's not an example of the dangers of unsustainability because Nauru's resources could never have been used sustainably.
Nauru's resources are phosphate. You can't use that "sustainably". You can dig it out of the ground and sell it, that's all.
Why are you quoting yourself (or possibly quoting me when I quoted you) and then replying to yourself without quoting anything I wrote? Seems a little narcissistic. Also, the statement that you can't use phosphate sustainably are ridiculous. Do you have any idea where the phosphate on Nauru even comes from? It's biologically accumulated through bird droppings. It has built up over time as birds have collected it from sea life. It can be used perfectly sustainably in situ in agriculture. You just can't wrap your head around any use that isn't short-sighted, rapid exploitation.
No, it's not. Speculation is taking a high risk. Gambling is taking a risk with an expected negative return.
There's just a fundamental problem in talking to you. You just don't use the same language as I do. "Gambling is taking a risk with an expected negative return"? Huh? Frankly, you don't seem to be using the same language as anyone.
The same way it always works: people who own a resource will use it to maximize their own goals. So, some people will squander it and their kids will be poor. Others will use it sensibly and their kids will be rich.
You kind of have that a bit backwards. The people who squander other people's resources tend to be the ones who end up rich. Their use is only sensible by a very narrow definition in which they're the only ones who matter. Also, you still haven't explained how your "the people who own a resource" plan would work _on Nauru_. What plan, based on your principles, would have worked there?
Stop waving your hands. Show me a feasible, detailed, widely-accepted scientific and economic plan for human global sustainability. Something that the majority of experts agree on (you know, a "consensus", you like those so much).
You're kidding, right? I have to give you, in this post, a detailed _global_ plan? Maybe I could do it a tweet instead? The details are vast, and it would be supreme hubris to claim that I, or anyone, has a complete grasp on the logistics of the entire freaking world! Meanwhile your notion that wanton, frivolous waste and poor planning will work as long as there are no regula
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You also wrote:
They exist because the US is kind of xenophobic and hostile to immigrants.
to which the reply was aimed.
Sure, I wrote that. You wrote:
...dismissing the fact that they are basically brought in as scabs to undercut the position of all other workers...
Which would be fine if the only thing I had written was:
They exist because the US is kind of xenophobic and hostile to immigrants.
However, since I wrote more than just that, it's a little disingenuous to aim an attack (a least an attack that claims that I'm dismissing something that I was essentially addressed in a sentence to which the reply wasn't aimed) at just one sentence out of context.
Maybe. Sometimes I feel that way, then I listen to someone talking about how drugs, unemployment, crime, moral decay, etc. are all the fault of immigrants. Or I just hear the subject of the French come up.
There are ways to solve this problem. One of them is to simply refer such people to someone else. If we step outside that car analogy, that's not as easy when the client is your nominal boss. Sure, you can look for another job, but that's fairly drastic. As far as I can tell, the main way to get around this is to lie. If you're asked if it can be done quick and dirty to get something that works, you simply say no.
Well, it's a car analogy, so it's not an exact fit to the question at hand. Still, how about this: because their car breaks, the can't drive to work and get fired, and then their kids end up homeless and starving. Maybe I don't want that to happen. Also, there's such a thing as professional pride.
You're caught up on the fact that the visa holders are here legally and dismissing the fact that they are basically brought in as scabs to undercut the position of all other workers (native and immigrant, alike). It's this aspect of the visa holders that upsets natives, not the people, their culture, or the fact that they're immigrants.
Um, I'm the one who wrote:
H1-B visas are a method of creating an underclass of what are essentially indentured servants strung along with the carrot and stick.
Blaming and hating the workers for being here on those terms is irrational and stupid, however. The exploitive system is the problem.
Obama himself, however, has publicly embraced the moniker "ObamaCare" and has said he is proud of the name;
I suppose, if that's the case, it's fair. One would wonder why he would want his name attached to it though. That just makes it more of a target. It's already pretty clear that it's going to be dismantled on partisan grounds as soon as there's a shift in power. It's also a bit of an abomination anyway.
I'm pretty sure you haven't ever lived overseas
I have. I've lived in several countries in several continents/geographic regions and I am currently an immigrant to the US. I'm well aware that there are places that are far more xenophobic and hostile to immigrants than the US but let's just say that there's still plenty of room for improvement here.
Just curious, are you an immigrant? I am. I've been an immigrant to multiple countries. Trust me on this one, the US is a bit xenophobic. It's certainly not the worst, but it's far from the best either.
Also, the "underclass" I was describing was people here on legal work visas. If the people of the US are hostile to those visa holders, how exactly does that disprove my point?
If there's a real bond of trust between those doing the implementing and those they're implementing for such that explanations and warnings are not ignored, that's a different story. In my life I've run into too many management types who think that the important details aren't important. I've been made to listen to listen to recordings from business self-help gurus by some of these people who listen to that nonsense religiously and want to proselytize to others. It doesn't seem to occur to them that technicians aren't going to appreciate listening to someone frankly expound that technicians are just peons to be exploited and that everything they say should be ignored because they don't understand business. This is really what some of these people think.
So, when they demand that something be done fast, and you try to tell them that it can be done quick and dirty, but it's a terrible idea because of all the terrible things that could go wrong, they don't listen. Or, they may listen but, when you can't predict the future and tell them exactly what could go wrong and can only explain things in generalities (because, if you can say for certain that the quick and dirty solution will fail and how, you can either fix it so it won't, or you can flat out say that the quick and dirty solution isn't a solution). I suppose it would pay to be more dishonest to people like that. To never say "It can be done, but..." and rather say "it can't be done that way, we'll have to..." The problem with that solution is that they will then find someone else who will tell them what they want to hear.
The water pump about to break was not a "detail".....the make of the replacement belt is a detail.
Well, it was just a car analogy. They're very popular and they're sort of a meme around here. In any case, what I was trying to say was simply that if someone has absolutely no care about the details then they don't have a sufficient grounding in the problem to even know what's an important detail and what isn't. That's why it's very important to provide that information. Trouble is, it's sometimes not so easy to get people to believe you.
Of course, this is all based on my personal experience and observations. I'm not remotely in your weight class, so I imagine your voice carries quite a lot more authority than mine.
It's solving the problem that the customer demands be solved. It's the problem right in front of them, and they don't care about the details, so when the mechanic says: "We could just replace the belt but..." they don't listen to anything after the "but".
They don't care if it's big-endian, little-endian, Python, or Visual Basic; they just want their problem solved.
Sure, same thing applies when people go to a mechanic, or a plumber, etc. They go to a mechanic and the mechanic tells them that their car has broken a belt and that it's probably happening because of some belt-driven component failing and it will take some work to fix. The person demands that the problem just be fixed and that the belt be replaced. Mechanic replaces belt. Car works. Smug car owner congratulates themselves on their intelligence. A month later, their water pump fails completely and they crack their engine block, destroying the engine.
People scream: "Just make it work", and don't care about the details. Fine. Good for them. That doesn't make the details unimportant.
Its ok to have a concern about minorities and immigrants, but its got strangely out of kilter.
You have to understand that, while H1-B visas can be a way to immigrate, and can be a path to naturalization, they don't really exist due to concern for immigrants. They exist because the US is kind of xenophobic and hostile to immigrants. H1-B visas are a method of creating an underclass of what are essentially indentured servants strung along with the carrot and stick.
Is Obamacare the official name for this healthcare reform package? Somehow I don't think it is. It's not very good legislation. It's definitely not healthcare done right. But using the term "Obamacare" still seems to smack of bias, especially when you consider that main details of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act are implementations of the Heritage Foundation's plan that the Republicans were pushing back when the US was trying to get meaningful healthcare reform. US politics seems to be driven by short memories and nasty, hypocritical backstabbing.
Can't it be normal, expected behavior and sinister at the same time?
Are you talking about the risk of being excluded from future jobs by employers who don't like being betrayed, or do you think this put him in actual danger somehow?
And it's worth noting that minimum wage prevents a lot of people from being employed simply because their labor is worth less than minimum wage at present.
The obvious issue there is that it's virtually impossible to live on minimum wage as it is. So, all these people who you seem to think would be able to get jobs if there were no minimum wage would be getting jobs where they earn starvation wages. Well, ok, they'll have plenty to eat as long as they don't waste their money on frivolous things like somewhere to live and clothes to wear.
I agree with you on the basic living wage idea. Not so much on getting rid of healthcare mandates, although I do agree that the US style ones are terrible.
All true, but not entirely fair to the Concorde since you're comparing modern airliners to a 35+ year old aircraft. Back then, the efficiency gap was much smaller. If development on supersonic passenger craft had kept up, the gap would have stayed smaller even though the advantage would always go to subsonic craft (until you start getting into the area of sub-orbital shuttles).
Fuel consumption also effects range. So, there is a reason the United States does not have any supersonic bombers.
Well, I would say that there is a reason and it's called missiles. I would say that, except for the B1-B. It's slower than a Concorde, but still supersonic, and it has a range of 7000+ miles.
The Concorde was both expensive and money-losing, and the side effects (sonic boom) were more than most people wanted to deal with.
The Concorde was expensive mainly because it didn't go into mass production. The sonic boom concerns were largely ridiculous. It was killed pretty much entirely by the one fatal crash and then 9/11.
Voyager has been underway for 36 years and is less than 0.002 light years from earth so it's 10,000+ generations away unless we can go much, much faster
Ion engines have been demonstrated to work. Solar sails may also be practical for acceleration in the inner solar system. Accelerating at a very conservative one ten/thousandth of standard gravity, a craft using some such constant acceleration system would be going faster than Voyager 1 in less than 7 months even without a gravity assist. After accelerating as long as Voyager has been, it would be travelling more than 60 times as fast relative to Earth. That would make for a trip of about 6500 years. That's still plenty of generations and is certainly a longer term project than anything humans have ever undertaken, but it's at least scraping the edge of the realm of possibility.
While seemingly true, this statement is misleading. Having found 3 habitable planets around a single star, it does not follow that all stars have 3 habitable planets. Or even that any other star has 3 habitable planets. I really hope this was just a statement made out of context...otherwise...it just makes me sad.
The point is that planets in the habitable zone are clearly not so rare (either that or we've gotten really, really lucky looking for them). I agree that it does not follow that all stars have three habitable planets. However it does make the odds vanishingly small that no other star has three habitable zone planets.
The problem is, we don't even have space shuttles any more. We're technologically regressing as far as air and space go. Still, if we ever manage to get our act together well enough to actually build something like a generation ship, 22 light years away is pretty close, relatively speaking.
150 years ago the thought of getting from N.Y to London in 8 hours was the stuff of fantasy. Today its an everyday thing.
Yeah, but 11 years ago getting from NY to London in less than 4 hours was an everyday thing (if pricier than other flights). Now it's unheard of. The only planes in service that have the speed and range don't regularly make that kind of trip and they don't take passengers. Modern enthusiasm for advances in technology seems to be limited mostly to whatever the latest smartphone is. Also, the people clamouring for those more advanced smartphones also typically have no clue whatsoever about the actual tech specs of them and are typically just being led around by the nose by marketing. Some of us are very pessimistic about the future of real technological development, at least in the short term.
You seem to be considerably more impressed by a degree in economics than most of us around here are. Also, you're making a pure appeal to authority here. Having an advanced degree doesn't free him from the need to provide some sort of evidence.
Now you can come up with an idea, get it patented in a matter of months, raise money on the IP, and be off to the races.
Simple ideas aren't meant to be patentable. Inventions are meant to be patentable. Just demonstrates how corrupt this guy is and the whole system is.
"Most" referred to pacific islands in general and is the correct term.
I thought "most" was part of the term "most carefully" implying that you put a lot of care into selecting the word marginal. Now you seem to be saying that you were using the word to refer to pacific islands in general. That doesn't even make any sense. Either you express yourself in really weird ways or it's just the poor memory for previous posts again.
Not by a long shot. Nauru has almost no freshwater, poor soils, and only a thin strip of fertile land.
Nauru has 2+ meters of rainfall a year. It has limited natural storage for that, of course, but that's still far better than nearly everywhere else in the world that isn't right next to a body of fresh water. The high phosphate levels that make the place so attractive to fertilizer companies can actually hurt the growth of various types of plants, but there are plenty of native plants that can grow there. Modern notions of what constitutes arable soil tend to be fairly biased. Just because it's not a great place to grow corn or wheat doesn't mean that it can't produce plenty of nutrition. Also, it only has a thin strip of arable land because of the mining that has destroyed most of the island. You're completely neglecting that the islands food resources used to include some very large bird colonies and that there's abundant fishing. I will re-iterate that people have lived there for millennia.
It's not an example of the dangers of unsustainability because Nauru's resources could never have been used sustainably.
Nauru's resources are phosphate. You can't use that "sustainably". You can dig it out of the ground and sell it, that's all.
Why are you quoting yourself (or possibly quoting me when I quoted you) and then replying to yourself without quoting anything I wrote? Seems a little narcissistic. Also, the statement that you can't use phosphate sustainably are ridiculous. Do you have any idea where the phosphate on Nauru even comes from? It's biologically accumulated through bird droppings. It has built up over time as birds have collected it from sea life. It can be used perfectly sustainably in situ in agriculture. You just can't wrap your head around any use that isn't short-sighted, rapid exploitation.
No, it's not. Speculation is taking a high risk. Gambling is taking a risk with an expected negative return.
There's just a fundamental problem in talking to you. You just don't use the same language as I do. "Gambling is taking a risk with an expected negative return"? Huh? Frankly, you don't seem to be using the same language as anyone.
The same way it always works: people who own a resource will use it to maximize their own goals. So, some people will squander it and their kids will be poor. Others will use it sensibly and their kids will be rich.
You kind of have that a bit backwards. The people who squander other people's resources tend to be the ones who end up rich. Their use is only sensible by a very narrow definition in which they're the only ones who matter. Also, you still haven't explained how your "the people who own a resource" plan would work _on Nauru_. What plan, based on your principles, would have worked there?
Stop waving your hands. Show me a feasible, detailed, widely-accepted scientific and economic plan for human global sustainability. Something that the majority of experts agree on (you know, a "consensus", you like those so much).
You're kidding, right? I have to give you, in this post, a detailed _global_ plan? Maybe I could do it a tweet instead? The details are vast, and it would be supreme hubris to claim that I, or anyone, has a complete grasp on the logistics of the entire freaking world! Meanwhile your notion that wanton, frivolous waste and poor planning will work as long as there are no regula