You could send an extremely credible looking SS detail to several locations. I suppose you could also give the President a one-time-use PDA too...
I think the problem is that if AF1 flies to Vandenberg, but the President has actually gone to Ellsworth, a trackable device would ruin the diversion, hence the security risk.
If you poison the cables, you will have to train everyone who may ever handle the cables, and you probably need to put signs everywhere to indicate the hazard. What happens when some contractor touches a cable, then rubs your super-potent rat poison in his eye? (I'll wait while you look up your liability policy and the OSHA regs on that.)
>Cuba isnt any threat to the safety of the world or anything...
Not very long ago, Cuba targeted the United States with armed nuclear missiles. The people who have been in power in the United States since that time, still carry quite a grudge over that incident. It is of course open to debate, but the status quo most certainly does hold Cuba as a very serious threat.
What's impressive is photographing a fish in the first place. Even professional photographers have great difficulty with fish. Even with a submersible camera and lights, aquarium photography is a bitch.
>Do you know people who live in the country? I do.
I do.
>They buy $10 jeans from Wal-mart.
I don't think you're quite getting the message of what is a necessity and what is a luxury.
>What the grandparent talked about was a family of four -- mom, dad, and two kids. $30k won't cut it.
That's what I used as a frame of reference. I think we are envisioning very different baseline standards of living. To begin with, I'm willing to be that these two kids don't share a room. I'm also willing to bet that they don't walk 5 miles to school. That they get more than one $10 pair of jeans in a year.
I still say this family can maintain a standard of living equivalent to 1950. I admit $30k is pushing it. It would be an interesting exercise to write out the budget to show that it is doable. Would suck, of course. Heating oil??? How about a wood stove, used *only* when it's *dangerously* cold.
My grandparents got by on a LOT less than $30K adjusted for inflation. Of course, to them, running water was a luxury, and I'm not even saying you'd have to go that far.
"Not enough" for what, exactly? My position is that a 1950 standard of living is attainable for a family on a very low income. Admittedly, it would be difficult in 2009 dollars, but still.
Family of four? OK.
2 Bedroom home, 900-1200 square feet. One basic automobile. No television. Maybe one, as a luxury. Except on very special occasions, every meal is consumed at home. One land-line telephone, a borderline luxury. Frugal clothing budget, with many homemade items and focus on mending. A clothes washing machine, as a luxury, but clothes dried on the line.
It's not a terribly desirable idea, but I could live on $30,000 and I assure you, so could you, if you had to, and if you put a serious effort into it. Yes it means doing without a large number of things you take for granted. But it can be done, and people are doing it.
Explain what it is that is so essential to survival that $60K can buy and $30K cannot. Storebought clothes, purchased more often than once or twice a year, and more than a few outfits for each family member? An expensive car? (A car *at all?*) A bigger house than is absolutely necessary? I'll wager that restaurant food is on the list, as are a lot of household appliances and the electricity to run them.
Then again, many people apparently would prefer death to a 1950 standard of living.
I don't disagree with you, necessarily, but I would agree more if your concern was with Open Office Calc not being a sufficient replacement for Excel. Would you care to list one or two of the most significant "glaring omissions" of OO Writer versus Word? "Glaring omissions" implies that they will be obvious to a casual user.
They may have a defense, but having a defense does not automatically limit your liability. The gun analogy is not so bad, because in many places you can indeed be held liable for negligently allowing a crime to be committed with your firearm.
>I don't think comcast lawyers are losing any sleep.
You've seen the clip? You understand the political and social stripe that is predominate out in Pima County where Comcast is the provider (as opposed to the extremely liberal city of Tucson proper?) I'm sure they are being confronted on all sides. I would almost put money on Comcast being stripped of their contract and replaced by Cox.
Laugh about the porn clip (I did, here in Tucson, I yelled "FTW!")
But depending on the origin of the video, Comcast may be on a very real hook for broadcasting copyrighted material without license, and could conceivably be exposed to distribution royalties for a much larger audience than the one that is supposed to be limited to a specific, accountable pay-per-view arrangement.
I would be very surprised if lawyers were not working this out in a damage control mode.
"My case is a bit different than the average American's, because I paid three and a half times their tuition, being a foreigner;"
Your case is *entirely* different, and the cost is elevated specifically in order to raise the barrier to entry for you. This is a completely different phenomenon from the "affordability of secondary education."
Once a week I make 4 loaves of bread and two pizza doughs. It's about four of five hours of prep time, but it's mostly just waiting. My breads are delicious and cost almost nothing compared to even the cheapest grocery store bread. My pizzas are a point of pride for me because I have the cost down to under $3.00, most of it being the Mozzarella. A pizza is a good way to get rid of leftovers. I will never again pay money for a restaurant pizza unless it's seriously a work of art.
It started to really amaze me how much money I was spending on restaurant food, back when I was making $140K. When I returned to academia, I made a lot less, and was forced to learn these lessons.
I could cook a whole chicken and make enough burgers for a hungry party with $8. I think what you're buying at McDonald's is some sort of convenience, but one you don't regard as a luxury.
As for the cheap tube of ground beef, at my local grocery store that turns out to be the same 94% lean beef that's wrapped in the clear packages and marked up. It also turns out to be better, I think because it's not exposed to as much light.
"As TFS says, there are only 85000 H1B workers in the country. They are skilled foreigners who do the technical/analytical jobs that Americans aren't doing because they've watered down technical education in so much of this country."
Take one of those 85000 position descriptions and post it, offering a reasonable mid-career level salary, and you will find American who is qualified, who studied whatever (Materials Science? Chemical Engineering? Pharmacology QA?) at a decent research-tier institution.
Go ahead, I dare you to post one of these position descriptions on Dice or Monster with the notice that only U.S. Citizens may apply, and I'll bet you get more responses than you have time to interview.
If you think technical education is watered down, I dare you to take a university-level physics course, or analog circuits, or math past Vector Calc. It'll be a cakewalk, right?
"Well, according to your logic, if they collect taxes, governments should protect taxpayers, not citizens."
You're at odds with a fundamental principle in the USA, though. It is not permitted to discriminate on the basis of taxpayer status or citizenship, at least not since 1868.
>Nope. Most high-level H1B workers come to the USA aiming to stay there and get a citizenship. So >in general they are not going to send a bulk of their salary back.
Not a "bulk" of their salary. Let's say, no more than maybe a religious person tithes, or maybe the amount you spend on your hobbies. Maybe even no more than you waste. The surprising thing for me has been to learn just how far that kind of money goes in some countries or certain areas of some countries.
The amount of money I throw away will buy *land* in some parts of the world.
>get that picture of poor little third-world-workers living on nothing but bread and water to send >every penny home to their dying mother in some village in africa out of your head please. It may >apply to some extend to the "migrant mexican workers" you're speaking about, but they don't >exactly work in the 60k tier of bank employees now do they.
I'm not going to get into the sniping over Mexicans in particular, because the thread is already going toward racism and misinformation. But as for the "mid-career professional wage", I've had co-workers from Bangladesh, Kenya, Coastal China, and also the only Iraqi that I've ever met. Each of them made enough money to live a lifestyle I'd say was equivalent to an affluent student -- a nice apartment in a desirable neighborhood, for example, and a lease payment on a decent car, not missing any meals, not wearing clothes from a missionary box -- in some ways these guys all 'lived better' than me but that's because of my choices. Anyway they generally did 'send money home' and it seems to me that even a modest amount is enough to basically make you a prince in some places... when and if you return home you own some land and have some business interests, etc. What's wrong with that?
Has someone on this forum actually been fired from a job and replaced by an immigrant or guest worker on a Visa? Or are people just bothered by the idea that a guest worker is being offered a job but nobody asked you if you'd like it first?
>Seriously, try to support a family of 4 on $30,000/yr that you work 60-80 hrs a week for.
$30,000 in a rural part of Ohio or Western Pennsylvania? Or $30,000 in Austin Texas or Destin Florida?
There are places where I could manage it, and there are places where $30,000 wouldn't be sufficient to justify staying there 80 hours total, let alone taking a job.
If I went back to my home town, $5-10K is a solid equity position in a house with *acres* of *arable* land. Assuming you're not starting from scratch, let's say, $30-40K is actually a pretty good living there, provided you do not try to live beyond your humble means. What does that mean? Basically it means a 1950s lifestyle:
1200 square foot house. Electricity and plumbing, yes. Maybe even a clothes washer, but dry them on the line. No TV, or maybe one. Maybe a landline phone. One automobile. All meals cooked at home, with the rare outing. If you take a vacation, it's a destination within 100 miles, ideally a self-sufficient camping/fishing/hunting trip.
I could live on a single income by those standards, and so could you.
Do I do it? Hell no. $30,000 wouldn't pay for my hobbies, let alone my mortgage, car payments and food. But I *could*, and I actually have a *plan* for it.
>You don't think financing an education is a problem?
Tuition at the state university where I work caps at well under two thousand dollars a semester. I would submit that the cost of education is not so much "tuition and books", but rather the cost of housing, transportation and food while not working to support those costs. But those are universal needs and they are expensive for any undertaking, not specific to education.
I would also point out that spots are not being left vacant for want of a qualified student to fill it.
Got a 20 year old going to college this fall? Don't pay thousands per semester for a dorm... by them a house. Not such great advice in an inflated market but right now, it'll likely pay off everything. With a private house and a functional kitchen, it becomes realistic to eat at home instead of in restaurants (or even dorm meal plans), which is an opportunity to be frugal. I've been amazed at how much money people spend on restaurant food and also how much time is spent doing that.
"I mean, what's the point of having emergency public health if the ensuing bankruptcy is going to absolutely break the person's and their entire family's life and career?"
To be fair, he said "half of all bankruptcies" not "half of all people seeking emergency heathcare go bankrupt."
Even in these relatively bleak times, most people are doing better than the headlines or the aggregate numbers make it sound like. There are some regional aspects to the economy that aren't captured well in headlines and soundbytes. On the other hand, in certain regions and certain industrial sectors things really are as bad as "they" say.
As my grandfather once told me "It's not bad to be in debt paying back 20 cent dollars."
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You could send an extremely credible looking SS detail to several locations. I suppose you could also give the President a one-time-use PDA too...
I think the problem is that if AF1 flies to Vandenberg, but the President has actually gone to Ellsworth, a trackable device would ruin the diversion, hence the security risk.
>Just don't lick the cable!
If you poison the cables, you will have to train everyone who may ever handle the cables, and you probably need to put signs everywhere to indicate the hazard. What happens when some contractor touches a cable, then rubs your super-potent rat poison in his eye? (I'll wait while you look up your liability policy and the OSHA regs on that.)
>Cuba isnt any threat to the safety of the world or anything...
Not very long ago, Cuba targeted the United States with armed nuclear missiles. The people who have been in power in the United States since that time, still carry quite a grudge over that incident. It is of course open to debate, but the status quo most certainly does hold Cuba as a very serious threat.
What's impressive is photographing a fish in the first place. Even professional photographers have great difficulty with fish. Even with a submersible camera and lights, aquarium photography is a bitch.
>Do you know people who live in the country? I do.
I do.
>They buy $10 jeans from Wal-mart.
I don't think you're quite getting the message of what is a necessity and what is a luxury.
>What the grandparent talked about was a family of four -- mom, dad, and two kids. $30k won't cut it.
That's what I used as a frame of reference. I think we are envisioning very different baseline standards of living. To begin with, I'm willing to be that these two kids don't share a room. I'm also willing to bet that they don't walk 5 miles to school. That they get more than one $10 pair of jeans in a year.
I still say this family can maintain a standard of living equivalent to 1950. I admit $30k is pushing it.
It would be an interesting exercise to write out the budget to show that it is doable. Would suck, of course.
Heating oil??? How about a wood stove, used *only* when it's *dangerously* cold.
My grandparents got by on a LOT less than $30K adjusted for inflation. Of course, to them, running water was a luxury, and I'm not even saying you'd have to go that far.
>Outline mode?
Navigator?
"Not enough" for what, exactly? My position is that a 1950 standard of living is attainable for a family on a very low income. Admittedly, it would be difficult in 2009 dollars, but still.
Family of four? OK.
2 Bedroom home, 900-1200 square feet.
One basic automobile.
No television. Maybe one, as a luxury.
Except on very special occasions, every meal is consumed at home.
One land-line telephone, a borderline luxury.
Frugal clothing budget, with many homemade items and focus on mending.
A clothes washing machine, as a luxury, but clothes dried on the line.
It's not a terribly desirable idea, but I could live on $30,000 and I assure you, so could you, if you had to, and if you put a serious effort into it. Yes it means doing without a large number of things you take for granted. But it can be done, and people are doing it.
Explain what it is that is so essential to survival that $60K can buy and $30K cannot. Storebought clothes, purchased more often than once or twice a year, and more than a few outfits for each family member? An expensive car? (A car *at all?*) A bigger house than is absolutely necessary? I'll wager that restaurant food is on the list, as are a lot of household appliances and the electricity to run them.
Then again, many people apparently would prefer death to a 1950 standard of living.
I don't disagree with you, necessarily, but I would agree more if your concern was with Open Office Calc not being a sufficient replacement for Excel. Would you care to list one or two of the most significant "glaring omissions" of OO Writer versus Word? "Glaring omissions" implies that they will be obvious to a casual user.
The real interest here is that the dam survived the quake, right?
They may have a defense, but having a defense does not automatically limit your liability.
The gun analogy is not so bad, because in many places you can indeed be held liable for negligently allowing a crime to be committed with your firearm.
>I don't think comcast lawyers are losing any sleep.
You've seen the clip? You understand the political and social stripe that is predominate out in Pima County where Comcast is the provider (as opposed to the extremely liberal city of Tucson proper?) I'm sure they are being confronted on all sides. I would almost put money on Comcast being stripped of their contract and replaced by Cox.
Thanks for the advice, turtledawn. It was a serious question and you gave a serious and useful answer and I appreciate that.
>Are you aware that it takes longer to yell eff tee dubba-yew than "FOR THE WIN!"?
Yes! That's why I did it! I also cheered when the Cardinals lost, just to be contrarian. I wish they'd have lost by one point though.
Air quality in Tucson is some of the best in the world, and it's beautiful weather right now...
Laugh about the porn clip (I did, here in Tucson, I yelled "FTW!")
But depending on the origin of the video, Comcast may be on a very real hook for broadcasting copyrighted material without license, and could conceivably be exposed to distribution royalties for a much larger audience than the one that is supposed to be limited to a specific, accountable pay-per-view arrangement.
I would be very surprised if lawyers were not working this out in a damage control mode.
I would actually like to be able to make a calligraphy ink from coffee grounds, never mind the printer application.
"My case is a bit different than the average American's, because I paid three and a half times their tuition, being a foreigner;"
Your case is *entirely* different, and the cost is elevated specifically in order to raise the barrier to entry for you. This is a completely different phenomenon from the "affordability of secondary education."
Your country doesn't have universities?
Once a week I make 4 loaves of bread and two pizza doughs. It's about four of five hours of prep time, but it's mostly just waiting. My breads are delicious and cost almost nothing compared to even the cheapest grocery store bread. My pizzas are a point of pride for me because I have the cost down to under $3.00, most of it being the Mozzarella. A pizza is a good way to get rid of leftovers. I will never again pay money for a restaurant pizza unless it's seriously a work of art.
It started to really amaze me how much money I was spending on restaurant food, back when I was making $140K. When I returned to academia, I made a lot less, and was forced to learn these lessons.
I could cook a whole chicken and make enough burgers for a hungry party with $8. I think what you're buying at McDonald's is some sort of convenience, but one you don't regard as a luxury.
As for the cheap tube of ground beef, at my local grocery store that turns out to be the same 94% lean beef that's wrapped in the clear packages and marked up. It also turns out to be better, I think because it's not exposed to as much light.
"As TFS says, there are only 85000 H1B workers in the country. They are skilled foreigners who do the technical/analytical jobs that Americans aren't doing because they've watered down technical education in so much of this country."
Take one of those 85000 position descriptions and post it, offering a reasonable mid-career level salary, and you will find American who is qualified, who studied whatever (Materials Science? Chemical Engineering? Pharmacology QA?) at a decent research-tier institution.
Go ahead, I dare you to post one of these position descriptions on Dice or Monster with the notice that only U.S. Citizens may apply, and I'll bet you get more responses than you have time to interview.
If you think technical education is watered down, I dare you to take a university-level physics course, or analog circuits, or math past Vector Calc. It'll be a cakewalk, right?
"Well, according to your logic, if they collect taxes, governments should protect taxpayers, not citizens."
You're at odds with a fundamental principle in the USA, though. It is not permitted to discriminate on the basis of taxpayer status or citizenship, at least not since 1868.
>That's 0.006% of the US population.
It is not evenly distributed across industries, and there are plenty of anecdotal reports of workplaces that are *dominated* by H1B workers.
>abusing the H1B labor program
If you have evidence of a crime, report it to the authorities, not here.
And if it's "not a crime" then it is, by definition, acceptable.
>Nope. Most high-level H1B workers come to the USA aiming to stay there and get a citizenship. So
>in general they are not going to send a bulk of their salary back.
Not a "bulk" of their salary. Let's say, no more than maybe a religious person tithes, or maybe the amount you spend on your hobbies. Maybe even no more than you waste. The surprising thing for me has been to learn just how far that kind of money goes in some countries or certain areas of some countries.
The amount of money I throw away will buy *land* in some parts of the world.
>get that picture of poor little third-world-workers living on nothing but bread and water to send
>every penny home to their dying mother in some village in africa out of your head please. It may
>apply to some extend to the "migrant mexican workers" you're speaking about, but they don't
>exactly work in the 60k tier of bank employees now do they.
I'm not going to get into the sniping over Mexicans in particular, because the thread is already going toward racism and misinformation. But as for the "mid-career professional wage", I've had co-workers from Bangladesh, Kenya, Coastal China, and also the only Iraqi that I've ever met. Each of them made enough money to live a lifestyle I'd say was equivalent to an affluent student -- a nice apartment in a desirable neighborhood, for example, and a lease payment on a decent car, not missing any meals, not wearing clothes from a missionary box -- in some ways these guys all 'lived better' than me but that's because of my choices. Anyway they generally did 'send money home' and it seems to me that even a modest amount is enough to basically make you a prince in some places... when and if you return home you own some land and have some business interests, etc. What's wrong with that?
Has someone on this forum actually been fired from a job and replaced by an immigrant or guest worker on a Visa? Or are people just bothered by the idea that a guest worker is being offered a job but nobody asked you if you'd like it first?
>Seriously, try to support a family of 4 on $30,000/yr that you work 60-80 hrs a week for.
$30,000 in a rural part of Ohio or Western Pennsylvania? Or $30,000 in Austin Texas or Destin Florida?
There are places where I could manage it, and there are places where $30,000 wouldn't be sufficient to justify staying there 80 hours total, let alone taking a job.
If I went back to my home town, $5-10K is a solid equity position in a house with *acres* of *arable* land. Assuming you're not starting from scratch, let's say, $30-40K is actually a pretty good living there, provided you do not try to live beyond your humble means. What does that mean? Basically it means a 1950s lifestyle:
1200 square foot house. Electricity and plumbing, yes. Maybe even a clothes washer, but dry them on the line.
No TV, or maybe one.
Maybe a landline phone.
One automobile.
All meals cooked at home, with the rare outing.
If you take a vacation, it's a destination within 100 miles, ideally a self-sufficient camping/fishing/hunting trip.
I could live on a single income by those standards, and so could you.
Do I do it? Hell no. $30,000 wouldn't pay for my hobbies, let alone my mortgage, car payments and food. But I *could*, and I actually have a *plan* for it.
>You don't think financing an education is a problem?
Tuition at the state university where I work caps at well under two thousand dollars a semester. I would submit that the cost of education is not so much "tuition and books", but rather the cost of housing, transportation and food while not working to support those costs. But those are universal needs and they are expensive for any undertaking, not specific to education.
I would also point out that spots are not being left vacant for want of a qualified student to fill it.
Got a 20 year old going to college this fall? Don't pay thousands per semester for a dorm... by them a house. Not such great advice in an inflated market but right now, it'll likely pay off everything. With a private house and a functional kitchen, it becomes realistic to eat at home instead of in restaurants (or even dorm meal plans), which is an opportunity to be frugal. I've been amazed at how much money people spend on restaurant food and also how much time is spent doing that.
"I mean, what's the point of having emergency public health if the ensuing bankruptcy is going to absolutely break the person's and their entire family's life and career?"
To be fair, he said "half of all bankruptcies" not "half of all people seeking emergency heathcare go bankrupt."
Even in these relatively bleak times, most people are doing better than the headlines or the aggregate numbers make it sound like. There are some regional aspects to the economy that aren't captured well in headlines and soundbytes. On the other hand, in certain regions and certain industrial sectors things really are as bad as "they" say.
As my grandfather once told me "It's not bad to be in debt paying back 20 cent dollars."