No one Everyone could've predicted...

...that our glorious corporate overlords (all hail!) pushing for more "skilled" immigration to solve our desperate "skills shortage" were doing so solely in order to keep wages in the STEM sectors low.

A brief excerpt:

If there was a shortage of IT jobs then you'd expect wages to rise, but in fact the team found wages in the field (on average) peaked in 2001 and have remained flat ever since, and in some cases have fallen over the last 14 years. The reason, according to the research, is that overseas workers are being recruited to keep wages low.

The researchers found that the US produces a surfeit of STEM graduates, but only half of them are hired. The rest of the jobs in the IT industry, primarily entry-level positions for the under 30s, are filled using foreign workers and may account for up to 50 per cent of new hires.

"Even our high-end estimate, of 50 percent, is a conservative estimate of the proportion of guestworkers hired," Professor Salzman told The Register. Salzman has spent the last 13 years researching this area of the market and has amassed a large body of evidence to support his claims.

I'm so surprised.

Just to be clear, I'm totally fine with immigration. Let people come here, whether they want to be ag workers, or tech workers. Just don't pretend that a certain kind of immigration is all swell and good and shiny while a darker icky smelly kind of immigration is eleventy times as bad as Hitler.

R.I.P.

Richie Havens, yet another relatively unsung great, died today. If not for the vagaries of fucked up logistics at Woodstock, he may never have even garnered the minor fame he ended up with -- he went on first because all the other filthy hippies were late.

Regardless, he was a man able to transform the blues standard "Motherless Child" into the Woodstock classic "Freedom":

RIP Richie.

UPDATE

Moar, 'cause fuck you Mr. Death:

The following contains the entirety of the first video above after the initial song. Oh well, sosumi.

Update again, 'cause fuck you that's why:

Update again: Moar? Yeah, more, you got a problem with that?

Fuck the NRA

And the creatures in congress that they own. Fuck them right in the ear, with the biggest example of one of the fucking guns they worship.

What a horrible, fucked up, shitty week.

Nothin'

I have nothing positive to say about anything. So here, have a puppy in a bowl:

Blinkout

Yeah, yeah, I know I'm having too much fun with this shit, but I don't care.

You really really need to

C'mon, you know you want to... All the kewl kids are doing it...

Evil Zedbra

For the fine folks at Riddled:

RIP Blinky, take 2

Since you lot were so enamored with my previous seizure-inducing ode to Blinky the wonder tag, here's something even worse! A twitching, blinking, color-shifting monstrosity that will terribly frighten and/or nauseate all viewers. Be sure to share it with your friends!

Much like last time, we first simply apply a "class" tag to any elements we want this technique to apply to. But to really fuck things up we throw a whole shitload of nested <div> tags in the mix:

<div class='blonk'>
<div class='blonk'>
<div class='blonk'>
(etc...)
<p class='blonk'>Some shit goes here</p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
(etc...)

And then we write just a tiny bit more code, simiilar but much worse than the last:

<script type="text/javascript">
//Two timers to make it kinda jerky and twitchy:
var longdelay=100; // change to adjust speed
var shortdelay=10;

var delay=longdelay;
var positive = 0;

// Evil array of evil color evilness:
var colors=["#ff00ff","#ffff00","#00ffff","#880088","#ff8800","#ff0000","#00ff00","#0000FF"];
var c=0;
function blonk() {
  var annoyances = document.getElementsByClassName('blonk');
  for (var i=annoyances.length - 1; i>=0; i--) {
    var b = annoyances[i];
    b.style.border="0.5em solid " + colors[c];
    if (positive === 1) {
      b.style.visibility = (b.style.visibility === 'visible') ? 'hidden' : 'visible';
      positive = 0;
    } else {
      b.style.visibility = (b.style.visibility === 'hidden') ? 'visible' : 'hidden';
      positive = 1;
    }
    if (i>=c) { // make the blinking a bit twitchy
      delay=(longdelay * 3)/2.5 + (shortdelay *c);
    } else {
      delay=shortdelay;
    }
    if (c < colors.length) {
      c++;
    } else {
      c=0;
      positive=1;
    }
    b.style.color=colors[c];
   }
   window.setTimeout(blonk, delay);
}

blonk();
</script>

And the result is gloriously, hideously, afwul!

Now that's just plain fucked up!