Thanks Reed Hastings:
This time you were able to offend only 50% of your customers. When you had announced the price hike and separate services a few weeks ago, you managed to upset 100% of your customers as everyone was affected. With the recent move to make two brands Netflix and Qwikster, the percentage of pissed of customers will only be 50%. That’s a significant decrease from the past and I commend you for that. Let me explain why only 50% - you have approximately 2.2 million DVD only customers, 9.8 million streaming only customers and 12 million customers who have both DVD and Streaming services. I am one of those customers with both the services. With two different companies and websites, the 2.2 million DVD and 9.8 million streaming only customers will not be affected (apart from a shock) but 12 million subscribers like me who have both the services will be miserable – two different accounts, two different queues, two different reviews! What else? Oh, if I change my address, I need to change it at two websites, same if I change my credit card. Also, I cannot discount the built in challenges to the service when a change like this is introduced!
But the bright side is that customers like me are only 50% of your total customers. Thanks for upsetting only half of us this time!
Monday, September 19, 2011
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Wanna Lose Weight? That's Easy, Just Eat Lunch Twice!
I am 5'8" and was 171 lbs three weeks ago - only 10 lbs over than my ideal weight. My weight was mostly concentrated around my waist. They say that women lose weight to look great and men lose weight to be healthy.
I am different; I do it for the gadgets!
What do you mean gadgets? Well, I have this habit of buying latest technology gadgets like laptop, iTouch, iPad etc. My eyes are already on the latest iPad from Apple and I also wanted to buy a Mac Mini to convert it into a media center. A few weeks ago my wife threw me a challenge and said, “Why don't you earn your gadgets - one gadget for every 5 lbs. That way you will get your gadgets and look good too”. I don’t know what my wife means when she says “I will look good” but an iPad in my hands will sure look fantastic!
So I took the challenge.
The results are in. In only 4 weeks, I was able to lose 5 lbs. I just bought my Mac Mini.
Losing 5 lbs in 3 weeks! Well, there is nothing dramatic there. You must have heard many stories with people losing four times that in less than half the time I took. There are two things to consider. One – losing the last 10 pounds is the toughest and second – I lost my weight by having lunch twice!
How can one lose weight by eating lunch twice?
Here is my analysis. To begin with, I did not follow any diet plan or changed my lifestyle or eating habits completely. I just did one thing - used common sense to observe what I ate and what calories they translate into. I then experimented with minimizing those calories without getting hungry. Following are some of my findings and suggestions:
1. Start with the "will": If you don't have the will, nothing will work. Forget all the diet plans and focus on motivating yourself. Some would like to have a better quality of life, better health, more energy, better looks or in my case better gadgets! Find out what motivates you. If you are not motivated you can never be committed and if you are not committed you will never lose weight.
2. Work with a friend or family member: This ties in nicely with the point above. If you share your goals or plans with a friend or a family member and work together with them to achieve your ideal weight, chances are, you will be more successful. The friend will keep you motivated and vice versa. He or she will also keep you honest too. You won't find yourself on your own. In my case I worked together with my wife at home and a colleague at work. My wife has already lost all the extra weight that she had gained after two kids. She is now working on toning and looking great. We both love to eat delicious food and find different ways to come up with low calorie recipes to fill us up.
3. Eat lunch twice: This is another way of saying that distributes your calories. I found out that my calories were bottom heavy. I rarely used to eat breakfast. I also used to have a quick lunch because of my busy work. As the evening approached, I used to feel famished. I will come home and start eating snacks, have a drink or two and just weight for the dinner to be served. I will then have a heavy dinner and go to bed almost immediately. I found out that I am consuming almost 60% of my calories during dinner. That was too much. Also, there was not enough time for the body to burn any of those calories as I used to go to bed soon after dinner. To get out of this rut, I started having breakfast regularly. It was a struggle to be hungry in the morning for a few days but my body quickly adapted to it. Then I started having sensible lunches - around 300-400 calories. I would have my lunch at 12:30pm but was starving again around 4:30pm. I tried to eat snacks - sometimes nuts, sometimes cereal and milk if I am at home, sometimes a granola bar and things like that. This helped but I was still famished in the evening. Also, the snacks were not always healthy and contained a lot of fat. One day, a thought came to my mind - I eat a sensible lunch of around 400 calories, why not have it twice. Its filling, it’s satisfying and has around the same calories as my snacks. That day I went to Subway and ordered a foot long turkey sandwich on a wheat bread. I ate 6" sandwich at 12:30pm and then another 6" at 4:30pm. That was the big difference! When I went home that day, I did not feel famished. I ate sensible dinner. As soon as I put this into routine, I started to lose pounds. It turns out that once I distributed my calories, I did not feel famished at any time. That was the trick.
4. Don't starve yourself: There is no sure way to succeed if you want to lose weight but in my experience a sure way to fail is to starve yourself. There are folks with great will power who have achieved success by doing this. I don't know if it is healthy to starve and lose weight but one thing is certain and everyone will agree with it that it is not practical. A human being goes through several emotions within a day - being excited to being passive to being exhausted to being tired to sometimes being depressed. Similarly a human being goes through many situations in a day - with guests, with clients, with kids, in a lunch meeting or in a celebratory dinner. In my experience it is difficult to overcome the urge to eat going through multiple combinations of emotions and situations that I talked above when you are starving. The best solution is to not be hungry.
5. Eat everything, Enjoy life: Another thing that works for me is the fact that I have very few restrictions as to what I can or cannot eat. In summary, I ate everything in moderation. Sometimes I went overboard and consumed many unnecessary calories but I did not make my one mistake negate everything I did in the past or all the good things I will continue to do in the future. Many people are too hard on themselves. They follow their diet religiously but one mistake and they give up everything and become depressed or de-motivated and start drinking and eating like crazy. Chill out, that was not murder, you just ate some pizza. Darn it, it smelled good, looked appetizing and was delicious especially after so many weeks! So enjoy the moment, don't punish yourself. Another way to eat everything would be to find new recipes that taste good and are not high calorie. My wife and I have found many. It was possible to have less than the required calories and fat grams while enjoying a delicious dinner of grilled vegetables and chicken, a glass of white wine that ended with hot tea with real sugar! I have realized that a teaspoon of sugar is 25 calories, nothing compared to almost 2000 calories that we consume every day. It is better to consume those extra sugar calories than to put chemicals in your body – some of which cause cancer. Yeah, cancer! Check the label next time.
6. The dreaded exercise: I don’t want to minimize the importance of exercise but doing regular exercise is a state of mind. There are many ways to do exercise – some people love to spend their time in a Gym, some love to play sport, some like to take long walks, some like to run in the morning, some like to ride their bicycle in the evening, some have young kids and cannot find time to rest! The bottom line is that one needs to find something that they like. That is the key. A gym membership is of no use if that is not what interests you. My wife and I spent almost $900 over the last Christmas and bought a Treadmill. But we both prefer to take walks outside of the house. So the Treadmill is OK if you motivate yourself to use it but for me the best thing would be to walk outside with a tangible goal – like walk to the strip mall and buy a book or climb the nearest hill and come back. Like I said with the food, there are many ways to succeed doing an exercise but the sure way to fail is to try to do something that is not your cup of tea. Another thing that helps is to do little changes in your lifestyle. In my case I decided to take the stairs instead of an elevator when possible. Remember, the key is “when possible”. As you must have noticed, I don’t believe in any impractical restrictions. My results and not my approach is important. We have a 4 story car park at work and I park on the third or fourth floor. My office is on the 5th floor and I take stairs to go to my office or my car whenever I can.
7. Define success, Define celebration: Most people are good at celebrating success but the key is to define what success is. If you are 300 pound over weight male in early 30s and if you decide to start watching what you eat. You are bound to lose 2-3 pound immediately but 2-3 pounds compared to what you may want to lose might be negligible. For example if I want to lose 60 pounds then losing 2 pounds is still less than 3 %. In my case I want to lose 10 pounds. I defined my first milestone for success to be 50 % or 5 lbs. But defining success is half the battle, the second important part is defining celebration. You can have a beer, an ice cream, buy new clothes, a gadget or anything that tickles your fancy. My experience is that you should have a pre-defined celebration – something that you miss and need dearly. In my case, I have my gadgets – a Mac Mini when I lose 5 lbs and an iPad for the next 5 lbs. My celebrations may not make sense to all of you but it makes sense to me. It keeps me motivated, it keeps me honest, and it keeps me driven. Once you find something that will do the same for you, you have defined both the success and the celebration.
8. Write down your journey - the good and the bad: What’s the one difference between successful, high profile people and us mere mortals? I am not talking about success in diets; I am talking successful scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs, statesmen, revolutionaries, politicians and others. You will notice that most of these successful people have a habit of writing down their ideas, their observations, their thoughts, their struggles etc. – some publish their writings and some do not. But if you are successful, you have a habit of writing. I have discovered it so late in my life but as they say you are never too late. I have found that writing or documenting is also introspection. If provides fodder for you to analyze, evaluate and make changes to your future because the past cannot be changed unless you are part of a science fiction sitcom! The best thing I did when I started my effort to lose weight was to write down my calories every day. Nowadays it’s fairly easy to document these kinds of things. I am personally using a site called www.fatsecret.com to document all my calories and exercise details. The site is fairly intuitive and has a pretty good database of foods that we eat. One can also create custom food items and store them in the site. The site tracks your calories along with fat, proteins and carbohydrate consumption. I have noticed that there were days when I did very well with my calorie intake but my fat consumption was high, I have also noticed that there were days when I consumed 130% of the recommended calories i.e. I overate! There were days when I did very well with calorie and fat intake but felt tired or hungry. Basically, every day taught me something new. I learned from my mistakes and increased my chances to succeed. The biggest benefit of documenting was that I could analyze my food habits and improve them. This blog is once again helping me put everything in perspective. This is a great exercise. Even if nobody reads my blog, I still want to do it because it is for me. If I don’t do it, I would lose and it won’t be the weight!
I am different; I do it for the gadgets!
What do you mean gadgets? Well, I have this habit of buying latest technology gadgets like laptop, iTouch, iPad etc. My eyes are already on the latest iPad from Apple and I also wanted to buy a Mac Mini to convert it into a media center. A few weeks ago my wife threw me a challenge and said, “Why don't you earn your gadgets - one gadget for every 5 lbs. That way you will get your gadgets and look good too”. I don’t know what my wife means when she says “I will look good” but an iPad in my hands will sure look fantastic!
So I took the challenge.
The results are in. In only 4 weeks, I was able to lose 5 lbs. I just bought my Mac Mini.
Losing 5 lbs in 3 weeks! Well, there is nothing dramatic there. You must have heard many stories with people losing four times that in less than half the time I took. There are two things to consider. One – losing the last 10 pounds is the toughest and second – I lost my weight by having lunch twice!
How can one lose weight by eating lunch twice?
Here is my analysis. To begin with, I did not follow any diet plan or changed my lifestyle or eating habits completely. I just did one thing - used common sense to observe what I ate and what calories they translate into. I then experimented with minimizing those calories without getting hungry. Following are some of my findings and suggestions:
1. Start with the "will": If you don't have the will, nothing will work. Forget all the diet plans and focus on motivating yourself. Some would like to have a better quality of life, better health, more energy, better looks or in my case better gadgets! Find out what motivates you. If you are not motivated you can never be committed and if you are not committed you will never lose weight.
2. Work with a friend or family member: This ties in nicely with the point above. If you share your goals or plans with a friend or a family member and work together with them to achieve your ideal weight, chances are, you will be more successful. The friend will keep you motivated and vice versa. He or she will also keep you honest too. You won't find yourself on your own. In my case I worked together with my wife at home and a colleague at work. My wife has already lost all the extra weight that she had gained after two kids. She is now working on toning and looking great. We both love to eat delicious food and find different ways to come up with low calorie recipes to fill us up.
3. Eat lunch twice: This is another way of saying that distributes your calories. I found out that my calories were bottom heavy. I rarely used to eat breakfast. I also used to have a quick lunch because of my busy work. As the evening approached, I used to feel famished. I will come home and start eating snacks, have a drink or two and just weight for the dinner to be served. I will then have a heavy dinner and go to bed almost immediately. I found out that I am consuming almost 60% of my calories during dinner. That was too much. Also, there was not enough time for the body to burn any of those calories as I used to go to bed soon after dinner. To get out of this rut, I started having breakfast regularly. It was a struggle to be hungry in the morning for a few days but my body quickly adapted to it. Then I started having sensible lunches - around 300-400 calories. I would have my lunch at 12:30pm but was starving again around 4:30pm. I tried to eat snacks - sometimes nuts, sometimes cereal and milk if I am at home, sometimes a granola bar and things like that. This helped but I was still famished in the evening. Also, the snacks were not always healthy and contained a lot of fat. One day, a thought came to my mind - I eat a sensible lunch of around 400 calories, why not have it twice. Its filling, it’s satisfying and has around the same calories as my snacks. That day I went to Subway and ordered a foot long turkey sandwich on a wheat bread. I ate 6" sandwich at 12:30pm and then another 6" at 4:30pm. That was the big difference! When I went home that day, I did not feel famished. I ate sensible dinner. As soon as I put this into routine, I started to lose pounds. It turns out that once I distributed my calories, I did not feel famished at any time. That was the trick.
4. Don't starve yourself: There is no sure way to succeed if you want to lose weight but in my experience a sure way to fail is to starve yourself. There are folks with great will power who have achieved success by doing this. I don't know if it is healthy to starve and lose weight but one thing is certain and everyone will agree with it that it is not practical. A human being goes through several emotions within a day - being excited to being passive to being exhausted to being tired to sometimes being depressed. Similarly a human being goes through many situations in a day - with guests, with clients, with kids, in a lunch meeting or in a celebratory dinner. In my experience it is difficult to overcome the urge to eat going through multiple combinations of emotions and situations that I talked above when you are starving. The best solution is to not be hungry.
5. Eat everything, Enjoy life: Another thing that works for me is the fact that I have very few restrictions as to what I can or cannot eat. In summary, I ate everything in moderation. Sometimes I went overboard and consumed many unnecessary calories but I did not make my one mistake negate everything I did in the past or all the good things I will continue to do in the future. Many people are too hard on themselves. They follow their diet religiously but one mistake and they give up everything and become depressed or de-motivated and start drinking and eating like crazy. Chill out, that was not murder, you just ate some pizza. Darn it, it smelled good, looked appetizing and was delicious especially after so many weeks! So enjoy the moment, don't punish yourself. Another way to eat everything would be to find new recipes that taste good and are not high calorie. My wife and I have found many. It was possible to have less than the required calories and fat grams while enjoying a delicious dinner of grilled vegetables and chicken, a glass of white wine that ended with hot tea with real sugar! I have realized that a teaspoon of sugar is 25 calories, nothing compared to almost 2000 calories that we consume every day. It is better to consume those extra sugar calories than to put chemicals in your body – some of which cause cancer. Yeah, cancer! Check the label next time.
6. The dreaded exercise: I don’t want to minimize the importance of exercise but doing regular exercise is a state of mind. There are many ways to do exercise – some people love to spend their time in a Gym, some love to play sport, some like to take long walks, some like to run in the morning, some like to ride their bicycle in the evening, some have young kids and cannot find time to rest! The bottom line is that one needs to find something that they like. That is the key. A gym membership is of no use if that is not what interests you. My wife and I spent almost $900 over the last Christmas and bought a Treadmill. But we both prefer to take walks outside of the house. So the Treadmill is OK if you motivate yourself to use it but for me the best thing would be to walk outside with a tangible goal – like walk to the strip mall and buy a book or climb the nearest hill and come back. Like I said with the food, there are many ways to succeed doing an exercise but the sure way to fail is to try to do something that is not your cup of tea. Another thing that helps is to do little changes in your lifestyle. In my case I decided to take the stairs instead of an elevator when possible. Remember, the key is “when possible”. As you must have noticed, I don’t believe in any impractical restrictions. My results and not my approach is important. We have a 4 story car park at work and I park on the third or fourth floor. My office is on the 5th floor and I take stairs to go to my office or my car whenever I can.
7. Define success, Define celebration: Most people are good at celebrating success but the key is to define what success is. If you are 300 pound over weight male in early 30s and if you decide to start watching what you eat. You are bound to lose 2-3 pound immediately but 2-3 pounds compared to what you may want to lose might be negligible. For example if I want to lose 60 pounds then losing 2 pounds is still less than 3 %. In my case I want to lose 10 pounds. I defined my first milestone for success to be 50 % or 5 lbs. But defining success is half the battle, the second important part is defining celebration. You can have a beer, an ice cream, buy new clothes, a gadget or anything that tickles your fancy. My experience is that you should have a pre-defined celebration – something that you miss and need dearly. In my case, I have my gadgets – a Mac Mini when I lose 5 lbs and an iPad for the next 5 lbs. My celebrations may not make sense to all of you but it makes sense to me. It keeps me motivated, it keeps me honest, and it keeps me driven. Once you find something that will do the same for you, you have defined both the success and the celebration.
8. Write down your journey - the good and the bad: What’s the one difference between successful, high profile people and us mere mortals? I am not talking about success in diets; I am talking successful scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs, statesmen, revolutionaries, politicians and others. You will notice that most of these successful people have a habit of writing down their ideas, their observations, their thoughts, their struggles etc. – some publish their writings and some do not. But if you are successful, you have a habit of writing. I have discovered it so late in my life but as they say you are never too late. I have found that writing or documenting is also introspection. If provides fodder for you to analyze, evaluate and make changes to your future because the past cannot be changed unless you are part of a science fiction sitcom! The best thing I did when I started my effort to lose weight was to write down my calories every day. Nowadays it’s fairly easy to document these kinds of things. I am personally using a site called www.fatsecret.com to document all my calories and exercise details. The site is fairly intuitive and has a pretty good database of foods that we eat. One can also create custom food items and store them in the site. The site tracks your calories along with fat, proteins and carbohydrate consumption. I have noticed that there were days when I did very well with my calorie intake but my fat consumption was high, I have also noticed that there were days when I consumed 130% of the recommended calories i.e. I overate! There were days when I did very well with calorie and fat intake but felt tired or hungry. Basically, every day taught me something new. I learned from my mistakes and increased my chances to succeed. The biggest benefit of documenting was that I could analyze my food habits and improve them. This blog is once again helping me put everything in perspective. This is a great exercise. Even if nobody reads my blog, I still want to do it because it is for me. If I don’t do it, I would lose and it won’t be the weight!
Arizona Immigration: Vigilante Justice
What's the difference between the state of Arizon and South Dakota?
Sure, "Heat vs. Snow", "Grand Canyon vs. Mount Rushmore", "South vs. North" and many more. Of course these are obvious differences that come to our minds but these are differences of Geography and Engineering marvels. Every US state will be different in some ways to other state. But a significant difference that is always missed is the fact that South Dakota share its borders with other US states and therefore has total control over it. Arizona on the other hand shares its border with another country - Mexico, and that makes all the difference!
How is sharing a border with other state different than sharing it with another country? To begin with, Arizona does not control Border Patrol, its a Federal Law Enforcement Agency. So unlike South Dokota, Arizona is at the MERCY of Federal government to ensure border security and immigration check points. But the intersting thing about all this is that once the immigrants - whether legal or illegal, are in Arizona, its no longer a Federal issue - it becomes a state issue.
Arizona is free to reap benefits that immigration brings with it - necessary labor, additional taxes and contribution to Arizona economy.
But along with these benefits there is a significant cost involved with illegal immigration.
Arizonans fork out nearly $1.3 billion annually to pay for all of the costs incurred from illegal immigration; around $810 million for education, $400 million for health care related expenses, $80 million in incarceration costs, and the remainder in welfare benefits. All of this is required while Arizona runs a $500 million deficit annually.
So Arizona is in a quandry. They don't want to fork out unneccesary dollars for illegal immigrants. The easy fix is to not allow illegal immigrants through the border but they don't control this. The border is controlled by Federal government and inspite of numerous requests, the Federal government is ineffective in controlling the flow of ilegal immigrants into Arizona. It's like I have a house to manage but additional "guests" keep coming in through the back door and the "host" must provide for thier school, food and medical expenses and yes, some of the "guests" do get into fight with the original residents of the house and the "host" also needs to descipline the "guests". One easy solution for the "host" would be to close the back door but the entry to the back door is controlled by Homeowner's Association!
What should Arizona do to mitigate the crime and voilence due to illegal immigration? What should Arizona do to reduce the cost associated with illegal immigration? What should Arizona do to be fair to its residents? Well, with the passage of the Arizona SB1070 bill into law, Arizona took matter in its own hands. They came up with a state solution to a federal problem.
The law makes it a state misdemeanor crime for anyone to be in the United States unlawfully, and requires police to make an attempt, when practicable, to determine a person's immigration status if there is reasonable suspicion that the person is an illegal alien. Police may, without a warrant, arrest a person if there is probable cause that the person is an illegal alien or is a legal alien not in possession of registration documents that the person is required to carry by federal law.
The above legalese can be translated into a simple statement - in Arizona, one can be stopped and asked for papers if there is a reasonable suspicion that the person is illegal immigrant. I am not sure what is meant by reasonable suspicion. I doubt if anybody does.
So is the law fair?
Well, stopping somebody and asking for papers brings out the worst memories of the Hitler era. But before we take this comparison too far, lets be clear with one big difference - in Nazi Germany the people asking for the papers were the oppressors and the Jews providing the papers were the sufferers however; in Arizona the people asking for papers are the sufferes dealign with crime and economic injustice. The illegal immigrants on the other hands are the criminals.
But nobody likes to be stopped and asked for papers in a country that is made of immigrants from the very beginning.
This translates to only one thing the current Arizona immigration law is "Vigilante Justice". Is Vigilante Justice acceptable? That depends on the situation. If my house is robbed on a regular basis and the police does not do anything in spite of numerous complaints then what should I do? Sit and be robbed again or take arms against the robber before he commits another crime? Its easy to dismiss Vigilante Justice on the moral grounds but once you are put into the situation where your family's safety is compromised, I think any reasonable person would be a Vigilante.
The real problem here is not the illegal immigrant, he is just the symptom. The problem here is also not the new Arizona state law, that's an act of defiance against the federal status quo. The real problem here is the Federal Government and its inability to control the borders.
I believe that the real solution would be to have state manage its own border except for war. As I have already said, if I cannot control the "guests" coming in from the back door, then don't blame me if I come up with a plan to kick them out when I want to.
Remember, this is my house!
Sure, "Heat vs. Snow", "Grand Canyon vs. Mount Rushmore", "South vs. North" and many more. Of course these are obvious differences that come to our minds but these are differences of Geography and Engineering marvels. Every US state will be different in some ways to other state. But a significant difference that is always missed is the fact that South Dakota share its borders with other US states and therefore has total control over it. Arizona on the other hand shares its border with another country - Mexico, and that makes all the difference!
How is sharing a border with other state different than sharing it with another country? To begin with, Arizona does not control Border Patrol, its a Federal Law Enforcement Agency. So unlike South Dokota, Arizona is at the MERCY of Federal government to ensure border security and immigration check points. But the intersting thing about all this is that once the immigrants - whether legal or illegal, are in Arizona, its no longer a Federal issue - it becomes a state issue.
Arizona is free to reap benefits that immigration brings with it - necessary labor, additional taxes and contribution to Arizona economy.
But along with these benefits there is a significant cost involved with illegal immigration.
Arizonans fork out nearly $1.3 billion annually to pay for all of the costs incurred from illegal immigration; around $810 million for education, $400 million for health care related expenses, $80 million in incarceration costs, and the remainder in welfare benefits. All of this is required while Arizona runs a $500 million deficit annually.
So Arizona is in a quandry. They don't want to fork out unneccesary dollars for illegal immigrants. The easy fix is to not allow illegal immigrants through the border but they don't control this. The border is controlled by Federal government and inspite of numerous requests, the Federal government is ineffective in controlling the flow of ilegal immigrants into Arizona. It's like I have a house to manage but additional "guests" keep coming in through the back door and the "host" must provide for thier school, food and medical expenses and yes, some of the "guests" do get into fight with the original residents of the house and the "host" also needs to descipline the "guests". One easy solution for the "host" would be to close the back door but the entry to the back door is controlled by Homeowner's Association!
What should Arizona do to mitigate the crime and voilence due to illegal immigration? What should Arizona do to reduce the cost associated with illegal immigration? What should Arizona do to be fair to its residents? Well, with the passage of the Arizona SB1070 bill into law, Arizona took matter in its own hands. They came up with a state solution to a federal problem.
The law makes it a state misdemeanor crime for anyone to be in the United States unlawfully, and requires police to make an attempt, when practicable, to determine a person's immigration status if there is reasonable suspicion that the person is an illegal alien. Police may, without a warrant, arrest a person if there is probable cause that the person is an illegal alien or is a legal alien not in possession of registration documents that the person is required to carry by federal law.
The above legalese can be translated into a simple statement - in Arizona, one can be stopped and asked for papers if there is a reasonable suspicion that the person is illegal immigrant. I am not sure what is meant by reasonable suspicion. I doubt if anybody does.
So is the law fair?
Well, stopping somebody and asking for papers brings out the worst memories of the Hitler era. But before we take this comparison too far, lets be clear with one big difference - in Nazi Germany the people asking for the papers were the oppressors and the Jews providing the papers were the sufferers however; in Arizona the people asking for papers are the sufferes dealign with crime and economic injustice. The illegal immigrants on the other hands are the criminals.
But nobody likes to be stopped and asked for papers in a country that is made of immigrants from the very beginning.
This translates to only one thing the current Arizona immigration law is "Vigilante Justice". Is Vigilante Justice acceptable? That depends on the situation. If my house is robbed on a regular basis and the police does not do anything in spite of numerous complaints then what should I do? Sit and be robbed again or take arms against the robber before he commits another crime? Its easy to dismiss Vigilante Justice on the moral grounds but once you are put into the situation where your family's safety is compromised, I think any reasonable person would be a Vigilante.
The real problem here is not the illegal immigrant, he is just the symptom. The problem here is also not the new Arizona state law, that's an act of defiance against the federal status quo. The real problem here is the Federal Government and its inability to control the borders.
I believe that the real solution would be to have state manage its own border except for war. As I have already said, if I cannot control the "guests" coming in from the back door, then don't blame me if I come up with a plan to kick them out when I want to.
Remember, this is my house!
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