Your whole "filter" hypothesis is really shows how we are often trapped by first-world thinking.
You might think if the atlantic ocean "filter" is somehow blocking *non-western* immigrants now, the pacific ocean filter would be similar or even better. However, history shows otherwise. Nearly all immigrants are "economic" immigrants, neither more liberal or more conservative. They are looking for a better life *economically*.
Large immigration wave from Asia to the US starting in the 19th century (and immigration checks and "tickets" were non-issues) did not result in "cream-of-the-crop" immigration coming to the US. The Taiping rebellion in southeast china caused economic catastrophe (colapse of industry and trade) in the region resulting in famine and flight (sound familiar). Some might argue that this current wave of economic immigration in Europe is similar to these early waves of Asian immigration to the US.
Of course as is part of history, the US responded to the first wave of Asian immigration by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 (1923 in Canada). Such laws effectively lasted until the US entered WWII (pacific front).
Perhaps Europe could learn from the US's (and Canada's) mistakes in this matter... But perhaps not...
The reality is that it is merely expedient for the current crisis for immigrants to venture to Europe. They could even travel to Asia, but they are not as welcome there. I don't think it's the "ocean" stopping them. History shows the ocean doesn't really these types of immigration waves. As another example, during the Irish Potato Famine, why did so many of the Irish come to the US/Canada/Australia instead of continental Europe which was much closer? Because as "unwelcome" as they became later in many of those places, they had the opportunity and the decision was mere expedience even if it involved crossing an ocean.
Mormonism is probably too new to make a comparison, and from what I understand, Mormons in general are just really nice people towards outsiders.
That is not fully my experience regarding Mormonism. Although all the Mormon people I know are relatively friendly, there is a limit to Mormonism "nice" with respect to outsiders.
For example, don't even think about getting an invitation to a Mormon Wedding. As non LDS temple-recommended members are not allowed in wedding at Mormon temples and if your Mormon friend dares to having a civil wedding to include their friends it will cause them to be punished by the church. To me it is hard to consider that "nice" to outsiders
Also, don't walk through the public area of BYU campus holding hands or wearing short pants and expect a "nice" reception (you are basically painting yourself as a target as an outsider with this behavior).
Also, the Mormon church members aren't really that nice to slightly lapsed Mormons (not enough tithing, or partaking in a little caffeine, alcohol, or premarital sex), they are effectively permanently shunned (even by family). I'm not sure I would generally categorize that behavior as "nice" to outsiders (i.e., a lapsed Mormon would then be considered an outsider).
But at least the Mormons I know are certainly are friendly. The church, not so much...:^(
In 2010, the USA, Asians passed Hispanics as the largest immigrant wave to the US with about 430,000 (36%) vs 370,000 (31%) Hispanic.
Ironically, the Asians seem to be adapting to US culture more than the Hispanics (e.g, willingness to learn English and blending in).
Just because the culture/language is more different than the native culture/language doesn't necessarily mean that integration is more difficult. One potential differentiation factors is that bulk of the Asian immigration has a higher level of education than the Hispanic immigration. But that doesn't explain the speed which the Vietnamese integration wave in the US achieved integration after the war (most of the immigrants had a similar education level than Hispanics and had similar language and cultural differences as Asians).
What most demographers see is that the main obstacles limiting integration of new immigrants isn't language, or culture, or education, but simply the type of resources available to immigrants when they come to the country. The obstacle to integration that many Hispanics face when they immigrate to the US is they have little pressure to learn English (if you ever been in East LA or Miami, there's really no reason to learn English). I suspect the same thing is true with certain recent Muslim immigrants in Europe. Because of the existence of these "ghettos", they feel little pressure to integrate.
Fortunately, for Hispanics coming to the US, these Hispanic "ghettos" aren't really ghetto at all in the US as many of the Hispanic enclaves in the US have been in existence since the 1800s (and actually used to be part of the Spanish empire back in the 1600s and/or Mexico) and are quite prosperous.
Doesn't sound like that is the case in Europe with new Muslim immigrants. However, if you look at Spain, Muslim immigration to that country is quite simlilar to Hispanic immigration to the US. As Spain has a long history of Muslim association (like the US with Hispanics), and might be considered anti-islam (given the Spanish history like the Spanish Inquisition), yet recent integration of Muslims into Spain and Portugal show quite a bit of success compared to the rest of Europe even with the "language" barrier remaining intact (similar to Hispanics coming to the USA).
So although they may have been warmly and generously welcomed, they are only as successful as integration the people they associate with most when they come and most of Europe didn't really treat those folks very well...
I'd like to find a single house that ever caught fire due to improper thermostat installation. Because you certainly can't electrocute yourself with that 24V circuit, so what other reason could there be for government meddling?
You are missing the point about requiring a licensed electrician. It's about jobs (usually union jobs). The safety aspect is just a ruse...
Although that doesn't always explain everything. In Oregon and New Jersey, you aren't allowed to pump your own gas. Although service stations in those states are all for allowing self-serve gas pumping (to reduce labor costs), disability activists have effectively torpedoed any bills to change these laws and keep the status quo.
The problem is that Nest is a bit *too* smart for it's own good. Smart things require power and native power requirements of such a smart controller are larger than that can be supplied by common thermostat wiring schemes.
Older thermostat wiring (in 70% of houses) can only really deliver power through the wiring when the heat (or ac) is on/active, so a thermostat must sip power when it is active, and save when it is idle. Ironically, the wire in the wiring scheme that can be used to deliver continuous power is called the "common" wire even though it is actually not too common**;^)
Being "smart", the Nest device (as with most "smart" controllers) likely attempts to use various power savings tricks to reduce their native power requirements to a lower average power so it can survive between active times on a battery with this typically wiring. Apparently this update wasn't as smart as it thought it was about conserving power and the energy received during the active time and their efforts were not enough to keep all the smarts going on the battery...
Of course the older "dumber" smart thermostats, drew such a small amount of power that they didn't need to apply smart power savings tricks to keep things alive between active cycles. Sometimes you can be too clever for your own good and I think the Nest falls into one of those situations...
** common as in common voltage potential in AC transformer thermostat wiring systems
The problem with trusting reliability from the cloud provider is that their economic interests are not necessarily aligned with yours (they could be, but most people are more "selfish" about their own cost-vs-reliability requirements than the typical profit generating enterprise).
In this case, I'm sure the potential value in pushing out their failed update (perhaps for improved data gathering capability), vs the amount of QA testing they did was a cost trade-off that they made. If the thermostat was working fine as is for you, and you didn't care about their new big brother capabilities (because they have no value to you), you may have made a different feature value vs QA cost trade-off. For example, you might have only updated it after the inevitable first round of patches gets released and things seem stable (e.g., the slow follower approach instead of the bleeding edge approach to updates)...
As a stupid example, do you have the setting on your phone to update itself at any arbitrary time, or do you set your phone to ask you when it is a good time to update? What if you phone didn't give you a choice? and updated itself whenever the cloud felt like it was a good time?
And then there's slashdot beta... Do you really like the cloud determining which version of software you are going to use?
Now that Canada doesn't have a penny, doesn't that technically mean you made your currency non-metric (div 20) on purpose? And you can't even blame the USA for this? So sorry for your loss...
Well technically, it's "its small copper coin", not "it's"
The USA's small copper coin is a zinc coin with a copper coating, well technically it is. But, its importance is technical, or technically it is (or is it technically it's). Is that "it's" a technicality? Something to think about there...
FWIW, your "mathematical" explanation is totally bogus. You appear to have literally no idea what you are saying.
The reason the FFT works for modular multiplication of *integers* with thousands of bits is that you can pick a radix and a convolution size where you do multi-digit convolution where you don't lose any precision in those thousands of bits. Using a "logarithm" algorithm would require nearly 10x the precision to do modular multiplication on integers and using hw floating point (even long doubles) would be totally useless because it isn't accurate to more precision.
Also, addition and multiplication in the time domain does NOT magically become multiplication and addition in the frequency domain. Convolution in the time domain becomes multiplication in the frequency domain (that's how the FFT algorithm works: FFT multiply iFFT becomes cheaper than digit convolution when the size of the problem becomes large).
Finally, although it might be technically possible to use a DCT used in a typical video decoder to do some trivial digit convolution, the precision of a typical video decoder' DCT is only 14-16 bits and limited to 8 points which isn't enough precision to do squat for the modular multiplication needed to search for very large Mersenne Primes (which is what Prime95 program does). Of course you can't even get to the 1D DCT used in GPU hardware accelerators (they are generally hardwired to do 2D DCT only and modern compression algorithms don't even use the DCT anymore).
Sorry to rain on your parade, but leaving stream of consciousness BS like that around unchallenged risks it getting modded up and makes it harder for people to distinguish the real shit from the BS...
How exactly does one use "Fast Fourier Transforms to multiply extremely large numbers" and when exactly did Prime95 become an industry?
The most common way to multiply numbers larger than the register size of the machine (e.g., 4000 bit numbers) is to express it like most people multiply numbers more than 1 digit relative to some base R.
Where R is 10 for humans, for a computer, R is some power of 2 (because computers like that).
A basic observation of the math is that product of digits computed this way is very similar to a linear convolution of those digits (coefficients in this representation) and you can speed up large convolutions using an FFT. If you pick R small enough, you can do the multiplication and all the partial products together without any rounding problems using the SSE/AVX SIMD floating point math on your x86-64 computer.**
Prime95 is freeware app that is used by GIMPS that uses this FFT technique to multiple large numbers together very quickly and is a big stress on the CPU because the code is highly optimized.
Nobody claimed Prime95 is an "industry", but other industries that rely on skylake processors to do complex operations might be affected by the same bug Prime95 has triggered.
**Interestingly, the straight forward integer multiplication is slower than floating point for a certain precisions in nearly all x86-64 implementations because of a premium on SSE/AVX speed, intel has invested more on 32-bit FP math (24-bit mantissa multiplier for FP), vs 32-bit int math (32-bit x 32-bit -> 64bit int multipliers are much bigger)
Also here's a question for everyone. Why is 1800K "warm" while 5000K is "cool". We should really work on the way we talk about colors. Blue is hotter than red, yet for some reason people associate blue with cold and red with hot. Why haven't we fixed this?
FWIW, if you want to learn some interesting things about how humans name colors, the results of the World Color Survey back in the 1970's are the primary source of information used by researchers the study any color language association theories.
Outside this basic information, several subsequent associated studies of people and language, "warm" colors are associated with fire and heat, "cool" colors are associated with water, sky, and shadow. Several studies also correlate the so-called "cool" color with "dark" and association with lower temperatures. Many researcher believe that because we don't have experience with the colors emitted black body radiators at high temperatures and those colors only appear in "cooler" context within the experience of those people that created our languages that is why we associate those colors with "cool" and not "warm".
On the other hand, blackbody radiation correlated temperature is really a bogus thing to measure anyhow. Forcing it to further correlate with "warm" and "cool" and "hotter" doesn't generally make sense in many contexts.
You can have a "warm" greeting and a "cool" greeting and it has nothing to do with any temperature. You can perceive color from a reflective object or a transmissive object that is not a black body radiators, so there is no "hotter" in that case.
On the other hand, if it simply bothers you that 5000K is "higher" than 1800K, then just measure your color "temperature" in Mireds...
The pollution from a gallon of diesel used to move a million tons of goods injures my lungs just as much as the pollution from a gallon of diesel used to move an ounce of goods. The real question is how does the damage caused by the pollution from moving a ton of goods with diesel compare to the damage caused by moving a ton of goods using other energy sources.
My guess, that given the current product mixes that are being move, simply the manufacturing of a "ton" of those products is causing the most pollution, not the transportation. By simply not making most of the products in the first place (and thus obviating the need to transport them anywhere), is the true winning strategy.
Unfortunately in our consumer driven society, I don't see that happening any time soon.
The whole point of denying that climate change is man made is as an excuse to do nothing; the thinking that if it's not our fault then we don't have to fix it.
I disagree. The whole point of denying that climate change is man made is to attempt to *absolve* us from the sin of doing it.
Take for instance a forest fire. It happens. We attempt to blame someone. When the cause appears "natural" (e.g., a lightning strike or similar), then we as a species seem somehow *absolved* from responsibility. However, regardless of the blame, we often still attempt to stop a forest fire and attempt remediation afterwards, not because of some moral duty to the planet, but because it serves our economic interests. The truth of the matter, is the mere act of stopping/managing forest fires for our own selfish economic reasons may be one of the *unnatural* contributing factors of making future forest fires more intense. That doesn't stop most people from thinking we shouldn't put out forest fires that we didn't start. You can't really separate "us" from "natural" in the modern environment. If it's gonna burn, it will burn, eventually. In the bigger scheme of things does it really matter who started it? No. But the act of assigning blame shifts the debate on the cost burdens of any remediation process. The remediation of course is not about the forest per-se, but the economic value of the remediation the forest (e.g., prevent land-slide from covering highways, blocking dams, polluting water sources we use).
The point is that most everything in this climate change debate is about economics, not the planet. The planet was here long before us and will be here long after we are gone. The sooner people start realizing the whole thing is about economics, not the planet, and stop trying to assign blame to drive their remediation agenda, we can attempt to negotiate a reasonable path forward. In all likelihood that path might be better economically for us as a species but potentially *unnatural* when compared to how the environment would evolve without us.
This really just reminds me of the nuclear freeze protests of the 80's. The main argument put forth at the time, was that we should just stop and wait until we figure it out (basically the argument that is made by AGW folks). Of course we didn't stop and then the situation changed (no more USSR) which eventually led to de-escalation that seemed to be what would have been better in the first place. On the other hand the escalation we did could have had WWIII, but nobody knew at the time that economics would drive the eventual solution (e.g., no more USSR). The same thing is true with AGW. Nobody knows will happen, but I predict in the end, economics will drive the situation one way or the other. The current "A" part is really just posturing.
Fact checking and editing used to be the core of journalism.
Now editorial staffing is pretty much non-existent in most publications. Even if it does exist, the disproportionate power of the "star" journalist has any rendered editorial oversight limp at best (e.g., Dan Rathers, Jayson Blair).
Journalists used to cut their teeth with fact checking. Fact checkers were the checks-and-balances built into the historical journalism structure. Now with a publication paths that doesn't require them learning how to fact check (e.g., web publishing), budding journalists simultaneously are both inexperienced with fact checking and do not see any value in fact checking. Thus the facts that are reported suffer. That is the crux of the problem.
We are probably simply reliving the days of yellow journalism (from the late 19th century). Some speculated the original outbreak had to do with circulation wars at the time. The more things change, the more they remain the same...
Let's just hope a Pulitzer-Hearst war doesn't lead to a modern day Spanish-American War (if I can dabble in a little yellow journalism myself;^)
I don't think you've learned the same history as I did...
Historically, all research was done through private wealthy benefactors (not the government). That never really stopped. What happened is that governments started to fund some specific research. But this research was/is mostly contracts done using semi-private labs.
The real turning point was when governments started funding their own universities and labs in the 19th century. But this is not the modern university research lab that you might be thinking about. Basically a quasi-religious institution that wasn't really open to the general public (elites only). The primary goal of these institutions was to train the bureaucracy. It wasn't until the early 20th century, you see the beginnings of the modern research university in Germany with a more scientific focus. By concentrating the resources of the state, they were able to finally become as influential as the private research labs.
The German R&D model isn't really what you might think of it either. Take for instance the Fraunhofer Society. Although nominally a public institution, it conducts research with the goal of industrialization often on contract as it is primary funded by industry (e.g., using mostly private money, not public money). Perhaps./-ers might be familiar with the MP3 audio compression development that has come out of Fraunhofer.
Sure there are now also pure research university groups doing good research with pure public money, but it has never (and probably never will be) exclusively that way.
The Moon Village is simply name coined by newly minted ESA Director-General Johann-Dietrich Woerner. He has selected this as his stretch goal as something he has discussed prior to become the head of the agency. It is in the *concept* stage right now. As of yet, there are no partners, no money, no plan, etc. It also doesn't yet have the actual ESA as backer as he made this whole thing simply in a speech at the 31st Space Symposium in Colorado Springs in April.
The concept he was pitching was a manned base on the far side of the moon which should have opportunities for astronomy and planetary science, learning resource management.
Some of NASA administrator Charles Bolden' comments on this so called "Moon Village"...
“The US does not have to be the country that says, ‘We’re going, follow us,’” he said. “We’re all going back to the surface of the Moon. But, it’s just that the United States has no intention of leading that effort. We will support and be along with anybody that goes.”
“It will be critical for industry, both in the United States and elsewhere, but most importantly for our international partners to finally step up” and take the lead on lunar landing plans, he said. “Unfortunately, nobody’s stepped up yet.”
The FAA seem to be simply just trying to grab some turf in the commercial angle of this, but there's nothing really to grab yet.
if the lead is coming from the local pipes in people's houses, then how come the lead poisoning started when they switched water sources? That sounds like bee ess.
pH changed when they switched the source of water, the now acidic water dissolved lead in solder joints and thus ends up in the water in people's houses...
FWIW, I still think you are ignoring the fact that he didn't even think it worked very well (and wrote a letter to the Navy to that effect).
There is the image of a scientist that puts the blinders on an thinks his invention is the greatest and damn the consequences, but I think in this case, the image is more, well, this kinda works, I'm going to ignore all the warnings I'm receiving and we can patent it and make some money on it. Maybe that's your image of the "typical" scientist, but I just don't happen to agree that is "typical".
Anyhow, I doesn't look like we will convince each other either way on this topic.
AFAIK, Mr. Midgley (and his boss Mr. Kettering) were both advocating ethanol as an anti-knock for a couple years, until Mr. Midgley stumbled upon TEL. Pretty much everyone at GM's engine production division was against it (because of the lead buildup problem), but Midgely and Kettering convinced management that since they could patent it, TEL was a better for financial reasons. To me that is pretty much putting profit above harm. That is not saying all his motivation was profit, but certainly profit tilted the decision in this case. In fact this history behind TEL shows the story.
The initial goal the the Delco research program headed by Kettering was to increase compression ratios in engines to smooth a transition to an alcohol based fuel because of a perceived pending shortage of oil. A higher compression engine would be able to burn both alcohol and gasoline, but the problem with gasoline was the so-call pre-ignition knock due to non-octane fractions which raised havoc with high compression engines.
Research in Kettering's lab by Mr Midgley showed that ethanol was probably the best fuel for high-compression engines and they a gasoline and ethanol blend was a reasonable transition. GM bought Delco (actually named Dayton Metal Products at the time as the original name was sold in a spinoff) and turned it into GM research division. Eager to convince GM to continue to fund advanced fuel research, he tasked Mr. Midgley to take that anti-knock additives, but basically the research stalled and because of the impending transition to alcohol, Mr. Midgley eventually filed a patent application for a blend of alcohol and gasoline on February 28, 1920, clearly intending it to be an antiknock fuel of choice.
Later with continued research they stumbled upon the TEL additive and made a strategically deceptive press announcement about it: “Discovery of a tellurium gasoline compound which increases gasoline mileage by one hundred percent over present gasoline fuel was announced at the research lab of the G.M. Co. here today.” (since TEL was secret, the press mistook it for tellurium instead of lead). It is documented in the GM archives that Mr. Midgley had personally received letters from four of the world’s leading experts in the field: Wilson of MIT, Reid Hunt of Harvard, Yandell Henderson of Yale and Charles Kraus of Pottsdam in Germany. Each of the letters gave grave warnings about the toxicity of TEL and admonished him from continuing in this line of research. In addition, he received a specific warning from Public heath and the US Surgeon General about TEL being “serious menace to public health.”
As a response this, they required all future correspondence with media and government regulators to call the TEL-gas mixture Ethyl Gas (their trade name) to minimize its association with TEL industrial accidents that had occurred.
Mr. Midgely is also on record for advising the Navy to not use TEL-gas: “We have made great progress in overcoming the spark plug and valve trouble caused by (Ethyl lead) but we have not yet solved the problem to our entire satisfaction; and, in view of the fact that it is essential that no engine trouble of any kind develop, it seems wise not to risk the use of this material Probably the best possibilities are offered by a fuel consisting of a gasoline-benzol-alcohol blend”
Even armed with this knowledge and his reservations about the material, Midgley later wrote the following: “The way I feel about the Ethyl Gas situation is about as follows: It looks as though we could count on a minimum of 20 percent of the gas sold in the country if we advertise and go after the business – this at three cent gross to us from each gallon sold. I think we ought to go after it as soon as we can without being too hasty ”
This isn't knee jerk reaction, this is reaction to this specific case (where you seem to be assuming a general position that Midgley is "typical").
You should remember that Thomas Migley was foremost a scientist, and quite representative of the hubris and single-mindedness of scientists. When he advocated for the safety of leaded gasoline, he wasn't lying for financial gain, he was doing so because he believed it. The scientists protecting you from ozone holes or lead or snake oil are indistinguishable from the scientists that create the ozone holes or leaded gasoline in the first place, or the scientists that create better cancer treatments; it's only in hindsight that you know who was right.
So, when scientists tell you how to live your life or tell you that the science is settled and you should just do what they tell you, just remember how this guy died: A tragic accident ended his life when he was caught and strangled by the system he created.
Although potentially generally true in abstract, in the case of Mr. Midgley, he was definitely advocating leaded gasoline for *profit*.
The TEL (tetra-ethyl-lead) anti-knock additive was patentable (the use and manufacturing techniques), where the other leading additive contender ethanol was most certainly not patentable. Mr. Midgley may or may not have believed that TEL was "safe-enough", but he and his boss Charles Kettering basically minted GM a small fortune as part of it's 50% stake in the Ethyl Corporation (formed with Standard Oil aka ESSO) which was formed to take the patented TEL to market.
For those that don't understand the subtleties of the function of TEL in gasoline, you should at least understand that TEL combusts to form Lead in the engine which will eventually degrade its performance**. To combat this, TEL needs to be combined with scavenger solvents like EDB (ethylene dibromide) to make sure that the lead leaves the exhaust pipe, but EDB causes some its own set of engine corrosion problems (forms acids which corrode spark plugs, mufflers, pistons rings) and is a ozone depleting chemical. This whole thing is akin to a "I don't know why she swallowed the fly, perhaps she'll die" problem. Basically, the whole TEL thing was a rube-goldberg disaster that was foisted on the world by GM and Esso when both of them knew that ethanol would have done the job. They knew that the TEL additive was spewing lead into the environment from the get go as the scavenger solvents required to make it work were designed to get the lead out of the engine through the tailpipe (and into the environment).
** this totally independent of a catalytic converter getting coated with lead and not working which is eventually the thing that killed TEL...
This article sparked the memory of wondering why we had to pay more for unleaded gas... Apparently it was expensive to remove the naturally occurring lead from the refined gasoline.
because instead of lead, they had to add other chemicals to raise octane ratings to reduce knocking. Those chemicals cost more.
In addition to costing more, some of them (like MBTE) were arguably worse for the environment... Damn you CARB (California air resources board)...
I hear there ARE some entitlements that they don't get and for which they (or the employer) don't pay. (I think it's state unemployment insurance in some states.)
IMHO if/when such exist, the employer should be required to directly pay them the fee he would otherwise have paid the government, in addition to the mandated minimum wage/salary.
(That's actually fair, too: They can use the extra money to buy, or otherwise do something to try to replace, whatever the entitlement they don't get would have been.)
The IRS is very clear that H1b pay all federal taxes including federal unemployment. I'm not familiar with the laws in each state, but at least in CA, H1b also pay state UI and disablity insurance (and are eligible to collect benefits). Of course if you are unemployed as an H1b, you will have an immediate immigration problem (technically have 60 days to leave), but you are eligible to collect for those 60 days (i.e., long as your visa is valid) as you have paid into the system.
However, there are a bunch of complications in the H1b tax situation that lead to the misconception H1b visa holders taking US jobs are somehow federal tax exempt.
The biggest one is that the US has tax treaty with many countries that allow citizens to work in the US exempt some of their income from US taxes and only pay taxes on that income in their home jurisdiction. However nearly all current US tax treaties contain a so-called "savings clause" that removes this exemption for those on visas that make them resident aliens (like H1b) and only allows them to non-resident aliens (like F1, J1, OPT). So, these exemptions might partially apply in the first year or so that a H1b visa holder is working in the US, but is not applicable after becoming a resident alien.
For the cases that affect most/.-ers (e.g., H1b W2 wage earners in the IT/engineering world), there really aren't any significant exemptions in any tax-treaty country after becoming a full year resident alien on an H1b. To be more specific, most of the income exempt-able by treaties is limited to stuff like scholarships/fellowships, foreign pensions, income from personal services (e.g., maid, nurses, personal assistant, coaches, agents), income received by researchers/teachers, reporters/journalists, income paid in diplomatic service (e.g., embassies, united nations), some musicians, entertainers and athletes, and international travel income (e.g., ship/air transport workers). Not things that would affects most/.-ers working in tech and most of them have pretty low limits (in time and/or $ amount), in any case.
This further muddied by the fact that in subsequent years, depending on the country, a H1b holder might still continue to owe taxes on income earned in their home jurisdiction whilst simultaneous owing taxes in the US (because the US taxes world-wide income). In this case, the IRS generally allows people in that situation to deduct most of the taxes paid in other tax-treaty jurisdictions from their US tax bills to avoid double-taxation. The net is the H1b person has to pay the full amount of US taxes, but some of it may be effectively received by other countries for which the US has specific tax treaty obligation.
You're figures are fine except that Hr1B visa holders DO NOT pay federal income tax (I'm not sure of the particulars, but it's true).
So their effective salary is significantly higher than the stated values.
CAP === 'accord'
I have no idea where you get your information, but H1B visa holder are required to pay all federal, state, local taxes including FICA (Social Security) and Medicare.
The only exception I am aware of is that if you by some circumstances become a non-resident-alien of the US for part of the year (hired mid-year, or terminated mid-year), you can dual-status and only pay US taxes on your US based income and a flat 30% on non-US connected income (normally you have to pay US taxes on your worldwide income although you can claim an exemption for taxes you paid to another country).
Your confusion might be that those on OPT (practical training) temporary visas which often are used by college graduates before they get H1Bs are exempt from FICA and medicare, but are still not exempt from other state and federal income taxes. OPT used to be a max of 1 year, but now it is 2 years.
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Your whole "filter" hypothesis is really shows how we are often trapped by first-world thinking.
You might think if the atlantic ocean "filter" is somehow blocking *non-western* immigrants now, the pacific ocean filter would be similar or even better. However, history shows otherwise. Nearly all immigrants are "economic" immigrants, neither more liberal or more conservative. They are looking for a better life *economically*.
Large immigration wave from Asia to the US starting in the 19th century (and immigration checks and "tickets" were non-issues) did not result in "cream-of-the-crop" immigration coming to the US. The Taiping rebellion in southeast china caused economic catastrophe (colapse of industry and trade) in the region resulting in famine and flight (sound familiar). Some might argue that this current wave of economic immigration in Europe is similar to these early waves of Asian immigration to the US.
Of course as is part of history, the US responded to the first wave of Asian immigration by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 (1923 in Canada). Such laws effectively lasted until the US entered WWII (pacific front).
Perhaps Europe could learn from the US's (and Canada's) mistakes in this matter... But perhaps not...
The reality is that it is merely expedient for the current crisis for immigrants to venture to Europe. They could even travel to Asia, but they are not as welcome there. I don't think it's the "ocean" stopping them. History shows the ocean doesn't really these types of immigration waves. As another example, during the Irish Potato Famine, why did so many of the Irish come to the US/Canada/Australia instead of continental Europe which was much closer? Because as "unwelcome" as they became later in many of those places, they had the opportunity and the decision was mere expedience even if it involved crossing an ocean.
Mormonism is probably too new to make a comparison, and from what I understand, Mormons in general are just really nice people towards outsiders.
That is not fully my experience regarding Mormonism. Although all the Mormon people I know are relatively friendly, there is a limit to Mormonism "nice" with respect to outsiders.
For example, don't even think about getting an invitation to a Mormon Wedding. As non LDS temple-recommended members are not allowed in wedding at Mormon temples and if your Mormon friend dares to having a civil wedding to include their friends it will cause them to be punished by the church. To me it is hard to consider that "nice" to outsiders
Also, don't walk through the public area of BYU campus holding hands or wearing short pants and expect a "nice" reception (you are basically painting yourself as a target as an outsider with this behavior).
Also, the Mormon church members aren't really that nice to slightly lapsed Mormons (not enough tithing, or partaking in a little caffeine, alcohol, or premarital sex), they are effectively permanently shunned (even by family). I'm not sure I would generally categorize that behavior as "nice" to outsiders (i.e., a lapsed Mormon would then be considered an outsider).
But at least the Mormons I know are certainly are friendly. The church, not so much... :^(
In 2010, the USA, Asians passed Hispanics as the largest immigrant wave to the US with about 430,000 (36%) vs 370,000 (31%) Hispanic.
Ironically, the Asians seem to be adapting to US culture more than the Hispanics (e.g, willingness to learn English and blending in).
Just because the culture/language is more different than the native culture/language doesn't necessarily mean that integration is more difficult. One potential differentiation factors is that bulk of the Asian immigration has a higher level of education than the Hispanic immigration. But that doesn't explain the speed which the Vietnamese integration wave in the US achieved integration after the war (most of the immigrants had a similar education level than Hispanics and had similar language and cultural differences as Asians).
What most demographers see is that the main obstacles limiting integration of new immigrants isn't language, or culture, or education, but simply the type of resources available to immigrants when they come to the country. The obstacle to integration that many Hispanics face when they immigrate to the US is they have little pressure to learn English (if you ever been in East LA or Miami, there's really no reason to learn English). I suspect the same thing is true with certain recent Muslim immigrants in Europe. Because of the existence of these "ghettos", they feel little pressure to integrate.
Fortunately, for Hispanics coming to the US, these Hispanic "ghettos" aren't really ghetto at all in the US as many of the Hispanic enclaves in the US have been in existence since the 1800s (and actually used to be part of the Spanish empire back in the 1600s and/or Mexico) and are quite prosperous.
Doesn't sound like that is the case in Europe with new Muslim immigrants. However, if you look at Spain, Muslim immigration to that country is quite simlilar to Hispanic immigration to the US. As Spain has a long history of Muslim association (like the US with Hispanics), and might be considered anti-islam (given the Spanish history like the Spanish Inquisition), yet recent integration of Muslims into Spain and Portugal show quite a bit of success compared to the rest of Europe even with the "language" barrier remaining intact (similar to Hispanics coming to the USA).
So although they may have been warmly and generously welcomed, they are only as successful as integration the people they associate with most when they come and most of Europe didn't really treat those folks very well...
I'd like to find a single house that ever caught fire due to improper thermostat installation. Because you certainly can't electrocute yourself with that 24V circuit, so what other reason could there be for government meddling?
You are missing the point about requiring a licensed electrician. It's about jobs (usually union jobs). The safety aspect is just a ruse...
Although that doesn't always explain everything. In Oregon and New Jersey, you aren't allowed to pump your own gas. Although service stations in those states are all for allowing self-serve gas pumping (to reduce labor costs), disability activists have effectively torpedoed any bills to change these laws and keep the status quo.
The problem is that Nest is a bit *too* smart for it's own good. Smart things require power and native power requirements of such a smart controller are larger than that can be supplied by common thermostat wiring schemes.
Older thermostat wiring (in 70% of houses) can only really deliver power through the wiring when the heat (or ac) is on/active, so a thermostat must sip power when it is active, and save when it is idle. Ironically, the wire in the wiring scheme that can be used to deliver continuous power is called the "common" wire even though it is actually not too common** ;^)
Being "smart", the Nest device (as with most "smart" controllers) likely attempts to use various power savings tricks to reduce their native power requirements to a lower average power so it can survive between active times on a battery with this typically wiring. Apparently this update wasn't as smart as it thought it was about conserving power and the energy received during the active time and their efforts were not enough to keep all the smarts going on the battery...
Of course the older "dumber" smart thermostats, drew such a small amount of power that they didn't need to apply smart power savings tricks to keep things alive between active cycles. Sometimes you can be too clever for your own good and I think the Nest falls into one of those situations...
** common as in common voltage potential in AC transformer thermostat wiring systems
The problem with trusting reliability from the cloud provider is that their economic interests are not necessarily aligned with yours (they could be, but most people are more "selfish" about their own cost-vs-reliability requirements than the typical profit generating enterprise).
In this case, I'm sure the potential value in pushing out their failed update (perhaps for improved data gathering capability), vs the amount of QA testing they did was a cost trade-off that they made. If the thermostat was working fine as is for you, and you didn't care about their new big brother capabilities (because they have no value to you), you may have made a different feature value vs QA cost trade-off. For example, you might have only updated it after the inevitable first round of patches gets released and things seem stable (e.g., the slow follower approach instead of the bleeding edge approach to updates)...
As a stupid example, do you have the setting on your phone to update itself at any arbitrary time, or do you set your phone to ask you when it is a good time to update? What if you phone didn't give you a choice? and updated itself whenever the cloud felt like it was a good time?
And then there's slashdot beta... Do you really like the cloud determining which version of software you are going to use?
Now that Canada doesn't have a penny, doesn't that technically mean you made your currency non-metric (div 20) on purpose?
And you can't even blame the USA for this?
So sorry for your loss...
Well technically, it's "its small copper coin", not "it's"
The USA's small copper coin is a zinc coin with a copper coating, well technically it is.
But, its importance is technical, or technically it is (or is it technically it's). Is that "it's" a technicality? Something to think about there...
FWIW, your "mathematical" explanation is totally bogus. You appear to have literally no idea what you are saying.
The reason the FFT works for modular multiplication of *integers* with thousands of bits is that you can pick a radix and a convolution size where you do multi-digit convolution where you don't lose any precision in those thousands of bits. Using a "logarithm" algorithm would require nearly 10x the precision to do modular multiplication on integers and using hw floating point (even long doubles) would be totally useless because it isn't accurate to more precision.
Also, addition and multiplication in the time domain does NOT magically become multiplication and addition in the frequency domain. Convolution in the time domain becomes multiplication in the frequency domain (that's how the FFT algorithm works: FFT multiply iFFT becomes cheaper than digit convolution when the size of the problem becomes large).
Finally, although it might be technically possible to use a DCT used in a typical video decoder to do some trivial digit convolution, the precision of a typical video decoder' DCT is only 14-16 bits and limited to 8 points which isn't enough precision to do squat for the modular multiplication needed to search for very large Mersenne Primes (which is what Prime95 program does). Of course you can't even get to the 1D DCT used in GPU hardware accelerators (they are generally hardwired to do 2D DCT only and modern compression algorithms don't even use the DCT anymore).
Sorry to rain on your parade, but leaving stream of consciousness BS like that around unchallenged risks it getting modded up and makes it harder for people to distinguish the real shit from the BS...
How exactly does one use "Fast Fourier Transforms to multiply extremely large numbers" and when exactly did Prime95 become an industry?
The most common way to multiply numbers larger than the register size of the machine (e.g., 4000 bit numbers) is to express it like most people multiply numbers more than 1 digit relative to some base R.
(c0 + c1*R+ c2*R^2 + c3*R^3 + ...) * (d0 + d1*R+ d2*R^2 + d3*R^3 + ...) = (p0 + p1*R+ p2*R^2 + p3*R^3 + ...)
Where R is 10 for humans, for a computer, R is some power of 2 (because computers like that).
A basic observation of the math is that product of digits computed this way is very similar to a linear convolution of those digits (coefficients in this representation) and you can speed up large convolutions using an FFT. If you pick R small enough, you can do the multiplication and all the partial products together without any rounding problems using the SSE/AVX SIMD floating point math on your x86-64 computer.**
Prime95 is freeware app that is used by GIMPS that uses this FFT technique to multiple large numbers together very quickly and is a big stress on the CPU because the code is highly optimized.
Nobody claimed Prime95 is an "industry", but other industries that rely on skylake processors to do complex operations might be affected by the same bug Prime95 has triggered.
**Interestingly, the straight forward integer multiplication is slower than floating point for a certain precisions in nearly all x86-64 implementations because of a premium on SSE/AVX speed, intel has invested more on 32-bit FP math (24-bit mantissa multiplier for FP), vs 32-bit int math (32-bit x 32-bit -> 64bit int multipliers are much bigger)
Also here's a question for everyone. Why is 1800K "warm" while 5000K is "cool". We should really work on the way we talk about colors. Blue is hotter than red, yet for some reason people associate blue with cold and red with hot. Why haven't we fixed this?
FWIW, if you want to learn some interesting things about how humans name colors, the results of the World Color Survey back in the 1970's are the primary source of information used by researchers the study any color language association theories.
Outside this basic information, several subsequent associated studies of people and language, "warm" colors are associated with fire and heat, "cool" colors are associated with water, sky, and shadow. Several studies also correlate the so-called "cool" color with "dark" and association with lower temperatures. Many researcher believe that because we don't have experience with the colors emitted black body radiators at high temperatures and those colors only appear in "cooler" context within the experience of those people that created our languages that is why we associate those colors with "cool" and not "warm".
On the other hand, blackbody radiation correlated temperature is really a bogus thing to measure anyhow. Forcing it to further correlate with "warm" and "cool" and "hotter" doesn't generally make sense in many contexts.
You can have a "warm" greeting and a "cool" greeting and it has nothing to do with any temperature.
You can perceive color from a reflective object or a transmissive object that is not a black body radiators, so there is no "hotter" in that case.
On the other hand, if it simply bothers you that 5000K is "higher" than 1800K, then just measure your color "temperature" in Mireds...
The pollution from a gallon of diesel used to move a million tons of goods injures my lungs just as much as the pollution from a gallon of diesel used to move an ounce of goods. The real question is how does the damage caused by the pollution from moving a ton of goods with diesel compare to the damage caused by moving a ton of goods using other energy sources.
My guess, that given the current product mixes that are being move, simply the manufacturing of a "ton" of those products is causing the most pollution, not the transportation. By simply not making most of the products in the first place (and thus obviating the need to transport them anywhere), is the true winning strategy.
Unfortunately in our consumer driven society, I don't see that happening any time soon.
and she no longer consents to him jerking to her private parts today.
What about his memories? Is he no longer allowed to think about her?
Apparently there is an experimental way to erase memories with a laser. Hopefully something like that will never become a court-ordered procedure.
When it comes to your political stance of privacy issues, be very careful what wish for...
The whole point of denying that climate change is man made is as an excuse to do nothing; the thinking that if it's not our fault then we don't have to fix it.
I disagree. The whole point of denying that climate change is man made is to attempt to *absolve* us from the sin of doing it.
Take for instance a forest fire. It happens. We attempt to blame someone. When the cause appears "natural" (e.g., a lightning strike or similar), then we as a species seem somehow *absolved* from responsibility. However, regardless of the blame, we often still attempt to stop a forest fire and attempt remediation afterwards, not because of some moral duty to the planet, but because it serves our economic interests. The truth of the matter, is the mere act of stopping/managing forest fires for our own selfish economic reasons may be one of the *unnatural* contributing factors of making future forest fires more intense. That doesn't stop most people from thinking we shouldn't put out forest fires that we didn't start. You can't really separate "us" from "natural" in the modern environment. If it's gonna burn, it will burn, eventually. In the bigger scheme of things does it really matter who started it? No. But the act of assigning blame shifts the debate on the cost burdens of any remediation process. The remediation of course is not about the forest per-se, but the economic value of the remediation the forest (e.g., prevent land-slide from covering highways, blocking dams, polluting water sources we use).
The point is that most everything in this climate change debate is about economics, not the planet. The planet was here long before us and will be here long after we are gone. The sooner people start realizing the whole thing is about economics, not the planet, and stop trying to assign blame to drive their remediation agenda, we can attempt to negotiate a reasonable path forward. In all likelihood that path might be better economically for us as a species but potentially *unnatural* when compared to how the environment would evolve without us.
This really just reminds me of the nuclear freeze protests of the 80's. The main argument put forth at the time, was that we should just stop and wait until we figure it out (basically the argument that is made by AGW folks). Of course we didn't stop and then the situation changed (no more USSR) which eventually led to de-escalation that seemed to be what would have been better in the first place. On the other hand the escalation we did could have had WWIII, but nobody knew at the time that economics would drive the eventual solution (e.g., no more USSR). The same thing is true with AGW. Nobody knows will happen, but I predict in the end, economics will drive the situation one way or the other. The current "A" part is really just posturing.
Fact checking and editing used to be the core of journalism.
Now editorial staffing is pretty much non-existent in most publications. Even if it does exist, the disproportionate power of the "star" journalist has any rendered editorial oversight limp at best (e.g., Dan Rathers, Jayson Blair).
Journalists used to cut their teeth with fact checking. Fact checkers were the checks-and-balances built into the historical journalism structure. Now with a publication paths that doesn't require them learning how to fact check (e.g., web publishing), budding journalists simultaneously are both inexperienced with fact checking and do not see any value in fact checking. Thus the facts that are reported suffer. That is the crux of the problem.
We are probably simply reliving the days of yellow journalism (from the late 19th century). Some speculated the original outbreak had to do with circulation wars at the time. The more things change, the more they remain the same...
Let's just hope a Pulitzer-Hearst war doesn't lead to a modern day Spanish-American War (if I can dabble in a little yellow journalism myself ;^)
I don't think you've learned the same history as I did...
Historically, all research was done through private wealthy benefactors (not the government). That never really stopped. What happened is that governments started to fund some specific research. But this research was/is mostly contracts done using semi-private labs.
The real turning point was when governments started funding their own universities and labs in the 19th century. But this is not the modern university research lab that you might be thinking about. Basically a quasi-religious institution that wasn't really open to the general public (elites only). The primary goal of these institutions was to train the bureaucracy. It wasn't until the early 20th century, you see the beginnings of the modern research university in Germany with a more scientific focus. By concentrating the resources of the state, they were able to finally become as influential as the private research labs.
The German R&D model isn't really what you might think of it either. Take for instance the Fraunhofer Society. Although nominally a public institution, it conducts research with the goal of industrialization often on contract as it is primary funded by industry (e.g., using mostly private money, not public money). Perhaps ./-ers might be familiar with the MP3 audio compression development that has come out of Fraunhofer.
Sure there are now also pure research university groups doing good research with pure public money, but it has never (and probably never will be) exclusively that way.
The Moon Village is simply name coined by newly minted ESA Director-General Johann-Dietrich Woerner. He has selected this as his stretch goal as something he has discussed prior to become the head of the agency. It is in the *concept* stage right now. As of yet, there are no partners, no money, no plan, etc. It also doesn't yet have the actual ESA as backer as he made this whole thing simply in a speech at the 31st Space Symposium in Colorado Springs in April.
The concept he was pitching was a manned base on the far side of the moon which should have opportunities for astronomy and planetary science, learning resource management.
Some of NASA administrator Charles Bolden' comments on this so called "Moon Village"...
“The US does not have to be the country that says, ‘We’re going, follow us,’” he said. “We’re all going back to the surface of the Moon. But, it’s just that the United States has no intention of leading that effort. We will support and be along with anybody that goes.”
“It will be critical for industry, both in the United States and elsewhere, but most importantly for our international partners to finally step up” and take the lead on lunar landing plans, he said. “Unfortunately, nobody’s stepped up yet.”
The FAA seem to be simply just trying to grab some turf in the commercial angle of this, but there's nothing really to grab yet.
if the lead is coming from the local pipes in people's houses, then how come the lead poisoning started when they switched water sources? That sounds like bee ess.
pH changed when they switched the source of water, the now acidic water dissolved lead in solder joints and thus ends up in the water in people's houses...
http://www.mlive.com/news/flin...
Or so they say... Or it all could be bee ess of course...
FWIW, I still think you are ignoring the fact that he didn't even think it worked very well (and wrote a letter to the Navy to that effect).
There is the image of a scientist that puts the blinders on an thinks his invention is the greatest and damn the consequences, but I think in this case, the image is more, well, this kinda works, I'm going to ignore all the warnings I'm receiving and we can patent it and make some money on it. Maybe that's your image of the "typical" scientist, but I just don't happen to agree that is "typical".
Anyhow, I doesn't look like we will convince each other either way on this topic.
AFAIK, Mr. Midgley (and his boss Mr. Kettering) were both advocating ethanol as an anti-knock for a couple years, until Mr. Midgley stumbled upon TEL. Pretty much everyone at GM's engine production division was against it (because of the lead buildup problem), but Midgely and Kettering convinced management that since they could patent it, TEL was a better for financial reasons. To me that is pretty much putting profit above harm. That is not saying all his motivation was profit, but certainly profit tilted the decision in this case. In fact this history behind TEL shows the story.
The initial goal the the Delco research program headed by Kettering was to increase compression ratios in engines to smooth a transition to an alcohol based fuel because of a perceived pending shortage of oil. A higher compression engine would be able to burn both alcohol and gasoline, but the problem with gasoline was the so-call pre-ignition knock due to non-octane fractions which raised havoc with high compression engines.
Research in Kettering's lab by Mr Midgley showed that ethanol was probably the best fuel for high-compression engines and they a gasoline and ethanol blend was a reasonable transition. GM bought Delco (actually named Dayton Metal Products at the time as the original name was sold in a spinoff) and turned it into GM research division. Eager to convince GM to continue to fund advanced fuel research, he tasked Mr. Midgley to take that anti-knock additives, but basically the research stalled and because of the impending transition to alcohol, Mr. Midgley eventually filed a patent application for a blend of alcohol and gasoline on February 28, 1920, clearly intending it to be an antiknock fuel of choice.
Later with continued research they stumbled upon the TEL additive and made a strategically deceptive press announcement about it: “Discovery of a tellurium gasoline compound which increases gasoline mileage by one hundred percent over present gasoline fuel was announced at the research lab of the G.M. Co. here today.” (since TEL was secret, the press mistook it for tellurium instead of lead). It is documented in the GM archives that Mr. Midgley had personally received letters from four of the world’s leading experts in the field: Wilson of MIT, Reid Hunt of Harvard, Yandell Henderson of Yale and Charles Kraus of Pottsdam in Germany. Each of the letters gave grave warnings about the toxicity of TEL and admonished him from continuing in this line of research. In addition, he received a specific warning from Public heath and the US Surgeon General about TEL being “serious menace to public health.”
As a response this, they required all future correspondence with media and government regulators to call the TEL-gas mixture Ethyl Gas (their trade name) to minimize its association with TEL industrial accidents that had occurred.
Mr. Midgely is also on record for advising the Navy to not use TEL-gas: “We have made great progress in overcoming the spark plug and valve trouble caused by (Ethyl lead) but we have not yet solved the problem to our entire satisfaction; and, in view of the fact that it is essential that no engine trouble of any kind develop, it seems wise not to risk the use of this material Probably the best possibilities are offered by a fuel consisting of a gasoline-benzol-alcohol blend”
Even armed with this knowledge and his reservations about the material, Midgley later wrote the following: “The way I feel about the Ethyl Gas situation is about as follows: It looks as though we could count on a minimum of 20 percent of the gas sold in the country if we advertise and go after the business – this at three cent gross to us from each gallon sold. I think we ought to go after it as soon as we can without being too hasty ”
This isn't knee jerk reaction, this is reaction to this specific case (where you seem to be assuming a general position that Midgley is "typical").
You should remember that Thomas Migley was foremost a scientist, and quite representative of the hubris and single-mindedness of scientists. When he advocated for the safety of leaded gasoline, he wasn't lying for financial gain, he was doing so because he believed it. The scientists protecting you from ozone holes or lead or snake oil are indistinguishable from the scientists that create the ozone holes or leaded gasoline in the first place, or the scientists that create better cancer treatments; it's only in hindsight that you know who was right.
So, when scientists tell you how to live your life or tell you that the science is settled and you should just do what they tell you, just remember how this guy died: A tragic accident ended his life when he was caught and strangled by the system he created.
Although potentially generally true in abstract, in the case of Mr. Midgley, he was definitely advocating leaded gasoline for *profit*.
The TEL (tetra-ethyl-lead) anti-knock additive was patentable (the use and manufacturing techniques), where the other leading additive contender ethanol was most certainly not patentable. Mr. Midgley may or may not have believed that TEL was "safe-enough", but he and his boss Charles Kettering basically minted GM a small fortune as part of it's 50% stake in the Ethyl Corporation (formed with Standard Oil aka ESSO) which was formed to take the patented TEL to market.
For those that don't understand the subtleties of the function of TEL in gasoline, you should at least understand that TEL combusts to form Lead in the engine which will eventually degrade its performance**. To combat this, TEL needs to be combined with scavenger solvents like EDB (ethylene dibromide) to make sure that the lead leaves the exhaust pipe, but EDB causes some its own set of engine corrosion problems (forms acids which corrode spark plugs, mufflers, pistons rings) and is a ozone depleting chemical. This whole thing is akin to a "I don't know why she swallowed the fly, perhaps she'll die" problem. Basically, the whole TEL thing was a rube-goldberg disaster that was foisted on the world by GM and Esso when both of them knew that ethanol would have done the job. They knew that the TEL additive was spewing lead into the environment from the get go as the scavenger solvents required to make it work were designed to get the lead out of the engine through the tailpipe (and into the environment).
** this totally independent of a catalytic converter getting coated with lead and not working which is eventually the thing that killed TEL...
This article sparked the memory of wondering why we had to pay more for unleaded gas... Apparently it was expensive to remove the naturally occurring lead from the refined gasoline.
because instead of lead, they had to add other chemicals to raise octane ratings to reduce knocking. Those chemicals cost more.
In addition to costing more, some of them (like MBTE) were arguably worse for the environment... Damn you CARB (California air resources board)...
I hear there ARE some entitlements that they don't get and for which they (or the employer) don't pay. (I think it's state unemployment insurance in some states.)
IMHO if/when such exist, the employer should be required to directly pay them the fee he would otherwise have paid the government, in addition to the mandated minimum wage/salary.
(That's actually fair, too: They can use the extra money to buy, or otherwise do something to try to replace, whatever the entitlement they don't get would have been.)
The IRS is very clear that H1b pay all federal taxes including federal unemployment. I'm not familiar with the laws in each state, but at least in CA, H1b also pay state UI and disablity insurance (and are eligible to collect benefits). Of course if you are unemployed as an H1b, you will have an immediate immigration problem (technically have 60 days to leave), but you are eligible to collect for those 60 days (i.e., long as your visa is valid) as you have paid into the system.
However, there are a bunch of complications in the H1b tax situation that lead to the misconception H1b visa holders taking US jobs are somehow federal tax exempt.
The biggest one is that the US has tax treaty with many countries that allow citizens to work in the US exempt some of their income from US taxes and only pay taxes on that income in their home jurisdiction. However nearly all current US tax treaties contain a so-called "savings clause" that removes this exemption for those on visas that make them resident aliens (like H1b) and only allows them to non-resident aliens (like F1, J1, OPT). So, these exemptions might partially apply in the first year or so that a H1b visa holder is working in the US, but is not applicable after becoming a resident alien.
For the cases that affect most /.-ers (e.g., H1b W2 wage earners in the IT/engineering world), there really aren't any significant exemptions in any tax-treaty country after becoming a full year resident alien on an H1b. To be more specific, most of the income exempt-able by treaties is limited to stuff like scholarships/fellowships, foreign pensions, income from personal services (e.g., maid, nurses, personal assistant, coaches, agents), income received by researchers/teachers, reporters/journalists, income paid in diplomatic service (e.g., embassies, united nations), some musicians, entertainers and athletes, and international travel income (e.g., ship/air transport workers). Not things that would affects most /.-ers working in tech and most of them have pretty low limits (in time and/or $ amount), in any case.
This further muddied by the fact that in subsequent years, depending on the country, a H1b holder might still continue to owe taxes on income earned in their home jurisdiction whilst simultaneous owing taxes in the US (because the US taxes world-wide income). In this case, the IRS generally allows people in that situation to deduct most of the taxes paid in other tax-treaty jurisdictions from their US tax bills to avoid double-taxation. The net is the H1b person has to pay the full amount of US taxes, but some of it may be effectively received by other countries for which the US has specific tax treaty obligation.
FWIW, according to the book Portraits in Silicon, Amdahl and Cray never actually met in person.
You're figures are fine except that Hr1B visa holders DO NOT pay
federal income tax (I'm not sure of the particulars, but it's true).
So their effective salary is significantly higher than the stated values.
CAP === 'accord'
I have no idea where you get your information, but H1B visa holder are required to pay all federal, state, local taxes including FICA (Social Security) and Medicare.
The only exception I am aware of is that if you by some circumstances become a non-resident-alien of the US for part of the year (hired mid-year, or terminated mid-year), you can dual-status and only pay US taxes on your US based income and a flat 30% on non-US connected income (normally you have to pay US taxes on your worldwide income although you can claim an exemption for taxes you paid to another country).
Your confusion might be that those on OPT (practical training) temporary visas which often are used by college graduates before they get H1Bs are exempt from FICA and medicare, but are still not exempt from other state and federal income taxes. OPT used to be a max of 1 year, but now it is 2 years.