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| OK, Xanga, it's been a good run. But there's a new kid in town. I've moved over to jaguilar.posterous.com. That site is a startup run by a guy I know, and it's already doing a pretty good job at out-competing Xanga at giving me the features I care about.
I'll still be following all y'all with RSS feeds. My posterous posts directly to my Facebook profile, so you won't miss anything either. I love you kthx bye bye! | | |
| John Barnes (of The Sky So Big And Black, Kaleidescope Century, Finity, and most recently Mother of Storms): ten real characters in eighty pages is too many. Cut.
Also, you have an unhealthy fascination with rape. Why is it in almost every book you write? Get help. | | |
| Watched Don Juan Di Marco with Sie Deen this weekend. It's my second time seeing it. She liked the movie very well -- how could she not? There's something very attractive about the Don Juan's ability to see "through" the surface of things to the beauty underneath. But how do you get there without giving up so much by your intentional blindness? | | |
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Mozilla are apparently creating a plugin
that will replace some of the Internet Explorer rendering logic to
bring it better into conformance with web standards. I think this is a
great idea because people who can't be troubled to install Firefox will
of course wish to install an IE plugin to fix compliance with a standard no one is using yet. | | |
| Illegal immigration is a bad thing right? It takes jobs away from
American workers, it leads to abuse of poor immigrants, weakens our
national security . . . how many of us believe this? Across the
nation, it's frightening. Surely some of my friends as well. I know I
have seen writing like that in my RSS feeds occasionally.
What
is the biggest source of wage discrimination in the world today? And I
don't just mean, "On average, men earn N% more than women in the U.S."
I'm talking about a much more serious standard, something more like,
"Men earn N% more than women with the same educational background, same
racial makeup, and in the same location."
Is it racist whites
taking advantage of blacks in the U.S.? Men getting paid more than
women (in Pakistan)? Whites getting paid more than blacks in the U.S.
in 1939? Any of those?
No, indeed it is not. The
biggest differences is between people of the same education level and
racial background living in the U.S. versus Nigeria. The same people
in the U.S. make 8.5 times more than people who are essentially
identical, but live in Nigeria.
What does this mean to you? To
start off with, claiming to care about the poor but ignoring the
poverty-ameliorating effects of immigration is bullshit. It is a type
of caring that only cares about the poor who happen to live in the same
nation -- a quality unearned except for in accident of birth, much like
skin color. That's right: nationalistic populism is a lot like
racism. It's just more socially acceptable . . . for now. But what
was socially acceptable in 1800 has passed, and this will too, but not
before many more have suffered.
Which increases a Bolivian
person's yearly wage more: an additional year in school, or working in
the United States? The latter, by about five times. Which is better:
the lifetime benefits Indonesian workers achieved through the
anti-sweatshop movement, or the financial benefits of a single chance
at working thirty weeks in the U.S.? The latter.
What does this
mean? Widening the conduits through which individuals of all stripes
-- poor, rich, and everything in between -- may flow into the U.S.
promises a greater benefit than almost any charity we can give to, and
a raging majority of that benefit goes to the poorest. It is time that
we started living up to our national ideals of freedom and listening to
what the French chiseled on the Statue of Liberty.
You see, those poor people don't really give a shit if we wish them well. They only care if we do them well. If we're not willing to drop our ideology to do well to those who need it most, how much is that ideology worth?
http://www.reason.com/blog/show/127718.html | | |
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