IHTG: Arnon Sofer's report is out of date. In my daily work, I see the phenomenon of African illegals in Israel in every factory and kitchen. They are filling an important even vital economic niche, so no petition will help. Moreover, the Government decided today to bring in more Ethiopians and convert them here to Judaism. The process has momentum, no one can stop it here or in Europe or in the USA or even Japan.
There are economic advantages to individual businessmen of hiring cheap illegal laborers but that does not mean the process is unstoppable or that we should not even try to stop it. There are also economic advantages for businessmen who sell heroin or cocaine. It's government's job to set wise policies and impose reasonable regulations that weigh private benefit against the costs to society which the businessman does not bear - some imports should be allowed to flow freely and for others there may be valid policy reasons to restrict or even ban their importation even though some might profit in the short run. Humans are just one more import that has to be analyzed in this way and the externalities can be large - the costs of educating the children of the illegal aliens, loss of national identity and cultural heritage, lowering avg. IQ of population, etc.
I should add that the US went thru this calculus once before w/slavery and the results tore the country apart and have left us scarred to this very day. "Cheap labor" can be very expensive indeed.
Since colonialism (exporting a mid- and high-IQ managerial class to countries with a low-IQ substrate) has been taken off the table, it is natural that countries with a mid-to-high IQ population import a low-IQ substrate. When they immigrate into a democratic country, the effects are predictable. I don't understand why you guys want to step on a rake that we, the French and Germans have just stepped on in front of you.
Speaking of stepping on a rake, do you want your children to grow up to a career raking leaves? I thought not. So who is going to do the leaf raking and cookie baking and potato peeling, etc.?
The Gulf Arabs, maybe due to their racism and lack of political correctness, have done this the right way. They have very explicit and strict guest worker programs. You can come here and make good money to send back home but don't bring your family and don't expect to become a citizen. That strikes me as a perfectly fair bargain and the right approach.
I want my children to a) exist and have grandchildren, b) be good people, including good citizens (which most members of our cultural elite are not,) and c) do whatever work they choose to do with pride and excellence. Whether they grow up to be nice Jewish dentists or pickup-driving, tobacco-chewing retards such as myself is of no real consequence to me, though I would prefer to be able to discuss Xenophon with them (something much easier to do with your average soldier than some dentist who's never seen life outside his cabinet.)
Tell me, when the Gulf Arabs run out of oil, what will they do? They don't know how to build anything and don't see working with your hands as noble or dignified. Any skills they may have once had in those fields have been long forgotten. Will they return to blowing camels for their sustenance?
We are all born to labor in the sweat of our brow.
I think it a matter of no small consequence to ask what the Arabs will do when the oil runs out.
I think the answer is, not much different from what they do now.
It could well be their fabulous wealth will be siphoned off by unscupulous manipulators like us English, and they will silently sink once again into the sands of their deserts; or the value of their non-oil assets will be dissipated by the likes of the US Fed.
In this way, religious fundamentalism might cease to be a force in Europe, and the immigrants that are in Europe will adapt or move out.
I think you can pretty much count on the Arabs to dissipate their wealth. If the money the Arabs pulled out of the ground in the last 70 years had stuck around and been properly employed to build infrastructure, an educational system, etc. the Arab countries would all be fully developed by now, but most of it has been squandered. So I think it's a pretty safe bet that it will continue to be squandered until it runs out and then they will be even more miserable than they are now. Saudi money is a double edged sword - they promote extremism but they also try to co-opt it and keep it under control (so the jihadists don't come after them). Being as poor as church mice hasn't helped the situation in Yemen.
You guys missed the point. Who gives a fuck about the Gulf Arabs? Rather, it is our future that I'm concerned about. We've stratified our society to the point that a large proportion of our high-IQ population spends their lives in unproductive "procedural manipulation" on Wall Street, the legal system, the science establishment (what are we going to use the Higgs Boson for when we find it?), academia, etc., instead of either making stuff or supervising other people making stuff, which is the only SUSTAINABLE way of improving quality of life. The reason we've been able to sustain this system in the short term is that we've mortgaged our future for immediate utility via squeezing global networks for maximum efficiency, printing the world's reserve currency, letting Wall Street run amok selling derivatives of derivatives, creating an unsupervised scientocracy and lawyerocracy, etc. The people getting the lion's share of the financial and power gains from this mortgaging are the intellectual elite, who have lost any vestigial productivity in the process. What happens when our house of cards falls? We'll be like the Gulf Arabs is what.
B - I hear you. My son was terribly frustrated w. his Wharton education because it was entirely geared to turning out intermediaries and manipulators who don't produce shit. He spend most of his free time building unnecessarily elaborate sets for school plays just to give himself an outlet where he produced a tangible product - for one play set in the back yard of a house he built the entire back wall of a house as a backdrop complete w. vinyl siding, windows, doors, etc. - it was spectacular. His frustration has led him to China where they still actually make stuff. Something within you cries out that it's not possible to not produce anything tangible (note that the US still does produce a lot of stuff) and still be wealthy. But oddly enough, in the modern world you can. Intellectual property is very valuable. Mark Zuckerberg or Sergei Brin have no factories, make no widgets and yet they have created billions of $ of value that people who do make shoes and widgets and such are willing to trade real $ for.
By the way, I would not underestimate the utility of the Higgs Boson (there is a fair chance that my daughter will end up doing particle physics). When Einstein proved the relationship between mass and energy, no one thought that would lead to practical exploitation of nuclear energy but it did. When he laid out the principles of relativity and space time, no one thought that would lead to GPS systems. Without Newton's work on gravity, J would not be able to design FOG interceptors. :-).
Intellectual property is very valuable as long as there's enough physical properties to go around. Tried eating an MP3 lately, or living in an MPEG?
What is this "created billions of $ of value"? What is this "real $"? What are "fake $"?
Newton and Einstein did not need multibillion $ particle accelerators to work out their theories. While I support your daughter's potential choice to dedicate her life to ever-more arcane pursuits, I have to point out the diminishing ROI of physical research. How many new ways to vaporize Japanese people do we need? We're already pretty fucking good at kicking ass, when the massive brakes constantly being applied to any such endeavor by our elites are taken off.
Shouldn't we figure out such problems as "whence Detroit?" or "where does money come from, and will printing more of it make our lives better?" before we go funding our best and brightest exploration of sub-subatomic particles?
November 14th., 2010
20 comments:
No air-conditioning here in NE US but it's going up to 17C today which is unusually warm for mid November.
Koko says: Looking at this picture, it seems like the Climate Change folks were right all along!
Anon.
Koko has a sense of humour. That's a picture of the sun. The sun has its own (Maunder?) cycle, which has nothing to do with CO2 emissions.
Adds Koko: "No wonder the frogs are vanishing!"
Anon.
OT: I don't think much of online petitions, but this one is new and important:
http://www.atzuma.co.il/africadanger
Can we at least get some desalination happening here?
Desalination is not "happening" my friend, living people is working very hard to make it happen. Nothing just "happens" in this Holy Land.
IHTG: Arnon Sofer's report is out of date. In my daily work, I see the phenomenon of African illegals in Israel in every factory and kitchen. They are filling an important even vital economic niche, so no petition will help. Moreover, the Government decided today to bring in more Ethiopians and convert them here to Judaism. The process has momentum, no one can stop it here or in Europe or in the USA or even Japan.
There are economic advantages to individual businessmen of hiring cheap illegal laborers but that does not mean the process is unstoppable or that we should not even try to stop it. There are also economic advantages for businessmen who sell heroin or cocaine. It's government's job to set wise policies and impose reasonable regulations that weigh private benefit against the costs to society which the businessman does not bear - some imports should be allowed to flow freely and for others there may be valid policy reasons to restrict or even ban their importation even though some might profit in the short run. Humans are just one more import that has to be analyzed in this way and the externalities can be large - the costs of educating the children of the illegal aliens, loss of national identity and cultural heritage, lowering avg. IQ of population, etc.
K
I should add that the US went thru this calculus once before w/slavery and the results tore the country apart and have left us scarred to this very day. "Cheap labor" can be very expensive indeed.
K
Since colonialism (exporting a mid- and high-IQ managerial class to countries with a low-IQ substrate) has been taken off the table, it is natural that countries with a mid-to-high IQ population import a low-IQ substrate. When they immigrate into a democratic country, the effects are predictable. I don't understand why you guys want to step on a rake that we, the French and Germans have just stepped on in front of you.
Well said. Anon.
Speaking of stepping on a rake, do you want your children to grow up to a career raking leaves? I thought not. So who is going to do the leaf raking and cookie baking and potato peeling, etc.?
The Gulf Arabs, maybe due to their racism and lack of political correctness, have done this the right way. They have very explicit and strict guest worker programs. You can come here and make good money to send back home but don't bring your family and don't expect to become a citizen. That strikes me as a perfectly fair bargain and the right approach.
K
I want my children to a) exist and have grandchildren, b) be good people, including good citizens (which most members of our cultural elite are not,) and c) do whatever work they choose to do with pride and excellence. Whether they grow up to be nice Jewish dentists or pickup-driving, tobacco-chewing retards such as myself is of no real consequence to me, though I would prefer to be able to discuss Xenophon with them (something much easier to do with your average soldier than some dentist who's never seen life outside his cabinet.)
Tell me, when the Gulf Arabs run out of oil, what will they do? They don't know how to build anything and don't see working with your hands as noble or dignified. Any skills they may have once had in those fields have been long forgotten. Will they return to blowing camels for their sustenance?
We are all born to labor in the sweat of our brow.
I think it a matter of no small consequence to ask what the Arabs will do when the oil runs out.
I think the answer is, not much different from what they do now.
It could well be their fabulous wealth will be siphoned off by unscupulous manipulators like us English, and they will silently sink once again into the sands of their deserts; or the value of their non-oil assets will be dissipated by the likes of the US Fed.
In this way, religious fundamentalism might cease to be a force in Europe, and the immigrants that are in Europe will adapt or move out.
This is perhaps too benign a scenario.
Anon.
I think you can pretty much count on the Arabs to dissipate their wealth. If the money the Arabs pulled out of the ground in the last 70 years had stuck around and been properly employed to build infrastructure, an educational system, etc. the Arab countries would all be fully developed by now, but most of it has been squandered. So I think it's a pretty safe bet that it will continue to be squandered until it runs out and then they will be even more miserable than they are now. Saudi money is a double edged sword - they promote extremism but they also try to co-opt it and keep it under control (so the jihadists don't come after them). Being as poor as church mice hasn't helped the situation in Yemen.
K
You guys missed the point. Who gives a fuck about the Gulf Arabs? Rather, it is our future that I'm concerned about. We've stratified our society to the point that a large proportion of our high-IQ population spends their lives in unproductive "procedural manipulation" on Wall Street, the legal system, the science establishment (what are we going to use the Higgs Boson for when we find it?), academia, etc., instead of either making stuff or supervising other people making stuff, which is the only SUSTAINABLE way of improving quality of life. The reason we've been able to sustain this system in the short term is that we've mortgaged our future for immediate utility via squeezing global networks for maximum efficiency, printing the world's reserve currency, letting Wall Street run amok selling derivatives of derivatives, creating an unsupervised scientocracy and lawyerocracy, etc. The people getting the lion's share of the financial and power gains from this mortgaging are the intellectual elite, who have lost any vestigial productivity in the process. What happens when our house of cards falls? We'll be like the Gulf Arabs is what.
B - I hear you. My son was terribly frustrated w. his Wharton education because it was entirely geared to turning out intermediaries and manipulators who don't produce shit. He spend most of his free time building unnecessarily elaborate sets for school plays just to give himself an outlet where he produced a tangible product - for one play set in the back yard of a house he built the entire back wall of a house as a backdrop complete w. vinyl siding, windows, doors, etc. - it was spectacular. His frustration has led him to China where they still actually make stuff. Something within you cries out that it's not possible to not produce anything tangible (note that the US still does produce a lot of stuff) and still be wealthy. But oddly enough, in the modern world you can. Intellectual property is very valuable. Mark Zuckerberg or Sergei Brin have no factories, make no widgets and yet they have created billions of $ of value that people who do make shoes and widgets and such are willing to trade real $ for.
K
By the way, I would not underestimate the utility of the Higgs Boson (there is a fair chance that my daughter will end up doing particle physics). When Einstein proved the relationship between mass and energy, no one thought that would lead to practical exploitation of nuclear energy but it did. When he laid out the principles of relativity and space time, no one thought that would lead to GPS systems. Without Newton's work on gravity, J would not be able to design FOG interceptors. :-).
K
Intellectual property is very valuable as long as there's enough physical properties to go around. Tried eating an MP3 lately, or living in an MPEG?
What is this "created billions of $ of value"? What is this "real $"? What are "fake $"?
Newton and Einstein did not need multibillion $ particle accelerators to work out their theories. While I support your daughter's potential choice to dedicate her life to ever-more arcane pursuits, I have to point out the diminishing ROI of physical research. How many new ways to vaporize Japanese people do we need? We're already pretty fucking good at kicking ass, when the massive brakes constantly being applied to any such endeavor by our elites are taken off.
Shouldn't we figure out such problems as "whence Detroit?" or "where does money come from, and will printing more of it make our lives better?" before we go funding our best and brightest exploration of sub-subatomic particles?
Post a Comment