Post Apartheid

I endorse the Manifesto for the Abolition of International Apartheid and Open Borders.

Really Offshoring

Wednesday, April 20th, 2005

Supposedly SeaCode (sea-code.com site forthcoming) is planning to set up a software development office on a used cruise ship in international waters off the southern California coast and potentially wherever customers are nearby international waters.

I love this idea. Two of the largest hurdles to fully utilizing the world’s talent and achieving equal pay for equal work are geographical and political:

  • Much human capital is located far away from much investment capital, in very different time zones.
  • It can be hard for investment capital to move to where human capital is due to a bad business environment in the latter location (e.g., terrible infrastructure, high corruption).
  • It is hard for human capital to move to where investment capital is due to immigration apartheid laws.

SeaCode could do a nice run around all of these.

However, I’d guess that ships are fairly expensive to maintain. If this practice grows perhaps it will be a good seastead business model.

John Dvorak should be ashamed of himself for promoting apartheid.

Via Boing Boing.

Addendum 20050423: Walt Patrick pointed out on a mailing list the story of offshore gambling ships in the 1930s. Same location offshore Los Angeles. Sounds like a made for film story:

[Earl] Warren rounded up a flotilla of State and Game boats, manned them with deputies and ordered them out to the Rex. Cornero was ready and repelled the invasion with high pressure hoses. The authorities laid siege for nine tense days while Cornero’s men stood guard with sub-machine guns. His attorneys filed suit after suit charging Warren with everything from harassment to piracy.

Posted in Apartheid, Economics, Politics | 1 Comment »

Programmers’ National Party

Sunday, October 24th, 2004

A couple days ago I linked to Peter Mork. Later I noticed that Mork has some postings on immigration that I find agreeable.

Here’s a quote from his latest, The One-Day Window:

A few months back I received a large manila envelope in the mail which I thought was junk mail. But to my surprise, as I opened it up, I realized it contained a photocopy of a letter to the editor I wrote to the WSJ that had been published a month before. My closing paragraph was highlighted and on the side margin was a note telling me that I should learn about “the real costs of immigration”. The letter was from The Programmers Guild and they implored me to read their newsletter, which was also enclosed, to learn about the true costs.

Unfortunately, it seems they ignored the true point I was trying to make. How is it that if I was born only 30 miles south of where I am currently sitting that this would deny me the right to enter into a voluntary agreement with a U.S. employer? This question has never been answered to my satisfaction.

And it won’t be. Change “only 30 miles south of where I am currently sitting” to “with skin a shade darker” or “with slightly different genes” to unmask the perverse injustice of movement and work only by state permission.

Like white miners in South Africa the last century most first-worlders are scared of competition and racist. There is no moral excuse.

Posted in Apartheid, Economics, Peeves, Politics | 3 Comments »

I Hate Nationalism

Tuesday, August 3rd, 2004

Alex Tabarrok hits on a profound point:

Blogging about the convention, William Saletan hits on a profound point. It’s not just Democrats, however, the framing of “us” and “them” is perennial and it’s the expansion of “us” that is at the heart of our civilization.

Obama, like other speakers at this convention, complains about “companies shipping jobs overseas” and workers “losing their union jobs at the Maytag plant that’s moving to Mexico.” At the same time, Obama holds himself out as a symbol of a diverse, welcoming America. How can Democrats be the party of diversity at home but xenophobia abroad, the party that loves Mexican-Americans but hates Maytag plants in Mexico, the party that thinks Obama’s mom deserves a job more than Obama’s dad does? I understand the politics of it. But what about the morals?

(Emphasis added, sort of — see title of Tabarrok’s post.)

Unfortunately Obama (and Kerry with his “Benedict Arnold firms” nonsense) are far outclassed in the hypocrisy department by Bush & co.’s complete misundertanding (I can’t think of an appropriately harsh word at the moment, so misunderstanding will have to do) of freedom, and just about everything else.

Posted in Apartheid, Economics, Peeves | 5 Comments »

Googlebot Prime

Friday, February 6th, 2004

Google co-founder Larry Page gave a talk called “Stanford and Google and the World, Oh My!” today. A few tidbits I didn’t know:

Most of the company goes on a ski trip to Tahoe every year. People ask when that tradition will end, as Google is no longer a small company (Page emphasizes that Google is medium-sized, not large). Page pointed out that the relative cost of sending most employees on the company outing is the same whether you have seven employees and leave one to mind the servers (as was the case on the first trip) or some larger numbers in similar proportions. The company culture doesn’t have to change (the purpose of the talk, followed by an info-session I didn’t stay for, was to recruit Stanford students). Ok, that tidbit was relatively boring, but easy to drop into conversation with most any crowd.

In order to hire more engineers, Google is adding engineering campuses in Manhattan, Switzerland, and India. Why those locations? They’re places where people already working for Google want to move. (Page quipped that India is someplace people want to move back to, unlike most places. I doubt the latter. I recall reportage of the phenomenon of people returning to Hong Kong and Ireland. People will go anywhere opportunity is to be found. If it is “home”, so much the better.) Immigration policies also made a difference: apparently it is easier for a spouse of a sponsored worker to work legally in Switzerland than in most places, and many good people are being kicked out of the U.S., a phenomenon Page decried. I strongly concur. By the way, 1) if there’s a race to the bottom for knowledge workers, Google is crazy for opening new offices in two of the most expensive places in the world, 2) on the way home I heard two Indian women talking about their immigration bureaucracy travails, and 3) Apartheid sucks.

One of Page’s slides was a picture of HAL’s front plate. AI is the goal of every computer scientist he says, excepting the scared ones. If Google can accurately answer any arbitrary query, you have AI. Google has many AI projects, some of them highly speculative (no details given). Eliezer Yudkowsky has often written that Google is the source of all truth and the like, but now he may be frightened, as I doubt Google engineers buy his friendly AI imperative.

Posted in Apartheid, Economics | 2 Comments »

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