And that is because only an American would know what a "tier 1" university is. This is another case of people reading too much of their own propaganda.
Actually it's a case based upon my own experience and those I work with every day. It's based upon dozens of international students I've spoken with, and the people from communities of my research areas. It's based upon on my talks with others in neighboring research areas, and is a continual area of interest to US universities. The large influx of foreign students has caused a discussion on this topic ad naseaum. I know who is doing research in my field. I know where the smart people. It is not "propaganda". It is very much real and very much the opinion of alot of people far more informed than you (and even I). Discount it as you wish, but I fear your own personal agenda plays far too much of a role to make that decision a rational one.
If you mean a compiler that takes simple linear code and magically makes it run faster on a massively parallel architecture, I'd be very interested in an argument for how that's even logically possible.
It's done by changing the paradigm. Stream programming, for one? You don't "magically" take linear code and make it fast. You get rid of "linear code". Linear code goes the way of the goto instruction... Very little of the computational heavy lifting is truely and unavoidably "linear".
Before you say that JITs cannot hack this, remember that they use exactly the same technology as your 'standard' compilers.
Except they do it online, not offline. Neglecting that difference is obviously unwise.
Secondly, if it is a question of taking too long to compile, realize that you can always ship optimized binaries from high-level languages (e.g. GCJ), but you cannot readily make your optimized native code work on a new platform.
As the overhead of interpreted languages gets smaller (through faster systems, JIT, and other optimizations), its inevitable that eventualy we'll all be using one (unless you are one of the few people who have to program the virtual machines, the JIT compilers, etc).
This cracks me up. As we head towards multi-core and massively-multi-core, you are telling me that things are going to get better for interprative languages? Compilers are about to kicked in the pants because we can only do thread-level-parallelism for so long (uh, lets say N=4.. when do those quad-cores come out? Early 07?).... The trend towards parallelism is going make compilers infinitely more importants as (memory bandwidth + computation bandwidth) gets the additions of a new, third term... communication bandwidth. It's just one more thing compilers are going to have to learn to deal with... and interpretative languages are going to fall farther behind... not catch up.
There will come day where we expect our compilers to encode parallel information into the code so it will run faster on our 1024 core machines. Interprative languages are going to be struggling to do that "just-in-time" like they struggle to do any optimizations now "just-in-time".
For one, I fail to see what research has to do with it
This is about as much that is worth replying to. Unfortunately, this pretty much proves you do not understand why Universities are successful nor why some are considered "top" and others are not. Stephen Hawking isn't at Cambridge because he wants to teach undergrads. The best and brightest don't take positions at MIT and Stanford and Cambridge to lecture. Research is what attracts these people, and consequently these people through their work bring fame and fortune to their schools.. and up the lists they go. There is nothing beyond research. It is, entirely, everything, when it comes to academic reputation.
I can sit here and find stuff that proves my points. Like this. Which gives the US 17/20 best universities in the world, and 53/100, and 90/200. However, it misses the point entirely. They don't make rankings on "Neural Networks for Computer Vision" or "Micro-Antenna" or "Lightning" or any of the other actual areas of research. Some giant averaging function that goes through and pumps out some number for each school is completely and utterly meaningless. The moral of the story is, through my field and the people I've met throughout neighboring fields, I believe my points is valid... At least half of the (meaningful) work is done in the US.. and much of it is done by foreign students or immigrant students. People come to the US because it's the best enviornment for them.
So not as clear cut as you seem to think. There's no doubt there are some great schools in the US, but there are great schools in lots of other places too:)
Perhaps I need to define "tier 1". The top 10 is a small part of what I could consider "tier 1". Also those catagories are ridiculously broad and don't really measure what should be quantified. If you ask a particular professor in his area of expertise (which is much more narrow than "Technology" or "Science"), to name the top 20 schools doing research in his area... and see what his response his. There may be 2 or 3 international universities on the list.
Like I said, it goes back to quantity. When you are talking about the most elite schools in the world, for my major, there are probably 4-5 (MIT, Stanford, Berkely, CMU, Illinois-Urbana) in the US and 2-3 (China/India) outside the US. However, if you include all of the "top" schools, there are probably 20 in the US, and 5 or so, not in the US. You don't need to go to the elite-of-the-elite to do world-class research. There is plenty of funding at the big state schools (Texas, Michigan, UCLA, Illinois..etc) , and a half dozen private schools in any particular discipline. There are 2-3 world class schools in every geographic region... but if you broaden your search to places that you would be able to do world-class research, the US list dominates.
The place is rife with incompetentence, and absolutely dogged with bureaucracy, politics and backstabbing. I can't understand how the word hasn't got out. It seems to be an extrordinarily well kept secret.
The piece of the equation that you are missing is that ALL universities are like that. University faculty, on average, are smarter and have less social grace than average people.. that makes them harder to get along with. That makes infighting, politics, and backstabbing at major research Universities the consistent m.o. I've seen major political infighting at every single department in which I know people and everyone thinks everyone is incompetant. And on at least one level, everyone is right.
Why is he asking about Universities in Europe? What about Eastern Europe or the Ukraine or Russia? What about the results to the programming challenge that everyone made a big fuss about? What about China's Universities?!
It's about quantity. If Chinese Universities were able to handle the demand of top Chinese students, they wouldn't flood to American universities by the thousands. There are top universities around the world, but if you write down all the "tier 1" universities in a particular discipline, more than half of them will be in America.
Re:Why football (soccer) isn't more popular in N.A
on
IT Meets the World Cup
·
· Score: 2, Funny
wow. the ignorance in your post is something you don't see that often in/.
in most latin derived languages (except english) it's just called football however.
That's an interesting point except for the fact that English isn't a latin-derived language in the traditional sense like Spanish, French, and Italian.
No mod points left. Unlucky for you. Of course, this is slashdot, so if I modded you up, and you became visible, you'd end up at 0 by the end of the day. So maybe, in a way, you got lucky.
So "deluded", "sheep", "fool", "idiots", and "wrong" are the words you've used to describe the soldiers in our military. You sound like a pretty rational guy... so I'm going to mercifully not reply in any meaningful way because it would be a giant waste of both of our times. Enjoy your extreme views..
Make no mistake, working for the government in any capacity is working for the institution. The dirt of the country doesn't have a bank account, and doesn't write you a paycheck. The government does. Who do you think you're working for, really? (Or well, who you were working for...)
I think it's incredibly sad that you can't see the forest for the trees. Mostly he was working so you could go off your little rant that I find ill-informed, simplistic, and mostly wrong... and yet neither of us is going to jail. This is where you say "This war isn't a threat to those ideals". And that is where I say that you need to distinguish between the warriors and the war. Condemnining the men and women of the military for going on a fool's errand, calling their service "wrong", and them "deluded" is truly sad.
making the argument that that's the main cause, it's clear that you don't think too highly of European labor law
That's incorrect. I don't think European labor laws are a silver bullet. If you understand and accept the cost (as most of Europe has done), then that is a choice a society is free to make and I have no problem with it. From an economics standpoint, Europe's labor laws are inferior for the economy to the US, and by equal logic, the US is equally inferior to China. However, the point is that chasing the dollar shouldn't be the metric by which we judge our lives, therefore maximizing our expected economic wealth isn't, necessarily, the best course of action for individuals. It's a matter of priorities.
My problem with Euro labor laws has nothing to do with the laws.. it has to do with the fact that people think they are "free". They aren't. There is a cost. If you understand and accept the cost, as a society, then more power to you. I am an economic libertarian in this respect... that I believe if you the populace is well-informed and chooses a weaker economy in exchange for more free time, then excellent. That is a perfectly valid, rational, and well-intentioned choice.
This is what I don't get, though. How would a 35-hour work week translate into unemployment? Explain it to me. I'm happy to be called the ignorant, uninformed rube with regards to economics I guess, because I just don't get this. Wouldn't a mandatory 35-hour work week simply mean you had more happy employees who had more time to attend to their lives. This should be a positive for productivity, no? At least productivity per hour.
This is the crux of the issue, and from this disagreement stems the entire argument. If you work 10% less a week, and get paid the same, presumably you produce 10% less. If we assume the same productivity an hour, that means they are paying you the same for 10% less. That means they have less revenue, less profits, and they expand slower. Slower expansion means less hires. We both should agree on that. Companies are essentially paying more and getting the same, if we assume same production / hour. This, naively, translates into a 10% cut in their revenue for the same cost... which depending on the margin of that company can wipe out all of their profits and more.
Your counterbalancing factor that you correctly include is that happier people should translate into more productivity. There are many other factors that equally contribute both positvely and negatively to that "productivity/hour", including competition. If the "happiness factor" makes people as productive in 35 hours as they are in 40 hours, then you are right. Everything is free. Unfortunately the data doesn't support this. There are other factors in the French labor laws that work against you, as well. For instance, it's much more difficult to fire people who aren't productive in France, therefore that is going to work to bring down their average, and so on. I don't mean to pick on France, by the way, you can substitute "US Federal Employees" for France in this conversation. They, on average, get more time off, and are harder to fire than private sector employees... however, they also get paid less.
As far as "ethics" go. What's ethical about making someone work 60 hours a week (which I did a large portion of the first 7 years of my career in IT)? What's ethical about trying to pay someone as little as humanly possible, such that they can't afford healthcare and can barely afford food to feed their family. I don't follow
Your ethics aren't the same as anyone elses. What you did in IT is light work in Japan or China. It's a societal issue. You have to recognize that this is a subjective measure. Ideally, we'd all work 0 and get paid 100k$, but life isn't free... There isn't some silver bullet where everyone gets everything and everyone is happy. There is work that must be done, and some system has to make that productivity as effecient as possible to reduce the work of e
I understand economics. Of course cheap labor supresses wages. Who decides to pay people cheap wages? Companies.
That's completely wrong. The market decides.. and companies must follow or go out of business faced with more effecient competition (note that effeciency is not solely determined by how little you can pay your workers...).
You deride Europeans for this
You really need to stop putting words into my mouth. I didn't deride anyone. I said there is a price to be paid. "There is no free lunch."... not in computer science, and definitely not in economics. There is ALWAYS a price. France has a system that values some things differently than others compared with the United States. France and other European countries with similar laws suffer economically in part BECAUSE of those workers rights you value so highly. They don't get 35-hour work weeks "for free". The lost time doesn't come out of some Evil Corporate Pot Of Gold (TM). The United States, equally, suffers economically from workers rights laws here (ie, minimum wage) when compared with China. It's a question of tradeoffs and ethics.
If that makes me angry... probably makes me a commie in your book
I feel you are severely ill-informed about how the economy works, mostly.
I have a rule that I don't discuss economics with people who haven't read chapter one of a high school economics textbook. I am only one man, and I don't have to time to start from scratch.
How do you people misunderstand basic economics so badly? Who, exactly, is supressing your wages? They've dropped some 30% since the 70s. who's suppressing them? Management. Why? Blame it on greed and the demands of wall street.
I like to enjoy life, thanks. Making a fair wage would be a bonus, but with tools like the one you responded to drinking the Kool-Aid, I suppose things will never change here in the US.
Yeah, tools like me who understand "economics" and don't blame all my problems on evil corporations. Being ignorant and angry is apparently more important than being informed and rational. Good luck with that outlook. Secondly, no one blamed immigrants. You should try spending 5 minutes reading my post and not pigeonholing me into your simplistic worldview where everyone is red-state/blue-state and believes the same shit. No one said immigrants are "the problem". I said "cheap labor" is the cause of supressed wages. A free and open system that includes immigration is ALWAYS going to have a source of a cheap labor.. therefore wages are ALWAYS going to suppressed. It isn't some evil "manager" somewhere deciding. Someone with a high-school economics education should understand that. Apparently, however, it's easier to be young, dumb, and angry then bother learning how the world works.
Jobs don't create themselves. There is a massive inherent connection between employment, wages, inflation, and economic growth. "Economic growth" isn't a measure of how much rich people are making. Ordinary blue collar people... ie people with retirement or pensions, depend on that economic growth for their retirement. It completely amazes me how much you discount the percentage of Americans who count as "investors". Virtually all retirement and pensions are some form of "investment". Therefore, anyone working at a blue or white collar carear with any benefits depends on "investment" for their retirement. The jobs that reduce unemployment don't create themselves. Economics isn't a vaccuum.
Who is supressing wages? We all are. Everything has to be cheap. There's a cost to living in a Wal-Mart society.
Well, exactly. Your father didn't have to deal with the same influx of new workers (especially at the bottom), and even less for your grandfater, and even less for your great-grandfather. In your great-grandfather's generation, he didn't compete against minorities, nor women. Those groups have all come into the working class, and at first qualified as "cheap labor". As education has improved, they have begun moving upwards, however we have had a steady stream of cheap labour since 1900. In today's day and age it is Mexico, and as their children grow up and migrate up the socio-economic scales (read: education), we'll probably find a new source of cheap labor. Having 10 million mostly unskilled workers added to the labor pool over 10 years has a substantial effect on all wages, except the effect is felt mostly at the bottom. Similar things have happened in previous generations. This is part of the price we are paying for being inclusive as a society. It's very simple supply and demand.
More to the point, there are places with better workers right. The french work 35 hours a week, and get (a legally enforced) 5 weeks of paid vacation a year or something like that. The price they pay is unemployment problems and very slow economic growth.
Slashdot Mirror
And that is because only an American would know what a "tier 1" university is. This is another case of people reading too much of their own propaganda.
Actually it's a case based upon my own experience and those I work with every day. It's based upon dozens of international students I've spoken with, and the people from communities of my research areas. It's based upon on my talks with others in neighboring research areas, and is a continual area of interest to US universities. The large influx of foreign students has caused a discussion on this topic ad naseaum. I know who is doing research in my field. I know where the smart people. It is not "propaganda". It is very much real and very much the opinion of alot of people far more informed than you (and even I). Discount it as you wish, but I fear your own personal agenda plays far too much of a role to make that decision a rational one.
If you mean a compiler that takes simple linear code and magically makes it run faster on a massively parallel architecture, I'd be very interested in an argument for how that's even logically possible.
It's done by changing the paradigm. Stream programming, for one? You don't "magically" take linear code and make it fast. You get rid of "linear code". Linear code goes the way of the goto instruction... Very little of the computational heavy lifting is truely and unavoidably "linear".
Before you say that JITs cannot hack this, remember that they use exactly the same technology as your 'standard' compilers.
Except they do it online, not offline. Neglecting that difference is obviously unwise.
Secondly, if it is a question of taking too long to compile, realize that you can always ship optimized binaries from high-level languages (e.g. GCJ), but you cannot readily make your optimized native code work on a new platform.
That's exactly my point.
As the overhead of interpreted languages gets smaller (through faster systems, JIT, and other optimizations), its inevitable that eventualy we'll all be using one (unless you are one of the few people who have to program the virtual machines, the JIT compilers, etc).
This cracks me up. As we head towards multi-core and massively-multi-core, you are telling me that things are going to get better for interprative languages? Compilers are about to kicked in the pants because we can only do thread-level-parallelism for so long (uh, lets say N=4.. when do those quad-cores come out? Early 07?).... The trend towards parallelism is going make compilers infinitely more importants as (memory bandwidth + computation bandwidth) gets the additions of a new, third term... communication bandwidth. It's just one more thing compilers are going to have to learn to deal with... and interpretative languages are going to fall farther behind... not catch up.
There will come day where we expect our compilers to encode parallel information into the code so it will run faster on our 1024 core machines. Interprative languages are going to be struggling to do that "just-in-time" like they struggle to do any optimizations now "just-in-time".
For one, I fail to see what research has to do with it
This is about as much that is worth replying to. Unfortunately, this pretty much proves you do not understand why Universities are successful nor why some are considered "top" and others are not. Stephen Hawking isn't at Cambridge because he wants to teach undergrads. The best and brightest don't take positions at MIT and Stanford and Cambridge to lecture. Research is what attracts these people, and consequently these people through their work bring fame and fortune to their schools.. and up the lists they go. There is nothing beyond research. It is, entirely, everything, when it comes to academic reputation.
I can sit here and find stuff that proves my points. Like this. Which gives the US 17/20 best universities in the world, and 53/100, and 90/200. However, it misses the point entirely. They don't make rankings on "Neural Networks for Computer Vision" or "Micro-Antenna" or "Lightning" or any of the other actual areas of research. Some giant averaging function that goes through and pumps out some number for each school is completely and utterly meaningless. The moral of the story is, through my field and the people I've met throughout neighboring fields, I believe my points is valid... At least half of the (meaningful) work is done in the US.. and much of it is done by foreign students or immigrant students. People come to the US because it's the best enviornment for them.
So not as clear cut as you seem to think. There's no doubt there are some great schools in the US, but there are great schools in lots of other places too :)
Perhaps I need to define "tier 1". The top 10 is a small part of what I could consider "tier 1". Also those catagories are ridiculously broad and don't really measure what should be quantified. If you ask a particular professor in his area of expertise (which is much more narrow than "Technology" or "Science"), to name the top 20 schools doing research in his area... and see what his response his. There may be 2 or 3 international universities on the list.
Like I said, it goes back to quantity. When you are talking about the most elite schools in the world, for my major, there are probably 4-5 (MIT, Stanford, Berkely, CMU, Illinois-Urbana) in the US and 2-3 (China/India) outside the US. However, if you include all of the "top" schools, there are probably 20 in the US, and 5 or so, not in the US. You don't need to go to the elite-of-the-elite to do world-class research. There is plenty of funding at the big state schools (Texas, Michigan, UCLA, Illinois..etc) , and a half dozen private schools in any particular discipline. There are 2-3 world class schools in every geographic region... but if you broaden your search to places that you would be able to do world-class research, the US list dominates.
The place is rife with incompetentence, and absolutely dogged with bureaucracy, politics and backstabbing. I can't understand how the word hasn't got out. It seems to be an extrordinarily well kept secret.
The piece of the equation that you are missing is that ALL universities are like that. University faculty, on average, are smarter and have less social grace than average people.. that makes them harder to get along with. That makes infighting, politics, and backstabbing at major research Universities the consistent m.o. I've seen major political infighting at every single department in which I know people and everyone thinks everyone is incompetant. And on at least one level, everyone is right.
Why is he asking about Universities in Europe? What about Eastern Europe or the Ukraine or Russia? What about the results to the programming challenge that everyone made a big fuss about? What about China's Universities?!
It's about quantity. If Chinese Universities were able to handle the demand of top Chinese students, they wouldn't flood to American universities by the thousands. There are top universities around the world, but if you write down all the "tier 1" universities in a particular discipline, more than half of them will be in America.
wow. the ignorance in your post is something you don't see that often in /.
Wow is right. You must be new here. Welcome.
And yes, in most of the rest of the world, interesting matches are broadcast for free. lol!
Really? And here in the US, most of the interesting matches are broadcast on ABC which is.. you guessed it... free! lol!
in most latin derived languages (except english) it's just called football however.
That's an interesting point except for the fact that English isn't a latin-derived language in the traditional sense like Spanish, French, and Italian.
I think this was brought up recently - how can I watch the games streaming in the U$A?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/. That, or watch ABC/ESPN/ESPN2.
No mod points left. Unlucky for you. Of course, this is slashdot, so if I modded you up, and you became visible, you'd end up at 0 by the end of the day. So maybe, in a way, you got lucky.
If you still believe that the oil war is about freedom then I commend you on tenaciously and blindly sticking to your fantasy.
You can't be serious. Try reading my entire post. Specifically the sentence after the one you quoted. Wow. Just wow.
So "deluded", "sheep", "fool", "idiots", and "wrong" are the words you've used to describe the soldiers in our military. You sound like a pretty rational guy... so I'm going to mercifully not reply in any meaningful way because it would be a giant waste of both of our times. Enjoy your extreme views..
Make no mistake, working for the government in any capacity is working for the institution. The dirt of the country doesn't have a bank account, and doesn't write you a paycheck. The government does. Who do you think you're working for, really? (Or well, who you were working for...)
I think it's incredibly sad that you can't see the forest for the trees. Mostly he was working so you could go off your little rant that I find ill-informed, simplistic, and mostly wrong... and yet neither of us is going to jail. This is where you say "This war isn't a threat to those ideals". And that is where I say that you need to distinguish between the warriors and the war. Condemnining the men and women of the military for going on a fool's errand, calling their service "wrong", and them "deluded" is truly sad.
making the argument that that's the main cause, it's clear that you don't think too highly of European labor law
That's incorrect. I don't think European labor laws are a silver bullet. If you understand and accept the cost (as most of Europe has done), then that is a choice a society is free to make and I have no problem with it. From an economics standpoint, Europe's labor laws are inferior for the economy to the US, and by equal logic, the US is equally inferior to China. However, the point is that chasing the dollar shouldn't be the metric by which we judge our lives, therefore maximizing our expected economic wealth isn't, necessarily, the best course of action for individuals. It's a matter of priorities.
My problem with Euro labor laws has nothing to do with the laws.. it has to do with the fact that people think they are "free". They aren't. There is a cost. If you understand and accept the cost, as a society, then more power to you. I am an economic libertarian in this respect... that I believe if you the populace is well-informed and chooses a weaker economy in exchange for more free time, then excellent. That is a perfectly valid, rational, and well-intentioned choice.
This is what I don't get, though. How would a 35-hour work week translate into unemployment? Explain it to me. I'm happy to be called the ignorant, uninformed rube with regards to economics I guess, because I just don't get this. Wouldn't a mandatory 35-hour work week simply mean you had more happy employees who had more time to attend to their lives. This should be a positive for productivity, no? At least productivity per hour.
This is the crux of the issue, and from this disagreement stems the entire argument. If you work 10% less a week, and get paid the same, presumably you produce 10% less. If we assume the same productivity an hour, that means they are paying you the same for 10% less. That means they have less revenue, less profits, and they expand slower. Slower expansion means less hires. We both should agree on that. Companies are essentially paying more and getting the same, if we assume same production / hour. This, naively, translates into a 10% cut in their revenue for the same cost... which depending on the margin of that company can wipe out all of their profits and more.
Your counterbalancing factor that you correctly include is that happier people should translate into more productivity. There are many other factors that equally contribute both positvely and negatively to that "productivity/hour", including competition. If the "happiness factor" makes people as productive in 35 hours as they are in 40 hours, then you are right. Everything is free. Unfortunately the data doesn't support this. There are other factors in the French labor laws that work against you, as well. For instance, it's much more difficult to fire people who aren't productive in France, therefore that is going to work to bring down their average, and so on. I don't mean to pick on France, by the way, you can substitute "US Federal Employees" for France in this conversation. They, on average, get more time off, and are harder to fire than private sector employees... however, they also get paid less.
As far as "ethics" go. What's ethical about making someone work 60 hours a week (which I did a large portion of the first 7 years of my career in IT)? What's ethical about trying to pay someone as little as humanly possible, such that they can't afford healthcare and can barely afford food to feed their family. I don't follow
Your ethics aren't the same as anyone elses. What you did in IT is light work in Japan or China. It's a societal issue. You have to recognize that this is a subjective measure. Ideally, we'd all work 0 and get paid 100k$, but life isn't free... There isn't some silver bullet where everyone gets everything and everyone is happy. There is work that must be done, and some system has to make that productivity as effecient as possible to reduce the work of e
The question of which came first, the chicken or the egg, exists because an egg is clearly not a chicken.
Did you just try to solve the great moral dilemna of our time by basing your logic on what my uncle used to ask me when I was six?
I understand economics. Of course cheap labor supresses wages. Who decides to pay people cheap wages? Companies.
That's completely wrong. The market decides.. and companies must follow or go out of business faced with more effecient competition (note that effeciency is not solely determined by how little you can pay your workers...).
You deride Europeans for this
You really need to stop putting words into my mouth. I didn't deride anyone. I said there is a price to be paid. "There is no free lunch."... not in computer science, and definitely not in economics. There is ALWAYS a price. France has a system that values some things differently than others compared with the United States. France and other European countries with similar laws suffer economically in part BECAUSE of those workers rights you value so highly. They don't get 35-hour work weeks "for free". The lost time doesn't come out of some Evil Corporate Pot Of Gold (TM). The United States, equally, suffers economically from workers rights laws here (ie, minimum wage) when compared with China. It's a question of tradeoffs and ethics.
If that makes me angry... probably makes me a commie in your book
I feel you are severely ill-informed about how the economy works, mostly.
I have a rule that I don't discuss economics with people who haven't read chapter one of a high school economics textbook. I am only one man, and I don't have to time to start from scratch.
How do you people misunderstand basic economics so badly? Who, exactly, is supressing your wages?
They've dropped some 30% since the 70s. who's suppressing them? Management. Why? Blame it on greed and the demands of wall street.
I rest my case.
I like to enjoy life, thanks. Making a fair wage would be a bonus, but with tools like the one you responded to drinking the Kool-Aid, I suppose things will never change here in the US.
Yeah, tools like me who understand "economics" and don't blame all my problems on evil corporations. Being ignorant and angry is apparently more important than being informed and rational. Good luck with that outlook. Secondly, no one blamed immigrants. You should try spending 5 minutes reading my post and not pigeonholing me into your simplistic worldview where everyone is red-state/blue-state and believes the same shit. No one said immigrants are "the problem". I said "cheap labor" is the cause of supressed wages. A free and open system that includes immigration is ALWAYS going to have a source of a cheap labor.. therefore wages are ALWAYS going to suppressed. It isn't some evil "manager" somewhere deciding. Someone with a high-school economics education should understand that. Apparently, however, it's easier to be young, dumb, and angry then bother learning how the world works.
Jobs don't create themselves. There is a massive inherent connection between employment, wages, inflation, and economic growth. "Economic growth" isn't a measure of how much rich people are making. Ordinary blue collar people... ie people with retirement or pensions, depend on that economic growth for their retirement. It completely amazes me how much you discount the percentage of Americans who count as "investors". Virtually all retirement and pensions are some form of "investment". Therefore, anyone working at a blue or white collar carear with any benefits depends on "investment" for their retirement. The jobs that reduce unemployment don't create themselves. Economics isn't a vaccuum.
Who is supressing wages? We all are. Everything has to be cheap. There's a cost to living in a Wal-Mart society.
Well, exactly. Your father didn't have to deal with the same influx of new workers (especially at the bottom), and even less for your grandfater, and even less for your great-grandfather. In your great-grandfather's generation, he didn't compete against minorities, nor women. Those groups have all come into the working class, and at first qualified as "cheap labor". As education has improved, they have begun moving upwards, however we have had a steady stream of cheap labour since 1900. In today's day and age it is Mexico, and as their children grow up and migrate up the socio-economic scales (read: education), we'll probably find a new source of cheap labor. Having 10 million mostly unskilled workers added to the labor pool over 10 years has a substantial effect on all wages, except the effect is felt mostly at the bottom. Similar things have happened in previous generations. This is part of the price we are paying for being inclusive as a society. It's very simple supply and demand.
More to the point, there are places with better workers right. The french work 35 hours a week, and get (a legally enforced) 5 weeks of paid vacation a year or something like that. The price they pay is unemployment problems and very slow economic growth.
#1 - I agree totally that PEOPLE (remember, us non-parents are people too) have supressed wages and are busier than we should be.
How do you people misunderstand basic economics so badly? Who, exactly, is supressing your wages?