That said, I hardly think blind religious fervor is a strictly American disease. Just look at Russia's attitude towards homosexuals.
Heck, it's not even a modern phenomenon. For example, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is serious argument that the rise of Christianity was a major factor in causing the Roman Empire to collapse. The idea was that because Christianity focused on the afterlife, rather than the quality of this life like pagan religions, and so people stopped giving a damn about whether they were taking the actions needed to ensure their own survival or the survival of their civilization.
Religion is fine when observable scientific reality trumps religious belief where they conflict. If you want to go to a building once a week to be part of what is essentially a performance with a bit of audience participation, go ahead. If you want to sit in a room and meditate for an hour, have fun. If you want to pray 5 times a day, go right ahead. But if you hold beliefs that are demonstrably wrong, that's not faith, that's stupidity, and if it is used to decide something important that's going to cause problems.
An interesting potential experiment: See if we could create a better "shadow Congress" by picking representatives at random from each congressional district and state. Yes, we'd have plenty of morons get in there, but I'd be hard-pressed to see how this kind of representation would do worse than our current elected officials.
An interesting example of this: In New Hampshire, there are enough House seats that almost anyone can get in if they are a reasonably good campaigner and actually want to do the job (it pays $100 a year, so most don't). In 1996, the residents of one district elected Peter Leonard, a developmentally challenged maintenance man. And you know what? He did just fine in the state House, and was re-elected once. Full disclosure: I knew him as an elevator operator, and he was really very kind, if not too bright.
For music from 40 years ago, might I recommend LPs? You can often pick them up really cheaply second-hand, along with a decent turntable, and rock out all you like to One Nation Under a Groove or whatever else you like from 40 years ago. Plus you get all the retro cred among hippie types you encounter.
I am surprised at your apparent attitude, given the track record of government-managed systems.
The track record of government-managed systems is actually pretty good overall. To name a few: - US Postal Service, which is still delivering stuff everywhere in the country at a ridiculously low cost using a system that is the envy of other country's postal systems. Seriously. It's good enough that to cover a lot of the country FedEx and UPS simply contract the delivery to the USPS. It's good even with a bunch of people in Congress trying to kill it by forcing them to fund the retirements of future postal workers who will be born 5 years from now (something no private company has ever done or ever had to do). - Municipal water supplies. They have their problems, but the vast majority of the time Americans have safe and clear tap water without even thinking about it, and you can thank your local water works for that. - The Veteran's Administration, the most cost-effective health care system in the United States. (Runners-up: Medicare, Medicaid) - Social Security spends approximately 0.05% of its budget on administration and overhead. You may disagree with the existence of Social Security as a matter of policy, but the implementation has been stellar. - OSHA has dramatically reduced the number of workers killed or maimed at work. - Government-run schools have made basic literacy near-universal (the "near" part is mostly older African-Americans who were denied proper schooling in their youth, and people with severe mental problems). - You use a government-run road system probably every day of your life. You've come to rely on them without thinking about it. There are a lot of countries where you can't. - The Internet was a government program. - Your chance of food poisoning is extremely low, thanks to government inspections and regulations. - When you pump what shows up as a gallon of gas on the pump at the gas station, you will get a gallon of gas. There are government inspectors that make sure of this.
Generally speaking, the reason you think that the government sucks is that you only hear of a lot of agencies when something bad happens. Most of the time, they're just doing their jobs and keeping things humming along.
And if your argument is that government employees have no motivation to help you, consider this: Private enterprise employees are actively motivated to screw you over.
Funny story about this point (anonymized to protect the guilty): A former coworker described working with a guy about 5 years ago who wasn't familiar with the concept of an "array", or in fact much else that would imply any kind of structure or competence. He lasted about 3-5 days before he was caught. Well, I decided to move on, and landed a position in another organization, and lo and behold that same guy had been their sole developer for 4 years! In addition, he'd done some work for some small businesses on the side, and screwed up their stuff too.
So don't hate these people too much: Reasonably competent people like me can make very good money cleaning up their messes!
It's in the same category as leaving a house unlocked.
That analogy is incorrect. In a correct analogy, the locksmith installed a lock that he swore up and down would protect your home, you locked the door thinking you were fine, and then somebody came in and stole a bunch of things. And that would in fact make the locksmith liable, especially if there was a written guarantee on the lock and the locksmith's work (but even if not, there's the implied warranty of merchantability that says that he's still liable).
And as soon as you look at the case that way, Starbucks is being negligent, just like the locksmith was in our analogous scenario. The key factor here is that the victim of the crime is not the person who left themselves vulnerable to it through their own stupidity.
Patents and "monitizing" of the university system seem to me to corrupt the purity of knowledge and education for their own sakes, replacing those abstract goals with concerns like "how much money will that research be worth" and "will teaching those classes result in higher wages for our graduates (and hence more and larger donations)".
On the other hand, classrooms, professors, laboratories, etc cost money, and universities are constantly looking for ways to get their hands on some. Their options are limited: - Foundations and other granting organizations want a ROI - Government funding is drying up as fast as Republicans can make it happen (whether you agree or disagree with that policy, that's the Republican Party position on education funding, and there's no sense in pretending otherwise) - Alumni are mostly broke - Tuition is already skyrocketing
So that leaves: - Stuff you can sell other than education, like licensed football team gear - Corporate funding (which brings a whole other set of compromises) - Begging rich people (which also brings a whole set of compromises, but is the most common method) - Using whatever assets the university has to force rich people or corporations from coughing up cash, like patents
The "again" part was that once the US/UN forces had pushed the North out of the South, they kept right on going until the North was crammed up against the Chinese border. There was of course a counteroffensive which sent the border close to where it had started.
1. Salaries in technology are rising at a rate of 7.5% or so per year. That's not really fast enough to stimulate the supply of people they need, but it's indicating that they can't get what they want for the price they were originally offering. 2. According to the BLS, they're projecting a 22% increase in demand for developers. The supply has gone up, but not by that much. 3. Unemployment among techies is about 4.4%, half the national average, and as low as 0.5% for DBAs. So very few who bill themselves as techies are out in the cold.
Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons. This has been verified repeatedly by the IAEA. The only people who say otherwise are the Israeli government, because they would really really like the United States to attack Iran. That's why their lobbyists have been working really hard to undo the deal that the Obama administration cut with the Iranians and the rest of the UN Security Council to make sure that the Iranians never get a nuke.
North Korea has had nukes for about a decade now. The serious threat has never been North Korea nuking the US, it's been North Korea nuking South Korea or Japan. They could already do that if they wanted to, and haven't, because they and their Chinese backers aren't really that crazy or stupid. Kim Jong Un has to make a lot of noise like he's going to launch a serious attack in order to gain credibility with the hardliners at home who would probably have him killed if he didn't look like he was one of them. The NK nukes are pretty much there as a doomsday device to make sure the US and its allies doesn't attack them again, and they're doing exactly that.
They have a demonstrably anti-competitive agreement between purchasers of a service to make each seller only able to deal with one of the purchasers, creating a monopsony. Textbook macro basically argues that the effect of a monopsony is that the only buyer in the market now has basically complete control of the terms of any agreement with the seller, because the seller's only option is to not sell his product.
Another way of describing this: Imagine you work for Amazon. Without these agreements, you have these options: 1. Accept a 3% raise to continue working at Amazon. 2. Accept a 25% raise to go work for Google. 3. Not work at all and be unemployed or at least accept a massive wage cut.
With these agreements your options now are: 1. Accept a 3% raise to continue working at Amazon. 2. Not work at all and be unemployed or at least accept a massive wage cut.
This is inherent in these kind of agreements. There's no need to prove intent.
For example, management often thinks a new developer can be instantly productive. S/he can't, because no matter how competent and experienced that developer is with the language and toolset, s/he doesn't know anything about the company's internal code library which is protected by trade secrets and NDAs and other dire consequences if anyone outside the company ever learns about it. And that internal knowledge is often more critical to the job than what the developer could possibly bring with them.
So if a manager thinks that anyone is going to contribute directly and immediately to the company's success on their first day, run! Some more fun translations between interviewer-speak and reality: - "Fast-paced environment": We replace actual decision-making and prioritizing with simply whipping the employees to work harder. - "Comfortable office space": We supply you with a $200 chair. - "Open office plan": We have one room we rented out for $400 a month, and we haven't bothered even installing cubicles yet. - "Break room with perks": We have a coffee machine.
Also because they don't want to train people to work in technology. There is legitimately a shortage of tech people in the US, and one potential response would be to increase wages until the right candidates are motivated to apply, but another potential response would be to take not-quite-ideal candidates and provide the necessary on-the-job training that would make them suitable employees.
And I'm not even talking about being willing to hire Java guys to write C#, although that's in play too. For example, a guy who spent 15 years keeping an assembly-line humming and has been unemployed for 5 years now might well be somebody who could help keep a network cruising along. You'd have your senior-level network admin start him off as a cabling monkey, then teach him what he's plugging things into, and as he gained experience he'd eventually get familiar with the monitoring tools and be able to recognize and respond to common problems. This kind of hire might never reach the top-notch skillset of your senior network admin, but he could be an effective and inexpensive junior-level employee. You could pretty easily dream up similarly effective training programs for desktop support technicians.
These kind of programs were exactly what the major corporations were doing in the 1950's, because there was such a shortage of available workers after WWII that they would basically hire anybody with a high school diploma and no demonstrable idiocy, and then train them for whatever the corporation needed to them to do. They provided good wages, benefits, and a career track for people who did their jobs well. This was an investment, but it worked well, and you ended up with people who were fiercely loyal to the company and proud to be a part of it.
H1Bs are basically stopping those kind of market corrections from happening - they both prevent the IT guys from getting paid what they're worth, and prevent non-IT people who want to get into IT from making the move.
Many of those items on the list are indeed bad, so why are you pushing for yet ANOTHER example of the government trying to screw with our internet to add to the list?
You're misunderstanding the argument. Your reasoning appears to be: 1. If Net Neutrality is implemented, the government can control the Internet. 2. If the government can control the Internet, it can (unnamed sinister action).
My argument is this: 1. The government can control the Internet without Net Neutrality. 2. If the government can control the Internet, it can (unnamed sinister action). 3. Therefor, whether or not Net Neutrality is implemented has no bearing on whether the government can (unnamed sinister action).
My guess, based on the rest of your post, is that you are a libertarian, and thus you oppose any rule the government makes on the theory that any rule the government makes benefits the government rather than accomplishing its stated purpose. My view is that sometimes government action serves the government, sometimes it actually accomplishes its stated purpose, and it's worth figuring out the difference because often that stated purpose is worth doing.
It was ALWAYS a tool to impose government control over the internet.
Yeah, it's not like the government had control over the Internet before. Except for: - when it was run by the Department of Defense for the early part of its existence - when it was opened up to the public by then-Senator Al Gore and placed under the jurisdiction of the FCC - when they paid AT&T to build and improve the network - when Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton tried to stop all Internet pornography - when the FBI created Echelon under the Clinton administration - when Admiral Poindexter started the Total Information Awareness project in 2001 - when the NSA cooperated with Google and AT&T and Verizon and a bunch of other major corporations to spy on everybody..
So clearly Net Neutrality was the thin wedge that was going to give government control of the Internet, right?
To be fair, Linux had a pretty strong head start, what with Unix starting to develop its CLI capabilities back in the 1970's and its GUI in 1984. That means that Linux has gone through an extra decade of knowing what doesn't work so well UI-wise, and the results show. Well, that and the fact that it's relatively easy to switch around UI behavior without changing the underlying operating system, and it becomes cheaper to fight the various battles about UI.
The summary of your post, once you take out the attempts at obfuscating the point, is "black kids from the inner city can't be helped, and we shouldn't try because it will cost too much."
It's an open question as to whether ANY social welfare spending (at least as structured in the US) can "solve" any of these problems. So many of the problems plaguing these students are CULTURAL issues, not issues of simply being poor. Teenage parents, missing or jailed parents, etc -- we don't seem to know how to solve these problems even in the broader social welfare system, let along trying to do it within the educational system.
Those aren't accidental results or entirely based on culture, but in many cases the effects of deliberate policy.
Teenage parents: Teenagers are much more likely to have children in high school if they don't have access to proper sex education or birth control. And that is partially a cultural issue (and also a problem among white fundamentalist types), but it's also an issue of parents not knowing enough to give "the talk" properly. That is absolutely something schools could teach if we actually wanted to.
Missing parents: A major reason many black men don't take responsibility for supporting their kids is that they can't afford to. A broke and unemployed father is basically another mouth for the mother to find a way to house and feed, and that is arguably worse for the family than no father at all. In addition, we have some perverse incentives in many of the existing government and charitable aid programs that give more favorable treatment to single mothers than 2-parent families. To the degree that there's a cultural side to it, it's that black America has a tradition of female-headed households because the policies of white America have been separating black fathers from their children since slavery.
Jailed parents: Most of the black men in jail are for non-violent drug possession, most frequently marijuana, and these typically only result in jail and a criminal record when non-white men commit them. End the ridiculous drug war and a lot of this problem goes away. And it should also be mentioned that this leads directly to the "missing parents" problem, because those same black men have a very hard time finding work after they get out of jail because of their criminal record.
Unstable housing (not something you mentioned, but it's important): During the 1990's and 2000's, there had been an emerging black middle class consisting of educated professional black parents who were married, and owning a home. The mortgage crash affected these families significantly more than their white counterparts, because banks had pushed black families towards subprime loans rather than prime loans that they would have been qualified for had they been white. It can be reasonably argued that the banks basically stole a generation of wealth from black America.
Lack of Parental Involvement: If you're a working class person, your availability for parent-teacher conferences, reading to your kids, PTA meetings, and other parental involvement in education is determined not by you, but by your boss, and frequently changes at the last minute. And if you work a physically demanding job, when you get home you have just about enough energy to microwave something to eat and flop down on the couch in front of the TV.
Are you advocating that people who have these means...sacrifice the lives of their children, send them for a poor education merely to prove a social "point"?
I think that he's advocating people who have means put those means towards making the public schools awesome, so that rather than just their little angel getting a great education every kid in the country gets a great education. The money that goes to support private schools could instead have been taxed and spent on public schools. If all the people rich enough and powerful enough to avoid using the public school system do so, then they will tend to not care enough about the public schools to make them worth attending.
The biggest reason to care about the education of children other than your own is that some of the children of poor people in poor environments with lousy schools have the potential to be great writers, artists, thinkers, scholars, scientists, leaders, etc, but instead end up flipping burgers because their educational environment failed them. That doesn't just hurt them, it hurts you, because whatever useful work they could have done doesn't happen. It also hurts you because these very same people will end up more likely to be criminals (costing you in police services and prisons), unemployed (costing you unemployment benefits), and addicted to drugs (costing you in police, prisons, rehab centers, and medical care).
Where else are you going to meet eligible people anyway?
Let's see, things that have led to relationships for either myself or other men I know: - Organizations and social clubs of all stripes. Whatever you're interested in (which incidentally means that you immediately have a shared interest). - Shows, sporting events, and other entertainments. Again, you immediately have something that you both like or at least tolerate enough to make the effort to be there. - Swing dancing and folk dancing. - Yes, at bars or restaurants. You don't have to be a drunk to go to a bar for 1-2 drinks once in a while. If you are an alcoholic, try hanging out with alcoholic support groups. - If you're a freethinker / agnostic / atheist, then try hanging out with the local freethinker / agnostic / atheist group. If there isn't one, try to start one. - Once you know some people, you're spending time with them, and in the process meet their other friends, some of whom become your friends, and then you're spending time with their friends, etc.
Sure, you're not going to get to know people by sitting on your couch, but to think that the 5 you mentioned are your only options is just plain silly.
I'm sorry women find you repulsive, but the way you imagine the world is, simply isn't true.
You are the one who is delusional if you think "not hitting on women at work" means "never have sex". But maybe this is because I have a social life when I'm not working.
It's really simple: There are times and places where it's acceptable to try to get laid. There are times and places where it's not acceptable. Work (and work-related activities like professional conferences) fall into the second category. Are you really so desperate for contact with women that the only ones you meet are the ones who are paid to be there?
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give them what they want but require they give equal time to beliefs that they don't believe in.
Yup, couldn't agree more. I can't wait for this version of the creationist-evolution debate to show up in schools: ODIN!
That said, I hardly think blind religious fervor is a strictly American disease. Just look at Russia's attitude towards homosexuals.
Heck, it's not even a modern phenomenon. For example, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is serious argument that the rise of Christianity was a major factor in causing the Roman Empire to collapse. The idea was that because Christianity focused on the afterlife, rather than the quality of this life like pagan religions, and so people stopped giving a damn about whether they were taking the actions needed to ensure their own survival or the survival of their civilization.
Religion is fine when observable scientific reality trumps religious belief where they conflict. If you want to go to a building once a week to be part of what is essentially a performance with a bit of audience participation, go ahead. If you want to sit in a room and meditate for an hour, have fun. If you want to pray 5 times a day, go right ahead. But if you hold beliefs that are demonstrably wrong, that's not faith, that's stupidity, and if it is used to decide something important that's going to cause problems.
An interesting potential experiment: See if we could create a better "shadow Congress" by picking representatives at random from each congressional district and state. Yes, we'd have plenty of morons get in there, but I'd be hard-pressed to see how this kind of representation would do worse than our current elected officials.
An interesting example of this: In New Hampshire, there are enough House seats that almost anyone can get in if they are a reasonably good campaigner and actually want to do the job (it pays $100 a year, so most don't). In 1996, the residents of one district elected Peter Leonard, a developmentally challenged maintenance man. And you know what? He did just fine in the state House, and was re-elected once. Full disclosure: I knew him as an elevator operator, and he was really very kind, if not too bright.
For music from 40 years ago, might I recommend LPs? You can often pick them up really cheaply second-hand, along with a decent turntable, and rock out all you like to One Nation Under a Groove or whatever else you like from 40 years ago. Plus you get all the retro cred among hippie types you encounter.
I am surprised at your apparent attitude, given the track record of government-managed systems.
The track record of government-managed systems is actually pretty good overall. To name a few:
- US Postal Service, which is still delivering stuff everywhere in the country at a ridiculously low cost using a system that is the envy of other country's postal systems. Seriously. It's good enough that to cover a lot of the country FedEx and UPS simply contract the delivery to the USPS. It's good even with a bunch of people in Congress trying to kill it by forcing them to fund the retirements of future postal workers who will be born 5 years from now (something no private company has ever done or ever had to do).
- Municipal water supplies. They have their problems, but the vast majority of the time Americans have safe and clear tap water without even thinking about it, and you can thank your local water works for that.
- The Veteran's Administration, the most cost-effective health care system in the United States. (Runners-up: Medicare, Medicaid)
- Social Security spends approximately 0.05% of its budget on administration and overhead. You may disagree with the existence of Social Security as a matter of policy, but the implementation has been stellar.
- OSHA has dramatically reduced the number of workers killed or maimed at work.
- Government-run schools have made basic literacy near-universal (the "near" part is mostly older African-Americans who were denied proper schooling in their youth, and people with severe mental problems).
- You use a government-run road system probably every day of your life. You've come to rely on them without thinking about it. There are a lot of countries where you can't.
- The Internet was a government program.
- Your chance of food poisoning is extremely low, thanks to government inspections and regulations.
- When you pump what shows up as a gallon of gas on the pump at the gas station, you will get a gallon of gas. There are government inspectors that make sure of this.
Generally speaking, the reason you think that the government sucks is that you only hear of a lot of agencies when something bad happens. Most of the time, they're just doing their jobs and keeping things humming along.
And if your argument is that government employees have no motivation to help you, consider this: Private enterprise employees are actively motivated to screw you over.
What do you mean? That wasn't his real name, his real name was Carlos Danger!
Funny story about this point (anonymized to protect the guilty): A former coworker described working with a guy about 5 years ago who wasn't familiar with the concept of an "array", or in fact much else that would imply any kind of structure or competence. He lasted about 3-5 days before he was caught. Well, I decided to move on, and landed a position in another organization, and lo and behold that same guy had been their sole developer for 4 years! In addition, he'd done some work for some small businesses on the side, and screwed up their stuff too.
So don't hate these people too much: Reasonably competent people like me can make very good money cleaning up their messes!
It's in the same category as leaving a house unlocked.
That analogy is incorrect. In a correct analogy, the locksmith installed a lock that he swore up and down would protect your home, you locked the door thinking you were fine, and then somebody came in and stole a bunch of things. And that would in fact make the locksmith liable, especially if there was a written guarantee on the lock and the locksmith's work (but even if not, there's the implied warranty of merchantability that says that he's still liable).
And as soon as you look at the case that way, Starbucks is being negligent, just like the locksmith was in our analogous scenario. The key factor here is that the victim of the crime is not the person who left themselves vulnerable to it through their own stupidity.
Patents and "monitizing" of the university system seem to me to corrupt the purity of knowledge and education for their own sakes, replacing those abstract goals with concerns like "how much money will that research be worth" and "will teaching those classes result in higher wages for our graduates (and hence more and larger donations)".
On the other hand, classrooms, professors, laboratories, etc cost money, and universities are constantly looking for ways to get their hands on some. Their options are limited:
- Foundations and other granting organizations want a ROI
- Government funding is drying up as fast as Republicans can make it happen (whether you agree or disagree with that policy, that's the Republican Party position on education funding, and there's no sense in pretending otherwise)
- Alumni are mostly broke
- Tuition is already skyrocketing
So that leaves:
- Stuff you can sell other than education, like licensed football team gear
- Corporate funding (which brings a whole other set of compromises)
- Begging rich people (which also brings a whole set of compromises, but is the most common method)
- Using whatever assets the university has to force rich people or corporations from coughing up cash, like patents
The "again" part was that once the US/UN forces had pushed the North out of the South, they kept right on going until the North was crammed up against the Chinese border. There was of course a counteroffensive which sent the border close to where it had started.
1. Salaries in technology are rising at a rate of 7.5% or so per year. That's not really fast enough to stimulate the supply of people they need, but it's indicating that they can't get what they want for the price they were originally offering.
2. According to the BLS, they're projecting a 22% increase in demand for developers. The supply has gone up, but not by that much.
3. Unemployment among techies is about 4.4%, half the national average, and as low as 0.5% for DBAs. So very few who bill themselves as techies are out in the cold.
Iran doesn't have nuclear weapons. This has been verified repeatedly by the IAEA. The only people who say otherwise are the Israeli government, because they would really really like the United States to attack Iran. That's why their lobbyists have been working really hard to undo the deal that the Obama administration cut with the Iranians and the rest of the UN Security Council to make sure that the Iranians never get a nuke.
North Korea has had nukes for about a decade now. The serious threat has never been North Korea nuking the US, it's been North Korea nuking South Korea or Japan. They could already do that if they wanted to, and haven't, because they and their Chinese backers aren't really that crazy or stupid. Kim Jong Un has to make a lot of noise like he's going to launch a serious attack in order to gain credibility with the hardliners at home who would probably have him killed if he didn't look like he was one of them. The NK nukes are pretty much there as a doomsday device to make sure the US and its allies doesn't attack them again, and they're doing exactly that.
They have a demonstrably anti-competitive agreement between purchasers of a service to make each seller only able to deal with one of the purchasers, creating a monopsony. Textbook macro basically argues that the effect of a monopsony is that the only buyer in the market now has basically complete control of the terms of any agreement with the seller, because the seller's only option is to not sell his product.
Another way of describing this: Imagine you work for Amazon. Without these agreements, you have these options:
1. Accept a 3% raise to continue working at Amazon.
2. Accept a 25% raise to go work for Google.
3. Not work at all and be unemployed or at least accept a massive wage cut.
With these agreements your options now are:
1. Accept a 3% raise to continue working at Amazon.
2. Not work at all and be unemployed or at least accept a massive wage cut.
This is inherent in these kind of agreements. There's no need to prove intent.
Say it, brother/sister!
For example, management often thinks a new developer can be instantly productive. S/he can't, because no matter how competent and experienced that developer is with the language and toolset, s/he doesn't know anything about the company's internal code library which is protected by trade secrets and NDAs and other dire consequences if anyone outside the company ever learns about it. And that internal knowledge is often more critical to the job than what the developer could possibly bring with them.
So if a manager thinks that anyone is going to contribute directly and immediately to the company's success on their first day, run! Some more fun translations between interviewer-speak and reality:
- "Fast-paced environment": We replace actual decision-making and prioritizing with simply whipping the employees to work harder.
- "Comfortable office space": We supply you with a $200 chair.
- "Open office plan": We have one room we rented out for $400 a month, and we haven't bothered even installing cubicles yet.
- "Break room with perks": We have a coffee machine.
Also because they don't want to train people to work in technology. There is legitimately a shortage of tech people in the US, and one potential response would be to increase wages until the right candidates are motivated to apply, but another potential response would be to take not-quite-ideal candidates and provide the necessary on-the-job training that would make them suitable employees.
And I'm not even talking about being willing to hire Java guys to write C#, although that's in play too. For example, a guy who spent 15 years keeping an assembly-line humming and has been unemployed for 5 years now might well be somebody who could help keep a network cruising along. You'd have your senior-level network admin start him off as a cabling monkey, then teach him what he's plugging things into, and as he gained experience he'd eventually get familiar with the monitoring tools and be able to recognize and respond to common problems. This kind of hire might never reach the top-notch skillset of your senior network admin, but he could be an effective and inexpensive junior-level employee. You could pretty easily dream up similarly effective training programs for desktop support technicians.
These kind of programs were exactly what the major corporations were doing in the 1950's, because there was such a shortage of available workers after WWII that they would basically hire anybody with a high school diploma and no demonstrable idiocy, and then train them for whatever the corporation needed to them to do. They provided good wages, benefits, and a career track for people who did their jobs well. This was an investment, but it worked well, and you ended up with people who were fiercely loyal to the company and proud to be a part of it.
H1Bs are basically stopping those kind of market corrections from happening - they both prevent the IT guys from getting paid what they're worth, and prevent non-IT people who want to get into IT from making the move.
Isn't that "Joyzee"?
Many of those items on the list are indeed bad, so why are you pushing for yet ANOTHER example of the government trying to screw with our internet to add to the list?
You're misunderstanding the argument. Your reasoning appears to be:
1. If Net Neutrality is implemented, the government can control the Internet.
2. If the government can control the Internet, it can (unnamed sinister action).
My argument is this:
1. The government can control the Internet without Net Neutrality.
2. If the government can control the Internet, it can (unnamed sinister action).
3. Therefor, whether or not Net Neutrality is implemented has no bearing on whether the government can (unnamed sinister action).
My guess, based on the rest of your post, is that you are a libertarian, and thus you oppose any rule the government makes on the theory that any rule the government makes benefits the government rather than accomplishing its stated purpose. My view is that sometimes government action serves the government, sometimes it actually accomplishes its stated purpose, and it's worth figuring out the difference because often that stated purpose is worth doing.
"I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth — rocks!" -Albert Einstein
It was ALWAYS a tool to impose government control over the internet.
Yeah, it's not like the government had control over the Internet before. Except for:
- when it was run by the Department of Defense for the early part of its existence
- when it was opened up to the public by then-Senator Al Gore and placed under the jurisdiction of the FCC
- when they paid AT&T to build and improve the network
- when Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton tried to stop all Internet pornography
- when the FBI created Echelon under the Clinton administration
- when Admiral Poindexter started the Total Information Awareness project in 2001
- when the NSA cooperated with Google and AT&T and Verizon and a bunch of other major corporations to spy on everybody..
So clearly Net Neutrality was the thin wedge that was going to give government control of the Internet, right?
the primary targets of violet crime
"Hello sir, we'd like you to have this flower on behalf of the Church of Religious consciousness, would you care to make a donation?"
To be fair, Linux had a pretty strong head start, what with Unix starting to develop its CLI capabilities back in the 1970's and its GUI in 1984. That means that Linux has gone through an extra decade of knowing what doesn't work so well UI-wise, and the results show. Well, that and the fact that it's relatively easy to switch around UI behavior without changing the underlying operating system, and it becomes cheaper to fight the various battles about UI.
The summary of your post, once you take out the attempts at obfuscating the point, is "black kids from the inner city can't be helped, and we shouldn't try because it will cost too much."
It's an open question as to whether ANY social welfare spending (at least as structured in the US) can "solve" any of these problems. So many of the problems plaguing these students are CULTURAL issues, not issues of simply being poor. Teenage parents, missing or jailed parents, etc -- we don't seem to know how to solve these problems even in the broader social welfare system, let along trying to do it within the educational system.
Those aren't accidental results or entirely based on culture, but in many cases the effects of deliberate policy.
Are you advocating that people who have these means...sacrifice the lives of their children, send them for a poor education merely to prove a social "point"?
I think that he's advocating people who have means put those means towards making the public schools awesome, so that rather than just their little angel getting a great education every kid in the country gets a great education. The money that goes to support private schools could instead have been taxed and spent on public schools. If all the people rich enough and powerful enough to avoid using the public school system do so, then they will tend to not care enough about the public schools to make them worth attending.
The biggest reason to care about the education of children other than your own is that some of the children of poor people in poor environments with lousy schools have the potential to be great writers, artists, thinkers, scholars, scientists, leaders, etc, but instead end up flipping burgers because their educational environment failed them. That doesn't just hurt them, it hurts you, because whatever useful work they could have done doesn't happen. It also hurts you because these very same people will end up more likely to be criminals (costing you in police services and prisons), unemployed (costing you unemployment benefits), and addicted to drugs (costing you in police, prisons, rehab centers, and medical care).
Where else are you going to meet eligible people anyway?
Let's see, things that have led to relationships for either myself or other men I know:
- Organizations and social clubs of all stripes. Whatever you're interested in (which incidentally means that you immediately have a shared interest).
- Shows, sporting events, and other entertainments. Again, you immediately have something that you both like or at least tolerate enough to make the effort to be there.
- Swing dancing and folk dancing.
- Yes, at bars or restaurants. You don't have to be a drunk to go to a bar for 1-2 drinks once in a while. If you are an alcoholic, try hanging out with alcoholic support groups.
- If you're a freethinker / agnostic / atheist, then try hanging out with the local freethinker / agnostic / atheist group. If there isn't one, try to start one.
- Once you know some people, you're spending time with them, and in the process meet their other friends, some of whom become your friends, and then you're spending time with their friends, etc.
Sure, you're not going to get to know people by sitting on your couch, but to think that the 5 you mentioned are your only options is just plain silly.
I'm sorry women find you repulsive, but the way you imagine the world is, simply isn't true.
You are the one who is delusional if you think "not hitting on women at work" means "never have sex". But maybe this is because I have a social life when I'm not working.
It's really simple: There are times and places where it's acceptable to try to get laid. There are times and places where it's not acceptable. Work (and work-related activities like professional conferences) fall into the second category. Are you really so desperate for contact with women that the only ones you meet are the ones who are paid to be there?