(no subject)

http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/we-asked-an-expert-happen-if-eu-opened-borders-to-everyone-584

A bunch of arguments that immigration makes people better off--

Would European workers experience a significant dip in wages? Is it possible for a market to integrate, say, millions of new labourers, some of who are untrained?

Future flows of immigrants, within a large range, are likely to raise the wages and employment of typical European workers.

Some of the best new evidence we have on this comes from economists Mette Foged and Giovanni Peri. No one out there has better data or more scientific methods than these researchers. They have studied the wages and employment of every individual worker in Denmark from 1991 to 2008 (yes, everyone) and tracked how they responded to a large influx of refugees from places like Somalia and Afghanistan. Those immigrants caused native unskilled wages and employment to rise.

To see why, you have to take a step back. Certainly, when there is a single job in construction or child care, a migrant filling that job means that a native does not fill it. But that is just the beginning of how a labour market works. When there are immigrants around, native workers make different choices. What Foged and Peri show is that low-skill native Danes responded to migrant inflows by specialising in occupations requiring more complex tasks and less manual labour.

Beyond that, other research has shown that natives acquire more skill when immigration rises. And firms adjust their investments when immigrants are present, shifting away from technologies that eliminate low-skill jobs for both low-skill immigrants and low-skill natives. Most simply of all, foreign workers are not just workers, they are also consumers. Immigrants at low wages tend to consume products, like fast food and budget clothing, that are made and sold by other low-wage workers.

All of these things mean that low-skill immigrants end up both taking jobs and creating jobs. The balance, in the best research we have on Europe, has been positive even in places were politicians and activists say that it must be negative. Communicating that fact will be a permanent challenge, because the ways that immigrants fill jobs are direct and visible; the ways that they create jobs are indirect and invisible.

Additionally, some immigrants are entrepreneurs and create jobs.

The article also mentions that immigrants generally contribute more in taxes than they get in government benefits, but in Great Britain, asylum seekers are not permitted to work and therefore receive more in government benefits.

Not letting asylum seekers work is an astonishingly cruel and stupid policy.

Link thanks to andrewducker.

Musical instruments

"How an Organ Makes Music" (Watch on YouTube)

This is about how pipe organs work, and I'm left with a couple of questions. Has anyone looked at pipe organs from the angle of user interface design? Until I listened to the video, I didn't notice the obvious fact that the instrument settings on a pipe organ are based on the instruments (flute, bagpipe, trumpet, etc.) which were available locally-- in this case, northern Germany-- when pipe organs were being developed. Are there any pipe organs which have a worldwide range of instrument settings?

3D printing for antique saxophone mouthpieces.