Actually, it's just Apple's branding of it's implementation of Zeroconf. The common Linux implementation is called Avahi, and I think most modern distros install that by default (i.e. they didn't ask the user if he wanted it).
If you don't ask, people complain. If you do ask, people complain about being bugged or being asked incomprehensible questions. Since people don't know what Bonjour is, how can they answer the question about whether they want it as part of the iTunes package? I think the fact that the software implements a non-proprietary standard makes a difference. There should be nothing hidden about what it does, and if there is a problem then a well informed person can handle it becaue there's nothing secret.
If Avahi is OK as a default on Linux, why is Bonjour a problem with iTunes? What we are seeing here is the old Scott McNealy prediction coming true: "the network is the computer." He was just a little ahead of his time. iTunes has music player functions, but primarily it is middleware. It's job is to sit between the iTunes music story and iPods, or between the media collection on one device (say a PC) and the user interface on another (say an AppleTV). In a sense, iTunes is a kind of operating system for a set of activities and networked devices.
When they are printing money like mad, you want to work because inflation is eating away at your savings. The money you're being paid isn't worth as much, but balancing that is that you're getting a lot more of it.
When you have disinflation (which we're seeing signs of), you may be less inclined to work if you have savings, because those savings will go farther. On the other hand, nobody is spending their money because they expect that money to farther tomorrow. This may sound like a good thing, until you take the currency glasses off for a second and take a good look at what's happening: people have stopped making things. As in every economic situation, some folks do better than others and a few people do very well, but overall the economy stops creating value.
Of course, that's an extreme and simplistic scenario, but the bottom line is disinflation is really, really bad. I suppose 0 inflation would be ideal, but as a practical matter low but positive inflation is the safest and best state for things to be in.
It is because disinflation is so bad that stimulus package is so huge. It needs to be huge and swift and (this is overlooked) sustained. The idea it should only include short term stimulus is, in my opinion flawed. People need to factor the inflationary effect of spending into their plans for the next two years at least.
Of course, we'll pay in the end, but it's rather like worrying about whether you can afford the surgeon who's taking out the bullet lodged next to your spine.
who has never bought an SF magaine, I'd be willing to do my part and subscribe to a magazine or two. On the other hand, I've never bought one, so I don't know the differences between them.
So, how are the different magazines positioned? What kind of stories do they publish?
Also, I have elementary and middle school aged kids at home. Which magazines are most kid friendly? We still read together, including relatively mature materials like the Terry Pratchett novels. By kid friendly, I mean interesting to kids. For example, one story I loved at that age was Clifford Simak's The Big Front Yard, which in aside from being a good story, captures something of what the world feels like when you're a inquisitive kid.
It's not the stamp of Gramm's name on the bill that makes it suspect to my way of thinking, it's the stamp of his philosophy. I have no animus against Phil Gramm, as you seem to think. A lot of people on the right and left have trouble thinking about politics on any level higher than personal hostility. If Gramm sponsored a resolution declaring oxygen to be the official respiratory gas of the United States, I know that a lot of people would probably try to hold their breath indefinitely, but I would not be one of them.
Now the left has got power, and there are a lot of people on my side who see this as payback time. I think that's a mistake. The Republican leadership overreached and let hostility make them stupid. I think it's a mistake to copy that, but there you go.
It's right, of course, to be skeptical of any theory that is to neat, like, it's all GLBA's fault. I don't subscribe to such a simplistic explanation. Nor do I subscribe to the theory that diversification per se contributed to the instability of banks. But what is medicine in one context is poison in another. Under the business and regulatory practices that prevailed in the better part of the last decade, diversification has certainly not been a shield against instability, and has been an avenue for instability to spread among poorly managed banks.
I own JP Morgan Chase stock, by the way, so I certainly don't think diversification is the automatic kiss of doom by any means.
The work doesn't magically go away because it's distributed. It just gets harder to keep track of. Something isn't more net work because it becomes easier to measure.
Now if you're stupid enough to concentrate all that formerly distributed work in one place and expect that you don't have to alter your staffing distribution, you deserve what you get.
In any case, TFA was clearly phoned in to generate click through revenue. It's so wrong headed it isn't even wrong. It's not that you can't dream up reasons why browser based application development is a bad idea, but the existence of valid questions is not tantamount to an answer to those questions. Put some effort into answering those questions, then write a real article.
Talk about looking for a piece of straw in a haystack.
I'm less concerned about the corrupting infuene that kind of "in bed" than the kind that keeps funneling money to election campaigns. For one thing, when its over its over. A politician corrupted is corrupted forever.
OK, your description of your troubleshooting efforts is very incomplete, but I can think of all kinds of ways to explain the behavior in the incadescent only scenario, none of which is particularly dangerous. What has me concerned is the behavior when you mix incandescent and fluorescent bulbs. That's a massive red flag.
There's nothing too mysterious about the incandescents barely glowing while CFLs in parallel with them are quite bright. For one thing, CFLs are not only more efficient, they have electronic ballasts which compensate for voltage fluctuations. Within limits, they'll draw more current to compensate for low voltage. In fact, like all devices they'll work beyond their design limits, but to unpredictable degrees, which is bad for you for reasons you'll see shortly.
Now here's the part that raises a red flag: that the incandescent bulbs somehow "know" the CFLs are there in parallel. They can't know. The only way to get a light bulb to burn less brightly is to apply less voltage to it. That means something in series is reacting to the load. That's very, very bad, for two reasons.
First, if the voltage is reduced across all the devices, then the "missing" voltage must be going somewhere else. Again, you haven't given me much to on, but one way this could happen is if the dim switch had a big power resistor in series with it. That's not only extremely inefficient, it's also dangerous. If there is a short circuit in the wiring, it might not blow a fuse, but it could cause whatever the hypothetical resistor is in to catch fire.
Secondly, this scenario assumes the electronic ballasts are drawing enough current to keep the bulbs at normal brightness. Since the incandescents tell us that the voltage is low, that means the working bulbs are drawing proportionally more current than normal. You could be exceeding the safe current for the wiring. Normally, I'd say the fuse would prevent this, but given the obviously improvised nature of your wiring, that's not a certain thing. The CFLS could be drawing not enough current to exceed what the wiring can handle (because of the circuit breakers they can't) but they can certainly draw enough current to cause our hypothetical dimmer resistor to catch fire.
The all flourescents scenario as you describe is not as inconsistent with this scenario as you might think. Unpredictable things happen when you connect non-linear devices in parallel with a non-constant power/current source. It could work like this: the most "eager" CFL drops its impedance until it is happy and lights up; the second most "eager" drops its impedance until it is likewise happy; thereafter the voltage has dropped so much across all the bulbs that the remaining two can't make it over the "hump".
Assuming your description of the wiring is correct, your description of the scenario is inconclusive, but consistent with a series resister dimmer. That would be a really bad thing. In any case, magical, non-standard wiring is a about the stupidest thing you can do in a building. Plugging fluorescent lights on a bastardized dimming circuit is a close second.
If anybody in charge of the physical plant had any sense, they'd get a licensed electrician down there immediately. If nobody has enough sense to do that, then you should call the risk management (insurance) people.
Well, the LEDs on your instrument panel probably consume 50mw at full blast. A rheostat dimmer is most efficient at full blast -- it's like it's not there (in fact most fixed brightness LEDS have just a series resistor). At 50% power output, the rheostat and the LED each consume 25mw, which is negligble. Not even counting the non-linear behavior of the diode, the efficiency is going to go down as the absolute power consumption drops, but as we're starting at 1/20 of a watt it doesn't matter.
I'm not sure of the equivalency, but I'm guessing you'd replace a 100w incandescent with a 12w LED. Dimming it to the equivalent of a 50w bulb would mean you're wasting half your energy in the rheostat. So, that's 6 watts wasted; not bad considering you're saving 38 watts compared to an incadescent, but from a design standpoint more of a concern than wasting 25 milliwatts.
Of course the whole reason we're on this is that LEDs are non-linear, which means you're actually wasting more than 50% of your power when you dim with a resistor. But in the grand scheme of things a rheostat dimmed LED lightbulb is preferable to a triac dimmed incandescent.
True, but the wise men of wall street were supposed to have their exalted status because they knew how to grade and price risk better than ordinary mortals. If I were a Citibank investor, and Charlie Prince told me to my face that the reason my stock was in the toilet wast that Franklin Raines pulled a two bit Svengali act on him, I'd spit in Prince's eye.
And with respect to Fannie and Freddie's "special status with the government", what, exactly is this special status they enjoy? That they are too big to fail? That's hardly confined to Fannie and Freddie. The only thing that is special is that they were started by the government; aside from that they don't have any more clout than any other private institution that controls astronomical sums of money (which admittedly leaves room for that being too much clout).
In fact Freddie was started for the exact too-many-eggs-in-one-basket concerns you raise. It doesn't matter how many baskets the economy's eggs are in, if the rules create an incentive to place them all in the same precarious position.
Well, here's the problem: you can't please everyone, nor is it that easy to make it possible for people to please themselves.
Back in the days when it was clear Apple was losing the general purpose desktop, it was Apple's laser printers that saved the company, repositioning the company as one that depended on graphics professionals. Eventually they didn't need to make printers, their need to provide what I call "the high end of the low end" to creative professionals gave them a lock on that market segment.
Well, times change. There's this thing, you see, called an iPod. Millions of people have them who don't know CYMK from a town in Wales. Apple is becoming a boutique for the fusion of computing and entertainment delivery. Adding $100 to a laptop to get a screen that serves the needs of photographers who for some reason need to do their work on laptops doesnt' add a dime to the bottom line. It's unfortunate for those loyal users that they have to fork over money for a separate display.
One thing that occurs to me is that the notebook form factor is to blame here. There are very few situations where having the display attached to the keyboard by a hinge is ergonomically optimal. Personally, I'd prefer a configuration in which a free standing screen was tethered to the keyboard in use, but they locked together for storage and transport in a way that resembles notebooks. Then people could mix and match their components to suit.
Tablet PCs have most of the engineering needed to make the display detachable from the keyboard, but of course for our scenario it would be better to have the CPU in the keyboard or a separate unit. And, when you use the keyboard, it looks to me like you're stuck with a standard laptop configuration, which is not by any means optimal for typing.
Here's what I do use most of the time: a notebook in a stand that raises the display, and a separate Lenovo USB keyboard with trackpad. The top of the screen is at eye level, which is much better on the neck than using the standard laptop configuration for hours a day. The CPU happens to be attached to the screen, but there's no reason it couldn't be in the notebook part. About the only thing wanting from this set up is that the best stand I've found from a stability standpoint is not particularly portable or adjustable, but that's not beyond the ability of a mechanical engineer to address. It'd also be nice if the USB hub on the keyboard was USB 2.0.
I'm certainly sympathetic to the idea that GLBA isn't the whole story, or even necessarily the main part of the story. In fact I'm fairly certain it's going to take years to sort out the story. Economists still disagree over the causes of the Great Depression, after all.
One of the striking aspects of this story is the degree to which CEOs of banks had no idea what their banks were investing in. This is a consequence, I believe, of GLBA encouraging financial institutions to become both bigger and more complex. It's not, of course an inevitable consequence. But there is another aspect of GLBA to consider. The diversification of banks created an avenue for the crisis to spread to all kinds of assets. Even if an asset did not directly contain mortgage based securities, it certainly had components which depended on the solvency of other institutions with exposure to mortgage based risk.
This is why TARP couldn't operate as it was originally conceived. It was supposed to by up risky assets, but the problem wasn't contained to assets that that directly contained mortgages. It was too late, especially after the decision to let Bear Sterns collapse, to contain the uncertainty about all institutions.
Again, I'm not saying that things are as simple as saying no GLBA, no crisis, with GLBA inevitable crisis. It is probable we'd have some kind of crisis anyway, given the same policies without GLBA. I believe that GLBA and the collapse of Bear Sterns accelerated the spread of the crisis. Absent either one and I believe that damage could have been contained more quickly and effectively.
Thanks for the tip on using the red LED. I've been thinking about doing an LED lighting system for my aquarium, but haven't because the narrow spectrum of the LEDs might make the fish look washed out. Any suggestions?
With respect to the circuitry, it reminds me of the circuitry that goes on each and every cell in a li-ion battery. Given the variations in household voltage, and the idea that you're trying to keep the LEDs at the peak of their efficiency, it seems like a no-brainer.
Speaking of LED lighting circuits, since we have somebody here who knows what he's talking about, how do LED bulb work when you dim them with a triac? It seems to me that a regulated power supply would tend to make them undimmable.
... which it never was during the 30 years from 1968 to 2000, roughly when banking deregulation took effect. It may be that such an institution is a bad idea, but you have to consider that financial institutions of all kinds are in desperate condition as well, so you can't use the financial disasters of 2008 as proof that Fannie is any worse an idea than, say, a private investment bank.
The idea that Fannies failure shows that it ought never have been, applied consistently, would argue for nationalizing banks. I, as one who has been a staunch liberal though the long winter of liberal dispute, think nationalization is a terrible idea. This is not because the government is bad and business is good, but because government and business would be indistinguishable, leaving nobody to watch the foxes in the chicken coop.
All in all, I think the widespread calamity in the financial sector more probably indicates that the particular kind of banking deregulation practiced in the post Gramm-Leach-Bliley era has at the very least unintended consequences.
Thank you. The image of a crack addled addict struggling in a vain attempt to clap some life into a dead CFL bulb is one that I am sure will stick with me the rest of the day.
(1) LEDs can in fact be dimmed by running less current through them, however their power efficiency drops, which negates the whole purpose of LED lighting. The most efficient way to dim an LED is to strobe it on faster than the human eye can detect By varying with fraction of the on/off cycle that the LED is on, the human eye perceives this as "dimmer". The number of photons averaged over a second is reduced, but for the milliseconds the LED is on it is at full brightness.
(2) Incandescent bulb dimmers are almost never been rheostats, not since maybe the 1920s. The problem is efficiency again. Imagine a certain current flowing through the light bulb and the rheostat; the power dissipated in each device is then proportional to the resistance. When the rheostat is at equal resistance to the light bulb, it is dissipating as much power as the light bulb is! A 100 watt light bulb at 50% of the normal RMS current dissipates 25 watts, which means your rheostat is getting as hot as a small soldering iron. You'd need a massive heatsink to handle this.
Therefore for many years, dimmers were not very practical. The best dimmers were actually transformers, but they were extremely bulky. They were mainly used in theaters and fancy restaurants to soften the shock of the prices on the menu by relief at being able to find them at all.
With the creation of the solid state silicon controlled rectifier (scr), it is possible to do a trick with incandescent bulbs that is rather like the LED strobing trick. What you do is you take the sine wave power and you clip out the parts of the waveform on either side of the peak. So rather than having power delivered to light bulb all the time, the light bulb is only powered for a fraction of the cycle. The difference is that an incandescent filament glows because it is hot; it does not flicker on and off.
Now with respect LED light bulbs, I'm not sure about what circuitry they contain, but they do contain circuitry. If you just plugged enough LEDs in series to plug straight into AC, they'd flicker at a very noticeable 60Hz. If you put a full wave rectifier into the circuit, they'd flicker at 120Hz, which might be fast enough you wouldn't notice the flickering. You'd certainly be able to use the a solid state dimmer to dim such as circuit, but flickering might be noticeable.
There are relatively simple tricks you could use to maybe double the frequency, in which case you probably would not be able to perceive the flicker. On the other hand, there might be fancier circuits that know how to do the right thing. One of the problems with LEDs is that they age, their brightness varies. If the LED bulb achieves its white color by using several different colors, you need a compensating circuit to maintain the original color.
Of course you could use white LEDs, but most of the bright ones are very harsh; I've seen warm white LEDs advertised, but I've never had one.
So there you go, the straight facts on dimming that every geek should know.
That's why I pretty much stick to F/OSS where I can. It's not the cost. It's the time it takes to figure out what you're allowed to do.
I worked for a small developer that wanted to resell Oracle for its customers. Anybody can download any of Oracle's products from their website for free. Oracle doesn't check up on people who download their stuff, even though it means there's probably a huge amount of "piracy". Still if you want to do the right thing, you've got a lot of work to figure out which licenses allow you to do what, and if you want to sell their products, then Oracle requires somebody in your company take an on-line test to prove you understand their licensing.
Unfortunately, nobody in my company was eager to do this, and in the meantime we'd sold a number of licenses whose validity was in question until we'd taken the test and got our official Oracle imprimatur. Finally, I took pity on the sale manager and volunteered to take the test. Not a problem, I figured, for somebody who reads this kind of stuff at 1000WPM. Except that the only documentation for the how and why of licensing was an on-line video. On the positive side, it was informative, and I can now say that I can confidently calculate how many Oracle angels that can dance on a core. On the other hand, I had to spend an afternoon watching members of Oracle's licensing committee (Oracle seems to run as if it were a government agency) sit around a table and drone on in monotone voices.
The thing to understand is that some very clever people at Oracle have spent a great deal of time figuring out how to give you as little as possible for your dollar while still offering a reasonable value in comparison to the competition (Microsoft, for the most part). However, very few people understand how Oracle licensing works. I've talked to other vendors about how they package and resell Oracle, and they very often counsel customers to do things that violate their licenses. I've talked to users about how they deploy Oracle, and if they aren't violating their licenses now, it's not because they know the extent of their rights.
It's very common for customers to have bought way too much Oracle, or too little Sometimes they've bought too much on one dimension and too little on another. The scary thing is that when they do this, they tend to think it all balances out, which is not how licensing works.
Now, in comparison, I don't think various versions of Windows are really that confusing. The key is not to look too closely. Look at the big picture. Your objective is to buy the fewest features you can live with. Windows' bundled features really aren't so wonderful, so if you want to edit movies, you're better off finding an open source or third party application, which gives you more flexibility. In order to buy the least windows that meets your needs, you have to understand Microsoft packages its OS products in four dimensions.
The first is OEM vs. retail licensing. OEM licensing is supposedly intended for system builders. The most important part of the licensing from my standpoint is that you can move retail licenses between machines so long as you deleted it off the old one. For the hobbyist or small IT shop that commonly does this, this makes retail a better deal. Also, if you upgrade a machine with an OEM license, Microsoft may refuse to issue you a reactivation key on the ground that the machine has changed so much it is a different machine. Sometimes you get a straw that breaks the camel's back; once I had to reactivate because I removed a network card.
The second and third dimensions are somewhat tied up with each other: they're home/business and good/better/best. In reality they are sets of features. Home Basic has the fewest features and Ultimate has everything MS offers as part of an OS product. Home Premium and Business have different feature sets, Home Premium providing things like video and home entertainment, and Business providing things like the
As you obviously know by bringing up probable changes in future stem cell policy. As others point out, there might not be any use for this material in a few years, although it's probably more significant that most people won't ever use their banked stem cells. But before we deal with hypotheticals, we should deal with established facts first.
The first question I'd ask myself is this: do we have a family history of diseases where this tissue would be useful therapeutically? If any of my siblings, nephews or nieces had something like childhood leukemia or immune system diseases, I'm looking at a very different situation than if my kids have "average" risk.
The second question I'd ask is whether I can afford it. Yes, $1000 is enough to make you stop and think, but to put that in perspective, a lot of middle class people spend well over $1000/yr on eating out for lunch. On the other hand, if you're mortgaged to your eyeballs and just barely keeping up, $1000 could mean losing your house. That would put you in a special category.
This cord blood banking was a new thing when my last child was born, and I was faced with the same decision. At the time my employment situation was pretty shaky, and I had no family history of diseases that would be treated, so I chose not to. And, as it turns out, my kids have never been seriously ill in any way. But, as I look back at that decision, I actually think it wasn't a good one. True, it turned out we didn't need it, and true $1000 seemed like a lot of money at that point to us. But the truth is, it wasn't really that much money. Over the years, $1000 has slipped through our fingers many times without our noticing, because we weren't paying attention. Just last year, we took an expensive vacation that cost several thousand dollars, and I'd much rather give that up than to do it without one of my kids.
Here's the most important point: it's important to line up all your rational arguments and consider them carefully, but in the end this is not a rational decision. It's important to be as rational as you can so you can distinguish between decisions you make as a parent on a rational basis, and the ones you make on whatever basis it was you became a parent. That basis, unless you are a subsistence farmer, is probably not something you can quantify.
Let me illustrate. One thing many insurance salesmen do is talk parents into insuring their kids. This makes no sense at all. Yes, it would be horrible if you kids died before reaching adulthood, but getting an insurance check isn't going to make it any better. What you insure when you buy life insurance isn't a person, it's an income. You buy insurance on yourself so that if you die, your kids will live in material comfort and have money for college. If your brother-in-law moved in to your basement, ate your food, left his laundry for you etc. without paying room and board, you wouldn't take out an insurance policy on him... except in certain restricted and Hitchcockian circumstances.
There's no rational justification to put your money into life insurance on your kids. But from a financial point of view, you're better off giving up your kids for adoption, so it's irrational to keep your kids at all. While refusing to take life insurance on your kids is without a doubt a good decision because it is rational, giving your kids away because they're the financial equivalent of a parasite isn't necessarily a good idea.
That's why I don't think my decision against banking was a good one. On the percentages, it was a substantial amount of money for something that I was very, very unlikely to need. On the other hand, I've spent that amount of money many times over on things I certainly don't need.
So, think carefully, then set aside that careful thought and ask yourself: what feels right?
In my experience, the whole parity and skills thing is a sham.
I knew a company that hired H1Bs right out of school. Now a lot of these H1Bs has masters degrees, which are rare. Masters are rare because there is little vocational value to getting one. Consider a BSCS and an MSCS degree holder. They both start with the BSCS, and one goes to work for a year or two and the other spends the same time getting masters. Unless we're talking about a teaching position, they're pretty much on par for the vast majority of jobs. The time I've spent teaching masters degrees holders what a version control system was and how to use it could well have been spent on teaching more advanced ideas to a baccalaureate.
I have nothing against getting a masters, but it makes sense if you have specific research interests you want to pursue. But in my experience nearly all the CS masters degree holders I've ever met are H1Bs, and none of those were in fact more practically skilled than if they'd skipped the masters entirely. It's a matter of diminishing returns. After four years of schooling, another year doesn't help much, unless you've put a couple of years of practical work under your belt.
Politically, the system is like those situations in diplomacy, when two leaders have a "frank" discussion. Everybody knows what really went on, but everyone pretends not to know. Everybody knows the H1B program is about reducing the price of entry level labor.Personally, out of all the H1Bs I've ever met, I've never met a single one who was a senior engineer when he came here, and very very few mid career ones. Surely if the problem is that there aren't enough skills, then experienced engineers are what we need most?
I'm not against immigration at all. I think it's a good thing. But the H1B system is corrupt, and deprives the country of the experience and knowledge gained by workers when they take an entry level job.
It's not immigration of people with engineering degrees that drives down wages. It's continually bringing in entry level people and expelling experienced people that does that.
Everyone here seem to grasp that the fact that music files are so readily and perfectly copyable changes the economics of sharing copies. What some people miss is how the same kinds of things make the economics of knowledge different than, say the economics of automobiles. Even having and automobile industry creates lots of related jobs, in suppliers, distribution, sales, advertising and the like. But if you brought in a bunch of low wage braseros to run your automobile plant, you'd definitely have that many fewer jobs for American auto workers.
But has Linus Torvalds living in the US decreased the net employment of American software engineers by one?
Software is different in that making software tends to generate more jobs making software.
Think about it. Some team comes up with this great software framework that makes doing something that was hard before, easy. Does this mean people who were doing that stuff lose their jobs? No. What happens is that there is a new demand for people who can use that framework to do things that weren't possible before.
Let's say we're talking about Geographic Information Systems. You can do the kind of things GIS does by programming in Fortran with nothing but bare metal and a library with a handful of trig functions. But back when this was the the only way to do GIS, almost nobody did, except maybe in the oil industry or defense. But when GIS becomes so simple minded that non-technical managers can do simple analyses of store siting decisions, none of those few people are going to lose their jobs. In fact, there's a whole new industry of people employed doing jobs that didn't exist before.
Employers make their hiring decisions based on marginal calculations. In the Fortran-and-bare-metal days, many things were theoretically valuable, but not worth the expense and uncertainty to try. When what was hard before becomes easy, this opens up a new universe of things to do, which equals new employment opportunities.
Yes. And let them stay as long as they want, rather than kicking them out to bring new H1Bs in to replace them. That's pretty much a formula for accelerating the movement of tech jobs overseas, taking inexperienced engineers, showing them the ropes, and sending them back to offshoring outfits in places with low wages.
I don't want to frame this as a kind of nationalistic struggle, but India and China don't need a US funded technology and tech jobs transfer program, which is what H1B really is. They are quite capable of developing their own, robust indigenous industries.
If a talented and educated person wants to move here for a while, and can support himself, I don't think it hurts us very much if at all. If after a few years he decides he'd like to stay here, that's good. Productive people create wealth, and wealth creates jobs. The very best create companies, even industries.
What's really bad for the country, not just American engineers looking for a job, is a revolving door program which drains the country of experience gained by work being done here. The knowledge gained by work is a capital resource, and kicking H1Bs out who want to stay here is like sending boxes of cash out of the country.
Well, the problem with that viewpoint is that it is simplistic. Logically, this makes the negation of that viewpoint simplistic as well.
There have been two problems with the Malthusian scenario to date. First is that technology has improved yields. The second is geographically larger markets, which averages variations in production over many areas, reducing the impact of crop failures. However, that's not the whole story.
About 13% of the world's population is undernourished, including about one third of the children in developing countries. The only reason this doesn't seem like a calamity to you is that you never think about those people, except to feel satisfied that percentage figure is so low. However the number of people who are suffering from hunger is at this moment as great or greater than it has ever been.
The world produces enough calories and macronutrients to meet the needs of its current population. In fact it produces a surplus. It just doesn't produce enough of a surplus that getting everybody the protein and calories they need is simple. Although we must remember that conflict, plus endemic poverty and the public corruption that stems from, are the probably the major cause of starvation, population instability is related to these in complex ways.
It drives me nuts when some economist makes a pronouncement of the nature that rising populations add to a nation's per capita wealth because people are a productive resource. It's true sometimes. If you have a healthy economy and stable society, yes. But if you have a society that is unstable the same thing that would be a blessing elsewhere can be a curse. Look at oil. Oil in an underdeveloped country is a curse to most of the people who live there. Petroleum doesn't have the same effect in Nigeria that it does in Norway.
The Malthusian model is based on the notion that an acre of cornland can be given a fixed productivity grading. Production naturally uses the best grade land first; increasing production in this model means recruiting successively lower and lower grades of land, until diminishing returns means you are making vast investments of land for little return.
It's important to note that the model that says agricultural technology is subject to diminishing returns as well. For example, thermodynamics tells us that (1) we can't extract more than the calories of solar energy that falls on a plot of land and (2) we can't extract all of them. It doubtful we can even extract more than a small fraction, given that the plant needs to use (and waste) energy for its own metabolism.
What's more, you can't indefinitely conjure things like trace metals out of the ground through biotechnology. Over the long term you can only extract at the rate geologic processes put them there. The increase of caloric production is not necessarily matched by micronutrients like vitamins and minerals. A recent study at the University of Texas showed a significant decline in nutritional value of US vegetables over the past 50 years, with reductions in protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin and vitamin C. Although this is just one study, clearly there are diminishing returns when it comes to trace minerals, whether or not we've got there yet.
I'm not a Malthusian, because it is an irrationally pessimistic position. Anti-Malthusianism is likewise irrationally optimistic. One thing Malthusians get wrong is the idea that as food supplies increase, human population growth increases. That's actually wrong. As people become more food secure their birth rates drop. Congo has a birth rate of nearly 50 per thousand; Japan's birth rate is less than 8 per thousand. If you could transfer a little of Congo's birth rate to Japan, both countries would benefit.
The key to a better future is not to tell the Third World to stop having babies, nor is it to assume that having babies will fix their problems when it only makes them worse. It's to improve the physical well being and security of the people who are alive today. It's to encourage responsible government which does not pursue power and stature of a few at the expense of inflicting conflict on the many.
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Actually, it's just Apple's branding of it's implementation of Zeroconf. The common Linux implementation is called Avahi, and I think most modern distros install that by default (i.e. they didn't ask the user if he wanted it).
If you don't ask, people complain. If you do ask, people complain about being bugged or being asked incomprehensible questions. Since people don't know what Bonjour is, how can they answer the question about whether they want it as part of the iTunes package? I think the fact that the software implements a non-proprietary standard makes a difference. There should be nothing hidden about what it does, and if there is a problem then a well informed person can handle it becaue there's nothing secret.
If Avahi is OK as a default on Linux, why is Bonjour a problem with iTunes? What we are seeing here is the old Scott McNealy prediction coming true: "the network is the computer." He was just a little ahead of his time. iTunes has music player functions, but primarily it is middleware. It's job is to sit between the iTunes music story and iPods, or between the media collection on one device (say a PC) and the user interface on another (say an AppleTV). In a sense, iTunes is a kind of operating system for a set of activities and networked devices.
Your first line shows that you take analogies too seriously.
Well, you've got it backwards.
When they are printing money like mad, you want to work because inflation is eating away at your savings. The money you're being paid isn't worth as much, but balancing that is that you're getting a lot more of it.
When you have disinflation (which we're seeing signs of), you may be less inclined to work if you have savings, because those savings will go farther. On the other hand, nobody is spending their money because they expect that money to farther tomorrow. This may sound like a good thing, until you take the currency glasses off for a second and take a good look at what's happening: people have stopped making things. As in every economic situation, some folks do better than others and a few people do very well, but overall the economy stops creating value.
Of course, that's an extreme and simplistic scenario, but the bottom line is disinflation is really, really bad. I suppose 0 inflation would be ideal, but as a practical matter low but positive inflation is the safest and best state for things to be in.
It is because disinflation is so bad that stimulus package is so huge. It needs to be huge and swift and (this is overlooked) sustained. The idea it should only include short term stimulus is, in my opinion flawed. People need to factor the inflationary effect of spending into their plans for the next two years at least.
Of course, we'll pay in the end, but it's rather like worrying about whether you can afford the surgeon who's taking out the bullet lodged next to your spine.
who has never bought an SF magaine, I'd be willing to do my part and subscribe to a magazine or two. On the other hand, I've never bought one, so I don't know the differences between them.
So, how are the different magazines positioned? What kind of stories do they publish?
Also, I have elementary and middle school aged kids at home. Which magazines are most kid friendly? We still read together, including relatively mature materials like the Terry Pratchett novels. By kid friendly, I mean interesting to kids. For example, one story I loved at that age was Clifford Simak's The Big Front Yard, which in aside from being a good story, captures something of what the world feels like when you're a inquisitive kid.
It's not the stamp of Gramm's name on the bill that makes it suspect to my way of thinking, it's the stamp of his philosophy. I have no animus against Phil Gramm, as you seem to think. A lot of people on the right and left have trouble thinking about politics on any level higher than personal hostility. If Gramm sponsored a resolution declaring oxygen to be the official respiratory gas of the United States, I know that a lot of people would probably try to hold their breath indefinitely, but I would not be one of them.
Now the left has got power, and there are a lot of people on my side who see this as payback time. I think that's a mistake. The Republican leadership overreached and let hostility make them stupid. I think it's a mistake to copy that, but there you go.
It's right, of course, to be skeptical of any theory that is to neat, like, it's all GLBA's fault. I don't subscribe to such a simplistic explanation. Nor do I subscribe to the theory that diversification per se contributed to the instability of banks. But what is medicine in one context is poison in another. Under the business and regulatory practices that prevailed in the better part of the last decade, diversification has certainly not been a shield against instability, and has been an avenue for instability to spread among poorly managed banks.
I own JP Morgan Chase stock, by the way, so I certainly don't think diversification is the automatic kiss of doom by any means.
Isn't that the idea?
The work doesn't magically go away because it's distributed. It just gets harder to keep track of. Something isn't more net work because it becomes easier to measure.
Now if you're stupid enough to concentrate all that formerly distributed work in one place and expect that you don't have to alter your staffing distribution, you deserve what you get.
In any case, TFA was clearly phoned in to generate click through revenue. It's so wrong headed it isn't even wrong. It's not that you can't dream up reasons why browser based application development is a bad idea, but the existence of valid questions is not tantamount to an answer to those questions. Put some effort into answering those questions, then write a real article.
Talk about looking for a piece of straw in a haystack.
I'm less concerned about the corrupting infuene that kind of "in bed" than the kind that keeps funneling money to election campaigns. For one thing, when its over its over. A politician corrupted is corrupted forever.
Missed that high school science class where they talked about precision, did you?
OK, your description of your troubleshooting efforts is very incomplete, but I can think of all kinds of ways to explain the behavior in the incadescent only scenario, none of which is particularly dangerous. What has me concerned is the behavior when you mix incandescent and fluorescent bulbs. That's a massive red flag.
There's nothing too mysterious about the incandescents barely glowing while CFLs in parallel with them are quite bright. For one thing, CFLs are not only more efficient, they have electronic ballasts which compensate for voltage fluctuations. Within limits, they'll draw more current to compensate for low voltage. In fact, like all devices they'll work beyond their design limits, but to unpredictable degrees, which is bad for you for reasons you'll see shortly.
Now here's the part that raises a red flag: that the incandescent bulbs somehow "know" the CFLs are there in parallel. They can't know. The only way to get a light bulb to burn less brightly is to apply less voltage to it. That means something in series is reacting to the load. That's very, very bad, for two reasons.
First, if the voltage is reduced across all the devices, then the "missing" voltage must be going somewhere else. Again, you haven't given me much to on, but one way this could happen is if the dim switch had a big power resistor in series with it. That's not only extremely inefficient, it's also dangerous. If there is a short circuit in the wiring, it might not blow a fuse, but it could cause whatever the hypothetical resistor is in to catch fire.
Secondly, this scenario assumes the electronic ballasts are drawing enough current to keep the bulbs at normal brightness. Since the incandescents tell us that the voltage is low, that means the working bulbs are drawing proportionally more current than normal. You could be exceeding the safe current for the wiring. Normally, I'd say the fuse would prevent this, but given the obviously improvised nature of your wiring, that's not a certain thing. The CFLS could be drawing not enough current to exceed what the wiring can handle (because of the circuit breakers they can't) but they can certainly draw enough current to cause our hypothetical dimmer resistor to catch fire.
The all flourescents scenario as you describe is not as inconsistent with this scenario as you might think. Unpredictable things happen when you connect non-linear devices in parallel with a non-constant power/current source. It could work like this: the most "eager" CFL drops its impedance until it is happy and lights up; the second most "eager" drops its impedance until it is likewise happy; thereafter the voltage has dropped so much across all the bulbs that the remaining two can't make it over the "hump".
Assuming your description of the wiring is correct, your description of the scenario is inconclusive, but consistent with a series resister dimmer. That would be a really bad thing. In any case, magical, non-standard wiring is a about the stupidest thing you can do in a building. Plugging fluorescent lights on a bastardized dimming circuit is a close second.
If anybody in charge of the physical plant had any sense, they'd get a licensed electrician down there immediately. If nobody has enough sense to do that, then you should call the risk management (insurance) people.
Well, the LEDs on your instrument panel probably consume 50mw at full blast. A rheostat dimmer is most efficient at full blast -- it's like it's not there (in fact most fixed brightness LEDS have just a series resistor). At 50% power output, the rheostat and the LED each consume 25mw, which is negligble. Not even counting the non-linear behavior of the diode, the efficiency is going to go down as the absolute power consumption drops, but as we're starting at 1/20 of a watt it doesn't matter.
I'm not sure of the equivalency, but I'm guessing you'd replace a 100w incandescent with a 12w LED. Dimming it to the equivalent of a 50w bulb would mean you're wasting half your energy in the rheostat. So, that's 6 watts wasted; not bad considering you're saving 38 watts compared to an incadescent, but from a design standpoint more of a concern than wasting 25 milliwatts.
Of course the whole reason we're on this is that LEDs are non-linear, which means you're actually wasting more than 50% of your power when you dim with a resistor. But in the grand scheme of things a rheostat dimmed LED lightbulb is preferable to a triac dimmed incandescent.
True, but the wise men of wall street were supposed to have their exalted status because they knew how to grade and price risk better than ordinary mortals. If I were a Citibank investor, and Charlie Prince told me to my face that the reason my stock was in the toilet wast that Franklin Raines pulled a two bit Svengali act on him, I'd spit in Prince's eye.
And with respect to Fannie and Freddie's "special status with the government", what, exactly is this special status they enjoy? That they are too big to fail? That's hardly confined to Fannie and Freddie. The only thing that is special is that they were started by the government; aside from that they don't have any more clout than any other private institution that controls astronomical sums of money (which admittedly leaves room for that being too much clout).
In fact Freddie was started for the exact too-many-eggs-in-one-basket concerns you raise. It doesn't matter how many baskets the economy's eggs are in, if the rules create an incentive to place them all in the same precarious position.
Well, here's the problem: you can't please everyone, nor is it that easy to make it possible for people to please themselves.
Back in the days when it was clear Apple was losing the general purpose desktop, it was Apple's laser printers that saved the company, repositioning the company as one that depended on graphics professionals. Eventually they didn't need to make printers, their need to provide what I call "the high end of the low end" to creative professionals gave them a lock on that market segment.
Well, times change. There's this thing, you see, called an iPod. Millions of people have them who don't know CYMK from a town in Wales. Apple is becoming a boutique for the fusion of computing and entertainment delivery. Adding $100 to a laptop to get a screen that serves the needs of photographers who for some reason need to do their work on laptops doesnt' add a dime to the bottom line. It's unfortunate for those loyal users that they have to fork over money for a separate display.
One thing that occurs to me is that the notebook form factor is to blame here. There are very few situations where having the display attached to the keyboard by a hinge is ergonomically optimal. Personally, I'd prefer a configuration in which a free standing screen was tethered to the keyboard in use, but they locked together for storage and transport in a way that resembles notebooks. Then people could mix and match their components to suit.
Tablet PCs have most of the engineering needed to make the display detachable from the keyboard, but of course for our scenario it would be better to have the CPU in the keyboard or a separate unit. And, when you use the keyboard, it looks to me like you're stuck with a standard laptop configuration, which is not by any means optimal for typing.
Here's what I do use most of the time: a notebook in a stand that raises the display, and a separate Lenovo USB keyboard with trackpad. The top of the screen is at eye level, which is much better on the neck than using the standard laptop configuration for hours a day. The CPU happens to be attached to the screen, but there's no reason it couldn't be in the notebook part. About the only thing wanting from this set up is that the best stand I've found from a stability standpoint is not particularly portable or adjustable, but that's not beyond the ability of a mechanical engineer to address. It'd also be nice if the USB hub on the keyboard was USB 2.0.
I'm certainly sympathetic to the idea that GLBA isn't the whole story, or even necessarily the main part of the story. In fact I'm fairly certain it's going to take years to sort out the story. Economists still disagree over the causes of the Great Depression, after all.
One of the striking aspects of this story is the degree to which CEOs of banks had no idea what their banks were investing in. This is a consequence, I believe, of GLBA encouraging financial institutions to become both bigger and more complex. It's not, of course an inevitable consequence. But there is another aspect of GLBA to consider. The diversification of banks created an avenue for the crisis to spread to all kinds of assets. Even if an asset did not directly contain mortgage based securities, it certainly had components which depended on the solvency of other institutions with exposure to mortgage based risk.
This is why TARP couldn't operate as it was originally conceived. It was supposed to by up risky assets, but the problem wasn't contained to assets that that directly contained mortgages. It was too late, especially after the decision to let Bear Sterns collapse, to contain the uncertainty about all institutions.
Again, I'm not saying that things are as simple as saying no GLBA, no crisis, with GLBA inevitable crisis. It is probable we'd have some kind of crisis anyway, given the same policies without GLBA. I believe that GLBA and the collapse of Bear Sterns accelerated the spread of the crisis. Absent either one and I believe that damage could have been contained more quickly and effectively.
Thanks for the tip on using the red LED. I've been thinking about doing an LED lighting system for my aquarium, but haven't because the narrow spectrum of the LEDs might make the fish look washed out. Any suggestions?
With respect to the circuitry, it reminds me of the circuitry that goes on each and every cell in a li-ion battery. Given the variations in household voltage, and the idea that you're trying to keep the LEDs at the peak of their efficiency, it seems like a no-brainer.
Speaking of LED lighting circuits, since we have somebody here who knows what he's talking about, how do LED bulb work when you dim them with a triac? It seems to me that a regulated power supply would tend to make them undimmable.
...turned Fannie Mae into a financial failure
... which it never was during the 30 years from 1968 to 2000, roughly when banking deregulation took effect. It may be that such an institution is a bad idea, but you have to consider that financial institutions of all kinds are in desperate condition as well, so you can't use the financial disasters of 2008 as proof that Fannie is any worse an idea than, say, a private investment bank.
The idea that Fannies failure shows that it ought never have been, applied consistently, would argue for nationalizing banks. I, as one who has been a staunch liberal though the long winter of liberal dispute, think nationalization is a terrible idea. This is not because the government is bad and business is good, but because government and business would be indistinguishable, leaving nobody to watch the foxes in the chicken coop.
All in all, I think the widespread calamity in the financial sector more probably indicates that the particular kind of banking deregulation practiced in the post Gramm-Leach-Bliley era has at the very least unintended consequences.
cinema's next The Devil Wears Prada.
Thank you. The image of a crack addled addict struggling in a vain attempt to clap some life into a dead CFL bulb is one that I am sure will stick with me the rest of the day.
(1) LEDs can in fact be dimmed by running less current through them, however their power efficiency drops, which negates the whole purpose of LED lighting. The most efficient way to dim an LED is to strobe it on faster than the human eye can detect By varying with fraction of the on/off cycle that the LED is on, the human eye perceives this as "dimmer". The number of photons averaged over a second is reduced, but for the milliseconds the LED is on it is at full brightness.
(2) Incandescent bulb dimmers are almost never been rheostats, not since maybe the 1920s. The problem is efficiency again. Imagine a certain current flowing through the light bulb and the rheostat; the power dissipated in each device is then proportional to the resistance. When the rheostat is at equal resistance to the light bulb, it is dissipating as much power as the light bulb is! A 100 watt light bulb at 50% of the normal RMS current dissipates 25 watts, which means your rheostat is getting as hot as a small soldering iron. You'd need a massive heatsink to handle this.
Therefore for many years, dimmers were not very practical. The best dimmers were actually transformers, but they were extremely bulky. They were mainly used in theaters and fancy restaurants to soften the shock of the prices on the menu by relief at being able to find them at all.
With the creation of the solid state silicon controlled rectifier (scr), it is possible to do a trick with incandescent bulbs that is rather like the LED strobing trick. What you do is you take the sine wave power and you clip out the parts of the waveform on either side of the peak. So rather than having power delivered to light bulb all the time, the light bulb is only powered for a fraction of the cycle. The difference is that an incandescent filament glows because it is hot; it does not flicker on and off.
Now with respect LED light bulbs, I'm not sure about what circuitry they contain, but they do contain circuitry. If you just plugged enough LEDs in series to plug straight into AC, they'd flicker at a very noticeable 60Hz. If you put a full wave rectifier into the circuit, they'd flicker at 120Hz, which might be fast enough you wouldn't notice the flickering. You'd certainly be able to use the a solid state dimmer to dim such as circuit, but flickering might be noticeable.
There are relatively simple tricks you could use to maybe double the frequency, in which case you probably would not be able to perceive the flicker. On the other hand, there might be fancier circuits that know how to do the right thing. One of the problems with LEDs is that they age, their brightness varies. If the LED bulb achieves its white color by using several different colors, you need a compensating circuit to maintain the original color.
Of course you could use white LEDs, but most of the bright ones are very harsh; I've seen warm white LEDs advertised, but I've never had one.
So there you go, the straight facts on dimming that every geek should know.
Put the premiums in a conservative investment, and if the kid lives to be 70 it'll do a lot more to defray the funeral costs.
That's why I pretty much stick to F/OSS where I can. It's not the cost. It's the time it takes to figure out what you're allowed to do.
I worked for a small developer that wanted to resell Oracle for its customers. Anybody can download any of Oracle's products from their website for free. Oracle doesn't check up on people who download their stuff, even though it means there's probably a huge amount of "piracy". Still if you want to do the right thing, you've got a lot of work to figure out which licenses allow you to do what, and if you want to sell their products, then Oracle requires somebody in your company take an on-line test to prove you understand their licensing.
Unfortunately, nobody in my company was eager to do this, and in the meantime we'd sold a number of licenses whose validity was in question until we'd taken the test and got our official Oracle imprimatur. Finally, I took pity on the sale manager and volunteered to take the test. Not a problem, I figured, for somebody who reads this kind of stuff at 1000WPM. Except that the only documentation for the how and why of licensing was an on-line video. On the positive side, it was informative, and I can now say that I can confidently calculate how many Oracle angels that can dance on a core. On the other hand, I had to spend an afternoon watching members of Oracle's licensing committee (Oracle seems to run as if it were a government agency) sit around a table and drone on in monotone voices.
The thing to understand is that some very clever people at Oracle have spent a great deal of time figuring out how to give you as little as possible for your dollar while still offering a reasonable value in comparison to the competition (Microsoft, for the most part). However, very few people understand how Oracle licensing works. I've talked to other vendors about how they package and resell Oracle, and they very often counsel customers to do things that violate their licenses. I've talked to users about how they deploy Oracle, and if they aren't violating their licenses now, it's not because they know the extent of their rights.
It's very common for customers to have bought way too much Oracle, or too little Sometimes they've bought too much on one dimension and too little on another. The scary thing is that when they do this, they tend to think it all balances out, which is not how licensing works.
Now, in comparison, I don't think various versions of Windows are really that confusing. The key is not to look too closely. Look at the big picture. Your objective is to buy the fewest features you can live with. Windows' bundled features really aren't so wonderful, so if you want to edit movies, you're better off finding an open source or third party application, which gives you more flexibility. In order to buy the least windows that meets your needs, you have to understand Microsoft packages its OS products in four dimensions.
The first is OEM vs. retail licensing. OEM licensing is supposedly intended for system builders. The most important part of the licensing from my standpoint is that you can move retail licenses between machines so long as you deleted it off the old one. For the hobbyist or small IT shop that commonly does this, this makes retail a better deal. Also, if you upgrade a machine with an OEM license, Microsoft may refuse to issue you a reactivation key on the ground that the machine has changed so much it is a different machine. Sometimes you get a straw that breaks the camel's back; once I had to reactivate because I removed a network card.
The second and third dimensions are somewhat tied up with each other: they're home/business and good/better/best. In reality they are sets of features. Home Basic has the fewest features and Ultimate has everything MS offers as part of an OS product. Home Premium and Business have different feature sets, Home Premium providing things like video and home entertainment, and Business providing things like the
As you obviously know by bringing up probable changes in future stem cell policy. As others point out, there might not be any use for this material in a few years, although it's probably more significant that most people won't ever use their banked stem cells. But before we deal with hypotheticals, we should deal with established facts first.
The first question I'd ask myself is this: do we have a family history of diseases where this tissue would be useful therapeutically? If any of my siblings, nephews or nieces had something like childhood leukemia or immune system diseases, I'm looking at a very different situation than if my kids have "average" risk.
The second question I'd ask is whether I can afford it. Yes, $1000 is enough to make you stop and think, but to put that in perspective, a lot of middle class people spend well over $1000/yr on eating out for lunch. On the other hand, if you're mortgaged to your eyeballs and just barely keeping up, $1000 could mean losing your house. That would put you in a special category.
This cord blood banking was a new thing when my last child was born, and I was faced with the same decision. At the time my employment situation was pretty shaky, and I had no family history of diseases that would be treated, so I chose not to. And, as it turns out, my kids have never been seriously ill in any way. But, as I look back at that decision, I actually think it wasn't a good one. True, it turned out we didn't need it, and true $1000 seemed like a lot of money at that point to us. But the truth is, it wasn't really that much money. Over the years, $1000 has slipped through our fingers many times without our noticing, because we weren't paying attention. Just last year, we took an expensive vacation that cost several thousand dollars, and I'd much rather give that up than to do it without one of my kids.
Here's the most important point: it's important to line up all your rational arguments and consider them carefully, but in the end this is not a rational decision. It's important to be as rational as you can so you can distinguish between decisions you make as a parent on a rational basis, and the ones you make on whatever basis it was you became a parent. That basis, unless you are a subsistence farmer, is probably not something you can quantify.
Let me illustrate. One thing many insurance salesmen do is talk parents into insuring their kids. This makes no sense at all. Yes, it would be horrible if you kids died before reaching adulthood, but getting an insurance check isn't going to make it any better. What you insure when you buy life insurance isn't a person, it's an income. You buy insurance on yourself so that if you die, your kids will live in material comfort and have money for college. If your brother-in-law moved in to your basement, ate your food, left his laundry for you etc. without paying room and board, you wouldn't take out an insurance policy on him ... except in certain restricted and Hitchcockian circumstances.
There's no rational justification to put your money into life insurance on your kids. But from a financial point of view, you're better off giving up your kids for adoption, so it's irrational to keep your kids at all. While refusing to take life insurance on your kids is without a doubt a good decision because it is rational, giving your kids away because they're the financial equivalent of a parasite isn't necessarily a good idea.
That's why I don't think my decision against banking was a good one. On the percentages, it was a substantial amount of money for something that I was very, very unlikely to need. On the other hand, I've spent that amount of money many times over on things I certainly don't need.
So, think carefully, then set aside that careful thought and ask yourself: what feels right?
In my experience, the whole parity and skills thing is a sham.
I knew a company that hired H1Bs right out of school. Now a lot of these H1Bs has masters degrees, which are rare. Masters are rare because there is little vocational value to getting one. Consider a BSCS and an MSCS degree holder. They both start with the BSCS, and one goes to work for a year or two and the other spends the same time getting masters. Unless we're talking about a teaching position, they're pretty much on par for the vast majority of jobs. The time I've spent teaching masters degrees holders what a version control system was and how to use it could well have been spent on teaching more advanced ideas to a baccalaureate.
I have nothing against getting a masters, but it makes sense if you have specific research interests you want to pursue. But in my experience nearly all the CS masters degree holders I've ever met are H1Bs, and none of those were in fact more practically skilled than if they'd skipped the masters entirely. It's a matter of diminishing returns. After four years of schooling, another year doesn't help much, unless you've put a couple of years of practical work under your belt.
Politically, the system is like those situations in diplomacy, when two leaders have a "frank" discussion. Everybody knows what really went on, but everyone pretends not to know. Everybody knows the H1B program is about reducing the price of entry level labor.Personally, out of all the H1Bs I've ever met, I've never met a single one who was a senior engineer when he came here, and very very few mid career ones. Surely if the problem is that there aren't enough skills, then experienced engineers are what we need most?
I'm not against immigration at all. I think it's a good thing. But the H1B system is corrupt, and deprives the country of the experience and knowledge gained by workers when they take an entry level job.
You don't get it.
It's not immigration of people with engineering degrees that drives down wages. It's continually bringing in entry level people and expelling experienced people that does that.
Everyone here seem to grasp that the fact that music files are so readily and perfectly copyable changes the economics of sharing copies. What some people miss is how the same kinds of things make the economics of knowledge different than, say the economics of automobiles. Even having and automobile industry creates lots of related jobs, in suppliers, distribution, sales, advertising and the like. But if you brought in a bunch of low wage braseros to run your automobile plant, you'd definitely have that many fewer jobs for American auto workers.
But has Linus Torvalds living in the US decreased the net employment of American software engineers by one?
Software is different in that making software tends to generate more jobs making software.
Think about it. Some team comes up with this great software framework that makes doing something that was hard before, easy. Does this mean people who were doing that stuff lose their jobs? No. What happens is that there is a new demand for people who can use that framework to do things that weren't possible before.
Let's say we're talking about Geographic Information Systems. You can do the kind of things GIS does by programming in Fortran with nothing but bare metal and a library with a handful of trig functions. But back when this was the the only way to do GIS, almost nobody did, except maybe in the oil industry or defense. But when GIS becomes so simple minded that non-technical managers can do simple analyses of store siting decisions, none of those few people are going to lose their jobs. In fact, there's a whole new industry of people employed doing jobs that didn't exist before.
Employers make their hiring decisions based on marginal calculations. In the Fortran-and-bare-metal days, many things were theoretically valuable, but not worth the expense and uncertainty to try. When what was hard before becomes easy, this opens up a new universe of things to do, which equals new employment opportunities.
Yes. And let them stay as long as they want, rather than kicking them out to bring new H1Bs in to replace them. That's pretty much a formula for accelerating the movement of tech jobs overseas, taking inexperienced engineers, showing them the ropes, and sending them back to offshoring outfits in places with low wages.
I don't want to frame this as a kind of nationalistic struggle, but India and China don't need a US funded technology and tech jobs transfer program, which is what H1B really is. They are quite capable of developing their own, robust indigenous industries.
If a talented and educated person wants to move here for a while, and can support himself, I don't think it hurts us very much if at all. If after a few years he decides he'd like to stay here, that's good. Productive people create wealth, and wealth creates jobs. The very best create companies, even industries.
What's really bad for the country, not just American engineers looking for a job, is a revolving door program which drains the country of experience gained by work being done here. The knowledge gained by work is a capital resource, and kicking H1Bs out who want to stay here is like sending boxes of cash out of the country.
Well, the problem with that viewpoint is that it is simplistic. Logically, this makes the negation of that viewpoint simplistic as well.
There have been two problems with the Malthusian scenario to date. First is that technology has improved yields. The second is geographically larger markets, which averages variations in production over many areas, reducing the impact of crop failures. However, that's not the whole story.
About 13% of the world's population is undernourished, including about one third of the children in developing countries. The only reason this doesn't seem like a calamity to you is that you never think about those people, except to feel satisfied that percentage figure is so low. However the number of people who are suffering from hunger is at this moment as great or greater than it has ever been.
The world produces enough calories and macronutrients to meet the needs of its current population. In fact it produces a surplus. It just doesn't produce enough of a surplus that getting everybody the protein and calories they need is simple. Although we must remember that conflict, plus endemic poverty and the public corruption that stems from, are the probably the major cause of starvation, population instability is related to these in complex ways.
It drives me nuts when some economist makes a pronouncement of the nature that rising populations add to a nation's per capita wealth because people are a productive resource. It's true sometimes. If you have a healthy economy and stable society, yes. But if you have a society that is unstable the same thing that would be a blessing elsewhere can be a curse. Look at oil. Oil in an underdeveloped country is a curse to most of the people who live there. Petroleum doesn't have the same effect in Nigeria that it does in Norway.
The Malthusian model is based on the notion that an acre of cornland can be given a fixed productivity grading. Production naturally uses the best grade land first; increasing production in this model means recruiting successively lower and lower grades of land, until diminishing returns means you are making vast investments of land for little return.
It's important to note that the model that says agricultural technology is subject to diminishing returns as well. For example, thermodynamics tells us that (1) we can't extract more than the calories of solar energy that falls on a plot of land and (2) we can't extract all of them. It doubtful we can even extract more than a small fraction, given that the plant needs to use (and waste) energy for its own metabolism.
What's more, you can't indefinitely conjure things like trace metals out of the ground through biotechnology. Over the long term you can only extract at the rate geologic processes put them there. The increase of caloric production is not necessarily matched by micronutrients like vitamins and minerals. A recent study at the University of Texas showed a significant decline in nutritional value of US vegetables over the past 50 years, with reductions in protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin and vitamin C. Although this is just one study, clearly there are diminishing returns when it comes to trace minerals, whether or not we've got there yet.
I'm not a Malthusian, because it is an irrationally pessimistic position. Anti-Malthusianism is likewise irrationally optimistic. One thing Malthusians get wrong is the idea that as food supplies increase, human population growth increases. That's actually wrong. As people become more food secure their birth rates drop. Congo has a birth rate of nearly 50 per thousand; Japan's birth rate is less than 8 per thousand. If you could transfer a little of Congo's birth rate to Japan, both countries would benefit.
The key to a better future is not to tell the Third World to stop having babies, nor is it to assume that having babies will fix their problems when it only makes them worse. It's to improve the physical well being and security of the people who are alive today. It's to encourage responsible government which does not pursue power and stature of a few at the expense of inflicting conflict on the many.