car12

How is the statistic of lower dipping fertility rates inside Muslim countries of relevance when talking about:

the "breeding like rabbits" image that politicians use to drum up fear among uninformed voters

The fertility rates of muslim immigrants are far higher than the natives which will lead to a decisive demographic and political shift, which is what those politicians are talking about.

The post that I was replying to was talking exactly about fertility rates of second, third and beyond generation immigrants in Netherlands.

And what was found is that females from south-east Asia had a big drop in fertility whereas Turks continued to have large families, comparatively.

So, no, the above research specifically disproves your argument.

What it is pussyfooting around is that there is not that drastic of a drop in fertility rates of muslims.

I guess it shouldn't be hard to conceive where Islamic parties start having a major voice in elections because of demographics.

Consider an individual John from Texas with a total population of N.

Initially John's chances of getting a job: 1/N

Now, with the arrival of new immigrant, John's chances: 1/(N+1) i.e. he's worse off.

Sure it turned out better for the new immigrant and he can earn way more than his original country and thus this is better for humanity and the globe but it is of little relief to John who is worse off now.

My assumptions in this:

- John is a low skilled worker who will not be easily able to switch to another line of work like a software developer

- John does not have significant savings to fall back on.

Another fun fact:

- The will to let the low skilled immigrant in, in today's environment does not stem necessarily from a position of goodwill, rather it is a calculated position to keep the numbers of a voting bloc which consistently votes for a given party, constant. This can be easily explained by seeing where the opposition to limiting immigration comes from.

So keeping in mind the above 2 points, it becomes readily apparent that what politics has gotten good at is winning elections and not betterment of people. One of the parties has discovered that one of the easiest "hacks" or "optimizations" is to keep importing poor people and that way you will have a steady stream of voters, otherwise you might actually have to start improving the stock of existing population.

This is somewhat analogous to how simply being good at a written test for a position does not necessarily mean you're a good fit for that position but you've simply optimized for the selection process.

All of this to say that as far as a hypothetical John is concerned, it is of no merit to him that the world is a bit more efficient because a person from Bangladesh is able to work with a little more efficiency, indeed whatever small gains from that are outright eclipse by an increased competition in the local pool of jobs and resources.

You can't win elections if you actually start talking about most contributing factors. In that case, very soon you'll be discussing immigration as your most important point and start sounding like Trump. Woops!

And that period to get assimilated and become net positive might be a period of +- few decades which is an insanely long time in today's world of super fast moving money and economic conditions and 4 year hyper partisan election cycles.

That is true but we're talking about the still remaining low skilled jobs that simply could not be outsourced.

Now with a high number of low skilled immigrants competing with natives for those same remaining low skilled jobs that couldn't be outsourced, the outcome is worse for existing population.

I wonder how much effect immigration has had on the matter of inequality.

I'm going off these assumptions:

-> Lesser immigration would've led to a higher GDP/capita figure for US.

-> More resources to subsidize college and lesser cut-throat competition for jobs.

-> Employers would be forced to pay higher wages and people would be more easily to retrain for different jobs.

-> Bonus points: We can help Africa and South american countries with a much higher monetary amount and resources to help them catch up to a developed world status.

clearly this is no "hack" to win elections because it is not working as you state.

Like I just said, it's working extremely reliably. Look at California, the opposition is decimated there not by the merit of liberal parties work or argument but by the sheer number of immigrant votes. Granted there is a delay factor such that new immigrants can't vote but the mechanism of immigrants voting for liberal party is still at work.

This is just for state level, I predict something similar happening at Federal level elections in a 1-2 election cycle period. Trump election was an exception IMO.

I should clarify, I meant: higher numerical intake limits for immigrants to developed countries.

Basically, most of the liberal parties have found this "hack" to win elections. Where they wouldn't be able to win elections normally, they simply keep importing more and more people, and these immigrants reliably vote for these parties. Eventually, these places end up becoming one party states. Consider the case of California as an example.

It's quite an indictment of the democratic processes.

News items like these are then used as fodder for higher immigration limits so that the liberal parties keep getting elected further, even as they enjoy less and less support from their already existing citizens.

What is a proto?

I hope they move on to using Matrix. I think the successor to IRC ought to be not slack or any other closed source chat app but an open source one.

Yeah sure, if I'm a huge enterprise and I want to run something like elasticsearch in house, I have 2 choices:

1. Get elasticsearch delivered as an inscrutable binary blob

2. Get elasticsearch delivered as binary blob but with its source as well so that I can see what ES is doing underneath the hood.

In most cases of proprietary software, the big clients eventually in case #1, do end up getting the source of the proprietary software as well. Just that the source is for viewing only not for modification.

What ES did was better than that, they made source available to anyone (including the small fish). This doesn't weaken the need for ES to make money through selling their sofware, just that the purpose of releasing the source is more towards "viewing" it and less towards making modifications and reselling it.

if companies can't make money by selling proprietary software, who's going to want to be a software developer?

And that did happen, we don't have a single decent affordable personal computing ecosystem at this point. The only good personal computing ecosystem is with Apple, which makes its money by selling proprietary software mostly but is not affordable to ordinary joe.

What an ordinary person can buy, is an ad-riddled machine like a windows desktop or a chromebook, where although the software is not proprietary, they're basically selling you ads(directly or indirectly through your data).

To tie it back in, in fact open source software did rise up and proprietary software did go down, but we lost the pure software aspect that came with proprietary software. Basically, open source software is being used to sell you ads and if the ads based business goes down/stops so does open source ecosystem.

If you haven't realized, the biggest parts of the open source economy are propped by FAANG and Microsoft. If these big whales go away, open source's vibrancy will vanish in a poof.

In fact open source software creation is hugely concentrated to North America and by extension FAANG. So if FAANG were to stop sponsoring open source, we'll be back to proprietary software age soon. So, I'm not convinced of your argument that "open source" has won conclusively.

Yeah, slice it whichever way, but this basically looks shitty on AWS.

At the end of the day, Open source developers need to be able to put food on the table. What AWS is doing here, is like a logging company, recklessly destroying things in its path as long as what they do is "legal", they don't seem to care.

Thing is, we should look at Open source software just like a precious rainforest or any other natural resource. If every company started doing what AWS were doing, soon there would be very few companies like Elastic in business and that kind of open software will cease to exist.

But hey, at least HNers won't be able to argue about technicalities of the license then, right?

I wonder if anyone here would agree to pay a small subscription fee, say $2/month, to get a text only version of websites. No to minimal images, no to almost minimal CSS flash/bloat/design. Pretty close to reading things on a newspaper.

While I haven't used a system76 Thelio, while we're discussing System76, I can speak about a Galago pro that I bought from system76.

Noteworthy, because I was one of those Mac refugees who needed a non-mac machine now that I don't like the new macbook keyboards or insane price bump that macs got.

I bought a 16 GB Ram, 14" Galago pro with 512 GB SSD with Ubuntu on it. Battery life is around 2 hours. Not too good compared to a macbook.

- Keyboard is pretty nice, each key has a comfortable travel to it.

- The trackpad is awful or at least compared to what I'd gotten used to using the macbook for last many years. The trackpad feels rough, is not as responsive or smoother as the mac touchpad either. The click buttons aren't too nice to click either.

Bottom line is that the next time I need to buy another Linux laptop, I'll be looking to try out the newer System76 to make sure they've fixed their touchpad, if not, I'll go with Dell XPS developer edition, no questions asked.

Surprisingly, the touchpad being what it is, I've not seen it mentioned in the reviews of Galago pro all that much, I suspect it's because there are not too many ex-mac owners buying these, the touchpad feels like it belongs to year 2008.