Being a Little Lazy

I've been pretty productive this week but I'm feeling lazy now. So I'm just resting right now.
PS I just worked for 2 and half hours on my project. I'm having some problems but I just don't know what quite is going on...

Working

I've been working on my project for LBL but my program has a lot of hiccups. I can't quite figure out why it isn't working. I'm going to have to sit down with it and dissect it. It really should be working. Oh well. I'm done with that for now. Lately I've been running around campus at about dusk which is good because I need it. Right now I'm taking a bit of break but it'll be back to work shortly.

A Visit

So my Dad and Paul came up to visit me today and it was a lot of fun. Paul even went to my geography class. We ate at the thai place for dinner and a brazilian place for lunch. They were both quite good. Not much new here. The only other thing is that I'm starting to get excited about the next Magic the Gathering set, Dissension. It should be pretty neat. Not much else...

A Rant on Immigration Reform

Let me start out by asking you what do you think of when you think of an illegal immigrant? Picture one in your mind. Is he hard-working? Lazy? Is this person smarter than you? Stupider? Does he have a family? Does he wake up in the morning and sleep at night? Is he any less of a person than you?

The point here is that we quite often let labels names make people into non-people. Firstly when we judge illegal immigrants we think of them as coming in and stealing something from us. But what are they stealing? Jobs in the fields? Would you really want the livelihood that they have, stooped over in a field for twelve hours a day? Does their being here really affect you in any way? Did they take your job? Well in America, we have an opportunity that they don’t. Through education we can make it so we don’t have to do the kinds of jobs that they have to do. To be honest, isn’t a field worker much more hard-working than a paper-pusher or a retail employee. For the same pay do you think that a McDonald’s employee would spend all day digging ditches? Do you think that there is any difference between them and us other than birthright?

So who is the average Mexican illegal immigrant? He’s from a poor village, whose historic livelihood came from growing corn, but due to the increased Globalization of our world, is no longer a viable source of income. After struggling for meager subsistence farming, they come up short and are forced into the United States to earn money to send back home to prevent their families from starving to death.

So without Mexicans, what would life be like? Not to mention ‘A Day Without a Mexican’ which I felt was not that well-done there are some real issues. Estimates predict that building costs would skyrocket 25%. There’s nothing to screech an economy to a halt like a jump in the capital needed to start or maintain a business. We have a labor shortage in this country for the most menial jobs. As far as legal immigrants replacing them, they couldn’t get through the bureaucracy fast enough or in large enough numbers. Also they would demand the minimum wage they are entitled to, which these businesses are not willing to pay.

What does it mean to be here legally? Is it that you were born here? Well there are those that believe that naturalization by birth should not be allowed to illegal immigrants even though that is one of the fundamental principles of our democracy and history. It’s a right that has only been denied to minorities in our nation’s unsavory racist past. Is it just that you had enough money to file some forms? Is that how thin the difference between legal and illegal is?

So what is the present situation? 3,000 men, women and children die every year in the Arizona desert trying to get into this country because we refuse to allow them in.

Why can’t someone live the American dream just because of a label or a bureaucratic process?

The term illegal immigrant is less than 50 years old. Prior to that, they were called Irish, Italian, or Portuguese immigrants on Ellis Island. Did your ancestors from several generations ago have proper papers when they arrived? The only reason why an illegal immigrant is ‘illegal’ is because that’s what we’ve decided to call them. We just arbitrarily decided about 50 years ago that if an immigrant came from Mexico, like they and other ethnicities had been doing for centuries, that they would be illegal. Do you really think that there was anything other than racial motivation to suddenly make this decision?

As far as building a wall, the only thing that accomplishes is preventing the current immigrants from returning home during the off-season, when there is no work. It would also probably just increase the death toll of our own Berlin Wall. Making it a felony would only further stuff our overcrowded prisons and deportation has proven to just be ineffective. It would also alienate and possible incite riots in millions of people who have lived and worked in this country for decades. The only feasible solution to the problem is not to go after the workers because you can’t punish Labor. The only real option is to actually fine and investigate the farms that are hiring these immigrants. I mean come on; you’re telling me it’s not obvious when a giant farm or business is employing hundreds of illegal immigrants. If you wonder why they’re never investigated and the attention isn’t focused on them, you just have to follow the money of who is making campaign contributions (and not just to the Republicans). The real people who are stealing money out of people’s hands are the one’s employing people and not paying them a decent wage. I mean isn’t it obvious how desperate these people are when they do the most menial jobs for the smallest unlivable wages. The problem is that they aren’t paying the immigrant enough money and that is why they undercut the American workforce. If for some reason, you really wanted to reduce the numbers of illegal immigrants, then go after the businesses, not the workers who have no other choice. We need stricter regulations on the businesses that hire illegal immigrants and we need to insure that they are receiving their rightful minimum wage. The truth is that Mexican illegal immigrants are more desperate than American laborers and more numerous.

My main point is that the cat is out of the bag; ‘illegal’ immigrants have been coming here since the beginning of our nation’s history. After the signing of NAFTA isn’t this even more of a moot point. How can you have free trade without free trade of labor?

The real issue at hand is the lackluster performance of this administration of border control, but you should keep in mind that the men that flew those planes into the two towers snuck in through our northern border.

So what’s my solution to the ‘Immigrant Problem’? Well, I’ll tell you. It might not surprise you in an era full of ‘Social Security Crises’ that well, there is no ‘Immigrant Problem’. Things are exactly as they have been for 200 hundred years and there is no reason to suddenly think of a phenomenon as bad simply because you’ve put the word ‘illegal’ in front of it.

A Programming Day Today

I've spent a lot of time today programming stuff for the lbl lab. Today was a pretty uneventful day. Just a lot of work and looking forward to the weekend. Sorry for nothing exciting happening. The most surprising thing about today was that the sun finally came out today.

I've Been Replaced!

So imagine my surprise when I found that in my own home I had been replaced by a DUCK! Needless to say I was furious. He may be wearing my clothes but I know for a fact that he scored worse than I did on the Physics midterm. Quack!

Well I got my midterm grade....

So let me just start by saying I was shocked when I got my test. So I heard that the mean was a 55 on this test which at first shocked me because it took that score to get an A on the last test. It wasn't until later that I found out that this test was graded out of 100 rather than the 80 that the previous one had with each problem worth 25 on this one and 20 on the last one. Once I got my test my heart sunk as I read a very large red 25 on my paper. I closed my eyes and turned away. I looked back at it and realized that that wasn't the last number on the page. That turned out to just be my score on one problem. Looking lower at a small scrawl in the corner it read 78, which looking at the statistics page looks like one of the top 10 scores in the class. I was flabbergasted. I thought I had really screwed up, but it turns out that where I thought I couldn't solve the problems it was because they weren'y supposed to be solved. OH well. I nailed it and now I'm sitting on a sweet steady A going into the final. I have no idea how it happened. I really thought I had screwed it up.