Psychopolitik 2.0

This site will be switching servers soon.

Also, I am moving.  Will let you know when I’m back on.  Check out the blogroll.

If you don’t hear anything in the next few days, it’s because my home computer is severely dysfunctional at the moment, bear with me.  I should be back up to normal in a few days.

Comments work again. Also, I’m going to be testing adding a Reddit link to posts.

Edit: Buttons kick ass.

I’ve just been informed via email that apparently the comments section is hosed. Hit up the email (longbongsilver -at- gmail.com) until further notice, I gotta reach the administrator.  Stickies don’t seem to be working either, for some reason…

Anyone tried to leave comments in the past few weeks?  I just recently had Spam Karma reinstalled, and it seems to be malfunctioning, when I go to the page for looking at what was tossed, held in moderation, whatever, it doesn’t show anything, even though it says it’s caught something.

If you’ve tried to comment recently & had your comment eaten, email me, I’ll get this straightened out.

You know you ate a lot on thanksgiving when the next morning you’re still full…

Hell, most of that was stuff other people fixed, I haven’t even gotten to what we cooked yet.  Barring events that absolutely beg for my two cents, give it ’till monday.

Does stuff like this give anyone else out there a case of the Huhs, or is it just me?

A drug cocktail that backers say is the first effective treatment for methamphetamine and cocaine addiction is dividing substance abuse experts into two hostile camps — those who say they have seen it work wonders and those who say it has been rushed to market without any scientific testing.

The strident debate over the “Prometa protocol,” manufactured by the Hythiam Corp., is complicated by the checkered Wall Street career of the company’s CEO, Terren Peizer, who previously championed an anti-AIDS drug that has yet to make it to market.

Hythiam, which is based in Los Angeles, launched Prometa in 2003 in private clinics, where meth and cocaine addicts, as well as alcohol abusers, pay $12,000 to $15,000 for a one-month outpatient treatment.  Now the company is aggressively pushing Prometa for the mass market, and asking governments and insurers to foot the bill. […]

Psychopolitik.com has just been moved to a new server. Please bear with us while we work out some of the outstanding issues (eg single-page links currently do not work). Posting will continue as normal.

***updated 110106 @ 6:11pm EST: the page links have been changed to the standard number form, and now work properly as far as we can tell. The RSS feed address has been altered, and as a result posts made surrounding the server transfer date may show up twice. That is only temporary.***

Population density in the US is such that there are huge areas of the country where your nearest neighbor might be miles away.  Cost of living is generally lower in the middle of the country.  Yet an empty lot in Manhattan, zoned for residential use & located in a landmarked district — restricting what can be put there — which just happens to be where a guy committed suicide by blowing up the entire building that once stood there, is getting offers at an $8 million asking price.

Eh, I was born & raised in “flyover country”.  This just looks dumb to me off instinct alone.

Yes, professional nerds have an interest group. Here’s what they’re up to at the moment:

The Programmers Guild, a group representing IT workers, has begun filing what will amount to about 380 legal complaints against U.S. companies advertising that they prefer to hire foreign workers with H-1B visas.

The group has filed about 100 complaints since May and plans to file about 280 more over the next six months, said John Miano, founder of the Guild. The complaints, made to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), accuse several companies of advertising that they specifically want H-1B workers, a violation of U.S. law.

The U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act requires that U.S. jobs must be available to U.S. workers.

Now, the charge may turn out true, I don’t know enough to be sure. But poke around on the Programmers Guild website & you’ll see this goes further than a mere “hey, waitaminute!” thing. They see their livelihood as being attacked, so their response is to blame it on tech-savvy immigrants. It seems everyone wants to blame immigration for their problems all of a sudden, it’s sad.

Of course, that’s only half of the story. Considering the case at hand I asked myself “hmm, if the charges are correct, then what’s driving them to do it?”, which prompted me to look into this whole “H-1B” mess. Going straight for the horse’s mouth, I find the following:

Who can an H-1B alien work for?

H-1B aliens may only work for the petitioning U.S. employer and only in the H-1B activities described in the petition. The petitioning U.S. employer may place the H-1B worker on the worksite of another employer if all applicable rules (e.g., Department of Labor rules) are followed. H-1B aliens may work for more than one U.S. employer, but must have a Form I-129 petition approved by each employer.

In other words, people who fall under this designation are legally tied to whatever job gets them accepted, barring what’s more than likely such a huge stack of paperwork that most don’t bother. When you’re an H1-B worker, the US government effectively acts as a huge temp agency — if not a pimp. No wonder they don’t want citizens, whether current or prospective, the labor market for H-1Bs is artificially rigged against the workers.

So, one side wants to run the IT departments of the country as serfdoms, while the other looks at tech-savvy immigrants the way Tom Tancredo looks at the guy that does his landscaping. Here’s an idea: abolish H-1B, & all other arbitrary hoops to jump through on immigration. You want to come here, whether permanently as an american or for awhile to run networks, long as you aren’t a known criminal come on in. The Programmers Guild’ll be pissed because of the sudden lack of discrimination, & the employers of tech guys’ll be crying because they can’t screw over Habib & expect him to stay, but fuck em. When advocates of increased government power on both sides lose, that’s a win in my book.