Good old economics kicks in.
If you offer a class at too low of a price, failure or just quitting is an option when there is little to loose. So you take a few classes, it isn't your cup of tea you quit.

If you drop a few grand down for a class, and it isn't your cup of tea, you will still stick threw it and get those credits, as you have already paid for it.

Actually this is an other case of Bad Math.

70% of its budget going to individuals... May be a good thing.

Because that means only 30% of its budget it going to the corporations. So the government is more likely to work in house to meet needs then outsource.

Because these payments to individuals includes... All the Government Employees, and Military Employees.

If I only had mod points today.

My thought was a second RAID Device, however my out dated experience with tapes had a 2gb limit.

This isn't a dupe, it's an escalation of the same story that happened after the original was already posted.

Rather like how they broke news of TEPCO's reactors as a separate story from the tsunami.

Actually I don't think that's even right, the US ratified the international covenant on human rights which is the legal implementation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Article 12 states:

"No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks."

Now I don't know what procedures the US has in place for dealing with breaches of these provisions, but certainly if nothing else the US has agreed to bind itself legally by these articles as a result of it's ratification of the respective covenants. The issue seems to arise from the fact that breaches aren't enforced however, so is it a problem of enforcement? although the constitution says "You can't do this" does it specify at all what should happen if you do do whatever it is the constitution says not to? How does the constitution cater for enforcement?

Either way, legally they shouldn't be doing what they're doing, how that's enforced is a different question.

There's bound to be some hit, but the hit will be so utterly negligible that it's not enough to care. You shouldn't let it be a concern because it's too small to matter.

Hate to break it to you but just because a majority of Crimea are ethnic Russian still doesn't mean they want to be part of Russia. 58% are ethnic Russians but many of those still identify themselves as being of Ukrainian nationality despite their ethnic origin.

If the referendum was free and fair it's almost certainly the case that Crimea would not vote to be part of Russia, in fact, a poll was done on exactly this before this shit even kicked off as it has now:

http://www.cityam.com/blog/139...

Even in Crimea, the most Russian leaning part of Ukraine support for joining Russia was at only 41% - not enough to win a referendum.

If you can't see why Russia has shut down movement in and out of Crimea, if you can't see why it's denying access to international observers, if you can't see why it has plastered billboards in pro-Russian propaganda and seized radio and TV transmitters, and if you can't see why it installed a pro-Russian administration in Crimea kicking out the previously democratically elected one then I probably can't help you understand what's going on here, but I figure it's worth trying. Russia is annexing Crimea, not because the people there want it but because Putin both wants it and wants to send a message to any other nation considering breaking away from his control that it wont be painless.

If the people of Crimea genuinely wanted to break away from the Ukraine do you not think a referendum with international observers would be sufficient? Why the propaganda campaign? why the hijacking of TV and radio to shut out information from the rest of the country? why the presence of Russian troops and the isolation of Ukrainian military to their bases so they can't communicate with the populace? Why is all this necessary if Crimeans would vote yes for independence anyway?

Russia has been playing a game in Ukraine for some time that would make even the CIA look like amateurs - even during the protests we had protesters being dragged off by kidnappings that could only be the work of state-sponsored organisation and beaten and left in the forest to die with one or two surviving against the odds to state that the people who did it spoke with actual Russian accents (yes, you've got it, Russia had death squads in the Ukraine during the protests). You had eyewitness accounts from both protesters and the police that snipers were shooting at both police AND protesters to try and provoke a bigger confrontation between the two.

So wake up and smell the coffee, Russia has been playing games for years in the Ukraine, those games are finally just coming to the light and there's no way the referendum on joining Russia can be considered the slightest bit free and fair whilst Russian troops and propaganda are controlling every bit of information in and out of the territory right now. Even if the people made up their own mind, how would you possibly prove the Russian troops aren't just changing the ballots? with no international observers confirming the fairness and legitimacy of the vote you might as well just make up the results right now and have done with it - it'll be no more or no less legitimate.

If the Democrats sent the military into Texas and blocked all communication and access in and out, took over the TV and radio transmitters there and plastered Democrat propaganda on every billboard whilst making up things about the Republicans, beat up pro-Republican journalists and so forth and then went on to win Texas with a landslide would you really, genuinely call that an acceptable outcome? a fair election? a legitimate election? That's exactly what's happening in Crimea.

My point was nothing more than a suggestion that a simple increase of supply inherently results in a reduction of pricing in the labour market is false.

If it were true then wages would be on a permanent downward spiral for nothing other than the simple fact of natural population growth even without immigration. It's not though, real terms wages have been increasing consistently for decades, despite the fact that the size of the labour market has also been growing, that in itself is direct evidence that the labour market does not follow a simplistic view of supply and demand as the original poster was claiming as there is no way to reconcile this lack of correlation with the idea that it does.

You don't have to start a war when you send troops in. We should've put a stop to this in Georgia, we should've deployed vast amounts of equipment and troops and rolled them right up to Russia's border with Georgia to make a point way back in 2008. We should do the same now.

We should be matching their deployment in Crimea with our own in Ukraine along Russia's borders and give them a far more simple option - we'll back off and withdraw, if you back off and withdraw. Right now just letting them take Crimea without question means they'll keep on doing it, just as they saw they got away with it in Georgia.

Even if not the Ukraine, we should be bordering troops around the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad Oblast with an explicit threat that annexation of Crimea will be met by Western annexation of Kaliningrad Oblast.

Right now Putin has nothing to love because our counter-threats are pathetic. Make it clear that for every bit of territory he gains through annexation he will lose some somewhere else and it's a much more clear cut choice for him.

We don't have to start a shooting war, we just have to match his non-shooting tactics in kind such that in the same way nuclear weapons and the MAD principle make nuclear war meaningless, threatening to match each Russian annexation with a Western annexation would make annexation pointless.

It doesn't take long before all those small territories we just let him have start to stack up as much larger land masses. Let him take Crimea and Eastern Ukraine will be next.

"If America DOES go in either we open up yet another front in our war, and this time against someone a little more sophisticated then the Taliban."

How much more sophisticated? Russia got it's ass handed to them by them in the late 80s, and collapsed shortly after. Their military then went through over 15 years of disrepair and lack of training until they invaded Georgia in 2008 and got their ass handed to them more badly than expected by an inferior opponent (they lost 40 armoured vehicles and 70 soldiers against the Georgians in 9 days), whilst Georgia suffered more that was largely because of air strikes which they didn't have such effective defence against - the Russians were completely outplayed in ground to ground fighting.

They've undergone some modernisation since then but it's a long slow process and still have an extremely long way to go.

Their strength of numbers alone makes them a dangerous threat, but Russia's military is not the toe-to-toe competitor it could've been at the height of the USSR. It's second rate at best, and whilst the US would suffer sizeable losses, Russia would still come off far far worse. Even relatively small Britain and France were spending more each per year on their military than Russia up until about 2008 and both have had consistently more active and effective training programs in place especially with international partners.

Even China's military is better funded, better equipped, and better trained nowadays. The residual threat of the USSR is almost entirely from nukes nowadays rather than anything else. In conventional warfare they'd suffer a slaughter - one that'd most definitely come at a heavy cost to the West, but a slaughter all the same.

I'm not convinced Russia would try it though, China would love nothing more than a Russia distracted fighting the West to annex parts of Eastern Russia for itself - especially where Russian-Chinese border disputes already exist. Even China's leaders are now calling on Russia not to annex Crimea suggesting that if push came to shove, even China would now probably be more likely to ally with the West than Russia. Worse, even Russia's closest allies like Belarus are showing signs they're uneasy with Putin's actions and if a puppet dictatorship like Belarus shows concerns you know Putin is pretty fucking isolated. About the only backing Putin has is from Assad as a thank you for preventing Western bombs toppling his regime there.

Neither did Iran, Syria, and North Korea due to years of crippling sanctions but they all managed to pursue nuclear weapons programs.

No, you should pursue training in parallel, but you can't train everything - sometimes other countries have exceptional talents in some areas that the US simply does not, when that's the case you want to get those guys over, possibly even to be the ones that do the training in the first place.

I'm absolutely 100% for training, but it's not a magical cure that prevents other countries getting ahead with some particular talent, it's something that has to be done alongside being able to bring over the best of other nations.

"The wages of tech workers are less than pre-recession levels and are increasing at a rate lower than inflation."

Sure but as I say, tech workers is a pretty broad term - it includes both development and support, and whilst development salaries have increased, support salaries have decreased. That's why I was intrigued to know what specific IT profession has seen it's pay drop by over a half.

"The big boys are definitely hiring the most H1B visas. Whether or not that is driving down their wages is debatable."

Sure but as I said, if you look through the raw data (available at the US DoL) those firms are also the ones that are paying far more people above the national average salary for the professions in question than below. The salary information is included in the H1-B visa data.

I've had a further look though and I think you're right in your later assertion - it's companies like WiPro that seem to be abusing the H1-B system to pay below average. Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Apple etc. are not - they're raising the average with H1-B but like you say, it looks like some of the other players are taking the piss a bit.

Perhaps the solution therefore is to crack down on such companies, or simply agree to an increase in H1-B cap that MS etc. are asking for on the agreement that no one can be paid less than the national average salary for the profession? This would allow the likes of Microsoft et. al. to keep using H1-B properly (because they're already paying above the average for nearly all the H1-B positions they use) whilst making it expensive for the likes of exploitative outsourcing firms like WiPro to take the piss with it?

You seem to think that every developer can do every other developer's job. That is simply false.

There are developers doing certain areas of brand new research pursuing ideas that no one is and who can hence develop things that no one else can.

It's possible that such a person has such a talent outside America that no one inside America has, it's possible that Apple wants this skill for a future product before anyone else gets it so is willing to pay for it.

The reason you're failing to grasp the situation is because you think every developer is interchangeable, they're not. Your argument is akin to the idea that the greatest basketball player in the world can be replaced by some fat extremely unfit guy at your local bar.

LOL paranoid much?