Back in the early days of jazz recording, it was not uncommon for bands or soloists to cut 4-5 sides in a session. Often those sessions would be only half a day.
Commercial music production today has taken out the "human" quality of recordings, as exemplified by artists such as Fats Waller, Fletcher Henderson and their peers. The quality of the takes is phenomenal given that they only had two or three attempts. There was no editing equipment to patch over mistakes. The mistakes themselves sometimes prove to be the most interesting parts of the performance.
I like the idea of getting back to simpler recordings that don't try to electronicize away all of the interesting stuff.
The biggest "threat" that comes from the average immigrant (and "paths to amnesty") is the fact that many of these people who are earnestly seeking a better life have little practical experience or knowledge about liberal western democracy. Admittedly, most Americans don't anymore, either, but it is more ingrained in our collective culture than much of the third world. Speaking historically, it is not a good thing to bring in vast numbers of foreigners who are unwilling to learn your language and customs in order to assimilate.
This is false and a red herring. It is false that immigrants don't understand liberal western democracy. I do community organizing around the Twin Cities and I can say that our immigrant Latino base has some really unique and interesting insights into the U.S. republican system of government. They bring an outside perspective that isn't influenced by growing up with incomplete information (at best) and propaganda (at worst).
Then there are the Somalis. Their organizing efforts, voter turnout, visibility, business acumen, etc. helped elect Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim to serve in Congress and a very eloquent champion of justice. I was amazed at the political sophistication of that group. My eyes were definitely opened.
The language issue is a red herring. Immigrants want to learn English. They understand it is best for them in the long run if they do so. Much of the problem is due to lack of classroom (adult, mainly) resources for ESL students. It's similar to what happened to the German, Italian and Hungarian immigrants. The first generation had a hard time learning the language, but their kids soaked it up and were fully integrated. I am seeing this happen in our Latino community here.
You've got it backward. Savings doesn't create jobs, money flowing through the economy does.
On the most important level, a progressive tax system is good because it is an expression that we all conbtribute to our society according to our ability to pay. Rich people didn't get rich in a vacuum. Public investment had a lot to do with it. It's only fair that those who benefit the most pay more. The rich should pay more because they have the most ability to pay and have received the most from society.
There is also value in using progressive taxation to combat the effects of rampant free-market capitalism. There needs to be some balance in the system and the state is the entity that has the authority to regulate it. On a more banal level, it's in the interest of the rich that the wealth and opportunity gap not widen so much as to provoke revolt, in whatever form that might take.
Finally, progressive taxation moves money from those who are not spending it and puts it in the hands of people who will actually spend it. This is good for the economy and creates jobs. A rich person can only spend so much money. Most of it just sits in an investment portfolio that really doesn't contribute much of anything to the economy. It helps a few mega-corporations raise some cash but does little for most people. It is better to have money flowing through the system than sitting in bank acounts, stocks and options.
What you're forgetting, and what we as a society have forgotten, is that very prosperous, stable and growing African American communities were plowed over by the Interstate Highway System in the 50's, 60's and 70's. We quite literally bulldozed countless middle-class homes and businesses to serve white flight caused by federal housing policy post World War II.
And, BTW, quite a majority of African American families are hardworking, educated and motivated, thank you very much. That's not to discount the problems we see with concentrated poverty. On the contrary, it's one of the things we need to address through systemic change. There is indeed truth in the statement that the environment a child grows up in influences his or her perspective of hope and the opportunities available. It is true that some people living in concentrated poverty need help learning life skills. But that's not the sole dominion of African American families. I've seen the same thing in Hmong, African and disadvantaged white neighborhoods.
How does it feel to be on the same side as GWB with your no-borders policy?
Clever.
Neither of us is talking about a no-borders policy.
I am happy to work with whomever can help make our society more just. If that is George W. in this case, so be it. I am not the rabid partisan you make me out to be.
First off, the vast majority of immigrants to the U.S. want to learn English. They aren't stupid. They understand that learning the local language gives them many advantages and opens up opportunities. My sister taught ESL in New York City for a while. The classes were always full. The problem isn't an unwillingness to learn, it's a lack of educational resources. Another way we have disinvested in our country and its people.
The first-generation Germans, Italians and Hungarians that emigrated to the U.S. didn't know English either and generally had the same difficulties learning it. But guess what? Their children soaked it up.
In my opinion, the REAL immigration problem is the illegal Swedes up in northern Minnesota. Believe me, they are up here. Bastards.
Reaosnable people can reasonably diagree, though I have to take issue with immigration being a complicated issue. It's really not. Allocating our resources to do good in the world is a complicated issue.
Honestly, in terms of would-be immigrants (legal or illegal) from Mexico, we might be better served (and they might be better served) if instead of opening our doors wide open we were to put more effort into helping Mexico, specifically lending a hand where appropriate to help clean up Mexican politics. It's a pretty bad system and perhaps the single biggest reason for Mexico's economic stagnation.
To me, the choice here is between crafting just and fair immigration policy vs. trying to change an entire society. It's the difference between something we can do very easily today vs. something that is a great long-term goal but is nearly impossible to do in the short run. To act justly, we have to do something to help people now if we have the capicity, and we do.
You're confusing paying taxes with filing returns. I don't know of any statistics concerning the filing of returns, so I can't comment on that.
Undocumented workers pay taxes in many ways: sales taxes, various forms of license and other fees, income taxes through employer withholding, FICA taxes through withholding and so on. One doesn't need a Social Security number to do this. A Taxpayer ID works just fine.
It's the difference between Thomas Aquinas and Descartes. Aquinas trusted his senses and believed we could reason about the things around us based on our experiences. Descartes distrusted his senses and had to go through a rather convoluted (and wrong) process to prove he existed. One is practical and leads to truth far more often than not. The other is esoteric and frought with incoherent arguments.
I'm not opposed to the scientific method. But as one wise man said, there are lies, damn lies and statistics.
You raise some important points. I'll answer your questions from my perspective.
Any reasonable immigration system will have checks for health, criminal records, etc. This is fine, good and necessary. The problem with the current system is that it is not allowing demand to be satisfied. So creative people work around the problem. If a reformed immigration system finds people with chronic or terminal health problems, we have a moral responsibility to get care for that person, whether it is in our own country or in the country of origin for the immigrant. I would lean toward saying that we have the greater responsibility to provide care here because we have the wealth and power to do so, while many countries do not. We have a responsibility to take in people with curable illnesses and cure them, allowing them to become productive members of society.
At worst, undocumented workers are committing a civil offense, hardly an indicator of future criminal activity.
As for past criminal records of immigrants, I suppose it depends on the offense. I wouldn't want to let child molesters or murderers in. It should be possible to send those people back to prison in their country of origin. However, if they've served their time and that time is reasonable according to our laws, I see no reason not to let them in. To do otherwise would be to say that rehabilitation is impossible and would directly undercut the very foundation of our justice system. Now, I understand that some people truly are beyond help. I'd classify them the same way I'd classify terminally ill immigrants. We have a responsibility to see they get proper care, either in our facilities or somewhere else.
There is another class of "criminals" who may have petty offenses. Economic hardship drives people to do awful things like stealing or prostitution. Again, I don't think we can morally exclude those people solely based on these petty offenses.
Worker exploitation is the number one problem with the current system. The solution is not to try to restrict the workers. That clearly hasn't worked. Globalization allows capital to freely move across borders. The problem with that is we don't allow the same mobility for labor. That's not only immoral, it's stupid. It's this restriction that is fueling exploitation, not the workers.
Skipping the line isn't the issue. The problem is that the line is too long (thousands of years). We are a very wealthy country. The wealthiest country in the history of the world, in fact. We have enough jobs.
Dangerous border crossing conditions are a result of our immigration policies, not a reason for an enforcement-only approach. Our country has a right to regulate immigration insomuch as it contributes to national security. We do not have a right to restrict immigration to hoarde wealth and power, which is what we are doing today.
Yes, it would be good if we were able to help non-US citizens. However, do we have an equal responsibility to help out potential immigrants as we do current citizens? Does our responsibility to potential immigrants take precedence over helping, say, people in Africa? The devil's in the details. I don't think the answers to these questions are unambiguously yes.
Thank you for raising good and interesting questions. I'll try to answer them given the values I hold. I understand that not everyone will agree with my answers.
I believe we have an equal responsibilty to help all people. It does not matter where they live. Given that, I understand that we as a country cannot help everyone. Just as no individual can make the kind of systemic changes we need in our country, no single nation can make the global shifts that need to happen. Therefore, we have a moral responsibility to work with other nations to address those larger problems. This is one reason I believe that Bush's policies toward Iran and Syria are immoral. Nothing will happen without engaging those nations.
When I look to Christian teachings (I'm Catholic, so this is relevant to me. Other traditions teach similar things), I see the line about removing the plank from one's own eye before calling out the sliver in another's. So I have some sense that we need to correct our problems here at the same time we reach out to other nations. In the end we make choices. We have a responsibility to do a lot but at any one time we can only do so much. Domestic immigration policy is clearly something we can address today very easily. It is not so easy for us to fix the problems in Somalia or Zimbabwe. So we must do what we can. That does not mean we ignore the problems in Somalia or Zimbabwe. We must make a full, honest effort to address them.
Does that at least begin to address your concerns? I agree that these are difficult choices and reasonable people can reaonsably disagree. But I cannot agree with anyone who would deny dignity to people when it is so very easy to fix the problems we have with immigration.
Your post is what people talk about when they say liberals form their opinion based on emotions, not facts or evidence.
There are two thrusts to what I wrote. One is based on my long personal experience living and working with immigrants, documented and undocumented. I could cite all sorts of "fact based" studies that attempt to quantify the benefits of immigration (legal and otherwise) but that's not really the point.
Which leads to the second thrust of the discussion, which is around values. Emotion comes into it because values are deeply held and people get upset when their values are violated.
You are in favor of illegal immigration simply because you want "dignity" for human beings.
You don't think every human being has intrinsic value and dignity? If that is the case, then we really have no hope of reaching any sort of mutual understanding. I value human dignity. There is nothing you or anyone else can say or do that will change that. If I didn't hold that value, I wouldn't be me.
You've invented some false idea that illegal immigration is "saving our cities" (even though it's not).
Immigrants are saving our cities. I see it with my own eyes. I smell it. I taste it. I feel it. You're not going to be successful in convincing me or anyone else who knows this from personal experience that this is not the case.
All that matters is what feels good in the short-term.
How did "feel-good" politics come into this? I'm talking about how we value human beings. That has very serious implications.
You even replace "illegal immigrants" with "undocumented immigrants" because you think calling them illegal is too harsh, even though they are, in fact, illegal.
No, they are not. People cannot be "illegal." It doesn't even make grammatical sense. Undocumented workers immigrated here illegally. They committed civil offenses. I freely and gladly admit that. But labeling someone "illegal" is degrading. We don't even do that to murderers and rapists.
1.) Why didn't they immigrate legally like millions of others have?
According to some reports, there are a couple tens of millions of undocumented workers in this country. Given the maximum number of visas allocated in any given year, it would take on average about 4,000 years for someone to legally enter this country from the less-favored areas of the world. I don't know about you, but I would have a hard time waiting that long.
2.) Why do they get to take jobs that would otherwise be high-paying jobs for legal residents? Do they realize if they were legal, they would get higher wages?
Of course they do! They aren't stupid, despite the stereotypes. That's why they want a path to citizenship.
And what about their responsibility to follow our laws?
This country has a long and proud history of civil disobediance concerning unjust laws. I don't know about you, but I'm doing that right now every time I watch a DVD on my MythTV box. I'd say our new neighbors are learning quite quickly, wouldn't you?
With a completely open border, anybody could come in unchecked. Fugitives, Al Queda, drug dealers, and others would have a field day.
Classic fear-mongering argument. Are you really so afraid of other people? How sad.
It is not our responsibility to house the entire world; our responsibility is to provide an opportunity for our legal residents.
Our responsibility is to our fellow human beings, regarless of race, creed, country of origin or any of the other silly things we use to divide ourselves against each other
Other countries are irrelevant when we are talking about U.S. domestic policy. We should not strive to be "like other countries." We should strive to do the right thing. And the smart thing.
Please have some serious, in-depth conversations with immigrants and those who know them. Talk to the U.S.-born wife who has waited over a year for her husband to get a visa while he waits in Mexico. Talk to the roofer who is trying to support two familes: his immediate family in this country and his extended family back in his country of birth. Talk to the wife who is afraid to approach the police about domestic abuse because she fears deportation and the resultant loss of her children.
Please get a human education on this issue. It is vitally important.
Anecdotal evidence is evidence. I don't care about "expert studies" that contradict what I see and experience directly in my own community. The "experts" aren't pounding the ground like I am. I am an expert on my community. They are not.
Please point out the non-sequiturs so I can address them.
This issue, like all issues, comes down to values. It's not an appeal to emotion. It's a call to think about what we really stand for. If you value individual wealth, increasing isolation among people and communities, "personal responsibility" over social responsibility and tax cuts for the rich over the dignity of all human beings, that's fine. But at least be honest and courageous enough to state it plainly.
Do you even know any immigrants who fill unskilled labor jobs? I do -- plenty of them. They are hardworking people. They pay taxes (yes, even the undocumented ones). Many of them lack higher-level education but some are doctors, nurses, etc. who cannot legally practice in our country due to draconian immigration policies.
These immigrants are quite literally saving our cities. South Minneapolis (my home) was a wasteland of crack houses and brothels in the 80's and early 90's. Latino and Somali immigrants moved in and completely transformed the place. It is now quite safe to walk around the main thoroughfares at night. I still wouldn't go into some parts of the city after dark but those places are becoming fewer and fewer.
These immigrants are certainly not criminals. The worst you can charge them with is a civil offense (though some bastards in Congress want to change that). They are not sucking money from the economy, they are creating wealth. And since when is a persons' economic benefit to you the primary definition of whether they are human beings?
Our immigration policies are out of whack, built by bigtos for a time long past. They do not serve the current needs of our country. If we allowed many more immigrants into this country (particularly from Central and South America) we would not see the undercutting of wages we are seeing now. Middle class workers are not losing jobs to immigrants. They are losing jobs to criminal employers that are taking advantage of our unjust immigration system. If all of the undocumented immigrants in this country were given legal immigration status those wages would rise.
The solution isn't to keep people out. It's to welcome them in with open arms.
Here's the low-down. You have to decide whether you will support the inherent dignity of human beings or not. If someone wants to emmigrate to build a better life from his or her family, it is our responsibility to provide the opportunity. We have great wealth and power. Therefore, we have a greater responsibility than others. This is not a "controversial" issue, it is quite simple. It's a question of right and wrong. It's a question of whether or not we are our brothers' keepers. Are we a selfish, arrogant and unjust people or not?
5) AMD and Intel continue to beat the crap out of each other with customers gaining but wondering why there is no software that supports those new 8-way processors, as both compilers and third-party developers fail to keep up.
The compilers exist, in the sense that outfits like PathScale and PGI already have compilers that support OpenMP and some degree of automatic parallelization. They need a lot of work to scale to larger numbers of cores but the primary roadblock here is integration with IDEs and moving these technologies into mainstream computing. If these companies and Microsoft figure out how to make these compilers pervasive with Visual C++, etc. things will change quite dramatically. I don't think this will happen in 2007, though. What will happen is that compiler vendors make significant strides improving access to parallel programming models, pareticualrly with support for Co-Array Fortran and UPC.
While I appreciate your confidence in my prognostications, I'm making predictions just like everyone else. They're informed predictions but as we know in this industry, sometimes that's not worth much.:)
We'll know when Intel has got it when they realize the infinite possible permutations of special purpose cores on one chip means a great deal of marketing advantage.
I'm not convinced of the usefulness of this approach either. Variety of special purpose cores translates to very complex programming models. To be successful in the future companies must come forward with software solutions that can automatically leverage any special-purpose hardware. That's going to limit the kinds of special-purpose hardware we see. It may be ok for IBM to live off the Cell hardware in '07 and '08 but unless they can provide a useful programming environment, its market is going to quickly shrink to the Playstation exclusively. Maybe they can produce a very productive programming environment that uses the chip efficiently. I will be mightily impressed if they do.
Of course that solution includes a great deal more compiler complexity than even massively parallel GPGPUs.
That's right. I think we're going to see some experimenting in the next few years as companies try to figure out how to build compilers, debuggers, performance analyzers, etc. Cell and GPGPU are disruptive technologies in HPC in that they are forcing companies to do some research again. It'll take a while to shake out, which is another reason neither Cell nor GPGPU will come close to dominating HPC in '07.
In the meantime, AMD will continue to lead in terms of chip volume in the HPC market during '07. Opterons are very popular. Intel might shake things up with the Core line, but not seriously until they can match HyperTransport.
It is unfortunate that HPC is going to have this shakeout in programmers who know what they're doing, vs template geeks. Unfortunate for the template geeks, that is. Real programmers code with the tools at hand and solve the problems they have.
What do you mean by "template geeks?" In the near future, real HPC programmers won't bother with squeezing flops out of odd architectures when they can patch together some more Opterons and get the overall job done faster. Time to solution includes programmer time, which is the most expensive part.
GPGPU owns the HPC high ground for 2007. Let's see if Intel can repurpose some of those 80 cores they showed off to do video encoding, random number generation and massively parallel floating point before we call the race in 2010.
AMD owns the high ground as far as chips go. IBM owns the high ground in system market share. Intel's TerraScale chip will have many of the same problems Cell does.
Oh, and of course to be relevant the compiler has to be GCC. No serious scientist would use a closed source compiler.
Hardly. PGI, Pathscale and Intel's compilers are far more relevant in HPC than gcc. Special-purpose systems like those from Cray have no open-source compiler. These compilers will be doing automatic parallelization that the gcc folks haven't even dreamed of yet. That's not a knock on gcc developers. They're working in a very different market. They don't care about 10,000 cores working on a single problem.
Naturally the ideal is an absurdly large address space of shared memory, but the reality is that no real processor can even CRC 2^40 bits of address space in real time.
I'm not following you here. CRC for what purpose? Machines with large shared address spaces do exist. They aren't "shared memory" in the sense that they are NUMA architectures, but I think we're going to see more of this in the coming years. Co-Array Fortran and UPC are gaining momentum. Co-Arrays are in the 2008 Fortran standard. Multicore would seem to push us in this direction.
Totally agree with you on interconnect, but I'm not convinced Cell solves the problem. Eventually one has to go off chip and at that point latency tolerance is everything.
We're programming down to the bare metal right now because that's how you get the answers in something close to real time with the available equipment.
Since when is real time a critical feature of HPC? I'm not being belligerent, just trying to understand the perspective you're coming from. I know very few HPC users who are willing to program the bare metal. ASM is not really an option anymore.
From an analyst point of view some of this stuff (granularity, interconnects, task sequencing) can and should be done by the OS or the compiler, and that's how it's going to work out in the long run.
Agreed. But it ain't gonna happen with Cell or GPGPU in 2007. AMD will continue to dominate the market in revenue, perhaps with Intel catching up a bit. People are buying lots and lots of AMD-based mnessage passing and distributed memory machines.
I am rather intrigued by AMD's Fusion project, though nobody really knows what it is. I gather they're trying to make the GPU more user-friendly, which would be a good thing. Regardless of who comes out on top in '07 or in the short-term beyond, I think we're going to see a resurgence of vector processing.
Cell takes over HPC. Not gonna happen. See GPGPU for why.
You're both wrong. Or more precisely, you're both wrong in the wider scope of "HPC." HPC is much more than machoflops. Cell may indeed dominate the Top 500 in 2007, but that's a useless list for people doing serious supercomputing work. It's one datapoint on a very complex computational surface.
Cell and GPGPU will remain niche technologies for one very simple reason: they're insanely difficult to program. HPC users are less and less willing to modify applications to take advantage of arcane technology. The HPC winners will be the companies with a strong software component. That may not happen in 2007, but it will happen by 2010. Personally, I'm rather excited by SSE4 because it seems that Intel is finally starting to understand the kinds of operations compilers want to use. It's not enough yet, but it's in the right direction.
I think where we're not seeing eye to eye is that you want to make a formal definition of what makes a "Christian". In my view, it's nowhere near that simple. "Judge not, lest ye be judged."
You're taking scripture too literally. Nowhere does the Bible say "do not judge anyone ever." The sense is closer to, "do not judge anyone for faults you yourself still have to correct." The apostle Paul frequently sent nasty letters to Christian communities that he felt were not upholding the teachings of Christ.
That said, everyone needs to have a broader understanding of "Christian." I'm Catholic (some do not consider me a Christian!) and I have little interest in moralizing about gays and guns. I am an authentically pro-life person, which means that I generally oppose abortion, capital punishment, etc. But I take the view that if I were a member of Congress, say, and an abortion ban bill came up, I would not support it unless the bill included things like full funding for pre- and post-natal care, universal health care access, children's services, full funding for public schools, etc. Life is not just about existance, it's about having the opportunity to achieve one's full potential, to become the person God wants one to become.
That's why I work with a faith-based coalition of congregations that does community organizing and political advocacy on social justice issues. One of my main projects right now is securing stable, dedicated funding for public transportation in Minnesota. After all, what good is a living-wage job if one can't get to it?
Christians need to begin understanding that the teachings of Christ go way beyond an individual relationship with God. The point of Christianity is not personal freedom, personal responsibility and personal salvation. It's building community.
Prehaps, I'm just becoming old. But reading Church, Turing, Shannon, McCarthy et al Is enjoyable, prehaps because I know the value of the work, prehaps because I can follow most of it, I don't know but I read most modern work and feel as if I'm being insulted. Almost a case of 'yeah so what, show me the breakthrough, show me the new idea, new application'.
How long have you been reading papers? A wise man once remarked that grad students go through three phases: the "OMG everything is great!" phase, the "Geez, all these papers are stupid" phase and finally reach the, "Ah, I can recognize what's good and what's crap" phase.
Most research papers are about evolutions of existing ideas. That's how research works. You will very rarely read a new paper and think it's a revolution. I haven't yet come across one. You cite the big names because of the big papers they wrote, but how many "ordinary" papers did they write before and after the big one? Lots.
There's a huge step from the research lab to production computing. Functional languages, for example, are used in lots of specialized applications. But they aren't suitable for general-purpose computing because no one has figured out a good way to run them efficiently and write the software we have without destabilizing the entire world of computing. That's life.
Many paces are doing good computing research. You've just set your expectations much too high.
Which large scale SMP system does Linux & Win run on?
Your question doesn't make sense. An SMP architecture itself is very limited in the number of processors it can efficiently support. If you're asking which large scale systems Linux runs on, the answer is "lots." Most of the big supercomputer manufacturers are migrating to Linux, for example.
I would say OO, Packet Networks & non Von Nueman machines are areas that came after 1960 and could be classified as ground breaking. I'm hard pressed to name anything else?
"Ground-breaking" change is very rare. I would argue that OOO was not all that groundbreaking. It's a natural evolution of sequential computing. I'd put it in the same class as pipelining. All of the things I mention above are at least as important.
I agree with much of your post, but not this part:
Tell me a piece of consumer software (sorry this doesn't include servers, compilers and hacker tools), that has become successful on Linux.
It depends on what you mean by "successful." If you mean market penetration, then not much. But I look at "successful" as whether it does what I need it to do and does it better.
For starters, GNU Lilypond, which is light-years ahead of software like Finale in its flexibility. True, it doesn't (yet) have all of the features of all the commercial products, but it has the hooks to allow users to add functionality. I'll never go back to graphical notation entry again. The Lilypond interface is much more efficient.
Ardour is another great project. Again, it provides flexibility that doesn't exist in commercial DAWs.
Of course there's always Emacs (or vi!). Show me a text editor with more timesaving and productivity-enhancing features.
I get along just fine with OpenOffice. Why should I shell out hundreds of dollars for software I don't need?
If these appliations don't work for you, that's fine, stick to the commercial stuff. But don't tear down others because they've found a different way that works better for them.
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Back in the early days of jazz recording, it was not uncommon for bands or soloists to cut 4-5 sides in a session. Often those sessions would be only half a day.
Commercial music production today has taken out the "human" quality of recordings, as exemplified by artists such as Fats Waller, Fletcher Henderson and their peers. The quality of the takes is phenomenal given that they only had two or three attempts. There was no editing equipment to patch over mistakes. The mistakes themselves sometimes prove to be the most interesting parts of the performance.
I like the idea of getting back to simpler recordings that don't try to electronicize away all of the interesting stuff.
This is false and a red herring. It is false that immigrants don't understand liberal western democracy. I do community organizing around the Twin Cities and I can say that our immigrant Latino base has some really unique and interesting insights into the U.S. republican system of government. They bring an outside perspective that isn't influenced by growing up with incomplete information (at best) and propaganda (at worst).
Then there are the Somalis. Their organizing efforts, voter turnout, visibility, business acumen, etc. helped elect Rep. Keith Ellison, the first Muslim to serve in Congress and a very eloquent champion of justice. I was amazed at the political sophistication of that group. My eyes were definitely opened.
The language issue is a red herring. Immigrants want to learn English. They understand it is best for them in the long run if they do so. Much of the problem is due to lack of classroom (adult, mainly) resources for ESL students. It's similar to what happened to the German, Italian and Hungarian immigrants. The first generation had a hard time learning the language, but their kids soaked it up and were fully integrated. I am seeing this happen in our Latino community here.
You've got it backward. Savings doesn't create jobs, money flowing through the economy does.
On the most important level, a progressive tax system is good because it is an expression that we all conbtribute to our society according to our ability to pay. Rich people didn't get rich in a vacuum. Public investment had a lot to do with it. It's only fair that those who benefit the most pay more. The rich should pay more because they have the most ability to pay and have received the most from society.
There is also value in using progressive taxation to combat the effects of rampant free-market capitalism. There needs to be some balance in the system and the state is the entity that has the authority to regulate it. On a more banal level, it's in the interest of the rich that the wealth and opportunity gap not widen so much as to provoke revolt, in whatever form that might take.
Finally, progressive taxation moves money from those who are not spending it and puts it in the hands of people who will actually spend it. This is good for the economy and creates jobs. A rich person can only spend so much money. Most of it just sits in an investment portfolio that really doesn't contribute much of anything to the economy. It helps a few mega-corporations raise some cash but does little for most people. It is better to have money flowing through the system than sitting in bank acounts, stocks and options.
What you're forgetting, and what we as a society have forgotten, is that very prosperous, stable and growing African American communities were plowed over by the Interstate Highway System in the 50's, 60's and 70's. We quite literally bulldozed countless middle-class homes and businesses to serve white flight caused by federal housing policy post World War II.
And, BTW, quite a majority of African American families are hardworking, educated and motivated, thank you very much. That's not to discount the problems we see with concentrated poverty. On the contrary, it's one of the things we need to address through systemic change. There is indeed truth in the statement that the environment a child grows up in influences his or her perspective of hope and the opportunities available. It is true that some people living in concentrated poverty need help learning life skills. But that's not the sole dominion of African American families. I've seen the same thing in Hmong, African and disadvantaged white neighborhoods.
Clever.
Neither of us is talking about a no-borders policy.
I am happy to work with whomever can help make our society more just. If that is George W. in this case, so be it. I am not the rabid partisan you make me out to be.
The language issue is a red herring.
First off, the vast majority of immigrants to the U.S. want to learn English. They aren't stupid. They understand that learning the local language gives them many advantages and opens up opportunities. My sister taught ESL in New York City for a while. The classes were always full. The problem isn't an unwillingness to learn, it's a lack of educational resources. Another way we have disinvested in our country and its people.
The first-generation Germans, Italians and Hungarians that emigrated to the U.S. didn't know English either and generally had the same difficulties learning it. But guess what? Their children soaked it up.
In my opinion, the REAL immigration problem is the illegal Swedes up in northern Minnesota. Believe me, they are up here. Bastards.
Reaosnable people can reasonably diagree, though I have to take issue with immigration being a complicated issue. It's really not. Allocating our resources to do good in the world is a complicated issue.
To me, the choice here is between crafting just and fair immigration policy vs. trying to change an entire society. It's the difference between something we can do very easily today vs. something that is a great long-term goal but is nearly impossible to do in the short run. To act justly, we have to do something to help people now if we have the capicity, and we do.
You're confusing paying taxes with filing returns. I don't know of any statistics concerning the filing of returns, so I can't comment on that.
Undocumented workers pay taxes in many ways: sales taxes, various forms of license and other fees, income taxes through employer withholding, FICA taxes through withholding and so on. One doesn't need a Social Security number to do this. A Taxpayer ID works just fine.
Straw man.
It's the difference between Thomas Aquinas and Descartes. Aquinas trusted his senses and believed we could reason about the things around us based on our experiences. Descartes distrusted his senses and had to go through a rather convoluted (and wrong) process to prove he existed. One is practical and leads to truth far more often than not. The other is esoteric and frought with incoherent arguments.
I'm not opposed to the scientific method. But as one wise man said, there are lies, damn lies and statistics.
You raise some important points. I'll answer your questions from my perspective.
Any reasonable immigration system will have checks for health, criminal records, etc. This is fine, good and necessary. The problem with the current system is that it is not allowing demand to be satisfied. So creative people work around the problem. If a reformed immigration system finds people with chronic or terminal health problems, we have a moral responsibility to get care for that person, whether it is in our own country or in the country of origin for the immigrant. I would lean toward saying that we have the greater responsibility to provide care here because we have the wealth and power to do so, while many countries do not. We have a responsibility to take in people with curable illnesses and cure them, allowing them to become productive members of society.
At worst, undocumented workers are committing a civil offense, hardly an indicator of future criminal activity.
As for past criminal records of immigrants, I suppose it depends on the offense. I wouldn't want to let child molesters or murderers in. It should be possible to send those people back to prison in their country of origin. However, if they've served their time and that time is reasonable according to our laws, I see no reason not to let them in. To do otherwise would be to say that rehabilitation is impossible and would directly undercut the very foundation of our justice system. Now, I understand that some people truly are beyond help. I'd classify them the same way I'd classify terminally ill immigrants. We have a responsibility to see they get proper care, either in our facilities or somewhere else.
There is another class of "criminals" who may have petty offenses. Economic hardship drives people to do awful things like stealing or prostitution. Again, I don't think we can morally exclude those people solely based on these petty offenses.
Worker exploitation is the number one problem with the current system. The solution is not to try to restrict the workers. That clearly hasn't worked. Globalization allows capital to freely move across borders. The problem with that is we don't allow the same mobility for labor. That's not only immoral, it's stupid. It's this restriction that is fueling exploitation, not the workers.
Skipping the line isn't the issue. The problem is that the line is too long (thousands of years). We are a very wealthy country. The wealthiest country in the history of the world, in fact. We have enough jobs.
Dangerous border crossing conditions are a result of our immigration policies, not a reason for an enforcement-only approach. Our country has a right to regulate immigration insomuch as it contributes to national security. We do not have a right to restrict immigration to hoarde wealth and power, which is what we are doing today.
Thank you for raising good and interesting questions. I'll try to answer them given the values I hold. I understand that not everyone will agree with my answers.
I believe we have an equal responsibilty to help all people. It does not matter where they live. Given that, I understand that we as a country cannot help everyone. Just as no individual can make the kind of systemic changes we need in our country, no single nation can make the global shifts that need to happen. Therefore, we have a moral responsibility to work with other nations to address those larger problems. This is one reason I believe that Bush's policies toward Iran and Syria are immoral. Nothing will happen without engaging those nations.
When I look to Christian teachings (I'm Catholic, so this is relevant to me. Other traditions teach similar things), I see the line about removing the plank from one's own eye before calling out the sliver in another's. So I have some sense that we need to correct our problems here at the same time we reach out to other nations. In the end we make choices. We have a responsibility to do a lot but at any one time we can only do so much. Domestic immigration policy is clearly something we can address today very easily. It is not so easy for us to fix the problems in Somalia or Zimbabwe. So we must do what we can. That does not mean we ignore the problems in Somalia or Zimbabwe. We must make a full, honest effort to address them.
Does that at least begin to address your concerns? I agree that these are difficult choices and reasonable people can reaonsably disagree. But I cannot agree with anyone who would deny dignity to people when it is so very easy to fix the problems we have with immigration.
There are two thrusts to what I wrote. One is based on my long personal experience living and working with immigrants, documented and undocumented. I could cite all sorts of "fact based" studies that attempt to quantify the benefits of immigration (legal and otherwise) but that's not really the point.
Which leads to the second thrust of the discussion, which is around values. Emotion comes into it because values are deeply held and people get upset when their values are violated.
You don't think every human being has intrinsic value and dignity? If that is the case, then we really have no hope of reaching any sort of mutual understanding. I value human dignity. There is nothing you or anyone else can say or do that will change that. If I didn't hold that value, I wouldn't be me.
Immigrants are saving our cities. I see it with my own eyes. I smell it. I taste it. I feel it. You're not going to be successful in convincing me or anyone else who knows this from personal experience that this is not the case.
How did "feel-good" politics come into this? I'm talking about how we value human beings. That has very serious implications.
No, they are not. People cannot be "illegal." It doesn't even make grammatical sense. Undocumented workers immigrated here illegally. They committed civil offenses. I freely and gladly admit that. But labeling someone "illegal" is degrading. We don't even do that to murderers and rapists.
According to some reports, there are a couple tens of millions of undocumented workers in this country. Given the maximum number of visas allocated in any given year, it would take on average about 4,000 years for someone to legally enter this country from the less-favored areas of the world. I don't know about you, but I would have a hard time waiting that long.
Of course they do! They aren't stupid, despite the stereotypes. That's why they want a path to citizenship.
This country has a long and proud history of civil disobediance concerning unjust laws. I don't know about you, but I'm doing that right now every time I watch a DVD on my MythTV box. I'd say our new neighbors are learning quite quickly, wouldn't you?
Classic fear-mongering argument. Are you really so afraid of other people? How sad.
Our responsibility is to our fellow human beings, regarless of race, creed, country of origin or any of the other silly things we use to divide ourselves against each other
Other countries are irrelevant when we are talking about U.S. domestic policy. We should not strive to be "like other countries." We should strive to do the right thing. And the smart thing.
Please have some serious, in-depth conversations with immigrants and those who know them. Talk to the U.S.-born wife who has waited over a year for her husband to get a visa while he waits in Mexico. Talk to the roofer who is trying to support two familes: his immediate family in this country and his extended family back in his country of birth. Talk to the wife who is afraid to approach the police about domestic abuse because she fears deportation and the resultant loss of her children.
Please get a human education on this issue. It is vitally important.
Anecdotal evidence is evidence. I don't care about "expert studies" that contradict what I see and experience directly in my own community. The "experts" aren't pounding the ground like I am. I am an expert on my community. They are not.
Please point out the non-sequiturs so I can address them.
This issue, like all issues, comes down to values. It's not an appeal to emotion. It's a call to think about what we really stand for. If you value individual wealth, increasing isolation among people and communities, "personal responsibility" over social responsibility and tax cuts for the rich over the dignity of all human beings, that's fine. But at least be honest and courageous enough to state it plainly.
You are completely off-base.
Do you even know any immigrants who fill unskilled labor jobs? I do -- plenty of them. They are hardworking people. They pay taxes (yes, even the undocumented ones). Many of them lack higher-level education but some are doctors, nurses, etc. who cannot legally practice in our country due to draconian immigration policies.
These immigrants are quite literally saving our cities. South Minneapolis (my home) was a wasteland of crack houses and brothels in the 80's and early 90's. Latino and Somali immigrants moved in and completely transformed the place. It is now quite safe to walk around the main thoroughfares at night. I still wouldn't go into some parts of the city after dark but those places are becoming fewer and fewer.
These immigrants are certainly not criminals. The worst you can charge them with is a civil offense (though some bastards in Congress want to change that). They are not sucking money from the economy, they are creating wealth. And since when is a persons' economic benefit to you the primary definition of whether they are human beings?
Our immigration policies are out of whack, built by bigtos for a time long past. They do not serve the current needs of our country. If we allowed many more immigrants into this country (particularly from Central and South America) we would not see the undercutting of wages we are seeing now. Middle class workers are not losing jobs to immigrants. They are losing jobs to criminal employers that are taking advantage of our unjust immigration system. If all of the undocumented immigrants in this country were given legal immigration status those wages would rise.
The solution isn't to keep people out. It's to welcome them in with open arms.
Here's the low-down. You have to decide whether you will support the inherent dignity of human beings or not. If someone wants to emmigrate to build a better life from his or her family, it is our responsibility to provide the opportunity. We have great wealth and power. Therefore, we have a greater responsibility than others. This is not a "controversial" issue, it is quite simple. It's a question of right and wrong. It's a question of whether or not we are our brothers' keepers. Are we a selfish, arrogant and unjust people or not?
The compilers exist, in the sense that outfits like PathScale and PGI already have compilers that support OpenMP and some degree of automatic parallelization. They need a lot of work to scale to larger numbers of cores but the primary roadblock here is integration with IDEs and moving these technologies into mainstream computing. If these companies and Microsoft figure out how to make these compilers pervasive with Visual C++, etc. things will change quite dramatically. I don't think this will happen in 2007, though. What will happen is that compiler vendors make significant strides improving access to parallel programming models, pareticualrly with support for Co-Array Fortran and UPC.
It will be an interesting year in HPC.
I'm not convinced of the usefulness of this approach either. Variety of special purpose cores translates to very complex programming models. To be successful in the future companies must come forward with software solutions that can automatically leverage any special-purpose hardware. That's going to limit the kinds of special-purpose hardware we see. It may be ok for IBM to live off the Cell hardware in '07 and '08 but unless they can provide a useful programming environment, its market is going to quickly shrink to the Playstation exclusively. Maybe they can produce a very productive programming environment that uses the chip efficiently. I will be mightily impressed if they do.
That's right. I think we're going to see some experimenting in the next few years as companies try to figure out how to build compilers, debuggers, performance analyzers, etc. Cell and GPGPU are disruptive technologies in HPC in that they are forcing companies to do some research again. It'll take a while to shake out, which is another reason neither Cell nor GPGPU will come close to dominating HPC in '07.
In the meantime, AMD will continue to lead in terms of chip volume in the HPC market during '07. Opterons are very popular. Intel might shake things up with the Core line, but not seriously until they can match HyperTransport.
What do you mean by "template geeks?" In the near future, real HPC programmers won't bother with squeezing flops out of odd architectures when they can patch together some more Opterons and get the overall job done faster. Time to solution includes programmer time, which is the most expensive part.
AMD owns the high ground as far as chips go. IBM owns the high ground in system market share. Intel's TerraScale chip will have many of the same problems Cell does.
Hardly. PGI, Pathscale and Intel's compilers are far more relevant in HPC than gcc. Special-purpose systems like those from Cray have no open-source compiler. These compilers will be doing automatic parallelization that the gcc folks haven't even dreamed of yet. That's not a knock on gcc developers. They're working in a very different market. They don't care about 10,000 cores working on a single problem.
I'm not following you here. CRC for what purpose? Machines with large shared address spaces do exist. They aren't "shared memory" in the sense that they are NUMA architectures, but I think we're going to see more of this in the coming years. Co-Array Fortran and UPC are gaining momentum. Co-Arrays are in the 2008 Fortran standard. Multicore would seem to push us in this direction.
Totally agree with you on interconnect, but I'm not convinced Cell solves the problem. Eventually one has to go off chip and at that point latency tolerance is everything.
Since when is real time a critical feature of HPC? I'm not being belligerent, just trying to understand the perspective you're coming from. I know very few HPC users who are willing to program the bare metal. ASM is not really an option anymore.
Agreed. But it ain't gonna happen with Cell or GPGPU in 2007. AMD will continue to dominate the market in revenue, perhaps with Intel catching up a bit. People are buying lots and lots of AMD-based mnessage passing and distributed memory machines.
I am rather intrigued by AMD's Fusion project, though nobody really knows what it is. I gather they're trying to make the GPU more user-friendly, which would be a good thing. Regardless of who comes out on top in '07 or in the short-term beyond, I think we're going to see a resurgence of vector processing.
You're both wrong. Or more precisely, you're both wrong in the wider scope of "HPC." HPC is much more than machoflops. Cell may indeed dominate the Top 500 in 2007, but that's a useless list for people doing serious supercomputing work. It's one datapoint on a very complex computational surface.
Cell and GPGPU will remain niche technologies for one very simple reason: they're insanely difficult to program. HPC users are less and less willing to modify applications to take advantage of arcane technology. The HPC winners will be the companies with a strong software component. That may not happen in 2007, but it will happen by 2010. Personally, I'm rather excited by SSE4 because it seems that Intel is finally starting to understand the kinds of operations compilers want to use. It's not enough yet, but it's in the right direction.
You're taking scripture too literally. Nowhere does the Bible say "do not judge anyone ever." The sense is closer to, "do not judge anyone for faults you yourself still have to correct." The apostle Paul frequently sent nasty letters to Christian communities that he felt were not upholding the teachings of Christ.
That said, everyone needs to have a broader understanding of "Christian." I'm Catholic (some do not consider me a Christian!) and I have little interest in moralizing about gays and guns. I am an authentically pro-life person, which means that I generally oppose abortion, capital punishment, etc. But I take the view that if I were a member of Congress, say, and an abortion ban bill came up, I would not support it unless the bill included things like full funding for pre- and post-natal care, universal health care access, children's services, full funding for public schools, etc. Life is not just about existance, it's about having the opportunity to achieve one's full potential, to become the person God wants one to become.
That's why I work with a faith-based coalition of congregations that does community organizing and political advocacy on social justice issues. One of my main projects right now is securing stable, dedicated funding for public transportation in Minnesota. After all, what good is a living-wage job if one can't get to it?
Christians need to begin understanding that the teachings of Christ go way beyond an individual relationship with God. The point of Christianity is not personal freedom, personal responsibility and personal salvation. It's building community.
How long have you been reading papers? A wise man once remarked that grad students go through three phases: the "OMG everything is great!" phase, the "Geez, all these papers are stupid" phase and finally reach the, "Ah, I can recognize what's good and what's crap" phase.
Most research papers are about evolutions of existing ideas. That's how research works. You will very rarely read a new paper and think it's a revolution. I haven't yet come across one. You cite the big names because of the big papers they wrote, but how many "ordinary" papers did they write before and after the big one? Lots.
There's a huge step from the research lab to production computing. Functional languages, for example, are used in lots of specialized applications. But they aren't suitable for general-purpose computing because no one has figured out a good way to run them efficiently and write the software we have without destabilizing the entire world of computing. That's life.
Many paces are doing good computing research. You've just set your expectations much too high.
Your question doesn't make sense. An SMP architecture itself is very limited in the number of processors it can efficiently support. If you're asking which large scale systems Linux runs on, the answer is "lots." Most of the big supercomputer manufacturers are migrating to Linux, for example.
Caches, virtual memory, multithreading, SMT, prediction (all kinds), multiprocessing, integrated circuits, LSI, VLSI, CMOS, optical interconnect, ...
"Ground-breaking" change is very rare. I would argue that OOO was not all that groundbreaking. It's a natural evolution of sequential computing. I'd put it in the same class as pipelining. All of the things I mention above are at least as important.
It depends on what you mean by "successful." If you mean market penetration, then not much. But I look at "successful" as whether it does what I need it to do and does it better.
For starters, GNU Lilypond, which is light-years ahead of software like Finale in its flexibility. True, it doesn't (yet) have all of the features of all the commercial products, but it has the hooks to allow users to add functionality. I'll never go back to graphical notation entry again. The Lilypond interface is much more efficient.
Ardour is another great project. Again, it provides flexibility that doesn't exist in commercial DAWs.
Of course there's always Emacs (or vi!). Show me a text editor with more timesaving and productivity-enhancing features.
I get along just fine with OpenOffice. Why should I shell out hundreds of dollars for software I don't need?
If these appliations don't work for you, that's fine, stick to the commercial stuff. But don't tear down others because they've found a different way that works better for them.