| H1-B Visas: Helping to Destroy the Middle Class |
[Jul. 2nd, 2007|12:19 pm] |
Many people who are not tech workers are not aware of America's H1-B visa program. In short, this is a program to allow companies who are unable to find competent American employees to "import" them from overseas, giving these employees temporary citizenship (a visa) in return for the promise of employment.
Sounds fair, right? If there's no Americans qualified for the position, why shouldn't companies be able to seek workers in other nations?
No. The reality, as these clips show, is that H1-B is contributing to a massive "brain drain" in the American economy. Companies are claiming that there is an enormous talent shortage in the American high-tech labor pool, at the same time that they're using that as an excuse to demand the ability to "import" more workers from other nations.
The thing is, there is no labor shortage. The corporations simply don't want to pay the prevailing wages to American laborers, and see that they can use the H1-B "loophole" to save a few bucks. The problem is that this is creating a shortage of truly available employment in America for high-tech workers. This is "outsourcing."
Some see no problem in this; usually the ones who see no problems either don't fully understand the magnitude of the issue, or stand to directly benefit. Some falsely claim that complaining against H1-B visas is "racism" -- but this is a crock. I work alongside mostly foreign-born U.S. citizens with no problems. In theory, they earn roughly the same wages as me and have the same talents. Foreign-born U.S. citizens would suffer equally as a result of H1-B visa abuse. It's not about racism.
Some think that this is just a factor of "competing in the global market." Maybe, maybe not. Corporations are notoriously short-sighted. There is a saying that applies here -- "penny wise, pound foolish." Meaning that it is foolish to cost yourself more money in the long run just to save a small amount now; yet publicly traded companies are notorious for doing just that because they are beholden to the short-term demands of the stockholders to always dividends, rather than focusing on the long-term interests of the nation and economy that they flourish in. And maybe that's their right -- to focus on profits. But it's the right and duty of the government to focus on America's best interests, and the H1-B program is certainly not in the best interests of this nation. Sadly, our government is completely selling out on this.
This H1-B policy is indeed very pound foolish. The American technical education landscape is falling behind; not because Americans are stupid or lazy (in fact a study I read a year or two ago found that Americans work harder -- as measured by hours worked per week -- than citizens of almost any other nation). No, our educational system is failing because our young people are not stupid -- they see friends and peers graduating in high-tech with an expensive 4- or 6-year degree... and waiting tables. They understand that it's getting to the point where it's not profitable for the average, non-superstar worker to work in high-tech. So many don't even pursue scientific and technical careers -- instead they pursue the proven moneymakers of business or legal degrees. This all contributes to a massive high-tech "brain drain."
And lest you think that this problem is only high-tech's issue, consider that if the H1-B floodgates are opened -- and this is something that Bush (deeply in the pockets of big business) is sneaking into his "immigration reform" bill -- no industry will be safe from decimation by cheap, underpaid imported labor. Work in construction? There's no real reason, from the point of view of the company that pays you, why a talented construction worker from Islamabad couldn't be imported to replace you at half your wages. And yes, the travel and H1-B process costs money, but probably not 1/2 your salary over your career -- and that's what they'd stand to save. Work in creative arts? You are eminently outsourceable. No American job is safe.
No, your job is at risk too. In fact the entire so-called "American way of life" -- which depends upon a healthy, vibrant middle class -- is at risk here. We are at war with special interests that would decimate this middle class, in order to line their own pockets.
I'd ask that you keep things like this in mind when you vote. |
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| DRM is dying |
[May. 17th, 2007|03:37 pm] |
...about... f'ing... time!
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward/2007/05/drms_demise_accelerates.html
Amazon and Apple are leading the way into a new, DRM-free reality.
If only this had happened before HDCP fucked everything up... (look it up)
DRM is evil. As one of the respondants on the page said, you can't simultaneously deliver content to someone and restrict their access to it. Once you give them the content, the jig is up (cryptographically speaking). The result of the content production conglomerates trying to solve this impossible pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps problem is the utter DRM cluterfuck we have today.
Hopefully before long, the root of all evil -- the DMCA -- will fall... dare we hope? |
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| Oy... |
[May. 11th, 2007|05:07 pm] |
http://hellboundalleee.blogspot.com/2006/05/war-on-relativism.html
This is a perfect example of someone who thinks they are a lot cleverer than they are. It's basically a ten thousand word joust at the straw man of "moral relativism."
It takes but a moment of research to realize that a moral relativist (like myself) is someone who believes that "good" and "bad" are not inherent to the world, but rather products of human judgment. On some things we agree (rape is bad), but on other things we may disagree (perhaps we disagree on drug legalization -- who knows). The moral relativist's point is simply that there's no final arbiter of "goodness." The legal system pretends to be such an arbiter, but there is a long history of unjust laws (*cough* Jim Crow *cough*), proving that just because something is "legal" doesn't mean it's "right," and vice versa. Ultimately the legal system isn't about "right" and "wrong" as much as it's about crime and punishment (in other words, "don't do this or I'll hurt you -- by putting you in jail or taking your money or executing you.") This is a necessary function of government, but it ain't the same thing as morality.
But I guess a simplistic straw man is much more fun. In "Hellbound Alleee's" blog, moral relativists are amoral (heh), shrill pedants who attack any "judgment" as morally wrong (thus neatly hoisting ourselves by our own petard; since if all morality is relative, who are we to say that judging is "wrong?" Get it... good...) The problem, as with all straw man arguments, is that this (easily counterable) position isn't what we're actually saying.
A lot of pseudo-intellectuals rely heavily upon straw men. Sad, when arguing the actual points is so much more entertaining... |
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| What autism epidemic? |
[May. 11th, 2007|04:18 pm] |
I've been told in the past by some friends/acquaintances that there is an autism "epidemic" underway. Apparently if you look at the numbers, the prevalence of autism has risen a thousandfold since the early 90's.
There's only one problem; it ain't true. As this article points out, the rise in recorded cases of autism is just that: a rise in recorded cases of autism. For various diagnostic purposes (notably special education), autism didn't exist as a diagnostic category before 1990. And guess what -- it's those same diagnostic criteria (cases reported in special ed studies) that are used to "prove" the autism "epidemic."
In the case of special education counts for children with autism, the administrative prevalence is simply the number of students with a primary classification of autism divided by the total number of students in that given region, whether it's a state, district or county.
This means, among other things, that data collected in this manner often underestimate "the true population prevalence because, for instance, schools do not go out into the community and actively seek out and evaluate all kids for autism," Shattuck said.
For instance, consider data collected in Wisconsin: In 1992, 18 children were counted in special education programs as being autistic. By 2002, that number had jumped to 2,739.
"The conclusion is that the prevalence of autism has grown by 15,117 percent. This is ridiculous," Shattuck said. "No credible clinician or scientist in the field would ever suggest there were actually only 18 children with autism in all of Wisconsin in 1992."
The key word phrase here is "no credible clinician or scientist."
What does all of this mean? The same thing I always say:
- What "everyone knows" is often wrong.
- Most people would simply make awful scientists.
- Most people wouldn't know the difference between a well designed study or a statistically-significant result, and a hole in the ground (correlate of the previous point).
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| Corporate Tribalism |
[Apr. 24th, 2007|03:16 pm] |
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2002/04/28/BU127682.DTL
I agree; people are using corporate identity (Nike, Apple, Microsoft, Abercrombie) in place of forming their own identity. And that's scary.
Even "free" products like Linux are guilty of this kind of tribalism.
As Karen points out, it's a weird world we live in, where people are more concerned about your "brand" than with what works for them.
And she's a Mac user ;) |
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| Hydration: Healthy or Hoax? |
[Mar. 28th, 2007|09:58 am] |
http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20020711213420data_trunc_sys.shtml
http://www.bendweekly.com/news/3871.html
These days, everyone knows the importance if drinking a lot of water. Friends, relatives, fitness "experts" -- everyone knows that you should drink at least eight eight-ounce glasses of water per day.
But, as is often the case, what "everyone knows" may well be wrong -- dead wrong. The recent news story about the woman who died due to drinking too much water -- producing a deadly effect known as water intoxication -- proves that you CAN over-consume water. On a less deadly note, we certainly don't need to be spending hundreds of dollars per year on trendy "designer water" -- good old tap water works fine. Most of the current hydration craze is based on marketing, not methodology. We're a consumer culture, and water has become trendy, as bizarre as that sounds.
In fact, many doctors believe that we get almost all the water we need from our food, and much of the rest from our coffee, tea, and soda (contrary to popular belief, caffeinated beverages DO provide hydration; they do NOT dehydrate you further). What do you think is the primary ingredient of that coffee you just drank? The cereal you ate? What do you think makes that turkey sandwich so moist?
So, while it's hardly exciting news, most doctors recommend listening to your body; when you're thirsty, drink. When you're not, don't. It's really that simple.
And throw away that bottle of "Propel" -- you might as well be burning money. |
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| Criticism == subversion? |
[Jan. 31st, 2007|04:26 pm] |
Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive.
-- Henry Steele Commager
The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.
-- H.L. Mencken |
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| Times are Dire |
[Jan. 19th, 2007|05:01 pm] |
As Sen. Patrick Leahy said to Alberto Gonzales yesterday:
"In the 32 years since I first came to the Senate – during the era of Watergate and Vietnam – I have never seen a time when our constitution and fundamental rights as Americans were more threatened by their own government," said Mr Leahy. "The [Justice] department has also played a pivotal role…in eroding basic human rights and undercutting America's lead role as an advocate for human rights throughout the world." |
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| NSA Spying: no progress, just more of the same |
[Jan. 18th, 2007|01:38 pm] |
It now appears that I was premature. Yesterday's announcement that the illegal NSA spying operation would be brought under FISA was premature.
It now looks like Bush & co. simply did yet another end-run around the Constitution. This time, they simply cherry picked the one Bush-appointed judge on the FISA court to give blanket approval to the illegal program.
Thus, they've retroactively made their criminal behavior legal. Pretty sneaky, sis.
More of the same. IMPEACH BUSH and his entire criminal administration. These boys make Nixon et al look like choir boys.
You can read the request from Leahy, and the response from Colleen Kollar-Kotelly (the chief FISA judge) basically telling him that the DoJ has tied her hands here. |
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| NEWS FLASH: Bush to drop warrantless eavesdropping program (update: or maybe not??) |
[Jan. 17th, 2007|12:40 pm] |
UPDATE: This may not be such a great victory after all. This may just amount to the Bush administration retroactively rewriting the law to cover its asses. See this article (esp. updates and commentary) for more info. We'll wait and see, but sadly the Bush Executive Branch hasn't had a good track record on civil rights and obeying the law. Frankly, they make the perps in Watergate look like a bunch of Boy Scouts in comparison. We'll see...
This is a major, major victory for civil rights advocates. It means that warrantless eavesdropping -- without a judge's warrant or the FISA court's oversight -- will once again be illegal.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush has decided not to reauthorize the controversial domestic warrantless surveillance program for terrorism suspects and to put it under the authority of a secret special court, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said on Wednesday.
Source: Reuters
Although Bush & co. will claim otherwise, this is almost certainly due to the amount of outrage brought by private citizens (aka, you and I), media organizations, and the legal pressure brought by activist groups like the ACLU and the EFF.
This may be the result of an August '06 verdict where a federal judge ordered that the NSA immediately stop its illegal spying on Americans:
Detroit U.S. District Court judge Anna Diggs Taylor, presiding over an ACLU challenge to the so-called "Terrorist Surveillance Program", rejected the government's assertion that the state secrets privilege prevents any review of the NSA surveillance.
In the past, the privilege has allowed the government to put an immediate stop to judicial proceedings that it says might reveal top national security secrets.
But in this case, "the court is persuaded that Plaintiffs are able to establish a prima facie case based solely on Defendants' public admissions" regarding the NSA's warrantless wiretapping of Americans.
The wiretapping "violates the Separation of Powers doctrine, the Administrative Procedures Act, the First and Fourth Amendments to the United States Constitution, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and Title III (of the Constitution)," according to Taylor's injunction.
[emphasis added]
Source: Wired News
Huzzah!
Now we just need to make sure that "they" (the CIA, FBI, NSA, DIA, etc.) don't just keep eavesdropping but doing it "under the radar." Now, at least, if they do this, we can send them to jail. |
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| Wow |
[Jan. 15th, 2007|02:04 pm] |
Very disturbing video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4595729596527335458&q=scientology
Most disturbing is the evidence that the Clearwater Police Department is becoming an enforcement arm for the notorious Church of Scientology. From an older St. Petersburg Times op-ed piece:
Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Judge Thomas Penick, who has the unenviable task of refereeing sidewalk skirmishes between the Church of Scientology and anti-Scientology protesters in Clearwater, recently pointed to an arrangement that allows off-duty Clearwater cops to work for Scientology and noted, "They are coming very dangerously close to becoming a private security force for the Church of Scientology."
[emphasis added]
http://theunfunnytruth.ytmnd.com/
Scientology. Evil. Not just amusing and weird, but evil. |
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| HD -- "Hopefully DOA" |
[Jan. 1st, 2007|06:09 pm] |
Here's hoping that HD (TV/DVD/BluRay/etc.) -- that worthless marketing term designed to convince you that you need to shell out zillions of bucks for pixels you can't see and audio you can't hear -- is dead on arrival.
HD-DVD's vaunted DRM (copy-protection) technology was cracked within days of being released. As the Inquirer put it:
What do we end up with? A year or more where the CE industry pushed, pulled, legislated and litigated their way to obscurity. Along the way, they killed yet another promising consumer technology, well 5 or 6 actually, and made Intel and AMD their bitches. We all were on the verge of losing this format and DRM infection war until a dark horse champion [ed: the hacker who cracked HD-DVD] emerged to snatch victory from the jaws of evil. Piracy, the better choice(tm). µ
Vista is starting to look like one of the biggest albatrosses Microsoft has ever produced (Vista was, from a consumers' rights perspective, one of the biggest sellouts in the history of mankind). And people are hardly rushing off to buy all new equipment to play the new "super high definition CD's." In fact, "pirated" MP3's are the primary source of music on the iPod (one of the most popular consumer devices in history, up there with the Walkman).
Here's hoping that 2007 spells the end (or at least the beginning of the end) of DRM -- digital rights mangling. |
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| WiFi makes you sick? Rubbish. |
[Dec. 12th, 2006|01:50 pm] |
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,72265-0.html
An article about the "dangers" of WiFi from the perspective of "electromagnetic radiation sensitivity" -- a made-up disease that ascribes real symptoms (chronic pain, parasthesia, etc.) to nonexistant causes (EM radiation with a signal strength of less than a watt).
What's interesting to me is not the article, but the comments. It appears that still, after a thousand years of evidence of the success of the scientific method, most people still put little stock in it.
The problem is that chronic pain sufferers are desperate to find any cause for their pain, and "we don't know yet" isn't satisfying to them. So they latch on to a simple idea -- it's "modern technology!" -- and form a crusade. I used to know a woman who was convinced that the mercury in mercury amalgam fillings was the cause of all of society's ills. Now don't get me wrong -- mercury is poisonous, but still -- the amount that leeches from fillings is tiny. It's trivial.
That's something that proponents of wacky theories like this forget; everything can be dangerous in high enough "doses," and yet almost everything is innocuous at low enough doses. The "dose" of EM radiation (which is non-ionizing, thus does not break up your cell's molecular structure -- which is why gamma radiation does cause cancer and WiFi routers don't) from your typical WiFi source is vanishingly small, like the "dose" of mercury leeched from your typical mercury amalgam filling.
Oddly, the proponents of the "WiFi causes cancer" theory went so far as to claim that the dangerous effects were independant of signal strength... which contradicts all known physics. Think about it... the sun puts off some EM radiation in almost all frequencies. This theory would claim that even the sun (which most of the crystal-gazer types see as healthy and holy and "natural") can cause cancer (or chronic pain, or whatever else they claim EM causes). This is just... well, sorry, but retarded.
Science works, people. Even when we don't like its conclusions (you really need to cut back on trans-fats and limit sun exposure) or we don't like the fact that it doesn't know the answer to something (such as what's causing your chronic pain), we can't just toss it in the dumpster. We just need to look harder for solutions that are actually based on the evidence. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 7th, 2006|11:54 am] |
http://www.caic.org.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1243&Itemid=12
Amazing. It's a French documentary (subtitled) about a New Age cult called Landmark Education (also sometimes aka the Landmark Forum). There are a lot of these corporate money-cults springing up -- Landmark, PSI, even offshoots of Scientology -- but they all have the same bait-and-switch tactics. They use cheap psychological tricks (tear you down, build you up) to produce a brief feeling of euphoria, all the while turning you into a narcissistic tool of the cult, with one mission -- to recruit your friends, your family, your coworkers into the cult. The video even documents how a doctor recruited one of his patients -- a sure abuse of a position of trust and authority, but I've heard stories of bosses firing employees who wouldn't attend these "personal growth seminars" (very illegal, of course, but that knowledge is cold comfort when you're unemployed).
The tactics are the same -- a cult of confession (confessing your "sins" to be "free"), an antagonistic, abusive "facilitator" whose primary goal is to tear down your psychological defenses (and they are very, very good at it -- watch the video), and laughing, clapping, hugging and weird, euphoric talk about how this will "change your life" -- all the while not offering anything concrete except to push you to recruit dear old Ma (so the "personal growth" group can drain her bank account).
Even weirder, the "self help" group involved in this specific instance -- Landmark Education -- tried to sue to prevent this video (which is investigative reporting with a hidden camera showing a lot of the weird, cultish things the group does) from being made public. Of course, the cat's out of the bag, and it's a real eye-opener to anyone who's never run into these whackjobs, or to anyone who's thinking about attending (if you are, PLEASE watch this first).
In the end, I don't blame the participants; they're just naive. Everyone thinks that "I couldn't be suckered into a cult" -- which is precisely how cults keep growing and spreading. We're all susceptible -- we all have warts and flaws and things we wish were different in our lives. We can all fall prey to psychological manipulation. It's not our fault for hoping that there's a simple, easy, "life-changing" answer.
No, I blame the cold, manipulative bastards at the top of pyramid schemes like this. These are the ones who are breaking up marriages, costing jobs, and in some cases even costing lives -- all for the almighty buck. These are the ones, the Alain Roths of this world, who need to be busted and jailed... for a long, long time. |
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| DRM == censorship...? |
[Dec. 5th, 2006|12:58 pm] |
Reknowned security expert Bruce Schneier, in his fascinating paper Electronic Commerce and the Street Performer Protocol, makes a point that I think is extremely relevant about DRM (digital rights management, or as some call it, digitial restrictions management -- since that's what it's all about, restricting your fair use):
Finally, the measures needed to really prevent widespread copyright infringement basically involve building the legal and technical infrastructure for widespread censorship.
Bingo. This hits the nail on the head; DRM is just a technical term for censorship. Sure, the content owners cry foul, and they claim that copying files puts performers on the streets (yeah... right.) But in reality, the DRM wars are about control -- control over who gets to listen to or see what, where, and when. And the DRM infrastructure being mandated with things like HDTV, Windows Vista, and Blu-Ray is a perfect foundation for a systematic program of censorship that would make Orwell roll over in his grave. |
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