US Virtual Border Fence Doesn't Work 337
lelitsch writes "The Washington Post reports that the initial pilot of the Virtual Border Fence planned by the DHS and subcontracted to Boeing has been a miserable failure. A lot of the points in the report have the hallmark of death-march software development projects. Some choice quotes include 'did not work as planned or meet the needs of the U.S. Border Patrol,' 'DHS officials do not yet know the type of terrain where the fencing is to be constructed,' and 'the design will not be used as the basis for future... development.' The article notes that Boeing was forced to deliver 'something' early as President Bush pushed for immigration reform in Congress in 2006. That reform effort died last year in the Senate."
It's only a virtual failure (Score:5, Funny)
Stop them.. why would we stop them? (Score:5, Funny)
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Not much at all, all things considered. Labor costs are around 5% of the cost of an item. SO, you could increase labor wages by a factor of 10, and only raise the cost of the final product by 50%.
Example:
Price per apple = $1.00
Labor cost per apple= $.05
Non-labor cost per apple= $.95
New Labor cost x 10= $.50
New apple cost= $.95 +.50 = $1.45
That's not bad con
Re:Stop them.. why would we stop them? (Score:4, Informative)
To be honest, it's just a number I remember from a previous thread on this topic.
But a little Google-Fu got me this:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003265139_imprices19.html [nwsource.com]
At a local QFC, Red Delicious apples go for about 99 cents a pound. Of that, only about 7 cents represents the cost of labor, said Tom Schotzko, a recently retired extension economist at Washington State University. The rest represents the grower's other expenses, warehousing and shipping fees, and the retailer's markup.
And that's for one of the most labor-intensive crops in the state
5%, 7%, close enough. The point stands: wages could go up substantially (even enough to attract citizens instead of illegals) and the price of friut would not 'triple' or 'quadruple' as some scaremongers claim.
Re:Stop them.. why would we stop them? (Score:4, Interesting)
That and we have PLENTY of able bodied people on welfare, that could be put to work....if you want welfare help, get out and work some jobs like this too.
If we didn't have illegals driving down wages in manual labor markets, our welfare folks might could get off welfare and make living wages.
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Re:Stop them.. why would we stop them? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think recent illegal immigration is messing with wage levels here, this is the other edge of the double edged sword of free-market capitalism: If strawberry-picker wages rise then the price of strawberries will rise too. But then wal-mart won't sell as many strawberries, so they'll go and buy them from producers in other, cheaper, countries, eg mexico. This will drive the growers out of business, losing the Fed a whole bunch of taxes and earning them a barracking in congress. To keep the US growers in business then the government either looks the other way while the growers use illegal immigrants to get their cheap labour (the only way to keep it cheap enough is for the employees not to have any benefits, hence illegal immmigrants) or pays them a subsidy to keep the prices down. Obviously they're going to plump for the cheaper option where possible.
You can replace strawberry picking above with pretty much any industry in the country, be it animal, vegetable or mineral.
For example Fruit/veg picking is largely manual labour that can't cut its costs by mechanising, it relies on on low labour costs so the government looks the other way. Cotton growing is now largely mechanised and wouldn't benefit much from cheaper labour so instead they get huge subsidies to keep the price competitive.
This is also of course why the US is increasingly on the wrong side of the WTO. Free markets are great while you can sell your stuff cheaper than everyone else, but when they undercut you, it doesn't look so rosy; He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.
GLADLY! (Score:4, Interesting)
The NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, MLS, etc all have physically demanding jobs that pay very well, thank you.
And I know what you meant. 'physically demanding jobs' would mean 'manual labor'.
Somehow, oil rigs are a good place to find physically demanding work that pays well. The key is that the product or output is valuable...
We don't want to spend as much on our landscaping as we do on our SAP implementation, because the 'product' of our landscaper is not as valuable. That never will change. And productivity of landscapers is not the issue. The value of the product is.
So answer me this,
In Downeast Maine, blueberries used to be picked by the Mic Mac Indians from Canada and Maine. recently, however, the growers started importing migrant and illegal workers from 'wherever', and most were indeed Mexican. Other workes such as high school kids and a fair amount of regulars used to pick as well. I could make $600 a week back in the 60s, which was a darned good sumemr job save for the literally backbreaking work of raking berries out of bushes a foot high at most. bending over, carrying the boxes to the truck, etc was hard, but damn the money was good for a few weeks. But no more, the growers claimed a labor shortage. Truth is, the illegals are even cheaper than the Mic Macs, which is cheap indeed.
This is not about our 'value' of labor, so much as it is the profit to be gained by reducing cost further.
Remember Sen. John McCain, also known down here in Arizona as "Senator Lettuce"? He spouted off a couple of years ago (2006?) about how we 'couldn't' do the jobs Mexican immigrants did. In particular he made this statement:
"If I offered you a job picking lettuce in Yuma for fifty dollars an hour, you couldn't do it, my friend".
The next day, more than a handful of people showed up with resumes in hand, looking for the $50 an hour lettuce picking job. They were ready. Of course there are no jobs like that. Lettuce isn't worth that much.
One of the lies is that this is about wages. It is about profits.
Nobody has a dog in this immigraiton fight except the ordinary citizen:
- Big Business likes cheaper labor, it equals both profits and lower costs of healthcare and such.
- Federal government doesn't want to rile Business.
- Democrats see Mexican immigrants as future Democrats.
- Republicans dare not offend them, lest they become Democrats.
- Labor unions see them as future members. Sooner or later.
- State governments don't want Business to move to another state or overseas, which they will do anyways.
Don't be surprised that the 'virtual fence' doesn't work. Ineffective measures will be a key component in the federal government's war on immigration. Reagan's '86 (or was it '87?) immigration reform had three main features:
- Amnesty. This worked, mostly.
- Securing the borders. No money, no securing the borders. This worked famously.
- Deportation of undesirables and future illegals. No money. This also worked famously.
The current plans will be more of the same. Amnesty is crucial, as it bring the Democratic Party new members, aids the labor unions, and gives Business the same workers at pretty much the same pay. Failing to secure the borders ensures continuing supplies of cheaper labor. Deportation is of course pointless if the border isn't secured. In fact, deportation is a free trip home to visit family and educate others on how to 'do it' in the U.S.
We need change, alright. Arizona's employer law is a start. But I'm not hopeful. We need to vote out the scoundrels. Sadly, all of our Presidential candidates seem to be drinking the same Kool-aid on this issue.
We also need to stop rewarding moving jobs offshore. We don't need to offer incentives for keeping jobs here, just not incentives for sending them overseas...
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I couldn't believe it the other day, I heard that a major Houston rodeo was being 'blackmailed' by the Hispanic community down there...that if they didn't print everything and make announcements in Spanish, they were going to be boycotted
That really doesn't sound likely, if they had trouble understanding the rodeo why were they there in the first place? Boycotting something you don't go to anyway doesn't make sense.
So I looked it up:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/5573321.html [chron.com]
I don't know where you heard that (right wing media playing on people's prejudices no doubt) but you might want to consider the propriety of that source in future. They threatened a boy
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They should have known (Score:5, Funny)
I have a simpler solution (Score:5, Funny)
You joke, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
The chutzpah is unbelievable.
Re:You joke, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Mexicans sending money home - surplus money.
Other Latin Americans illegally entering the country and sending money home - lose money.
This is also not just Mexico, but all over the world. In some places it is actually legal. Poland is exporting workforce to the UK and importing from Belorussia and Ukraine. Romania is exporting workforce to Italy and Spain and is importing from Moldova. And so on. And all of them try to restrict influx while very happily consuming money sent home by gastarbeihters.
Re:You joke, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
But she also talked about the utter lack of affordable housing for the workers, the huge crime problem that comes with (and between) them, the large camps of them that live under bridges, etc. But the Romanians (largely) she referred to come and do it, rack up the cash, and them take it or send it home. The main point was that this is as old as time (well, as old as relatively modern civilization, anyway). Sure, the Romans did it at the point of a spear, and the (ironically named) Romanians are doing it out of an interest in clawing their way back from the ravages of life under a typically nasty Socialist regime... but the notion of having "other people" do certain kinds of work is, literally, a classic.
Re:You joke, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
From the all knowing wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
[ tinfoil ]
Why, it's almost as if illegal immigration from Mexico is overlooked by the US Government as a method of foreign aid to Mexico. US corporations get cheap disposable labor ( if the workers complain they get deported ), Mexico gets an infusion of cash to prop up their government.
[
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Personally, I'm all for illegal immigration, Mexican food just isn't the same with a legal immigrant cooking it.
Cheers.
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Why, it's almost as if illegal immigration from Mexico is overlooked by the US Government as a method of foreign aid to Mexico. US corporations get cheap disposable labor ( if the workers complain they get deported ), Mexico gets an infusion of cash to prop up their government.
It's part of the circle. We are the largest consumer of Mexican drugs (we're one of the world's largest producers of cannabis but still consume the lion's share of the product from mexico... we're also the world's largest consumer of cocaine as per the CIA WFB) which both puts money and crime into their country. We support military regimes in Mexico; you could buy a car in Brazil and drive towards Canada and the hardest part to get through would probably be Mexico. There's 16 year olds toting M-16s and we
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The chutzpah is unbelievable.
I'd be more inclined to say "admirable." Given that it is estimated that more than 10% of Mexico's GDP comes from money sent back home from the US he's doing everything he can to improve his economy. Just think about his situation: he gets to govern a country with an income that goes up when people leave the country. People who are out of the country don't consume servives or materials and don't commit crimes. He should be doing everything he can to keep people coming across Mexico's southern border.
Well, it worked for us (Score:3, Interesting)
I am doubtful that the reverse will happen here, but the main reason why they come here is simple; MONEY. W's building a fence is a total joke. Whether physical or vir
Why bother? (Score:3, Funny)
It's hopeless anyway (Score:5, Funny)
The Six Million Peso Man [youtube.com]
Stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
But, I suppose anything is better than coming up with a sensible immigration policy. Gotta keep those high-paying fruit picking, chicken boning, and christmas tree cutting jobs local.
Re:Stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, you wouldn't.
Ideology is easy when it doesn't hurt you (or, in this case, your pocket).
Re:Stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
Like it or not, we don't have the workforce to fill out those sorts of jobs anymore, and frankly it doesn't make any economic sense to force a decently educated worker into a job that could be filled for much less cost by someone who has no education at all. If nothing else, there is a huge opportunity cost for our economy when you force a worker that is capable of working some kind of high automation line job, into the kind of crap work that was common 100 years ago...It makes far more sense to send the work to another country in that case.
It always annoys me when people like you think that, if only we paid the fruit pickers more and threw out all the migrant workers, then our economy would somehow boom. The only thing that would boom is the cost of the fruit, and that makes everyone who buys it poorer, it makes fruit from other countries more competitive in the marketplace, and that drives domestic fruit producers out of business. What a great plan.
Re:Stupid. (Score:5, Interesting)
Ahh... so the best option for everyone is to ensure illegal aliens arrive en mass. If they complain about low wages, hazardous working conditions or exploitive management ( see: Company Store [wikipedia.org] ) then we deport them.
Right. Nice way to maintain a permanent underclass.
After all, it's not like if we required proof of citizenship and forced the agricultural industry to pay decent wages those workers would spend any money here in the US, right?
Or if we permitted those workers to come to the US on visas and bring their families with them the practice of sending remittances to their home country might dry up or significantly decrease thus keeping more money in the US?
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The reason illegal immigrants
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People like me? Wow. I'd no idea I've such power.
.
To be clear, I'm in favor of legal immigration. I'm also in favor of making that easier to reduce wait times and backlogs.
I don't want to see anyone exploited because they're afraid to go to the authorities if their working conditions are unsafe, their wages are substandard, et. al.
And I'd suggest that manufacturing in
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To offset this, they hire more people than they need, so those people can pay into the pension fund, and keep the whole thin
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It's hard to blame the auto companies...They've got a lot of problems that aren't of their making. Their pension system is like our social security system...It's got a lot of people drawing on it, and less and less people paying into it.
Where is the problem not of their making? I'm not seeing it here.
US automakers made shitty cars and blew their good name so the Japanese made a bunch of brilliant cars and now the US automakers are fucked. If they don't suck union dick the unions will strike and make them look like assholes and they'll sell even less cars. But this is really their fault because they blew it in the seventies with total shitpiles everywhere. The Japanese made light little unibody cars while we were still fucking with stub
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Actually, the reason is that you put someone through 12 years of school, and he doesn't want to work in a chicken processing plant anymore.
Nonsense. People don't want to do those jobs at the wages offered, and the work conditions present.
it doesn't make any economic sense to force a decently educated worker into a job that could be filled for much less cost by someone who has no education at all.
More pure nonsense. Are you trying to tell me the education system is that much different than it was 30 years
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Anyway, you're wrong. We were hemmoraging manufacturing long before 30 years ago. First it all fled the North, to the South, where the workers were cheap, and there were no unions. Then it fled to other countries...Little countries called "Japan" and "Taiwan" were gearing up to kick ass in the 70's.
And it's nonsense to say that its a waste to
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There are probably a number of people qualified to come and do my job. Frankly, that doesn't bother me, because I have a lot of ski
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Second when I was 12 years old I worked in the fields, pulling weeds of all things. Yes the work sucked badly
and the pay was crap but I had a job and earned a wage. A few years later I ended up working in a meat packing plant I was 16 at the time. Yes it was a nasty job but yet again here is a legal white male citizen doing a job that all the idiots say nobody would do. A few y
Re:Stupid. (Score:5, Insightful)
Damn Chinese they kept building it for decades upon decades all in a feeble attempt. Everyone knows that the Great Wall of china was a complete failure.
sarcasm aside it CAN work and BE effective if it was not half-assed. Therein lies the problem. The idiots in Washington get all puffy and hem and haw all over the issue while in reality they secretly don't care and want to allow the illegal immigrants in the country. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that every single one of those congress critters has an illegal wither cleaning their house, pool or keeping up the yard. They dont want to stop the flow of very cheap labor coming into the US.
Re:Stupid. (Score:4, Interesting)
How much money are you willing to sink into putting a goddamn WALL around the country? I frankly don't think it will ever work, and sure if we put as much money into it as we put into Iraq, I bet we could stop the immigration across the land, but I don't think that would be sufficient in the long run. If people want in, they'll get in.
It never ceases to make me laugh how hard people fight to keep immigrants from doing jobs that they would never do, not in a million years. If you're worried about their treatment, then make it legal, give them the right to sue over poor conditions and workplace injuries. Tax their salaries to help pay for the demographic hellhole that will be this country for the next 30 or so years...Worried about your job? In 10 years, as the boomers retire en masse the workforce is literally going to shrink. That means we will need those people; we will need their labor, and we will need the tax revenue to pay for services for the huge chunk of society that's going to be retired.
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But if I did that, who would I ever get to mow my lawn?
I sure don't want to have to do it!
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You've said this twice, with zero backup at all. Care to give some insight into this (false) theory? The wall(s) were WILDLY successful in stopping the constant threat of invasion from the North. During the 15-1600s, the Manchus tried for close to A HUNDRED YEARS to get past the walls, only succeeding after a traitorous border official OPENED THE GATES for them to let them through. Where do you get your info that the W
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Well, it did help a little to keep the damn Mongorians [comedycentral.com] out for a while, but they kept knocking down the Shitty Wall.
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Indeed.
A better idea would have been to arm Lou Dobbs with automatic weapons.
As the previous architect of... (Score:5, Interesting)
Wide Area Surveillance is, like any real world 'enterprise' solution, complex. That is not to say it is not achievable, it is just not something you decide to do on a whim
This means that during the bidding process for these jobs, as with any $$$LARGE$$$ government contract, much of the sub-contracting can be political and very rarely results in a proffered solution that is 'best in breed' in all (or even most) areas.
This is all very normal. The real difficulty is in identifying which aspects of a WAS solution will kill your project. For example, the article claims that using off the shelf commercial software for dispatchers was a serious issue. I can tell you from experience, there's no way that this derailed the project. There are several companies (the one I used to work at is one for example) that specialize in integrating their 'command & control' (for lack of a more encompassing term) suites with 3rd party streaming video, network systems, hardware devices, et cetera. The relative cost of these systems varies from very low (with a fair amount of services work being entailed) to moderate (where you get far more C&C stuff than you plan to use but it's there if you need it in the future - but they fully integrate the things you do need off the bat.)
Usually the biggest problems are from poor planning at the start or 'mid course correction' by people who didn't make careful consideration of their options up front regarding the physical infrastructure required. A good example of this is 'pole placement.' One of the easiest, conceptually, methods of watching swathe of territory where there isn't supposed to be much activity is to use a high quality camera mounted (usually mounted on a Pan/Tilt/Zoom gimbal) on a tall pole. How tall? THAT is the question my friends. From a cost point of view you want to put them up as high as is feasible given the terrain and what the local survey should be. This means less poles, less cameras, and less overall costs to cover a wider area; HOWEVER, the higher you put that camera the more difficult the installation of the pole because I assure you that putting a camera 60 feet off the ground results in shaking, deflection, twisting, and all kinds of other frame stabilization nightmares. Usually what happens is that the project denotes the max camera heights, assigns what types of poles/towers will support the cameras, how they will be built in order to overcome problems like these and then 6 months later they change the camera heights (usually because they want to cut out a few poles and the neighboring cameras must take up the slack), bingo you're well thought out and budgeted pole no longer serves your needs.
It is at this point that the reader will think 'ok, then we need to redesign the poles right? No big deal...' Sadly this does not usually happen. The change request costs associated outweight the money saved on the pole changes but that doesn't mean they won't still use the wrong poles and save a hundred thousand on camera costs, they'll just try to hack some solution like putting a frame stabilizer black box on the back of the camera, because that should work, right?
This is why I always laugh at NASA promises (Score:4, Insightful)
NASA, the FBI, etc. all seem to follow the same pattern. They get the idea in their head for something big (usually as the result of politicians putting it there or the need to make it look like they're doing something about some big problem). Then they contract the technical stuff out to some contractor who feeds them a line of bullshit (instead of hiring their own people to do it, the way NASA did it in the 60's). Then they hold a big press conference, in which they make grandiose promises about how great this new thing will be (the best ones are accompanied by CGI animation of said great thing). Then they give some contractor a shitload of money. Then the contractor ends up in delays and overruns, forcing government agency to give them even MORE money. Then the contractor either doesn't deliver anything usable at all, delivers a shoddy piece of shit that doesn't even come close to the original promise, or simply delays it until the administration changes or the project gets canceled. Rinse. Wash. Repeat.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
DHS vs basic math (Score:4, Informative)
"Boeing has already been paid $20.6 million for the pilot project, and in December, the DHS gave the firm another $65 million to replace the software with military-style, battle management software. "
"Boeing has said that the initial effort, while flawed, still has helped Homeland Security apprehend 2,000 illegal immigrants since September"
A quick division $85 600 000 / 2 000 gives $42 800 per illegal immigrant. And this is the cost to the taxpayer without personnel salaries and other expenses, just what was payed to Boeing. I strongly doubt that each illegal immigrant, if not apprehended, will cost the US tax payers $42 800.
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Immigrant labor has, historically, always been a boon to the economy. The only real issue here, is how poorly they're treated, and that has nothing to do with building walls.
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*sigh*
Chevrolet invested (just making up a number here) $120 million developing the Chevrolet Volt. So far, not a single unit has been sold! Dividing 120 million by zero tells us that the whole project has been a h
Boondoggle! (Score:2)
Development Issues (Score:5, Informative)
Boeing was hired as the project's integrator and instead of subcontracting or working with the existing systems tried to do everything themselves. Why? To keep as much money for themselves, of course. They ignored, at first, all the existing systems and tried to replace them with proprietary technology that would anchor them into govermnent contracts in perpetuity.
They failed. Now they have to rely on refined data from a government-developed system to produce any results at all. This is a pattern I've seen in 26 years of working for the government: we hire an outside vendor who comes in and has to rely on our knowledge to make anything work. In a lot of cases they get us to do much of their work for them. The vendor's employees get huge bonuses and we get downsized. Granted there are times where if you don't bring in someone from the outside nothing will change, but the number of times internal staff saves the vendor's ass has been, in my experience, much higher than the other way around.
Sometimes it's better to spend your money on what your own staff can do instead of just assuming that an outside vendor will automatically develop something better. For some reason, too many executives undervalue the abilities of their own people and hire big names like Boeing for many times what it would have cost to develop better systems in house. The Secure Border Initiative is apparently one of them.
Re:Development Issues (Score:4, Insightful)
If you do it yourself, you'll just be a manager of a larger group with more work, but no more pay.
If you hire Boeing, at least you know you'll be able to quite DHS in a few years and get a nice cooshy job as VP of Product Oversight for $1.5/mil a year for life, because of your aid in getting them the $4 billion contract.
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It'd be interesting to see which Congressman pushed on this project, and how much he/she got back from Boeing
I'M SHOCKED!! (Score:3, Insightful)
Good, Fast, Cheap... Pick Two (Score:2, Insightful)
It was never meant to work (Score:5, Interesting)
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This is by far the most sensible comment on this thread (though it had some close competitors, to be fair).
It's no secret that every major decision maker knows that we need the cheap labor, unless we're all suddenly willing one day to pay $300 for that head of lettuce. (IIRC only Mike Huckabee was brutally frank about it, and that was not a message his target audience wanted.) What's more, these same people, and various media types like Mr. Dobbs, know full well that illegals = ratings.
Remember the big ba
Simple solution (Score:2, Funny)
on illegals. The problem would disappear overnight.
Illegal Male 100 bucks
Illegal pregnant Female 300 bucks
Illegal child 400 bucks (smaller target)
I'd wager border incursions would fall off within two weeks of the practise
starting. Plus the 'sportsmen' would become better shots. A win-win situation.
Yeah, I do have too much time on my hands. My Grandparents stood in line to
get in legally. Why cannot others do the same? They are CRIMINAL
this is probably the most disappointing thing ever (Score:2, Troll)
The problem isn't immigration, it's corruption (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason Mexicans come to the US in droves is because their country is broken. Most of the police and half the military are on the take. Even the honest folks have decided to steer clear of the disaster.
Nothing America erects on that border is going to change the fact that Mexicans can make a decent and safe living in Mexico.
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I'm not saying we have to spend out tax dollars fixing Mexico. The history of previous American efforts to intervene in Mexico haven't exactly been positive.
I'm just identifying the problem. No one much discusses the issue of why Mexicans are leaving their country in the first place.
No fence is needed (Score:2, Insightful)
Catch an illegal and send him back, and that's all. If they really wanted to make the illegal aliens stay away, all they'd have to do would be to make illegal entry in this country a felony with a mandatory five year prison sentense for a first offense, fifteen years for a second
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Let me see if I understand this. I'm in some country starving to death, and your answer to keep me out is to threaten to throw me in a prison where I get 3 squares a day and a bed to sleep on
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And as to placing the penalty on those who do the hiring, that has its own problems. First, that's the way it's done now. They just sentenced someone from China who ran a local restaraunt for hiring illegals here in Springfield. That tactc isn't keeping illegals out, now is it?
Second, you can't put a corporation in prison, and corporate leaders are almo
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It's kind of hard to walk here from Rwanda. I know, I tried. It's very wet, and after a while I couldn't breath.
Weird, this hasn't been federal law since the 1950s.
However Arizona pa
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Also, if you really want to stop illegal immigration, don't make illegal entry a felony -- make employing illegal immigrants a felony, and start throwing the people who employ them in jail. If the demand dries up, the supply will follow.
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It would only work if we let GM, Ford, and Chrysler use prison labor to build cars for free. Or if we let mining companies use prison labor down in the mines. Or some similar plan that lets US companies take advantage of the low c
a great success! (Score:3, Funny)
Congratulations!
No, we just think you're stupid (Score:5, Informative)
Relevant quote: If you're so woefully underinformed, just keep from commenting, ok?
Re:No, we just think you're stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
What Germans are doing is penalizing children born to illegal immigrants.
These kids become criminals from birth, but you Enlightened Europeans probably see no problem with that either (since the kids should have chosen better parents, right?)
Re:No, we just think you're stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
an illegal immigrant brings in her 1 year old daughter to the US. The child grows up there, but remains illegal. Ok, so she isn't a criminal from birth, just a criminal from age 1. That doesn't strike me as a huge improvement.
I want to preface this statement by saying that we continually poop on Mexico and so the situation is inherently unbalanced, but the idea is to motivate people to fix the problems in their own countries instead of just coming here. But again, to be fair, in the case of Mexico (and some other countries, really) we have created their situation and so it's not fair to tell them to go and fix it. Just need that disclaimer there to complete my statement :P
consider some poor guy in his twenties - he flees from his homeland because he'd starve otherwise. His only viable choice is to enter a developed country illegally.
In some countries which are now desert largely due to human activities (deforestation, irrigation) people really can starve because there is no food and no means to support food. But in many other countries, people are starving because they won't work the land. In most countries there is land out in the boonies that no one wants where you can live as a farmer. Boring life, but it's a living.
People fleeing themselves, I have little compassion for (I need to apply the attitude to myself on occasion as well.) People fleeing someone else, okay, I feel sorry for them and am inclined to give them aid.
I can't feel bad about Mexicans etc. running up here to the US to get health care and education because let's face it, between NAFTA and the War On Some Drugs and supporting or preventing this or that coup we have crapped up Central America beyond belief. By the same token, anyone who comes over here from the mid-east (for peaceful reasons, anyway) is well-justified in my book. But immigration creates real social problems and it's unfortunate when that happens to people who don't deserve it. (Life, of course, is not fair.)
I my mind it makes a lot more sense to try and help that country they are trying to escape from, rather than handing out citizenship to a few of it's inhabitants, or it's inhabitants' children.
I agree wholeheartedly. But that's not the way to make money, so you're not going to convince any capitalistic society to get on board.
About the only country I think you might potentially get really interested in helping the world would be China - but they'd want to do it their way. And I don't think the results would be pretty. It's really never all that good when a whole country is on the same page, to be honest. (This is where I invoke Godwin's law, right?)
Really though it would probably be enough for the various industrialized nations of the world to stop defecating on everyone else.
For Americans it's very important to think that being born within a country constitutes a right to be there - because they know that they've immigrated a few generations back, at best. Europeans are more likely think of their country as something which belongs to their people.
Yeah well, they're both wrong. The "native" Americans (who migrated to the northwestern part of the area now known as the Estados Unidos Norteamericanos about 12,000 years ago) had it right; the land does not belong to us, we belong to the land. Not all of them felt that nobly about it of course but frankly, the idea of drawing lines on a map and suggesting that they have significance is folly. The only regions that make sense are ones with natural boundaries -- Or as they are sometimes called today, "bioregions."
Humans are destroying the land's ability to support humanity. I don't want to get in a full-on debate over the "noble savage" but around here people built temporary homes and burned them, starting fires that truly did manage the forests of the area. Suggesting that people with a strong oral tradition who lived here for 10
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Re:forced to deliver early, for political reasons (Score:4, Insightful)
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"Can this software do X?"
"Absolutely! In fact, it had that in the last version, and this one's even better!"
"We'll take 8!"
Re:forced to deliver early, for political reasons (Score:4, Insightful)
Just Business (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:forced to deliver early, for political reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
And a slashdot user once again trots out their favorite villain without actually using their damn head.
So, you're saying that Boeing told DHS that this would not work in its first prototype/deployment? They were under orders to deploy something they knew would not work? Or is it possible that the procurement people said, "We need something that can do X, can you provide that on this timetable?" And the vendor said they could, and that it would work. Is your position that the president looked over their proposal, saw the technical flaws and systems integrations problems with the laptops and software, and said, "no one will notice, do it anyway," or that perhaps it's not the executive branch's leadership job to know when a vendor is lying about the compatibility of the components they're stitching together? Why aren't you complaining about Boeing, for lying about their ability to actually do this, and agreeing to take the contract?
Re:forced to deliver early, for political reasons (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:forced to deliver early, for political reasons (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:forced to deliver early, for political reasons (Score:4, Informative)
Besides, big deal, China can do it too. Have they been spending billions of dollars since the mid-80s to come up with their success?
Re:forced to deliver early, for political reasons (Score:5, Informative)
SDI had two purposes. One: win the cold war. Only we could afford to go into space over and over. Two: produce technology for the weaponization of space.
Uh, do you know the contents of every US military satellite currently orbiting?
No? I didn't think so.
The technology, however, is on the way. Being able to do these things from the earth is much harder than being able to do them from space (aside from power requirement issues, which can be solved by spending more money to put up more mass.) If you can fly a 747 with a chemical laser in it and shoot down a missile (done) then you can build the laser anti-missile satellites. Especially since our spy program has taught us so much about optics and tracking.
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He's simply the poster child for incompetent government.
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Ah, but a troll that so closely matches the dimwitted, but frequently tossed-around memes that one sees here, whether a troll or not, requires that rebutal. Otherwise, the rest of the bunch that simply see a rant that dovetails with their world view say, "Yeah, man - tell it like is! The Man..." blah blah. If you're going to troll, you've got to do a much more nuanced job of it. At least invoke the Trilateral Commission, or fake up some money-making scheme that allows D
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Boeing just got another big chunk of my tax dollars to fix the problem of using the incorrect software in their initial system. That hardly sounds like holding feet to the fire. When they are required to refund some of their initial payment, or the process is opened to their competitors, get back to me, m'kay?
Re:forced to deliver early, for political reasons (Score:4, Insightful)
No they aren't. It's common knowledge about all the stuff that went on behind closed-doors with our current leaders...repubs aren't better at hiding it, they just don't care that they are doing it. Dems are the ones that try to convince you they aren't lying...Repubs say "hey, here is what I have to say, it's full of shit. You know it, I know it, and we also both know you won't do jack about it."
There is definitely a difference.
Re:Oh Vey (Score:4, Insightful)
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Pareto Optimality. It's what corporations live for. They have stats that prove around 80% of their customers are happy. Never mind that no-one in the company cares about the other 20%, nor is making any effort to increase quality into that margin. No-one in a corporation is trying to be perfect, they are all trying to be good enough to meet the 80% service level target. If you are a per
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If you are a large multinational or your employee is a Canadian, you can use TN and L visas. For all the others, H1B is the only way since green cards take way too long.