Rain, Bocce, Immigration, Accessibility, etc.

[quikchange]

On Sunday I walked across San Francisco with ayanosuke, stangerous and our housemate Chris. Although the Bay to Breakers race had begun long before we reached the city and we got lost within several minutes of starting, we eventually caught up to the crowd of 70,000 or so people in exotic costumes. It took us about three hours to finish the entire journey but we

Comments

[quikchange]

There are an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the US and I wouldn't be surprised if a good chunk of them were in California. But the ones in California are mostly seasonal because they come here in the summer to harvest crops and then leave again. Because the margins on some of the crops gown here (e.g. strawberries) are so low, the farmers can't actually afford to pay legal wages to their workers. So, yes, a good chunk of California's fruit farming industry would collpase in the absence of illegal immigrants willing to work at half price. But that's about where the argument ends. All the other jobs currently being done by illegal immigrants in the US could easily be done by US citizens if they were paid a decent wage but that doesn't happen because of price competition in the labour market from the illegal immigrants. That is the immediate reason for people wanting to stem the influx of illegal immigrants. Hence the guest worker program, although I'm not sure how exactly that plans to get around the existence of minimum wage.

As for Spanish, a large numbeer of Americans in border state already do speak it. Not Chinese though, although a couple of Taiwanese have casually suggested that I learn Mandarin. I don't think it's feasible for me to learn a language withut having to use it constantly though. And the only times I've ever needed to use Spanish so far have been when volunteering to help out those who couldn't speak English. It was frustrating, I'll admit, but not enough to make me actually learn it. English is the QWERTY of languages: it's an evolving mess of inconsistent rules but more people begin learning it every day than the number of people who have ever spoken Esperanto. I do think that, as countries like China, India and Brazil become increasingly dominant in the global economy, there will be higher incentives for Americans and other formerly English monoglots to learn new languages. But The network effect is impossible to fight.

Yeah, we brought up the dog (and cane) as inspirations before we began our design experiment. Dogs take a long time to train but consumer electronics tend to become very cheap very fast so if you can replace the dogs with off-the-shelf components that would definately be very useful.