I find any ideological opposition to regulation curious.

Are you aware that the current crash came after a period of deregulation of the financial industry comparable only to what happened before 1923?

I recommend that you to read a book called "This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly" - you'll find not only that the current crisis is nothing new, but also that all the greatest banking crisis happened following phases of banking deregulation, just like this one. In fact the credit bubble that resulted in the current crisis started when the Glass-Steagal regulation was repealed.

Think of banking regulation like the economic equivalent of regulating an industry that deals in explosives - the side effects of a fireworks factory exploding right in the middle of a residential neighbourhood are so bad that the industry has severe restrictions about where and how they setup their business.

In your no-regulation world, how would you avoid that a fireworks factory is setup right next to your house (or maybe a nice nuclear waste treatment plant)?

I can only talk about IT startups, not startups in areas which have artifical high barriers to entry thanks to local regulations.

My experience as a serial emigrant and a Software Developer is that the set of skills for most things done in an IT company is the most portable there is. The barriers to entry to practice things like software development and graphics design are pretty much zero anywhere in the world and professional experience retains it's value across borders.

In such a domain, the only barriers one has to start one's company are related to one's own risk tolerance and things like the amount of savings one has and family support.

In practice there seem to be 2 kinds of immigrants:
- The desperate poor that emmigrate because that's the only chance they have
- The ones who could have a decent life in their own country but chose to emmigrate

I suspect the former are no more likelly to start a company than anybody else.

As for statistics, the article in the OP is the one quoting the statistic. Feel free to read it.

I'm just providing what seems a likelly explanation in view of that and in view of my personal experience.

you really sound like a jerk describing your "friend" as you do

Actually I think it's a shame. She's a sensitive person that ended up in a profession which, for all it's glamour, can be extremelly harsh and unforgiving.

As for non-IT startups in London, I wouldn't at all be surprised that "small investment firms and hedge funds, layers practices" have far more UK entrepreneurs: these are much more local-centric domains, in industries much more tightly coupled by webs of personal aquaintance and where knowing the right people from the get go makes a huge difference, so things like having gone to the right UK University and maintaining the right contacts makes a huge difference. A foreigner coming here from outside has much more difficulty breaking into those industries even with years of industry experience abroad - I know this for sure because I've actually worked in investment banking (and essentially had to prove myself all over again) and it's a very closed industry (and quite mediocre in the IT area).

BTW: Please notice that although I think imigrants are more likelly to startup new companies, I don't think that they are more likelly to success than non-imigrants. They are more likelly to try, IMHO, but that's it.

I think a little quote from the GP explains a lot:

who take any available job and try to work their way up, but opportunities never appear.

You see, the thing about emigrants is that they are not satisfied by staying within the system they know, going for the steady plod up and hopeing that luck will land them with a big opportunity. The passive way never works unless you're born in the right family with the right connections.

Immigrants go out there and make their own way: they seek or maketheir own opportunities. After all, this is the kind of people that is willing to leave their own country, their family, friends and all that they know to go to a far away place where even things like unwriten social norms are different - starting your own company is a far easier endeavour.

The reason I know this is because I'm one of them and, not so long ago, after 3 countries and 7 years as a freelancer in IT I started my own Startup. I look around in the startup incubator where I'm based (Google Campus in London) and most people in there doing the same as me are foreigners too - in light of what it says in this NYTimes article, the abundance of foreigners now makes sense to me.

(PS: the GP's posture kinda reminds me of a friend of my who is an actrice - a profession with high unemployment - whose acting career goes nowhere preciselly because she keeps waiting for acting gigs rather than being out there promoting herself and looking hard for new opportunities)

Well, the good news with the whole economic depression and breakdown of the consumer society in Developed nations is that Science and Engineering might very well regains the status they lost against things like Finance and Law.

We might very well be at the brink of a new age when people turn to Science to discover the new sources of progress and Engineering to build the structures and machines that let us do things and go places we could never do or go to before.

We could do with some near-future Utopian Sci-Fi to help us along!

Actually DNA technology as currently used to investigate crimes is not accurate.

DNA fingerprinting as used is only based on a few genetic markers, not full DNA sequencing. Sometimes as few as 8 or 12 markers are used. This means each combination of markers is the same for thousands of people.

Typically, this is not a problem for the situation when DNA is obtained from a crime scene and in parallel obtained from a suspect and then compared (the likellyhood of a false positive is something like 1 in 8 million).

It is however a problem when DNA is obtained from the crime scene and then a database of DNA samples (which, remember, does not contain a full DNA code, just the values for the markers) is searched for matches - because if the database is big enough, matches will be found for certain (after all, thousands of people have that exact same set of markers) and of late the government has been growing those databases as fast as possible.

So yeah, DNA fingerprinting has to be looked at with some skepticism and it did made sense for the defense to struck you out.

That makes sense, after all Atheism is being against religion while Agnosticism is having no religion.

Being activelly against an entire social movement does require a certain level of tunnel vision to paint all individuals in that group as sharing a set of bad personal characteristics which really are only shown by a subset of loud individuals in that group.

Frankly attacking a whole group for the actions of a minority of individuals is counter-productive. The silent majority is often disgusted by the actions of those self-proclaimed representantives of the group and would rather distance themselves from them.

Actually the recent push for creationism seems to have come almost entirelly from born-again type sects mostly in the US and some developing countries with mainly christian populations.

As far as I'm aware there is no push for creationism in Europe, not from Catholics, Protestants or Orthodox Christians. Some imported Christian sects (the kind that do public rituals of faith healing and banishing of bad spirits) do preach creationism, but those are a tiny minority, concentrated on the uneducated and downtrodden).

In that sense, especially in Western Europe, education has created a generation (actually, two generations by now) of critical thinkers, where even those who do have religious beliefs are not prone to blindly believe what the men of the cloth tell them.

My impression in Europe of crossing paths with people that are believers is that Religion has become far more a personal thing, a belief born from the inside rather than a set of ritualised social events.

Religion can and often is used as means of control of the (unwashed) masses: it's like a police in the brain and is far more effective than the police on the street.

Probably this is why America's founding father explicitly sought to separate the state ( and politics ) from religion.

Unfortunately, in this day and age when the US Constitution is completely disregarded, religion is once again a tool in the toolbox of politics.

Not all innovation is technical in nature. New ways to bring technology to people are also a domain for innovation.

If you want to build a better mousetrap, you don't focus solely on the mechanism that springs the trap - you also need to consider how to best get the mice to come to the trap.

The kind of innovation as Apple has been doing of late is making technology accessible and fashionable. Merging technology with fashion and making it very easy for non-technical people to use is something that nobody else in the Tech industry is doing well and why Apple is so successfull at the moment.

In that sense your post displays the same kind of limited horizons mindset that underpins the current stagnation of traditional tech companies like Microsoft - that of worrying far more about the mechanics of the device rather than how it's used.

As someone with a highly technical background (cut my teeth on the old Slackware Linux on floppies, can design embedded circuits and then code for them) I myself often have the particular kind of engineering blindness we can have when it comes to technology. However, mingling with people from far, far different backgrounds has made me realize that it is a form of short-sightness.

If the wind conditions are "No Wind" then a lighter than air platform (blimp) would probably be the best choice - certainly it would solve the problem of finding something that has a 20km minimum range and can carry 2 hi-def cameras: it would be very slow but have great staying power if there is no wind.

Somehow I think "No Wind" might be a simplification too far.

Guess what, plenty of managers know that Software Developers tend to be overly optimistic.

Worse, it's even a well known management technique to get Developers to give estimates and go along with them (even knowing they're far too optimistic) as a form getting "commitment to the deadlines" from the Developers, which innevitably results in crazy overtime.

Look around whenever you're again in one of those jobs where "it's the workers" - you'll notice that the ones that do the most overwork are invariably male and young. It's not by chance, they're the easiest to manipulate in that way.

In my experience of 15 years in the industry, people that always worked long hours because "that's the way everybody does it" don't actually know that overall productivity is much higher with shorter working hours.

Also, when going from longer-hours to shorter-hours one doesn't immediately get to the maximum productivity sweet-spot: if you've been working 80h-week, going to 40h-week will cut your productivity in half to begin with and it will take a couple of weeks before your productivity passes that of the 80h-week. In an environment where everybody does long-hours, people cutting down in overtime often give up (or are pressured into giving up) during the first few weeks when their body has not yet recovered enough from chronical burnout to compensate for the reduced number of hours.

My personal discovery of this only came when I moved from my native land (Portugal) where I worked 60h-weeks to Holland were if you're in the office after 6 PM your manager tells you to go home. It was an eye openner for me to see just how much more overall productivity (and lower stress and far fewer bugs) a Software Developer has in Holland's 40h-week system than in Portugal's 60h-week one.

When I moved to the UK I brought the Dutch 40h-week habit with me, and even though more than one of my managers tried to pressure me into staying in the office longer hours, my productivity was always better than my colleagues, my decisions were sharper and they always renewed my contract (I was working as a freelancer).

And heck, if you can do 8 hours of work at home in 2 hours, why not get 8 hours of pay! The key is productivity.

No, no, no!

Modern management evaluation techniques require that people are seen to work long hours so that management can claim that they work hard and make their people work hard.

In services industries, because results are hard to measure consistently, the perception of doing a lot of work is used to measure productivity. In addition to that, since in services projects are mostly unique and usually done done in response to needs of external actors, faster than expected delivery tends be followed by an idle period (since the next project "isn't ready to start yet") while in manufacturing, if you finish making a widget faster, you can immediatly start working on doing another widget.

The result is that in services efficiency is in fact treated as a bad thing - if you work smart, you're not visibly working hard and (worse) you finish your projects early and have periods of idleness while you wait for sales/management to catch up with new projects.

(I find it both funny and sad that in some cultures "working hard" is actually seen as a good thing, since by definition if you need to work hard either you or somebody else is not doing their job in an efficient maner)