Or, I don't like guns, I've never seen a gun, I'm clueless about guns - so I think I'm qualified to decide on the laws about guns.
Very funny. Often people who hold absolutist positions on gun control also support old men for whom it is biologically impossible to get pregnant and bear a child write draconian anti-abortion laws. Freedom! it is for people with guns, not for people with uterus.
It is not just toilet cleaning. Even washing dishes and clothes are considered infra dig for a person of good social standing. It is cultural. The education chasm is so wide in India almost all the immigrants are from middle class using education as a ticket for upward mobility. All the middle class folk in India are used to maids. Back when I was earning 200$ a month as a rocket scientist for government of India, I was spending 10$ a month for a maid who washed dishes, washed clothes, cleaned the bathroom and scrubbed the floors seven days a week. Just yesterday my nephew from Mumbai shunned a Chinese made cheap mobile phone, "yeek, that is a servant's phone, I am not touching it" and went for a Samsung Galaxy Note.
To understand this, you need to talk to your parents or grandparents generation where they paid enormous attention to their clothes. My Italian American colleague, son of an immigrant, recalled that his dad used to pack his work clothes in a case and wear a shirt, tie and trousers to ride the buses to the factory where he would change to his work clothes. And change before leaving the factory. For him to be seen in his oil stained factory denim trousers and denim bib was infra dig. I have seen pictures of foremen ridiculously wearing a tie a shirt and a hat, completely drenched in sweat looking miserable overseeing a mass of workers stripped to the waist manhandiling girdirs or railroad ties etc. For them that tie is a status symbol worth all the misery of wearing one!
I am one of the competent H1-Bs who came in during the 1990s. All immigrants with work permits are H1-Bs. There was no other way for engineers/doctors/nurses to work here. So I think by "before H1B1" you mean before the drastic increase in H1B numbers in the Y2K hype.
People with poor skills are able to lie through their teeth and come in here because the good ones are staying back.
I don't get IIT resumes any more. Now a days I don't even get Region Engineering Colleges, NIT resumes either. It is all no name engineering colleges with unpronounceable (even to me) engineering colleges from godforsaken hinterlands of India. Talk to graduate school admission officers in top American Univs. How much the inflow from IITs to do Masters/PhD has dwindled.
You have absolutely no idea. Guptas are not brahmins. (Nor are they kshatriya descendents of the rulers of the Gupta dynasty). They are descendents of a guy named Aggarsen, who had seventeen sons according to the folk history. Each of them founded a last name. Gupta, Aggrawal, Goel... etc. Sometimes they are used synonymously. A son of Gupta might call himself Agrawal etc. Some of these names are exogamus groups. (As in a Gupta will not marry a Gupta). But some of them allow endogamy as well. They are traders (vysayas). Not brahmins.
Being dumb, being incompetent in the job but being street smart etc are kind of universal. You find all kinds of people in all castes.
You could be the typical troll who incites a brahmin-non-brahmin brawl in threads in soc.culture.indian. Typically almost all the threads there end in such a brawl. The Indian version of Godwin's law is, once the thread mentions brhamins vs non-brahmins, it is time for sane people to kill the thread and leave.
What the hell is wrong with their numbering conventions? They went from Xbox 360 to Xbox 1? Are they starting all over again from version 1? Why? Is it because finally they have erased all the sunken costs and the franchise is finally in the black? On the windows they went DOS 3.1 to Win95, Win98, Millenium, Win2K, Vista and then finally discovered their first grade math, Win7,8,9...
Now it is true as a matter of history that one point the "Founding Fathers" considered was that a nation that relied on a militia (armed and trained body of citizens) for its defense, rather than a standing army, had a built-in defense again its government going tyrannical.
And they learned that the government might be stopped from becoming tyrannical, but even a lightly armed flotilla from a nation across the ocean can knock the whole damned never-can-become-tyrannical government. The only war in which the United States of America was invaded and defeated was the war of 1812. Remember that.
Compare to the pre 2000 era, the quality of H1-Bs from India has fallen dramatically. Family ties, food and entertainment preferences, increasing availability of imported stuff, increasing wages due to local economic growth etc have created a very good working conditions for the top quality Indian engineers. So many/most of them prefer to stay back. Labor is cheap in India, so these guys/gals employ cooks, servant maids and drivers and get plenty of free time to enjoy the money they earn. The heavy influx of Indians in the pre 2000 sent back real down to earth feedback about life in America. "Uninterrupted power, running water, clean air, cars, air conditioned homes etc etc. But no servant maids, you clean the toilet yourself". Many younger generation Indians, especially girls refuse to come to USA, because often the dirty task of cleaning the bathrooms fall on the wives. All this has led to a drastic reduction in the quality of people still willing to come to USA.
Most people who are still coming to USA fall in two categories. Some of them still love the freedom, opportunities and the general law and order and free markets etc. The other set is people who did not make the top cut in India, so trying to improve their chances by adding American experience to their resume.
Pretty soon all the goodwill earned by the top notch graduates from IITs, IISc and National Institutes of Technology, in the 1990s and early 2000s would have been totally spent. May be it has already happened. Now the fresh Indian H1-Bs are often seen as malingering, incompetent but with highly inflated ego. So even if the H1-B quota is raised to infinity, if the American corporations wise up, most of these visas will go unused. But Corporate America has to wake up first.
The fundamental tenet of the gun rights advocates is that, armed citizenry will take down tyrannical governments. Well, we are now going to see how true it is. These 3D printed cheap plastic guns are going to flood Africa and other such places with very cheap guns. We will know if it enables them to take down tyrants.
The main effect of these cheap plastic guns for us Americans is going to be even more draconian gate rape at the airports. Buy stock in Megabus, Boltbus etc. Air travel is going to be used only when it is unavoidable.
I wish you would be so nonchalant and forgiving of the corporations and lay all the blame on the congress critters, if and when some large bank uses legal methods to unfairly foreclose on your home and garnish your wages.
I know it is totally unfair and probably mean. But when I read the line
Interestingly, some judges suggested that a computer becomes a 'new machine' every time it loads different software."
I imagined a bunch of old fogeys who do not really understand technology, who have been poring over legal definitions and making finer and finer distinctions and abstractions for decades, delving into "how many microprocessors can dance on the head of a pin?"
The general consensus is that Homo sapiens neanderthalis did not use throwing spears and it was the Homo sapiens sapiens who did this innovation. Seems to generally agree with the consensus estimates of the departure of the original stock breaking out of Africa some 70000 to 50000 years ago.
In a related note it was there is an recorded instance of Boreopithecus redmondonis that hurled chairs.
The only thing that unites Pakistan is the hostility towards India. Basically the country is fragmented into many factions. The state of Balochistan has secessionist rumblings. The political and economic power is with the Punjabi Sunnis. But other muslims like Shia, Ahmadia, Sufis etc feel discriminated and exploited. The descendent of Indian muslims who moved to Pakistan at the time of partition are called pejoratively "mohajirs". The armed forces of Pakistan use eminent domain to allocate itself prime pieces of real estate and other things. Then it sells these properties to "officers' associations". Most of the economy is in the grip of the armed forces. Pakistan never had real control over Northwest Frontier Province. The islamic terrorists groomed by the army to be used in a proxy war with India are difficult to control, and they often turn against the local state government.
Recently they had election and an old disgraced politician named Nawaz Shariff has formed a new government. So as usual they are thumping their chests and beat the war drums in some attempt to unify the country behind him. Hope he calls the yelping dogs off before serious permanent damage is done.
Once customers get used to getting something for free or close to free, they are not going to pay more, no matter what. All these VC's paying customers to use their product for free is setting up the mentality. When they stop subsidizing it, it founders.
I see mundane things in bed bath and beyond, 12$ for the shower curtain or 250$ for a window treatment kit. People just shrug and pay. The very same people pick a flight that is 10$ cheaper but needs an additional stop and 3 more hours. All the price maximizing optimizing strategies by the airlines have created a sense that" my fellow passenger probably paid 10$ less for the very same ticket" and that changes the way people shop and decide. All these social networks are going to find it difficult to make money off their users.
In a country like India where piracy is rampant and no one wants to pay anything for any kind of music, video, movie or software, the telephone ringtones are raking in several hundred million dollars to the phone companies. So how users arrive at a consensus fair price is a very difficult thing to understand or predict.
Adjusted for inflation, or seen as a percentage of GDP, or as a multiple of median income of the country etc, Bill Gates fortune is dwarfed by the rich men of early 1900s. I think Andrew Carnegie, when he sold USSteel for some 450 million dollars in 190X, he got 2% of the GDP of the country or something. John D Rockefeller became richer, but the country also grew faster than his personal fortune and he did not top that percentage, if my memory serves me right.
There is nothing wrong with any one person amassing that level of wealth, and it might even serve as a motivation for lots of people. But the society has to be on guard. But SCOTUS has ruled money is speech and rich people can out shout poor people, that would be damaging to free exchange of ideas. Even if the top rich men did not care, they have many hangers on, suck ups and brown nosers. They might get the confidence of these rich people, do enormous collateral damage to the society in their quest to peel of a measly million or two from these billionaires.
Many of our academic institutions are actually running on very little money comparatively, newspapers and other such institutions are struggling. So some rich dude dropping a million dollars a year could corrupt and poison such foundations of democracy easily, sometimes without even meaning to.
Basically poor people have only one thing to sell, their labor. Well, their honor and kidneys too but that is not the norm. Once labor loses its value, you have 90% of the humanity with nothing to sell. They are not going to simply fold up and die. They are coming at you with pitchforks.
Bushitting about the future sitting as tenured professor is something robots will never be able to do as well as humans. This prof is the grand example.
I can tell you got your "degree" from an on line diploma mill because you make grand conclusions based on one personal anecdote. The online diploma might get some respect in the first year or two. Once the system gets gamed, and it attracts free loaders looking for easy degree, its value will plummet. You might not be called for an interview if your degree was from an on line diploma mill.
It is not plagiarism. An actual human being did actual work. Except the "enrolled" student at Penn State was partying his way to glory, his paid Jeeves in India who happens to be an underpaid assistant professor in a college does the home work. You can't detect it by any algorithm.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, I don't like guns, I've never seen a gun, I'm clueless about guns - so I think I'm qualified to decide on the laws about guns.
Very funny. Often people who hold absolutist positions on gun control also support old men for whom it is biologically impossible to get pregnant and bear a child write draconian anti-abortion laws. Freedom! it is for people with guns, not for people with uterus.
To understand this, you need to talk to your parents or grandparents generation where they paid enormous attention to their clothes. My Italian American colleague, son of an immigrant, recalled that his dad used to pack his work clothes in a case and wear a shirt, tie and trousers to ride the buses to the factory where he would change to his work clothes. And change before leaving the factory. For him to be seen in his oil stained factory denim trousers and denim bib was infra dig. I have seen pictures of foremen ridiculously wearing a tie a shirt and a hat, completely drenched in sweat looking miserable overseeing a mass of workers stripped to the waist manhandiling girdirs or railroad ties etc. For them that tie is a status symbol worth all the misery of wearing one!
There is too much blood in my caffeine system. We brew starbucks and Seattle's best in the kitchen. Lemme run and get my afternoon fix.
People with poor skills are able to lie through their teeth and come in here because the good ones are staying back.
I don't get IIT resumes any more. Now a days I don't even get Region Engineering Colleges, NIT resumes either. It is all no name engineering colleges with unpronounceable (even to me) engineering colleges from godforsaken hinterlands of India. Talk to graduate school admission officers in top American Univs. How much the inflow from IITs to do Masters/PhD has dwindled.
Being dumb, being incompetent in the job but being street smart etc are kind of universal. You find all kinds of people in all castes.
You could be the typical troll who incites a brahmin-non-brahmin brawl in threads in soc.culture.indian. Typically almost all the threads there end in such a brawl. The Indian version of Godwin's law is, once the thread mentions brhamins vs non-brahmins, it is time for sane people to kill the thread and leave.
What the hell is wrong with their numbering conventions? They went from Xbox 360 to Xbox 1? Are they starting all over again from version 1? Why? Is it because finally they have erased all the sunken costs and the franchise is finally in the black? On the windows they went DOS 3.1 to Win95, Win98, Millenium, Win2K, Vista and then finally discovered their first grade math, Win7,8,9...
Now it is true as a matter of history that one point the "Founding Fathers" considered was that a nation that relied on a militia (armed and trained body of citizens) for its defense, rather than a standing army, had a built-in defense again its government going tyrannical.
And they learned that the government might be stopped from becoming tyrannical, but even a lightly armed flotilla from a nation across the ocean can knock the whole damned never-can-become-tyrannical government. The only war in which the United States of America was invaded and defeated was the war of 1812. Remember that.
And so, you agree that highly armed citizenry does not lead to deposing of despots.
Most people who are still coming to USA fall in two categories. Some of them still love the freedom, opportunities and the general law and order and free markets etc. The other set is people who did not make the top cut in India, so trying to improve their chances by adding American experience to their resume.
Pretty soon all the goodwill earned by the top notch graduates from IITs, IISc and National Institutes of Technology, in the 1990s and early 2000s would have been totally spent. May be it has already happened. Now the fresh Indian H1-Bs are often seen as malingering, incompetent but with highly inflated ego. So even if the H1-B quota is raised to infinity, if the American corporations wise up, most of these visas will go unused. But Corporate America has to wake up first.
And if you have a AK-47, the goat is actually free.
Nah, but many operators will make these and sell them cheap. Free market. Prices will fall.
The main effect of these cheap plastic guns for us Americans is going to be even more draconian gate rape at the airports. Buy stock in Megabus, Boltbus etc. Air travel is going to be used only when it is unavoidable.
I wish you would be so nonchalant and forgiving of the corporations and lay all the blame on the congress critters, if and when some large bank uses legal methods to unfairly foreclose on your home and garnish your wages.
Interestingly, some judges suggested that a computer becomes a 'new machine' every time it loads different software."
I imagined a bunch of old fogeys who do not really understand technology, who have been poring over legal definitions and making finer and finer distinctions and abstractions for decades, delving into "how many microprocessors can dance on the head of a pin?"
In a related note it was there is an recorded instance of Boreopithecus redmondonis that hurled chairs.
Recently they had election and an old disgraced politician named Nawaz Shariff has formed a new government. So as usual they are thumping their chests and beat the war drums in some attempt to unify the country behind him. Hope he calls the yelping dogs off before serious permanent damage is done.
I see mundane things in bed bath and beyond, 12$ for the shower curtain or 250$ for a window treatment kit. People just shrug and pay. The very same people pick a flight that is 10$ cheaper but needs an additional stop and 3 more hours. All the price maximizing optimizing strategies by the airlines have created a sense that" my fellow passenger probably paid 10$ less for the very same ticket" and that changes the way people shop and decide. All these social networks are going to find it difficult to make money off their users.
In a country like India where piracy is rampant and no one wants to pay anything for any kind of music, video, movie or software, the telephone ringtones are raking in several hundred million dollars to the phone companies. So how users arrive at a consensus fair price is a very difficult thing to understand or predict.
There are 10 kinds of people. Those who think in binary and those who don't.
There are two kinds of people, those who classify people into two kinds of people and those who don't.
There is nothing wrong with any one person amassing that level of wealth, and it might even serve as a motivation for lots of people. But the society has to be on guard. But SCOTUS has ruled money is speech and rich people can out shout poor people, that would be damaging to free exchange of ideas. Even if the top rich men did not care, they have many hangers on, suck ups and brown nosers. They might get the confidence of these rich people, do enormous collateral damage to the society in their quest to peel of a measly million or two from these billionaires.
Many of our academic institutions are actually running on very little money comparatively, newspapers and other such institutions are struggling. So some rich dude dropping a million dollars a year could corrupt and poison such foundations of democracy easily, sometimes without even meaning to.
Basically poor people have only one thing to sell, their labor. Well, their honor and kidneys too but that is not the norm. Once labor loses its value, you have 90% of the humanity with nothing to sell. They are not going to simply fold up and die. They are coming at you with pitchforks.
Bushitting about the future sitting as tenured professor is something robots will never be able to do as well as humans. This prof is the grand example.
... King Canute?
I can tell you got your "degree" from an on line diploma mill because you make grand conclusions based on one personal anecdote. The online diploma might get some respect in the first year or two. Once the system gets gamed, and it attracts free loaders looking for easy degree, its value will plummet. You might not be called for an interview if your degree was from an on line diploma mill.
It is not plagiarism. An actual human being did actual work. Except the "enrolled" student at Penn State was partying his way to glory, his paid Jeeves in India who happens to be an underpaid assistant professor in a college does the home work. You can't detect it by any algorithm.
It got redistributed, that is all.