Keep the foreigners out, unless they want to die!!!

Somedays the world just makes less sense

GLOBAL UNEMPLOYMENT IS A HUGE THREAT!!...

Job Losses Pose a Threat to Stability Worldwide
Just last week, the new United States director of national intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, told Congress that instability caused by the global economic crisis had become the biggest security threat facing the United States, outpacing terrorism.

...SO LET'S HIRE FOREIGNERS TO FIGHT IN IRAQ...

U.S. Military Will Offer Path to Citizenship
Stretched thin in Afghanistan and Iraq, the American military will begin recruiting skilled immigrants who are living in this country with temporary visas, offering them the chance to become United States citizens in as little as six months.

BUT DON'T GIVE THEM THE JOBS AMERICANS WANT...

(Computerworld Article)
"A provision intended to require banks receiving federal bailout funds to give hiring priority to U.S. workers over foreigners with H-1B visas was left in the economic stimulus package when U.S. House and Senate negotiators agreed on a compromise bill this week."

EVEN IF IT MAKES LOTS OF ECONOMIC SENSE

The Cheapest Bailout: Thomas Friedman, NY Times
“All you need to do is grant visas to two million Indians, Chinese and Koreans,” said Shekhar Gupta, editor of The Indian Express newspaper. “We will buy up all the subprime homes. We will work 18 hours a day to pay for them. We will immediately improve your savings rate — no Indian bank today has more than 2 percent nonperforming loans because not paying your mortgage is considered shameful here. And we will start new companies to create our own jobs and jobs for more Americans.”

“Dear America, please remember how you got to be the wealthiest country in history. It wasn’t through protectionism, or state-owned banks or fearing free trade. No, the formula was very simple: build this really flexible, really open economy, tolerate creative destruction so dead capital is quickly redeployed to better ideas and companies, pour into it the most diverse, smart and energetic immigrants from every corner of the world and then stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat, stir and repeat.”

For a "civil" society

Never felt so patriotic. Support the The Pink Chaddi Campaign. It is about equality, it is about dignity, it is about freedom. It is about my daughters.

Obama: The Poetry

HOPE: Obama wins

It is rare nowadays when one feels hope, it is difficult to rise above one cynicism & indifference towards riots in Kenya, murder in Pakistan, deaths in Iraq, SUV driven petro dollar funded terrorism, pollution, global warming...

But today was different. Barack Hussein Obama won!!

Father is muslim from Kenya, grandfather used to herd sheep, mother from Kansas, studied in Indonesia, smoked cocaine, opposed Iraq war, went to Harvard, teaches constitutional law, speaks the truth and speaks well.

I have a man crush on this guy. Strongly recommend his first book "Dreams from my father".

Amazing this happen in a democracy. I am currently reading the book "India after Gandhi" (Ramchandra Guha). Recommend that to feel hopeful about India.

'Free trade' and 'freedom of movement'

Bill Gates calls for infinite visas to fill the 'critical shortage' of high tech workers in US. Greg Mankiw's blog post has on this has attracted the expected spectrum of opinions on this issue.

Unfortunately the spectrum does not go wide enough to cover complete 'freedom of movement' for all people across national boundaries. While restrictions on movement of capital, goods, knowledge are rapidly reducing, existing barriers on free flow of labor does retard our march towards the overall goal of "global economic integration and interdependence" for everyone's benefit.

Clearly labor markets are getting integrated using Interent ( where services can be provided from a remote location ) and the trend towards temporary and short term labor mobility replacing permanent migration.

All this means countries that choose to isolate themselves from these integrated labor markets should be ready to pay a price for that choice

Tough Interview

More often than not interviewers on Indian Television are servile, squeamish, hagiographical when it comes to politicians, powerful bureaucrats, and big-successful businessmen.

Here is an exception...Udayan Mukherjee on CNBC interviewing Kamal Nath, questioning him on the government's moves to control cement prices. I wish we had more of this.

Good show... Udayan.

But the question still remains: Why is Government targeting cement companies...

is it because mid last year cement companies reneged on their promise to reduce prices

or is it a surgical move to burst the real estate bubble

or a fear of cartelization since 40% of capacity is owned by the top 4 players

or if this was indeed a move to counter inflation it has clearly backfired as cement companies hiked prices in defiance

I hope this is as Surjit Bhalla says a sign of the rise of markets and decline of dangerous "populist" politicians used to passing on orders of the high command.

Clearly politicians and media owe us better answers and insights

Why God exists??

A fascinating article in New York Times titled "Darwin's God" By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG, March 4, 2007 :

In the world of evolutionary biology, the question is not whether God exists but why we believe in him. Is belief a helpful adaptation or an evolutionary accident?

there seems an inherent human drive to believe in something transcendent, unfathomable and otherworldly, something beyond the reach or understanding of science.

Scientists studying the evolution of religion agree on one point that religious belief is an outgrowth of brain architecture that evolved during early human history. What they disagree about is why a tendency to believe evolved, whether it was because belief itself was adaptive or because it was just an evolutionary byproduct, a mere consequence of some other adaptation in the evolution of the human brain.

Evolutionary Byproduct

Hardships of early human life favored the evolution of certain cognitive tools, among them the ability to infer the presence of organisms that might do harm, to come up with causal narratives for natural events and to recognize that other people have minds of their own with their own beliefs, desires and intentions. Psychologists call these tools, respectively, agent detection, causal reasoning and theory of mind.

Agent detection evolved because assuming the presence of an agent — which is jargon for any creature with volitional, independent behavior — is more adaptive than assuming its absence.

It means our brains are primed for it, ready to presume the presence of agents even when such presence confounds logic.

The human brain has evolved the capacity to impose a narrative, complete with chronology and cause-and-effect logic, on whatever it encounters, no matter how apparently random.

Gods, by virtue of their strange physical properties and their mysterious superpowers, make fine candidates for causes of many of these unusual events.”

Belief in the separation of the body (the visible) and the mind (the invisible). If you can posit minds in other people that you cannot verify empirically, suggests Paul Bloom, a psychologist and the author of “Descartes’ Baby,” published in 2004, it is a short step to positing minds that do not have to be anchored to a body. And from there, he said, it is another short step to positing an immaterial soul and a transcendent God.

Evolutionary Adaptation

Intriguing as the "byproduct" logic might be, there is another way to think about the evolution of religion: that religion evolved because it offered survival advantages to our distant ancestors. This is where the action is in the science of God debate, with a coterie of adaptationists arguing on behalf of the primary benefits, in terms of survival advantages, of religious belief.

Religion made people feel better, less tormented by thoughts about death, more focused on the future, more willing to take care of themselves. As William James put it, religion filled people with “a new zest which adds itself like a gift to life . . . an assurance of safety and a temper of peace and, in relation to others, a preponderance of loving affections.”

The advantage might have worked at the group level too, with religious groups outlasting others because they were more cohesive, more likely to contain individuals willing to make sacrifices for the group and more adept at sharing resources and preparing for warfare.

Amartya Sen and IT Industry

Giving the keynote address at the NASSCOM 2007 India Leadership Forum in Mumbai on 7 February 2007 Amartya Sen talks about the moral imperative for the IT sector to feel some responsibility towards making India a more equitable country

My point is not that the IT industry should do something for the country at large, for that it does anyway... rather, is that it can do even more, indeed in some ways, much more.

Why assume there is any obligation at all for IT to do anything other than minding its own business? I think part of the [reason] for human interest in justice and equity...lies in reciprocity....

IT has benefited from

...the visionary move, originally championed by Jawaharlal Nehru, to develop centres of excellent technical education in India i.e. IITs, IIMs.

...the nature of Indian society and traditions [that] have tended to support the pursuit of specialized excellence

...a general attitude of openness in India to influences from far and near - of admiring excellence no matter where it is produced.

...the love of mathematics that has inspired so many young Indians throughout history,

...many ways Indian IT has depended on what we can call TI, that is, "talkative Indians."

Gary Kildall : A good life !?

As the popular press celebrates the 25 years of PC revolution, and recounts the PC stories where the heros are Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell etc., it is also important to remember Gary Kildall who could have/should have been where Bill Gates is today.

I came across this article about Gary Kildall, head of Digital Research and who wrote CP/M operating system. According to article/legend when IBM came knocking for an OS to run its PC, Kildall was of flying his aerobatic biplane, and left his wife Dorothy to do the talking who in turn was too hassled planning for vacation to take the IBM proposal more seriously.

The article quotes former CEO of Symantec Gordon Eubanks: "Gary could have owned this business [ie, computing] if he had made the right strategic decisions... He did not care that much. Dorothy ran the business and he ran the technical side, and they did not get on."

Article goes on to mention : "Kildall died in 1994 at the age of 52 from injuries received in a biker bar brawl during a night out in Monterey, California."

A more sympathetic story in Dr. Dobb's journal mentions the cause of Kildall's death as falling from a ladder in the bar. The story refers to Kildall as an academic type who cleared the path on which Microsoft flourished.

He starts of happy, a laid back academic -- "Gary was happy in his marriage, happy to be living by the ocean, happy not to have gone to Vietnam, and most definitely happy in his job". -- whose accomplishments though path breaking was overshadowed by the success of Microsoft "his resentment of Bill gates was inevitable" but "never expressed publicly"

He did become wealthy by selling his company to Novell 1991.

Gary then moved to the West Lake Hills suburb of Austin, Texas. The Novell deal had made him a wealthy man. His Austin house was a sort of lakeside car ranch, with stables for 14 sports cars and a video studio in the basement. He owned and flew his own Lear jet and had at least one boat

A great quote from Tom Rolander's eulogy at Kildall's funeral " ...It was then that I learned that computers were built to make money, not minds."

In some ways every competitor to Microsoft has been a repeat of the Kildall story. Kildall was passionate about software, Bill was passionate about the "business of software".

Everyone is a hero, depending on your perspective.

Gordon Eubanks sets the record right about the MS deal with IBM in this interview. (very interesting reading)

Norlin's Maxim & Digital Footprints

AOL's accidental release of the search records, while giving an interesting peek into private livesof its users, is another proof of Norlin's" Maxim: that "The internet inexorably pulls information from the private domain into the public domain"

Inspite of Norlin's Maxim, enterprises are clearly duty bound to treat users/customer's digital footprints with same level of care as they would treat their credit card numbers. I don't think I am comfortable with AOL/Time Warner having any such data in its possession in a manner that is potentially accessible to someone/anyone. My identity and my digital footprints should be inaccessible to anyone that includes people within organizational boundaries.

Digital lifestyle does leave footprints, your entire life is being recorded. Here is interesting article that appearded on this issue: "Beyond the question of informed consent lie larger questions: Should all of this electronic flotsam and jetsam be archived in the first place? What are the consequences for us if our digital footprints survive indefinitely? Who should decide whether they do survive?