Rain, Bocce, Immigration, Accessibility, etc.

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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

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From what I've read California would implode if all the illegal immigrants left, and most of them have jobs that 'real' Americains would never deign to do.

I figure most people don't mind those immigrants, it's the ones that breed and move their next generation to compete on the middle class turf that has voters scared. Any economy that protects itself as much as theirs gets no sympathy from me. I wish their own worst fears on them for their own good: That their kids will need to learn Chinese and Spanish (^-^)

Besides that, sounds like you invented an expensive, head-mounted seeing-eye dog (^-^)

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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

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Oh, he's a very good speaker; uses just enough wit to hold the audience's attention and ends with valuable insights. I bought To Own a Dragon after the talk.