I actually wonder if anyone needs to be paid to handle this stuff. It's a useful service, and hence potentially profitable - why wouldn't the market deal with it? Once we start getting substantial excesses of power from residential solar, the energy companies would be seeking for places to dump it, and one can offer such a thing, for a fee. And then sell that power back to the company when they need it (peak of consumption) at a slightly higher rate. So long as this roundtrip is cheaper than the cheapest generated power, the energy companies would participate.

Natural gas is already paid separately for the connection and for the gas itself, so adopting such a model wouldn't be breaking any new ground.

Sure. And a starving guy who can't find a job is not entitled to the contents of your wallet if he finds it on the street, but you'd have to be a sociopath or a retard to actually blame him for not returning it to you, even if that's a "right thing" to do. Or claiming that he's somehow a bad guy if he doesn't.

Those Mexican citizens aren't trying to solve the problems of Mexico as a whole. They're trying to solve the problems that they have as individuals.

And, of course, no-one asked them if they want to be citizens of Mexico when they were born, so Mexico is not entitled to having them solve its problems, either.

They don't have sovereignty, the Mexican state does. To what extent it actually represents the citizens in general, and these citizens in particular, is a question that you should ask before pursuing this line of argument any further.

Shipping Mexican citizens into the US won't fix the problems in Mexico.

Those Mexican citizens aren't trying to solve the problems of Mexico as a whole. They're trying to solve the problems that they have as individuals.

And, of course, no-one asked them if they want to be citizens of Mexico when they were born, so Mexico is not entitled to having them solve its problems, either.

They don't have sovereignty, the Mexican state does. To what extent it actually represents the citizens in general, and these citizens in particular, is a question that you should ask before pursuing this line of argument any further.

Saying that green card lottery is a viable way to legally immigrate is like saying that gambling is a viable way to legally earn money for a living. It's true in a very pedantic way, but practically meaningless.

I'm not saying anything of a kind. In fact, I didn't say a single word about what government should or shouldn't do, only about your attitude towards people who break that particular law. I don't know about you, but I know dozens of people who break the law - most of them smoke weed. I don't see why it should affect my opinion of them in any way, since it's obviously a bad and stupid law that I don't have to respect.

I am an H1B as well, so I can relate. But ...

Let me make this clear: you are being abused (the terms of H1 visas are effectively abusive for would-be immigrants due to the way they tie you to a specific employer with a very complicated switching process, and reset your green card application if you switch while it's still ongoing), and so you don't like it when other people - who don't get even the abusive option that you do - dodge that?

(And of course being in US as an illegal immigrant is still a very subpar experience to being legal ... hell, just try opening a bank account that way!)

The point is, people tout the illegal status of an immigrant as some kind of huge moral character flaw or failure, sufficient in and of itself to treat them as scum. I'm merely point out that it's not true in general, and specifically depends on how easy it is to immigrate legally for the same person, and how strong are the reasons that prompt them to immigrate. As I'm sure you know full well from your own experience, it's not a light decision to take in the first place, and US immigration system in particular is a mess of gigantic proportions with no coherent immigration policy whatsoever - just a confusing mish-mash of random decisions made over the last few decades.

Can you give an example of an immigration track for an average Mexican, then? What visa he should apply for first etc.

The only thing I can think of is the green card lottery. But it is just that, a lottery, it's not something you can actually rely on to get you there, no matter how long you wait.

Suppose that everything was true, except that they were there illegally (because there is no way for them to immigrate legally, which is the case for most Mexicans). Would your opinion of them change?

Sure, but that's essentially it's current state, and everybody knows that. But some people do want to experiment with a microkernel still, and so here we are.

Well, a large company has more senior and chief managers, too. Obviously one guy cutting his paycheck wouldn't make much difference, but several dozen just might.

Well, the standing hypothesis for domestication is that it wasn't really conscious, it just happened to be beneficial for both species - but for wolves first. Presumably they started by scavenging on edible remains left in the vicinity of human camps. The wolves that were less shy (so they approached the camps more) and exhibited less aggressiveness (so they would be chased away less) had an evolutionary advantage in that population, and so they bred for those traits. At some point that could have produced a wolf tame enough for people to take notice and try to consciously domesticate and breed them from there, presumably as hunting companions initially (or maybe even that was originally just a natural symbiosis).

Speaking of MS OpenTech, people just don't understand what it is (or rather, was) about. Back when MS was still in the "dark ages" wrt open source, but slowly coming out of them, OpenTech was set up as an independent org that could work with open source without the fear of "contaminating" MS proper - remember, this was back when Ballmer with his "GPL is a virus" notions was still around, and lawyers were super-paranoid about people copy/pasting some code snippet and inadvertently exposing the code to some OSS license, or a patent claim or something like that. They were even more paranoid when people wanted to contribute something upstream; with a few exceptions, this was something that you had to go to OpenTech to do.

Now that this is no longer the case, and regular devs inside MS are allowed (in fact, actively encouraged) to use and contribute to open source, the legal separation that was the whole point in the first place has lost its relevance. Notice how the announcement specifically notes that this is not about laying people off, just closing down the legal entity.

Yes - and this was based on the assumption that EU commission conclusions were valid. Seeing how they were valid in the past (in e.g. the Microsoft case), it's a reasonable assumption. If not, then that's what we should be discussing.

Note that the guy to whom I initially replied didn't dispute that at all, he just said that they should be able to do whatever the hell they want because it's their product. That was the point I was addressing.

I'm not saying that what they're doing is wrong. I'm saying that, if EU commission findings are correct, then regulating them is the proper course of action (as opposed to "free market will just sort it out").

The consumers are harmed because they end up with fewer choices to pick out of than are actually there. Worse yet, they may not even be aware that the choices they know are not all that is there.