Yes and no. As long as they don't police your traffic, then they're not responsible for policing your traffic. Once they take that step, they're opening up a whole can of worms, and putting their common carrier status in jeopardy.
Once they start down that road, its only a matter of time before someone sues them for something that came through their network. I mean, it's not so far-fetched to have a class action suit against a provider for allowing crackers to run mass automated remote exploits on their network...If I can recognize them on my end, then they should be able to recognize them on the network. Hell, that's trivial beside trying to determine whether someone is downloading kiddy porn or lol cats.
Meh. As long as it doesn't become airborne it's no big deal with this type of brain cancer. My mother had it, so I know a decent amount about it.
As it stands, if you get a glioblastoma, you're dead. It may take a year, but more likely you have a lot less, and it won't be quality time either, it will be a quick trip down the road toward being a non-responsive vegetable.
So if the cure kills you, no big deal. Your chances are pretty non-existent either way. Most cancer "cures" are really just a test to see if your normal healthy cells are able to take more punishment than the cancer cells. With a GBF, you're just prolonging the process.
My home firewall/nat box runs Linux, and I check the logs on a semi-regular basis, just as a lark, and because it makes me itch to not check the logs, and I can assure you that there are plenty of automated attacks out there looking for linux.
Usually it's just common password stuff (because there are a lot fewer services that can be compromised through the usual buffer overflow stuff...I did have a couple of weeks where a guy was spamming an overflow exploit for some version of FTP I wasn't running), looking for application installs where the username is known, and the default password is also known. I get five or six hundred of of those a day, on a system that doesn't even respond to ping from the outside world.
I think the thing that really keeps people from hitting the Linux that hard is the fact that the odds are that an internet-facing Linux box is just a security appliance, and those are hard to break (by definition) and even if your l33tness managed to crack the box, you can end up left with a basically worthless box, which may not even be facing a network with anything good on it.
Sure, sure, people are dying to do these crap jobs, and it's only the evil illegal immigrant, or his legal migrant worker cousins that are stealing this dream of backbreaking labor from the indigent unemployed.
You sound like you have had an interesting life, but I'm sure you recognize that you're the exception rather than the rule. I've worked my share of hard jobs, from cutting tobacco to building houses, and it definitely influenced my desire to do something that involved air conditioning and no bloody blisters, but I know it's not everyone who wants to do those jobs...Especially these days; you never get suburban kids who run out to do the hard labor...If the GAP isn't hiring, they just mooch off their indulgent parents.
Completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Do you buy only US made/grown goods? Do you only support companies that adhere to fair labor practices? Unless you're living in a commune, growing your own food and making your own clothes, that's extremely unlikely.
The government sponsored a program a while back to push the "Made in the USA" brands. They had billboards, licensing, radio and tv spots...It flopped. Made in the US gear is too expensive, and the vast majority of consumers vote with their wallets. Autoworkers leave their plants and head straight to Wal-Mart to buy whatever slave produced mass market crap happens to be on the shelves.
Implying someone else is unpatriotic or lazy because you don't agree with them is a pretty sorry indicator of your personal ideology.
Yea, sure. The people who employ those workers depend on the low cost of labor to stay in business...erase that, they go out of business, and those 12 million jobs dry up. Local fruit producers go out of business, but the stuff from overseas now costs too much because of your damn tariffs...Sounds like a nightmare. The exorbitant cost of labor in this country is the reason there are so few blue collar jobs left.
And tariffs...Yech...All that will do is ensure that we pay more for everything we buy. It may make sense for critical industries, but certainly not across the board, and certainly not for foodstuffs. You want to have problems with the poor, by all means increase the price of all food. Look at countries like France; do you want their economy? It's been in the crapper for 50 years. Sure the workers get high wages, excellent benefits, long vacations...Only problem is, there aren't enough jobs! And you think our problems with welfare are bad? Theirs are crippling.
Countries that engage in bad labor practices will reap what they sow; those things come back to haunt you for centuries. China, as an example, has a demographic bump coming down the line that is so economically terrifying that they're opening their markets, and polluting their country in a desperate attempt to build enough prosperity that they will be able to survive it when those workers become too old to work, and their legally-mandated one-child-per-family (who is probably male, and likely unmarried) is going to have to support them because the state can't afford to. The problem is, the pollution and poor working conditions are causing a health care crisis already, and worst of all, the falling dollar means their products cost more and more, which eats away at their trade advantage.
Welfare is nothing compared to Social Security, and we're about to be in a situation where we're going to have way more people taking from social security than paying into it, while having a diminishing workforce. That problem China has coming in a few decades, we have coming in one. Bringing in a bunch of cheap labor to help restart our stagnant local manufacturing sector will boost our economy across the board, and the money that they would pay in (which we could collect if we allowed them to work LEGALLY) could offset some of those costs for the rest of us.
I agree with that, actually. I'm all in favor of vo-tech and job training programs, continuing education, etc, etc, etc. In almost every case, when you have an industry that is getting squashed by foreign competition, it is better to allow the industry to die, retrain the workers, and send them forth to do other things in growing industries. Even in industries that must be preserved to safeguard national interests, its a much better idea to push them to modernize than it is to try and protect them with tariffs. High tariffs ensure a weak and inefficient industry.
Workers are a resource, and like any resource we should cultivate it, and try to bring it to its maximum potential.
We're not primarily a tech company, so H1-B's aren't an issue. Otherwise to answer your questions: Yes, No, Yes.
Still, we're doing a lot of outsourcing. They're outsourcing an entire graphic design department from 2 properties in about a month...About 50 people in total. I actually think it's stupid; one thing that the current trend toward outsourcing never takes into account is the fact that on-site workers can be pressured into overtime, and can be held accountable for a variable amount of output...e.g They can be exploited. Outsourcing companies contract at specific volumes, and if your demand exceeds that volume, you have to renegotiate, or pay a premium.
I got hired as specifically a local applicant...I just happened to be living in town. I was actually trying to move up into the Research Triangle in N.C (North Carolina) and was meeting a lot of resistance because I didn't already live in the area...They were trying to hire local people first, and the fact that I'd grown up there and lived there until I went away to school, held no weight.
I think you're right; a lot of jobs can be filled by tech school people. A lot of those jobs require someone onsite, however, so they're difficult to outsource. And really, we should be able to produce people who are better than the average tech school grad...That's not really high skill stuff.
I think once the "gold rush" of IT subsides the market will normalize, and differentiate more. Too many places just hire random people, and hell, schools cater to that by putting out graduates who come without much specialization. Over time I think the degree programs will diverge (we're already seeing this with IT degrees being offered alongside CS degrees) and some of the uncertainty will leave the industry.
As far as the H1-B thing, I'd like to see the entire program abolished, and instead of offering them guest worker status, offer them citizenship. If we brain-drain the elite from other countries, we'll pretty much secure our status at the top. Force them to grow their own local tech industry, however, and we'll have much more work to do to stay competitive.
I think the biggest problem is the switch from old style production methods to the newer stuff, and the number of people involved multiplied the institutional inertia to the point where it was lucky if they could get anything done.
I don't blame them for the pension thing; that shit should be nationalized, and it's unfair to saddle a business with the welfare of decades worth of former workers. That crap killed the steel industry, and it's pretty bad for a lot of other worker-heavy industries as well...Slows the adoption of automation, and other crap that would keep us competitive.
And unions? Shit. What else is there to say? Those bastards will drag a whole industry down trying to squeeze out a little more for themselves. Sometimes they do a good thing, and then the rest of the time they're only out for more slops in their trough.
I'm the senior administrator/programmer/dba on a financial system that deals with about 2,000,000 dollars a week. I've got 7 years of college and 3 degrees, so 19 years of education. Some of what I do could be done by someone with only a high school degree, and a fricking ton of training, but the bulk of it is hilariously abstruse, and really needs someone with a bit more skill.
There are probably a number of people qualified to come and do my job. Frankly, that doesn't bother me, because I have a lot of skills, and there are plenty of other places I can work. I have my job because I work hard, and do a good job. I invest in training, I keep my skills current. If it comes down to it that I can't get a job anywhere anymore, I'll view that as more of a personal failing than a problem with other people having "stolen" my work.
During the post-bomb years, when I was just finished with my second round of college, I had trouble getting work. No one was hiring. So I started my own thing, and made good money undercutting the people who wouldn't give me a job. And they complained! I was "stealing their work!" They wouldn't pay me, but they'd complain about me, they'd badmouth me to my customers, tried to shut me out of contracts! They tried to rat me out to the BSA, but that flopped because I was only deploying OSS, mostly because I couldn't afford to use anything else.
So no, I've got no patience with that crap. If someone can do what I do, and will do it for less, then they deserve it.
And the jobs won't stop going away because you stop illegal immigrants. They'll send the jobs overseas, like they've been doing for decades. It's a better idea to bring in MORE immigrants, restart manufacturing here using the cheaper labor, and then employ the people who lost their manufacturing jobs in the expanding service sector. The idea that you can restrict the workforce and more people will have jobs doesn't make any sense...The more people who are working, the more people who will have to work to provide those people with services. A factory that employs 500 people will give jobs to 2,500 people, and money to countless more.
East Germans? Is there such a thing? The Israeli wall will fall as well.
Nothing will prevent border crossing. Fighting supply and demand is like fighting the sea...You can put up a wall, but it won't last. Not only does it not solve the problem, but it prevents finding a solution.
It's just common sense. If you choose between two identical products, where the only difference is cost, why would you not buy the cheaper one? Have you ever tried to buy only US made goods? It's practically impossible. I spent 3 days last x-mas trying to find a basketball that wasn't made in goddamn China.
The secret to bringing manufacturing back to the US is lowering the labor cost, and that means bringing in immigrant labor. If you want to be able to buy "Made in the USA" that's what you're going to have to support.
It's hard to blame the auto companies...They've got a lot of problems that aren't of their making. Their pension system is like our social security system...It's got a lot of people drawing on it, and less and less people paying into it. Automation has dramatically cut the workforce car manufacturers need, but they're still paying pensions on people who worked for them, pre-automation.
To offset this, they hire more people than they need, so those people can pay into the pension fund, and keep the whole thing going, but it also perpetuates the problem, and causes tons of inefficiency. There are also union obligations...Remember a few years back when the auto companies were selling SUVs at cost? The problem was a supply glut, and the reason for the glut is that the company had contracted with the unions to make X number of SUVs, and it was cheaper for them to make the SUVs that no one wanted than it was to try and get out of the contract...That stuff is everywhere, so again, inefficiency.
I'm also in favor of legal immigration, and generally lowering the bar for entry, especially for seasonal work. There is nothing wrong with having a bunch of people who want to work in your country. I'd much rather be pro-active on the supply side; monitor the people who employ the workers, make sure conditions are acceptable, and that the workers aren't being mistreated. And give 'em the ability to sue for workplace injury, same as any other employee...There is no reason that should be restricted to only americans.
You think so? Historically the worst jobs have always gone to immigrants and poorly educated people, just back then they were more likely to already be in this country.
Anyway, you're wrong. We were hemmoraging manufacturing long before 30 years ago. First it all fled the North, to the South, where the workers were cheap, and there were no unions. Then it fled to other countries...Little countries called "Japan" and "Taiwan" were gearing up to kick ass in the 70's.
And it's nonsense to say that its a waste to put a well educated person to work doing menial labor? The only reason PhDs aren't driving garbage trucks is because the garbage industry has bad wages? Come on! The conditions in a chicken packing plant are never going to be good...It's chicken packing. Same with fruit picking! It's terrible work, the kind of stuff no one would do if they had another choice.
Highly skilled workers are capable of doing jobs that unskilled workers are not capable of doing. While it is true that a PhD could drive a garbage truck, that person (probably) has skills that would allow him to do work that could only be done by the comparatively tiny portion of the world that has equal skills, and it makes sense for him to do that work, rather than drive a garbage truck, a level of work that can be done by many many more people.
But even driving the garbage truck is reasonably skilled work. Our society revolves around people who have what we consider "low skills," but these skills are much greater than the skills of people who don't have the advantages of our system. You don't need a high school education to pick fruit.
If they finally get good fruit picking robots in production, we can put the high school grads in charge of the robots, and pay them a salary that is commensurate with the work. Until that point, it makes absolutely NO SENSE to force someone to go to school for 12 years, and then tell them they have to pick fruit, because someone has to do it, and we can't let the dirty immigrants do it! And to tell the fruit growers that the only people they can hire are these surly people who are pissed off they can't get a better job, and who have to make eight bucks an hour even though there are people who would be glad to do it for less.
The amount of money they send home is trivial compared to the amount of money we send to China to buy crap that could never be made here because if it was, it would cost ten times as much. The reason it costs so much is because that sort of labor is hugely scarce over here, and thus extremely expensive. But try and bring in more labor and you're "destroying american jobs". So we build giant walls, and, in the meantime, all our manufacturing relocates to places with cheap labor.
The reason illegal immigrants are treated so poorly is because people like you have made it a crime to allow people to come here and work. If we stopped paying so much money trying to beat supply and demand, and started spending money making sure the workers were well treated, then they wouldn't be an "exploited workforce" they'd just be a cheap and efficient workforce.
First generation immigrants often do tend to be an underclass. They often come in with little education, and few skills. Second generation immigrants have the benefits of our system, and the opportunity to go to school, perhaps college. There is no such thing as a third generation immigrant. Most people in this country are third and fourth generation immigrants. That's why people want to come here. People like you don't want to have to compete with people who are willing to work for less, willing to sacrifice to make things better for their children. Me? I don't care. I don't feel like anyone owes me a living, just because I was born here.
Quite the reverse. Cheap labor drives down the cost of domestically produced goods, which increases their appeal to consumers (both foreign and domestic), and the cheap labor, while they may send a portion of their income home to their country of origin, spends a goodly chunk of that income here, on goods and services.
Immigrant labor has, historically, always been a boon to the economy. The only real issue here, is how poorly they're treated, and that has nothing to do with building walls.
It actually didn't work all that well. Certainly didn't keep invaders from invading. It would have been far more effective (and cheaper) to just have a better military.
How much money are you willing to sink into putting a goddamn WALL around the country? I frankly don't think it will ever work, and sure if we put as much money into it as we put into Iraq, I bet we could stop the immigration across the land, but I don't think that would be sufficient in the long run. If people want in, they'll get in.
It never ceases to make me laugh how hard people fight to keep immigrants from doing jobs that they would never do, not in a million years. If you're worried about their treatment, then make it legal, give them the right to sue over poor conditions and workplace injuries. Tax their salaries to help pay for the demographic hellhole that will be this country for the next 30 or so years...Worried about your job? In 10 years, as the boomers retire en masse the workforce is literally going to shrink. That means we will need those people; we will need their labor, and we will need the tax revenue to pay for services for the huge chunk of society that's going to be retired.
Actually, the reason is that you put someone through 12 years of school, and he doesn't want to work in a chicken processing plant anymore.
Like it or not, we don't have the workforce to fill out those sorts of jobs anymore, and frankly it doesn't make any economic sense to force a decently educated worker into a job that could be filled for much less cost by someone who has no education at all. If nothing else, there is a huge opportunity cost for our economy when you force a worker that is capable of working some kind of high automation line job, into the kind of crap work that was common 100 years ago...It makes far more sense to send the work to another country in that case.
It always annoys me when people like you think that, if only we paid the fruit pickers more and threw out all the migrant workers, then our economy would somehow boom. The only thing that would boom is the cost of the fruit, and that makes everyone who buys it poorer, it makes fruit from other countries more competitive in the marketplace, and that drives domestic fruit producers out of business. What a great plan.
When the hell has building a giant wall ever helped anything? Jesus...At least they could have outsourced the work to China...Their wall didn't work, but at least it got finished.
But, I suppose anything is better than coming up with a sensible immigration policy. Gotta keep those high-paying fruit picking, chicken boning, and christmas tree cutting jobs local.
Food production, medicine, transportation, water treatment, sewer treatment...Moving back to subsistence sounds good for about 5 minutes, until you think about it.
We can sustain 6 billion people today because we can grow the food, we can purify the water, and we can process enough of our waste to keep from drowning in it. Drop electricity (for example) food production goes through the floor, large-scale food preservation becomes impossible, heat cannot be provided, so we'd need a few billion camp fires every night. Waste would be untreated, fouling water supplies in short order. Most places don't have reliable local water supplies that can be drunk unpurified, so that's already a problem...Disease levels go through the roof, and no hospitals, so mortality runs right there with it...
Pre-industrial revolution there were about 500 million people on the planet. If we went back to subsistence, we'd be back there pretty quickly...If we were lucky we'd be able to maintain around that level.
When did they say that their product didn't produce carbon dioxide when combusted?
Trying to blame people for centuries of being ignorant is the height of stupidity. Are you going to sue the Italians because the Romans contributed to the desertification of North Africa? You going to sue everyone who ever imported an invasive species for all the problems caused by that one plant, mollusc, or rodent?
I think you should start off suing everyone who ever used a petroleum product, which is pretty much everyone on the planet, and then move to the oil companies, whose crime is getting rich off providing stuff we just can't get enough of.
Agree 100% with regards to navy blue. I'd rather go in jeans and a ripped t-shirt than a navy blue suit; it's hugely generic and always makes me think of prep school and the goddamn red tie with the little blue widgets.
Black can be classy; it all depends on the cut of your suit, your shoes, and what shirt/tie you pair it with. I like grey as well, but I tend to go with a lighter grey...Charcoal is dark enough that I'd rather wear black.
I can't imagine a situation where I'd wear anything other than grey or black; if you go farther afield in color choice, you'd best be prepared to buy a new suit when that color ceases to be in fashion.
I'm not sure if you meant to reply to me, because you're answering points I didn't make. But hey, I'm game...
"1. Open Source isn't about innovation, but about educating the programmer. "
I don't think that's the case anyway. If you want to make something, fine. Open Source is all about putting tools out in the market that anyone can pick up and create value with. It's not about "learning to program" it's about having the tools that you need to create software, or a website, or a file server, or a security appliance. Until OSS those tools were out of reach for most people, so to be a "developer" you had to have a fortune in tools. Now, you can be a developer using only free tools, and some of those development tools are top notch.
"2. Why can't I make something on my own and use it however I want?"
Well in a nutshell, reverse engineering has been a perfectly acceptable business practice since the dawn of time. If you steal something, that's wrong, but if you use your brain and make something that does the same thing... What's wrong with that? Especially when the idea is trivial, like with Photoshop, or Office...I don't think it's stealing to make a photo manipulation program, or a word processor.
3. Here's a list of programs that prove you're wrong!
I don't know what the hell you're talking about here. I listed a few proprietary apps, but no OSS. But talking about the internet, you kinda have to mention Php these days. And Apache (running on Linux). And Firefox. OSS is in a lot of places. The average person may not know they use it every day, but a lot of them do.
4. Microsoft doesn't make Office for Linux, so OpenOffice is important.
I personally think OO sucks. But saying it doesn't do anything that regular Office doesn't do is irrelevant. So what? Are you saying that there is no room for a competing brand in the market? That makes no sense. And, again, it's a tool issue. Do I have to be able to afford Office to be able to use a word processor with a decent number of features?
5. It isn't about sticking it to the man! It's about keeping my money out of the hands of a terrible monopoly!
It's not about money to me, and to a lot of other people who contribute to OSS. If there is a better closed source product, I'll use it. But OSS has great flexibility, it allows a level of customization and control that closed source cannot compete with. It's got good alternatives to huge closed source projects, it's got lightweight stuff that can run on older machines, so you don't have to have the latest and greatest closed source operating system to run an FTP site that's not going to get exploited.
In a lot of cases, we turn from "the man" because the man has failed us. Linux is a direct consequence of all the hugely proprietary Unixes that once roamed the earth. Apache is something that came about because "the man" didn't think this "internets" thing was going to catch on. Firefox came about because Microsoft stopped doing work on the webbrowser after they cornered the market. Not all good ideas come from the man, and the reason that a lot of "the man" actually supports OSS (Sun, IBM, Novell, etc) is because we create good stuff that is useful, even to them!
If I want to use a tool, and am willing to make one myself so that I can use it, and then I put that tool out for everyone to use, what exactly is the problem with that? Should I be forced to buy the expensive tool from the big tool company, even though I have the skill to make it myself? Should I be forced to charge for my tool when I don't feel any need to do so?
If I like tetris, and make a tetris variant of my own to see if I can do it, am I then forbidden from showing it to anyone?
No one owes Microsoft, Macromedia, and Adobe a living. If their products are superiour, then they'll do well enough. If not, then they deserve to go out of business. End of story.
And it's not just about "free". If it were only about free, then no one would have bothered writing an alternative to the existing commercial stuff; we'd have just pirated it. The amount of work needed to crush security on any copy-protected media is trivial compared to the amount of work required to create an alternative.
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Yes and no. As long as they don't police your traffic, then they're not responsible for policing your traffic. Once they take that step, they're opening up a whole can of worms, and putting their common carrier status in jeopardy.
Once they start down that road, its only a matter of time before someone sues them for something that came through their network. I mean, it's not so far-fetched to have a class action suit against a provider for allowing crackers to run mass automated remote exploits on their network...If I can recognize them on my end, then they should be able to recognize them on the network. Hell, that's trivial beside trying to determine whether someone is downloading kiddy porn or lol cats.
Meh. As long as it doesn't become airborne it's no big deal with this type of brain cancer. My mother had it, so I know a decent amount about it.
As it stands, if you get a glioblastoma, you're dead. It may take a year, but more likely you have a lot less, and it won't be quality time either, it will be a quick trip down the road toward being a non-responsive vegetable.
So if the cure kills you, no big deal. Your chances are pretty non-existent either way. Most cancer "cures" are really just a test to see if your normal healthy cells are able to take more punishment than the cancer cells. With a GBF, you're just prolonging the process.
My home firewall/nat box runs Linux, and I check the logs on a semi-regular basis, just as a lark, and because it makes me itch to not check the logs, and I can assure you that there are plenty of automated attacks out there looking for linux.
Usually it's just common password stuff (because there are a lot fewer services that can be compromised through the usual buffer overflow stuff...I did have a couple of weeks where a guy was spamming an overflow exploit for some version of FTP I wasn't running), looking for application installs where the username is known, and the default password is also known. I get five or six hundred of of those a day, on a system that doesn't even respond to ping from the outside world.
I think the thing that really keeps people from hitting the Linux that hard is the fact that the odds are that an internet-facing Linux box is just a security appliance, and those are hard to break (by definition) and even if your l33tness managed to crack the box, you can end up left with a basically worthless box, which may not even be facing a network with anything good on it.
It's just a lot of work, for little return.
Sure, sure, people are dying to do these crap jobs, and it's only the evil illegal immigrant, or his legal migrant worker cousins that are stealing this dream of backbreaking labor from the indigent unemployed.
You sound like you have had an interesting life, but I'm sure you recognize that you're the exception rather than the rule. I've worked my share of hard jobs, from cutting tobacco to building houses, and it definitely influenced my desire to do something that involved air conditioning and no bloody blisters, but I know it's not everyone who wants to do those jobs...Especially these days; you never get suburban kids who run out to do the hard labor...If the GAP isn't hiring, they just mooch off their indulgent parents.
Completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Do you buy only US made/grown goods? Do you only support companies that adhere to fair labor practices? Unless you're living in a commune, growing your own food and making your own clothes, that's extremely unlikely.
The government sponsored a program a while back to push the "Made in the USA" brands. They had billboards, licensing, radio and tv spots...It flopped. Made in the US gear is too expensive, and the vast majority of consumers vote with their wallets. Autoworkers leave their plants and head straight to Wal-Mart to buy whatever slave produced mass market crap happens to be on the shelves.
Implying someone else is unpatriotic or lazy because you don't agree with them is a pretty sorry indicator of your personal ideology.
Yea, sure. The people who employ those workers depend on the low cost of labor to stay in business...erase that, they go out of business, and those 12 million jobs dry up. Local fruit producers go out of business, but the stuff from overseas now costs too much because of your damn tariffs...Sounds like a nightmare. The exorbitant cost of labor in this country is the reason there are so few blue collar jobs left.
And tariffs...Yech...All that will do is ensure that we pay more for everything we buy. It may make sense for critical industries, but certainly not across the board, and certainly not for foodstuffs. You want to have problems with the poor, by all means increase the price of all food. Look at countries like France; do you want their economy? It's been in the crapper for 50 years. Sure the workers get high wages, excellent benefits, long vacations...Only problem is, there aren't enough jobs! And you think our problems with welfare are bad? Theirs are crippling.
Countries that engage in bad labor practices will reap what they sow; those things come back to haunt you for centuries. China, as an example, has a demographic bump coming down the line that is so economically terrifying that they're opening their markets, and polluting their country in a desperate attempt to build enough prosperity that they will be able to survive it when those workers become too old to work, and their legally-mandated one-child-per-family (who is probably male, and likely unmarried) is going to have to support them because the state can't afford to. The problem is, the pollution and poor working conditions are causing a health care crisis already, and worst of all, the falling dollar means their products cost more and more, which eats away at their trade advantage.
Welfare is nothing compared to Social Security, and we're about to be in a situation where we're going to have way more people taking from social security than paying into it, while having a diminishing workforce. That problem China has coming in a few decades, we have coming in one. Bringing in a bunch of cheap labor to help restart our stagnant local manufacturing sector will boost our economy across the board, and the money that they would pay in (which we could collect if we allowed them to work LEGALLY) could offset some of those costs for the rest of us.
I agree with that, actually. I'm all in favor of vo-tech and job training programs, continuing education, etc, etc, etc. In almost every case, when you have an industry that is getting squashed by foreign competition, it is better to allow the industry to die, retrain the workers, and send them forth to do other things in growing industries. Even in industries that must be preserved to safeguard national interests, its a much better idea to push them to modernize than it is to try and protect them with tariffs. High tariffs ensure a weak and inefficient industry.
Workers are a resource, and like any resource we should cultivate it, and try to bring it to its maximum potential.
We're not primarily a tech company, so H1-B's aren't an issue. Otherwise to answer your questions: Yes, No, Yes.
Still, we're doing a lot of outsourcing. They're outsourcing an entire graphic design department from 2 properties in about a month...About 50 people in total. I actually think it's stupid; one thing that the current trend toward outsourcing never takes into account is the fact that on-site workers can be pressured into overtime, and can be held accountable for a variable amount of output...e.g They can be exploited. Outsourcing companies contract at specific volumes, and if your demand exceeds that volume, you have to renegotiate, or pay a premium.
I got hired as specifically a local applicant...I just happened to be living in town. I was actually trying to move up into the Research Triangle in N.C (North Carolina) and was meeting a lot of resistance because I didn't already live in the area...They were trying to hire local people first, and the fact that I'd grown up there and lived there until I went away to school, held no weight.
I think you're right; a lot of jobs can be filled by tech school people. A lot of those jobs require someone onsite, however, so they're difficult to outsource. And really, we should be able to produce people who are better than the average tech school grad...That's not really high skill stuff.
I think once the "gold rush" of IT subsides the market will normalize, and differentiate more. Too many places just hire random people, and hell, schools cater to that by putting out graduates who come without much specialization. Over time I think the degree programs will diverge (we're already seeing this with IT degrees being offered alongside CS degrees) and some of the uncertainty will leave the industry.
As far as the H1-B thing, I'd like to see the entire program abolished, and instead of offering them guest worker status, offer them citizenship. If we brain-drain the elite from other countries, we'll pretty much secure our status at the top. Force them to grow their own local tech industry, however, and we'll have much more work to do to stay competitive.
I think the biggest problem is the switch from old style production methods to the newer stuff, and the number of people involved multiplied the institutional inertia to the point where it was lucky if they could get anything done.
I don't blame them for the pension thing; that shit should be nationalized, and it's unfair to saddle a business with the welfare of decades worth of former workers. That crap killed the steel industry, and it's pretty bad for a lot of other worker-heavy industries as well...Slows the adoption of automation, and other crap that would keep us competitive.
And unions? Shit. What else is there to say? Those bastards will drag a whole industry down trying to squeeze out a little more for themselves. Sometimes they do a good thing, and then the rest of the time they're only out for more slops in their trough.
I'm the senior administrator/programmer/dba on a financial system that deals with about 2,000,000 dollars a week. I've got 7 years of college and 3 degrees, so 19 years of education. Some of what I do could be done by someone with only a high school degree, and a fricking ton of training, but the bulk of it is hilariously abstruse, and really needs someone with a bit more skill.
There are probably a number of people qualified to come and do my job. Frankly, that doesn't bother me, because I have a lot of skills, and there are plenty of other places I can work. I have my job because I work hard, and do a good job. I invest in training, I keep my skills current. If it comes down to it that I can't get a job anywhere anymore, I'll view that as more of a personal failing than a problem with other people having "stolen" my work.
During the post-bomb years, when I was just finished with my second round of college, I had trouble getting work. No one was hiring. So I started my own thing, and made good money undercutting the people who wouldn't give me a job. And they complained! I was "stealing their work!" They wouldn't pay me, but they'd complain about me, they'd badmouth me to my customers, tried to shut me out of contracts! They tried to rat me out to the BSA, but that flopped because I was only deploying OSS, mostly because I couldn't afford to use anything else.
So no, I've got no patience with that crap. If someone can do what I do, and will do it for less, then they deserve it.
And the jobs won't stop going away because you stop illegal immigrants. They'll send the jobs overseas, like they've been doing for decades. It's a better idea to bring in MORE immigrants, restart manufacturing here using the cheaper labor, and then employ the people who lost their manufacturing jobs in the expanding service sector. The idea that you can restrict the workforce and more people will have jobs doesn't make any sense...The more people who are working, the more people who will have to work to provide those people with services. A factory that employs 500 people will give jobs to 2,500 people, and money to countless more.
Did it stop the Manchu? No. Therefore, not effective. Because it stopped them for a while it was a great success? That doesn't make any sense to me.
Walls work for a little while. But they don't solve the problem, and time has a way of breaking them down.
East Germans? Is there such a thing? The Israeli wall will fall as well.
Nothing will prevent border crossing. Fighting supply and demand is like fighting the sea...You can put up a wall, but it won't last. Not only does it not solve the problem, but it prevents finding a solution.
It's just common sense. If you choose between two identical products, where the only difference is cost, why would you not buy the cheaper one? Have you ever tried to buy only US made goods? It's practically impossible. I spent 3 days last x-mas trying to find a basketball that wasn't made in goddamn China.
The secret to bringing manufacturing back to the US is lowering the labor cost, and that means bringing in immigrant labor. If you want to be able to buy "Made in the USA" that's what you're going to have to support.
It's hard to blame the auto companies...They've got a lot of problems that aren't of their making. Their pension system is like our social security system...It's got a lot of people drawing on it, and less and less people paying into it. Automation has dramatically cut the workforce car manufacturers need, but they're still paying pensions on people who worked for them, pre-automation.
To offset this, they hire more people than they need, so those people can pay into the pension fund, and keep the whole thing going, but it also perpetuates the problem, and causes tons of inefficiency. There are also union obligations...Remember a few years back when the auto companies were selling SUVs at cost? The problem was a supply glut, and the reason for the glut is that the company had contracted with the unions to make X number of SUVs, and it was cheaper for them to make the SUVs that no one wanted than it was to try and get out of the contract...That stuff is everywhere, so again, inefficiency.
I'm also in favor of legal immigration, and generally lowering the bar for entry, especially for seasonal work. There is nothing wrong with having a bunch of people who want to work in your country. I'd much rather be pro-active on the supply side; monitor the people who employ the workers, make sure conditions are acceptable, and that the workers aren't being mistreated. And give 'em the ability to sue for workplace injury, same as any other employee...There is no reason that should be restricted to only americans.
You think so? Historically the worst jobs have always gone to immigrants and poorly educated people, just back then they were more likely to already be in this country.
Anyway, you're wrong. We were hemmoraging manufacturing long before 30 years ago. First it all fled the North, to the South, where the workers were cheap, and there were no unions. Then it fled to other countries...Little countries called "Japan" and "Taiwan" were gearing up to kick ass in the 70's.
And it's nonsense to say that its a waste to put a well educated person to work doing menial labor? The only reason PhDs aren't driving garbage trucks is because the garbage industry has bad wages? Come on! The conditions in a chicken packing plant are never going to be good...It's chicken packing. Same with fruit picking! It's terrible work, the kind of stuff no one would do if they had another choice.
Highly skilled workers are capable of doing jobs that unskilled workers are not capable of doing. While it is true that a PhD could drive a garbage truck, that person (probably) has skills that would allow him to do work that could only be done by the comparatively tiny portion of the world that has equal skills, and it makes sense for him to do that work, rather than drive a garbage truck, a level of work that can be done by many many more people.
But even driving the garbage truck is reasonably skilled work. Our society revolves around people who have what we consider "low skills," but these skills are much greater than the skills of people who don't have the advantages of our system. You don't need a high school education to pick fruit.
If they finally get good fruit picking robots in production, we can put the high school grads in charge of the robots, and pay them a salary that is commensurate with the work. Until that point, it makes absolutely NO SENSE to force someone to go to school for 12 years, and then tell them they have to pick fruit, because someone has to do it, and we can't let the dirty immigrants do it! And to tell the fruit growers that the only people they can hire are these surly people who are pissed off they can't get a better job, and who have to make eight bucks an hour even though there are people who would be glad to do it for less.
The amount of money they send home is trivial compared to the amount of money we send to China to buy crap that could never be made here because if it was, it would cost ten times as much. The reason it costs so much is because that sort of labor is hugely scarce over here, and thus extremely expensive. But try and bring in more labor and you're "destroying american jobs". So we build giant walls, and, in the meantime, all our manufacturing relocates to places with cheap labor.
The reason illegal immigrants are treated so poorly is because people like you have made it a crime to allow people to come here and work. If we stopped paying so much money trying to beat supply and demand, and started spending money making sure the workers were well treated, then they wouldn't be an "exploited workforce" they'd just be a cheap and efficient workforce.
First generation immigrants often do tend to be an underclass. They often come in with little education, and few skills. Second generation immigrants have the benefits of our system, and the opportunity to go to school, perhaps college. There is no such thing as a third generation immigrant. Most people in this country are third and fourth generation immigrants. That's why people want to come here. People like you don't want to have to compete with people who are willing to work for less, willing to sacrifice to make things better for their children. Me? I don't care. I don't feel like anyone owes me a living, just because I was born here.
Quite the reverse. Cheap labor drives down the cost of domestically produced goods, which increases their appeal to consumers (both foreign and domestic), and the cheap labor, while they may send a portion of their income home to their country of origin, spends a goodly chunk of that income here, on goods and services.
Immigrant labor has, historically, always been a boon to the economy. The only real issue here, is how poorly they're treated, and that has nothing to do with building walls.
It actually didn't work all that well. Certainly didn't keep invaders from invading. It would have been far more effective (and cheaper) to just have a better military.
How much money are you willing to sink into putting a goddamn WALL around the country? I frankly don't think it will ever work, and sure if we put as much money into it as we put into Iraq, I bet we could stop the immigration across the land, but I don't think that would be sufficient in the long run. If people want in, they'll get in.
It never ceases to make me laugh how hard people fight to keep immigrants from doing jobs that they would never do, not in a million years. If you're worried about their treatment, then make it legal, give them the right to sue over poor conditions and workplace injuries. Tax their salaries to help pay for the demographic hellhole that will be this country for the next 30 or so years...Worried about your job? In 10 years, as the boomers retire en masse the workforce is literally going to shrink. That means we will need those people; we will need their labor, and we will need the tax revenue to pay for services for the huge chunk of society that's going to be retired.
Actually, the reason is that you put someone through 12 years of school, and he doesn't want to work in a chicken processing plant anymore.
Like it or not, we don't have the workforce to fill out those sorts of jobs anymore, and frankly it doesn't make any economic sense to force a decently educated worker into a job that could be filled for much less cost by someone who has no education at all. If nothing else, there is a huge opportunity cost for our economy when you force a worker that is capable of working some kind of high automation line job, into the kind of crap work that was common 100 years ago...It makes far more sense to send the work to another country in that case.
It always annoys me when people like you think that, if only we paid the fruit pickers more and threw out all the migrant workers, then our economy would somehow boom. The only thing that would boom is the cost of the fruit, and that makes everyone who buys it poorer, it makes fruit from other countries more competitive in the marketplace, and that drives domestic fruit producers out of business. What a great plan.
When the hell has building a giant wall ever helped anything? Jesus...At least they could have outsourced the work to China...Their wall didn't work, but at least it got finished.
But, I suppose anything is better than coming up with a sensible immigration policy. Gotta keep those high-paying fruit picking, chicken boning, and christmas tree cutting jobs local.
Food production, medicine, transportation, water treatment, sewer treatment...Moving back to subsistence sounds good for about 5 minutes, until you think about it.
We can sustain 6 billion people today because we can grow the food, we can purify the water, and we can process enough of our waste to keep from drowning in it. Drop electricity (for example) food production goes through the floor, large-scale food preservation becomes impossible, heat cannot be provided, so we'd need a few billion camp fires every night. Waste would be untreated, fouling water supplies in short order. Most places don't have reliable local water supplies that can be drunk unpurified, so that's already a problem...Disease levels go through the roof, and no hospitals, so mortality runs right there with it...
Pre-industrial revolution there were about 500 million people on the planet. If we went back to subsistence, we'd be back there pretty quickly...If we were lucky we'd be able to maintain around that level.
When did they say that their product didn't produce carbon dioxide when combusted?
Trying to blame people for centuries of being ignorant is the height of stupidity. Are you going to sue the Italians because the Romans contributed to the desertification of North Africa? You going to sue everyone who ever imported an invasive species for all the problems caused by that one plant, mollusc, or rodent?
I think you should start off suing everyone who ever used a petroleum product, which is pretty much everyone on the planet, and then move to the oil companies, whose crime is getting rich off providing stuff we just can't get enough of.
Agree 100% with regards to navy blue. I'd rather go in jeans and a ripped t-shirt than a navy blue suit; it's hugely generic and always makes me think of prep school and the goddamn red tie with the little blue widgets.
Black can be classy; it all depends on the cut of your suit, your shoes, and what shirt/tie you pair it with. I like grey as well, but I tend to go with a lighter grey...Charcoal is dark enough that I'd rather wear black.
I can't imagine a situation where I'd wear anything other than grey or black; if you go farther afield in color choice, you'd best be prepared to buy a new suit when that color ceases to be in fashion.
I'm not sure if you meant to reply to me, because you're answering points I didn't make. But hey, I'm game...
"1. Open Source isn't about innovation, but about educating the programmer. "
I don't think that's the case anyway. If you want to make something, fine. Open Source is all about putting tools out in the market that anyone can pick up and create value with. It's not about "learning to program" it's about having the tools that you need to create software, or a website, or a file server, or a security appliance. Until OSS those tools were out of reach for most people, so to be a "developer" you had to have a fortune in tools. Now, you can be a developer using only free tools, and some of those development tools are top notch.
"2. Why can't I make something on my own and use it however I want?"
Well in a nutshell, reverse engineering has been a perfectly acceptable business practice since the dawn of time. If you steal something, that's wrong, but if you use your brain and make something that does the same thing... What's wrong with that? Especially when the idea is trivial, like with Photoshop, or Office...I don't think it's stealing to make a photo manipulation program, or a word processor.
3. Here's a list of programs that prove you're wrong!
I don't know what the hell you're talking about here. I listed a few proprietary apps, but no OSS. But talking about the internet, you kinda have to mention Php these days. And Apache (running on Linux). And Firefox. OSS is in a lot of places. The average person may not know they use it every day, but a lot of them do.
4. Microsoft doesn't make Office for Linux, so OpenOffice is important.
I personally think OO sucks. But saying it doesn't do anything that regular Office doesn't do is irrelevant. So what? Are you saying that there is no room for a competing brand in the market? That makes no sense. And, again, it's a tool issue. Do I have to be able to afford Office to be able to use a word processor with a decent number of features?
5. It isn't about sticking it to the man! It's about keeping my money out of the hands of a terrible monopoly!
It's not about money to me, and to a lot of other people who contribute to OSS. If there is a better closed source product, I'll use it. But OSS has great flexibility, it allows a level of customization and control that closed source cannot compete with. It's got good alternatives to huge closed source projects, it's got lightweight stuff that can run on older machines, so you don't have to have the latest and greatest closed source operating system to run an FTP site that's not going to get exploited.
In a lot of cases, we turn from "the man" because the man has failed us. Linux is a direct consequence of all the hugely proprietary Unixes that once roamed the earth. Apache is something that came about because "the man" didn't think this "internets" thing was going to catch on. Firefox came about because Microsoft stopped doing work on the webbrowser after they cornered the market. Not all good ideas come from the man, and the reason that a lot of "the man" actually supports OSS (Sun, IBM, Novell, etc) is because we create good stuff that is useful, even to them!
If I want to use a tool, and am willing to make one myself so that I can use it, and then I put that tool out for everyone to use, what exactly is the problem with that? Should I be forced to buy the expensive tool from the big tool company, even though I have the skill to make it myself? Should I be forced to charge for my tool when I don't feel any need to do so?
If I like tetris, and make a tetris variant of my own to see if I can do it, am I then forbidden from showing it to anyone?
No one owes Microsoft, Macromedia, and Adobe a living. If their products are superiour, then they'll do well enough. If not, then they deserve to go out of business. End of story.
And it's not just about "free". If it were only about free, then no one would have bothered writing an alternative to the existing commercial stuff; we'd have just pirated it. The amount of work needed to crush security on any copy-protected media is trivial compared to the amount of work required to create an alternative.