The Insanity of Trying To Debate Over Twitter
It is much easier to crap on topics like free trade or immigration than it is to defend them; the same is true when you talk about cutting the deficit. When you talk specifics, vested interests will come out of the woodwork to defend the status quo. The university professor which is still part of me tends to be like columnist George Will who builds a careful detailed summary on a topic before making salient points. Progressives tend to interrupt you in the process and introduce many new fallacies into the conversation, trying to divert you from the main point and shut you down. It really depends on my mood when it happens. Sometimes I'll respond with a burst of rapid fire sniper kill shots into stupid arguments, and I don't suffer fools gladly. I usually won't respond with a personal attack (although I may throw in a descriptive term in making a point, depending on the tone of the original tweeter). I, at least more recently, will typically start off, "No. [Here is what I think...]" Of course, people don't like getting contradicted. There have been a couple of times someone has tweeted back, "Yeah, dude, I blew it." But let's just say I have more critics than followers. I would really to inspire other pro-liberty people, but as my friend Bruce says, I'm an acquired taste.I've had debates of sorts with the left or the (alt-)right. I've been called a racist or a Russian bot, also a far left liberal. I recently criticized the blue slip policy where a home state senator can essentially veto a judicial pick. So some left-wing tweeter essentially tweeted, "Where was this guy when Toomey (R-PA) blue-slipped one of Obama's picks?" And my response was, "Dude, I happen to think appointments should get floor votes, not this blue slip thing." I wasn't familiar with that nominee; I will say that I was negatively impressed by Obama's nominees in general. But as a senator, I don't think I would abuse the democratic process in confirming a nominee based on my preferences.
I have in mind a recent authorized immigrant (second-generation), and perhaps it comes as a surprise to many, but some of the most ardent critics of liberalized immigration are recent immigrants. One of my best friends, born in India, is a naturalized citizen (interestingly, I don't think we've personally discussed immigration policy--he was in the latter half of his stretch to gain green card (permanent residency status), a prerequisite for citizenship). Employer sponsors exploited these workers; I was a subcontractor, not an employee of the same company. He would tell me of things the company did, e.g., renege on promises, lower pay, etc. The company could make his life miserable; there were ways they could withdraw their sponsorship, forcing him back to India and then having to find another employer to start the 7 year or so timetable from scratch. We were part of a small tech staff for a Japanese chip tester manufacturer subsidiary, and we did things at work that still boggle my mind to this day. I jokingly referred to us as the Lennon-McCartney of IT. For example, while he had taken over a failed several month project from consultants and implemented limited functionality, including customizations in less than 2 months, I resurrected and implemented a 6-month project within 6 weeks from ground zero (easier said than done because I had to modify workflows which required management decisions, not to mention the political nature of work flows involving expense reimbursements).
I often refer to that experience as my "job offer by extortion". I had been commuting from Chicago. Originally the contractor wanted to lowball my rate and I refused. They later came back and agreed (and I later determined they were trying my bill me out at double, which was absurd). In fact, the first thing out of the controller's mouth is, "No offense, but my first priority is replacing you." Was it my cologne? It was originally for 5 weeks so they could hire a replacement locally (but they were offering below market). My new boss was hired 2-3 weeks later. He made several attempts to recruit me informally, but I had a standard "no compete" clause in my contract--meaning I couldn't work for them for up to 6 months after the end of my contracted assignment. And I really, really hate California; I had never pursued job opportunities there.
There was a Filipina accounting manager who hated me from day 1. The story is my predecessor, her friend, went up for the IT manager position, didn't get it and resigned--which is how I got recruited as his temporary replacement. There are several stories involving this woman, who is one of the worst people I've been cursed to meet over my career. [The one that first comes to mind is we had to release our financial statements to corporate imminently maybe 6 months or so after I went perm. She came down with a case of the blue flu, demanding my immediate termination before she would fell well enough to come into work and do her part in the financial statements. Her boss, the same guy who hired me as a temp, was willing to throw me under the bus. My boss wasn't going to allow that and basically responded by putting a help desk between us. Yea for bureaucracy! When she regained sanity, she was pissed because she needed my help to do her job.]
But one of the early stories was when I was still a subcontractor. They had had some kind of corporate meeting with employees and there was (as any regular reader knows) a pizza luncheon to follow. As a lowly contractor, I was at my desk doing my job. My new boss came up to my desk and told me to go downstairs and grab some slices: "There's plenty left!" I wasn't on my low-carb thing yet, but I politely refused. He persisted, and so I went down. [Now I swear this is true.] The 5-foot Filipina (if that) sees me approach the open boxes of pizza and races to intercept me. "NO! You can't have any pizza. Pizza is for EMPLOYEES only, and you're not an employee." I told her my boss had specifically authorized me, but she was resolute. So I went back upstairs and told my boss what happened. It was extremely stupid on her part; the company was paying my expenses. If I wanted to go down to Pizza Hut and order fresh pizza, never mind leftover cold pizza, the company would have reimbursed me. The leftover pizza was a sunk cost. I've mentioned I've had university clients who demanded I eat on campus with some sort of meal pass vs. my going off campus to eat and charge back the bill. There are reasons I'm mentioning this story: they were trying to recruit me, and this stuff immediately comes to mind: do I want to work with these jerks perm?
I wasn't crazy about the commute, but I was making decent money. Even if the company wanted me, my agency would demand some sort of finders' fee or bonus. So on Friday afternoon in late September, I'm getting ready to leave for the airport; I already have my return reservations booked, etc., when my boss stops me. "You need to accept a job offer from us now, or you don't come back Monday. Look, we appreciate what you've done for us, and you'll be the first we call when we need to do an Apps upgrade [short note: they wouldn't do one until over a year after I left, and I had been pushing to do an upgrade from the start]." All I'm thinking is, "Damn, I'm unemployed Monday and I've got nothing lined up." I was pretty sure he must be bluffing (I've certainly not transitioned someone to take my place). I point out my no-compete; he laughs and tells me he's got leverage (apparently some mispriced invoices), but they agree to handle the legal expenses if the agency sues me. Not that I wanted to ever live in California in the first place. Some points were amusing; he actually tried to persuade me pointing out the quarter Coke cans in the machine downstairs. Now I had Silicon Valley clients bringing in fresh Krispy Kreme donuts for workers; others throwing a Friday afternoon beer keg party. My client is offering 25-cent Cokes. Ask me how many Cokes I bought downstairs over all the time I worked for them. Zero.
Now you may be wondering--I thought he was writing about immigration. Where is he going with this? Bear with me a short while longer. So of course the agency went batshit crazy when they heard of my decision. "Benedict Arnold" was the tame stuff. I've got corporate managers screaming at me. Not that they really gave a damn about me. I had stretched a 5-week gig into 3.5 months of billing for them. Never mind if Steve had told them, "I've decided I don't want Ron back Monday", they probably would have let me go in a split second without so much as a "thank you". If anything, they would have accused me of doing something to provoke the client.
Now keep in mind my Indian buddy was still with the agency (and he would later me that he had picked out my resume to recruit). So I have no doubt he's getting grief and blame over my jumping ship. My boss is thinking all sorts of things that could backfire on my colleague, e.g., he's willing to bump up my colleague's rate $10/hour if the increase all goes to my colleague. The only thing he would accomplish is pointing out he's paying below-market.
Then the IT company was acquired by an ISP in 2000. My boss is laying low, hoping that my colleague will get lost in the shuffle. No such luck. He gets reassigned to some project in the SF area. My boss is livid, threatening to sue the ISP. I'm not happy about my friend leaving (for one thing, the boss was driving me crazy, and my friend could handle Steve. Since I had gone perm, I was now working 70 hour weeks. With my friend gone, I now had to endure crazy Steve full-time. (When I was a temp, crazy Steve had never surfaced, because he was courting me to work for him. Believe me, I would have turned crazy Steve down, even if it meant weeks without a work assignment.) He once described his management style as "throwing non-swimmers in the deep end of the pool". I was developing stress-based coughing fits. I used to be in a high school choir, and all of a sudden my voice could go silent outside a 2-note range. I didn't know what the hell was going on and it was freaking me out. (Within 2 weeks of resigning from the company months later, everything went back to normal. Alarmed by my constant coughing over the phone, my Mom months earlier had pushed me to see a doctor, who said I was recovering from a cold. Quack.)
I really was afraid that maybe months away from my friend finally getting his green card, my boss' attempted intervention would end badly.
Long story short, I was in the process of leaving--I had scheduled a job interview with a real estate portal in Austin, TX--when my boss suffered a heart attack in a visit to our Vermont facility. (We did some business with IBM there.) It would have hurt the company if I left at that point. Months later, I finally resigned. The real estate company was no longer interested. I hooked up with a consulting company eventually folding when its venture capitalist backers withdrew support. (I was in the first wave of layoffs.) I would return to the Chicago area a year after my resignation. My Indian friend finally got his green card and was immediately hired by our former boss. I don't know the details, but company management eventually soured on my former boss, he reportedly stopped coming into work on a regular basis, my Indian friend was basically named as temporary operating IT manager, my former boss saw him as a rival and traitor, at some point my former boss resigned or was terminated, and my Indian friend become the perm IT manager.
I remember asking him shortly after he got his green card, "Are you going to become a (naturalized) citizen?" And he jumped down my throat which he almost never did: "Why does everybody ask me that? I've worked a long time just to get to this point; let me just enjoy the moment". A few years later, he added nonchalantly to an email, "Oh, by the way, I got sworn in as a citizen last week." I'm like "Dude! Why didn't you tell me? I would have flown in to be there."
Long story, but I've known a number of others as well (lots of Indian immigrants in IT: it affect things even to the extent that if you have a pizza event, you have an ensure a significant proportion of pies are veggie). You have colleagues who have to take a day off to meet with very expensive immigration lawyers.
There are other things, Before I went down to Brazil a couple of time in 1995, I had to get a visa from the Brazilian embassy in downtown Chicago. It's expensive (I think the client, ultimately Citicorp, paid), time-consuming. I've done consulting work as a non-resident in Minnesota, California, Wisconsin, Virginia, Utah, Oklahoma, Georgia, Virginia, Maryland, Texas, Missouri, and New York, and I've also worked perm in Florida, Illinois, West Virginia, South Carolina, and Arizona (not to mention TX, WI, and MD). Could you imagine what kind of paperwork I would have to do if these had been independent states? I remember at the time my Oracle skills were difficult to find in Brazil. I don't remember how the idea of living Brazil had come up, maybe while discussing a Brazilian lady I liked, but she had no interest in living in America (hear that, anti-immigrant cranks?) My friend [let's call him George] said, "Dude, you want to live in Brazil? I can get you a $100K job here, easy. You can live like a king on $100K. Give me 15 minutes with the client." Let me say, it was very tempting. I wasn't making $100K at my own job at the time. Things were different, interesting. E.g., I was walking in a mall when a very attractive woman walked past me dressed in sheer lingerie. Apparently it was a technique designed to attract foot traffic to the lingerie shop. But I was a loyal American; Brazil is a wonderful place to visit, but I didn't want to live there.
So, now let's get to the immigrant tweeter (I think a female but am not sure; for simplicity, assume it's woman). I had written some pro-immigrant tweet making some reference to what I regard as unconstitutionally restrictive immigration law. (Now obviously I don't favor occupation by foreign troops, spread of a contagion, violent criminals, etc.) But I don't accept as morally legitimate government restrictions on say international employers looking my job skills or I want to visit my cousin in Australia. or if some European university wanted to hire me.
So the troll assumed that restrictions are morally acceptable. Now in a certain way I understand her probable hostility to violations of the rule of law. It may have taken her own family 15-20 years to make it to Ameica legally, versus someone walking over the Mexican border. But basically two wrongs don't make a right. Borders are just arbitrary; I had to travel over 2000 miles to take a job in Arizona. I was probably less than a half hour drive to Mexico. Yet a Mexican with a job waiting encounters all kinds of trouble I never did. That is basically arbitrary.
Oh, but yes, you can have your open immigration but only if you do away with your welfare state. Wait a minute. First of all, we didn't even have a welfare state until after the income tax enabled huge federal spending. America became the world's largest economy in large part due large-scale immigration. Immigrant didn't arrive here independently wealthy or with a welfare system.. How did they cope? With private sector institutions. Besides, even for today's authorized immigrants, there are waiting periods. And let's be clear: I oppose the welfare state as morally hazardous and corrupting. I prefer voluntary private-sector institutions helping those temporarily down on their luck.
But it's more evil than that. undocumented immigrants have paid payroll taxes for programs they can't even benefit from. And in only 1 or 2 states (the last time I checked) did unauthorized alien expenditures account for even 1/10th of social spending in state budgets. And keep in mind unauthorized immigrants account for about 3 to 4% of American residents. But this troll had the audacity to claim I was repeating what she said while denying it. I said quite clearly we had an open immigration system (with a Chinese exception) until WWI, none of the current quota bullshit. She also points out we've always had immigration laws, and I'm just contradicting myself. She also claims that a Wikipedia article I cited actually supported her point, and at multiple points accuses me of repeating what she was saying.
First, yes, immigration has been regulated, almost from the get-go, but not in the sense of the quota systems introduced in the WWI/post era. Most of this stuff was deciding qualifications (including waiting periods) for naturalized citizenship, status of children born to mixed citizens and/or at foreign locations.
Second, it wasn't until the 1880's before we saw restrictions on national origins, specifically, the Chinese. However, the article notes that Japanese, Koreans and others from Asia replaced Chinese immigrants to the West Coast by the early 1900's. It is true that American Administrations sought to slow the flow, e.g., from Japan and South Asia diplomatically in the 1900-WWI area, and then there was a more general Asian restriction during WWI.
I don't deny restrictionists carried the day from roughly 1917 through 1924. A lot of this had to do with panics and short-lived depressions and this historical nonsense of a zero sum contention for work opportunities between native and foreign-born workers. It would take one or more other blog posts to go into details eviscerating the cases from anti-immigrant think tanks like CIS, but basically the US economy is more entrepreneurial-friendly and diversified which attracts professionals, many foreign workers have skills in short supply domestically and immigrants facilitate specialization of labor, and we're beginning to see potential shortages in low- educated/skill labor (in response to others wanting to cherrypick high-end labor)
I saw one xenophobe sympathetically tweet to the troll that she should feel free to cite his work. Oh, really, xenophobe? Make my day, and stand on your own 2 feet. You are talking to someone who literally cites hundreds of sources in his articles. I read empirical studies for fun. I know who Krikorian is. As for anti-immigrant buffoons like Ann Coulter, the only advantage she has over me is she's 6 feet tall. Maybe that gives her an advantage in grasping for straws.
Bathroom Behavior
I never thought I would address this topic in a blog post. There was a mandatory meeting at work this week, and one item in discussion stood out as particularly bizarre. Apparently now on two occasions in a centralized bathroom, janitors have found and had to clean up someone who has directly defecated and urinated on the floor, presumably in a stall area. The janitors have said that they will not clean up after any future incident. We were warned that anyone caught engaging in bad bathroom behavior would be immediately terminated.I don't have any issue with the termination policy, but I'm not exactly sure how they would catch someone engaging in such deviant behavior without taping what goes on in a bathroom, which would be a giant violation of privacy. It's not like I go around checking stalls after people use them. I myself almost always never use public stalls. It's one thing to watch where you step on a lawn because of occasional dog poop, but I never thought about watching where I step inside a bathroom stall. In particular, I'm worried about what happens if this deviant acts again. Are they seriously going to leave a filthy stall untreated?
I have to say in all the public bathrooms I've ever had to use--rest stops, restaurants, work, stores, schools, airports, etc.--I've never heard of this before. I don't know if it's drugs, mental illness or what.
In a manner of speaking, it does remind me of an incident I probably mentioned in an earlier post and familiar readers may remember. This was when I was on faculty at UWM (Milwaukee). I had no social life so if I wasn't lecturing that weeknight, I might walk back to campus after dinner in my neighborhood apartment to work on my next days lectures or on a research paper. So I had a little hot pot and some instant coffee and then went to the nearby men's restroom down the hall to fill my hot pot at the sink.
This one night I walk into the bathroom ready to do my usual ritual, when I'm literally overcome with this overpowering stench. Gagging for air, I saw something I've never seen before, hopefully never again--the walls are coated with excrement. Me, I'm a bachelor uncle who has barely changed diapers; I can't even imagine someone willingly smearing poop on bathroom walls. I don't think it's possible for one person to have done that; did they bring up pails of excrement up the stairs--without getting noticed?
How am I going to tell anyone about this? Who's going to believe me? Are they going to think I'm the pervert?
So I called up campus security. I identify myself and then I say, "You're never going to believe this."
The male cop says, "Try me." I then explain what I've just seen. The last thing I expected was his frank acknowledgment and low-key response.
"Yeah, it's the druggies. They did it on the first and second floors of your building. We figured it was just a matter of time they made it up to your floor." Funny; I didn't hear any mention of earlier instances.
Still, I hesitated before going into the same bathroom the next morning. What if nobody cleaned it yet? No posted signs or warnings. I go in--and it's spotless. You would never have guessed it was the same bathroom. Did last night really happen? I don't know what they did--if they hosed it down or whatever. Whoever did it earned their pay that night.
