Saving lives is the main thing for me. Waymo at least seems to take safety fairly seriously, with data indicating they cause far fewer serious accidents than the average human driver.
Traffic fatalities are one of the top 3 causes of death for kids in the US (iirc it's right behind firearms).
Beyond children, more people in the US in general are killed by drivers/cars than firearms. In the 25-44 age bracket, it's the most probable cause of death IIRC.
And, as an avid pedestrian and cyclist (and as a driver), the more humans we get off the road, the better.
Ah, blue city progressivism: "Welcome to my country! Now get the fuck out of my city."
Also, note that these cities always happily welcome more offices and businesses. They just don't want to build the housing for those workers to actually live in.
It’s because the companies are following a flawed process, not that they’re committing fraud.
The PERM process is flawed because it puts the onus of proving a need for international labor in the market on the company instead of doing it at a government level. Say in the market, you have 1000 jobs available for a role, but 900 US citizens available for doing the job. If the companies want to fill the 100 positions with non citizens and provide them to a path for permanent residency, they have to prove that no US citizens are available by advertising the position and hiring for it.
In a theoretical state, none of the 900 candidates will apply for that job because they are already employed. In reality candidates move around, so the test they ask companies to conduct is flawed.
I know people get emotional on this matter but they don’t understand the process. IMO all of this can be avoided if the labor market tests are managed centrally like a lot of countries do. You evaluate the shortage, fill those roles and then update the statistics to reflect that the shortage was filled.
This model assumes that the number of positions is fixed at any given time, but that is not true. Instead, it will fluctuate based on what must be paid. So, to extend your example, without H1B or a similiar program or de-facto state that does the same thing, then we'd get roughly the 900 jobs that are willing to pay the most to be filled, while the rest are not worth the cost of employing someone in this hypothetical market. The result, then, is a higher wage for those 900 citizens.
This is not to say that such programs are bad. To consider that, we must ask questions like:
- Is citizens being able to make much more than non-citizens a desirable outcome? (it's electorally incentivized, since citizens can vote in the relevant elections but non-citizens can not but that is not the same as being desirable in a more broad sense)
- How big is this effect?
- How badly do we (meaning society at large) want these final 100 jobs done?
- How will this affect competition with other countries?
- What about outsourcing?
A labor shortage has a temporary effect of creating an upward pressure on the 900 jobs, but there’s a ceiling and the long term effects are complex. I may have to pay 900 jobs 1.5x to attract and retain the talent as a business, but that cost will be eaten by other functions where there’s a surplus. Or long term, the businesses will find ways to either automate or ship the jobs away.
Additionally there will be a loss in productivity for business and the 900 jobs will have more work on their plates, so in a way they could be underpaid for the job they do. This is just scratching the surface, but I assume there’d be a lot of second order effects.
> the businesses will find ways to either automate or ship the jobs away
Both are acceptable terms for me compared to importing cheap labor. If they automate, then at least it creates new high end jobs, and if they ship jobs away then they now have to deal with foreign cultures, foreign courts and legal system, etc that will hamper their business.
That’s because you’re automatically assigning “cheap labor” tag to all workers on visa. Which in itself is not accurate. But these same workers after following the above process become permanent residents and citizens. (Which implies these are the people companies want to retain and move them off a visa by sinking 10s of thousands of dollars) The reality is much more nuanced.
The business won't be hampered much by hiring in other countries because EOR companies have streamlined the process. And your username is very much on point.
> This kind of “logic”—the process is broken, therefore it’s okay to cheat—isn’t very popular with Americans.
Especially because when such processes are broken they usually got that way not on accident, but because of sustained lobbying by the same forces that then take advantage of the broken system they helped to shape.
(I'm speaking generally, not necessarily claiming it applies to the particular policy being discussed here, which I'm not super familiar with the history of one way or the other).
It's become pretty obvious that the US voters do consider it important that the spirit of laws be obeyed, even when it goes against the letter of the law; and that's quite funny because in the US common law system, the spirit of the law is almost never taken into consideration by courts, as opposed to European courts.
Nope. Companies are just taking advantage of the system. Just look at who the biggest importers are. Tata Consulting? I mean that's clearly just cheap tech labor. I once was contracting and had to train my replacement from Infosys who was there on an H1b visa.
100% happens. Microsoft is for sure an offender, but the biggest offenders are companies like Infosys, Cognizant, Accenture, and IBM (among others).
There's a whole business model of US-citizen managers, H1B front-line employees, and offshore support staff. They flood the H1B lottery, crowding out (imo) more deserving high-skill folks. Was really insane to see.
IMO, going after sketchy practices like this is a MUCH better approach than reducing the volume of H1B employees.
If you are ever at a tech company and oddly see a piece of paper taped to the wall near the ceiling with microscopic font, that is a job posting. Its representing the tech company making their 'best effort' to hire an american. You can't make this stuff up.
I saw a similar notice on a random wall at the office of a late-stage startup I occasionally visited (since acquired) -- although it was in regular sized font. I actually informed one of my friends who was looking for a job to sponsor his visa about the position, and he was hired.
> They flood the H1B lottery, crowding out (imo) more deserving high-skill folks.
I really wish this was quantifiable in some way -- I have no way to tell if this statement is accurate.
I've worked with some very skilled H1B that definitely deserved to be here. If companies like Infosys or Cognizant are taking "slots" that could be filled by people like those H1Bs, then I'd consider that a big problem. Companies like these are not doing "highly skilled" work.
Edit: I kinda wonder if the "highly skilled" value judgement is a holdover from the era where people thought you were a genius if you touched a computer.
> "If companies like Infosys or Cognizant are taking "slots" that could be filled by people like those H1Bs, then I'd consider that a big problem."
It's hard to get data, but this is precisely what appears to me to be happening.
There's a limited number of slots by country. These companies specifically target those slots. I've worked with these folks (who are wonderful people, to be clear), and also had multiple friends with very niche, in-demand skills need to leave the country.
I don't have the data, but at a micro level, the system does appear to simply be set up backwards.
Remember that H1B is a lottery. If you are skilled you will be around the skilled people who won the lottery. But most of the jobs aren’t going to those people. The lottery treats a job at Google and a job at WiPro as being the same in terms of odds.
> If you are skilled you will be around the skilled people who won the lottery.
But it's a lottery that's truly random then there's no reason to believe that those that won the lottery would necessarily be highly skilled, right?
Anecdotally, over the course of my ~15 yrs of experience in the industry, I've definitely met some brilliant people on H1-B visas but I'd put that estimate at around ~30% or so, the rest were just people of average skill / talent doing work that a US citizen could be doing.
Again, just my personal observation, others may have wildly differing estimates based on places they've worked at.
If H1b were about getting the most talented, it wouldn't be 75-80% from just one country and another 10% from a second country. I'd expect it to be very evenly distributed.
I would expect tons of H1Bs from former soviet bloc countries that have incredible math and science education. The fact that the H1B program isn’t clogged with Russians and Ukrainians is evidence something is amiss.
Ukrainians and Russians typically have Western Europe as cultural beacon and thus are uninterested in living in the US, while it's full of them (software engineers) in Germany, Switzerland, Finland, Austria, Netherlands, etc...
The same is true for almost all Europeans: living in the US would be considered a downgrade in quality of life so very few highly qualified workers are willing to move to the US when they can have a good life moving to the more productive Western countries (Sweden, Switzerland, Netherlands, Germany, Austria).
>Ukrainians and Russians typically have Western Europe as cultural beacon and thus are uninterested in living in the US
Souce? Because H1B was created specifically for them, post-USSR collapse, so that the US industry would absorb all the now unemployed skilled mathematicians, physicists, electrical engineers that were previously working in the Soviet defense industry, so that their skills now benefit the US private sector economy (SV) instead of some rogue element post-USSR collapse. And many, MANY, emigrated there in the last 35+ years, at least when emigration to the US was still easy.
Also, "cultural beacon" is such a vague BS theater-kid term that fits no argument. Knowing many of them personally, they more identify to the individualist capitalist "big house with lawn and big car" mindset of the Americans, than the socialist/communist "solidarity via let's tax the hard working high-earners and give to the lazy low-earners so we all live in concrete shoebox apartments" mindset of Europeans.
They come to western Europe instead of the US now, because western Europe is closer, cheaper, easier to get to thanks to open borders, and provides most welfare aids to refugees than US, not because the US is not a "cultural beacon" or whatever.
>while it's full of them (software engineers) in Germany, Switzerland, Finland, Austria, Netherlands, etc...
Bullshit. I live in Austria and it's not "full of them" (programmers I mean) because they earn less in Austria than back home. Maybe Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland because there's more US big-tech there with high earning potential, but definitely not Austria, which for me was the indicator that you don't know what you're talking about, and is making stuff up.
You'll notice it follows a population distribution of the world, with higher weighting from less developed countries. Soviet bloc people are not a high %age of world population and also tend to be captured more by europe since it's closer. People from developed countries tend to have less incentive to move on top of that. Indians have a further advantage of already knowing english on top of that and you get our current distribution of mostly people from india, china, canada (proximity, easy TN visa and english), europe with significant slavic representation and then everywhere else in the tech industry.
The relevant metric isn’t population, but educated population. India has 70% of H1bs while most other countries have under 1%. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/visualized-h-1b-visa-approv.... India doesn’t have 70% of the world’s college graduates in developing countries.
India has 140 million college degree holders, which is less than China and only twice as much as the U.S. China has more graduates but only 12% of H1b. Russia has about 40 million and gets under 1% of H1bs. So India has 3.5x as many degree holders as Russia, but gets over 70 times as many H1bs. Brazil has about 30 million college graduates and again under 1% of H1bs. So India has 5x the college population but over 70x the H1bs. Indonesia has 17 million degree holders but less than 0.1% of H1b. So India has 8x as many graduates as Indonesia but gets 100x+ as many H1bs.
Well, India and China have 1.5B people each. Even if people there were actually less talented than in the US (as a percentage of people passing some bar), you would still expect the absolute number of applications from those countries to be high.
I mean that each employer petition on behalf of a worker is selected randomly. But, prior to the petition, the workers are hired by the companies in a non-random fashion. That’s important to keep in mind because I think a lot of people are like “oh the H1Bs I met working on AI at Google are super smart, so the program must bring over the best of the best.” But the system treats an H1B petition from WiPro the same as one from Google. Because the system is a lottery, it can be true that there are super smart H1bs working at Google and also that most of them are doing jobs many Americans could be doing. The lottery system makes the bar quite low and the spread very wide.
> The lottery treats a job at Google and a job at WiPro as being the same in terms of odds.
This actually changed this year. Applicant gets 1-4 tickets depending on their pay relative to job/area. So $500k Google engineer has quite a bit higher chance than $100k WiPro one.
Of course it still has issues (Google probably has 1-2 possible applicants for that position and would prefer all of them, Wipro has 100 and cares more about what % of them pass).
Fair. I think there's a discussion to be had on whether it should be a lottery, but I don't think that discussion is feasible in the current political zeitgeist.
The people that deserve the jobs are Americans. It doesnt matter if a foreigner is more skilled--the American people don't want to complete for jobs in a global labor market.
Yes, exactly. I don't think Microsoft's hiring 6K foreign workers is really the problem. It's companies like Accenture and their shady practices. I've seen entire departments of American workers laid off only to be replaced by Accenture through H1Bs. This is just a publicity stunt from the administration. If they really cared about this issue, they would work with congress and update their antiquated immigration laws regarding foreign workers.
It's a controversial site simply because of what it's targeting but "jobs [dot] now" surfaces a lot of these newspaper ads that they catch, and also highlight crazy (in the modern day) stuff like "send your resume via mail to this address to apply" or at times even custom job boards that only have the PERM roles on them when the company has a completely different board for all others.
This happens. It’s the SOP, but it’s because they already have someone doing the job on a work visa and they don’t want to have to fire them and hire/train someone else.
It’s not necessarily a green card problem (ok it is, but…); it’s more of a visa problem.
One should not have to disclose one's politics to make such a comment. IMO. That means that we should not think "smells like a Republican, so ignore them!".
One shouldn't pay heed to any comments one way or another that are prefaced with "I am X". They are thinly veiled attempts at appealing to people's base emotions.
Or -more likely- they reflect fear of being judged for their political views as inferred by others. But yeah, it could be manipulation! "I'm not an X but " could be a purposeful way to push views held by people who are .
I get it. Like 90% of the Republicans platform is the dumbest policies imaginable. It’s like saying you agree with a bunch of drunk, belligerent, clowns. You’d want people to know that you don’t paint your face and piss your pants too.
You really think that the democrats are much better? It seems like they are more concerned with their image than actually doing anything. Or if they do, it seems like they are more interested in the symbolic aspect of it and to perpetually keep the problem, such as how they deal with homelessness.
"Hours after the [Microsoft H-1B] announcement, President Trump awarded Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, the National Medal of Technology and Innovation at a summit in Washington where Mr. Musk and other tech executives also were honored.
Mr. Nadella came to the United States for graduate school and joined Microsoft in 1992. Two years later, he wrote in his memoir, he turned in his permanent residency for an H-1B visa so that his wife could immediately join him in the United States."
The "replacement of an American" is where the narrative breaks down. Traditionally we haven't had large numbers of unemployed developers. One of the consequences of the the Dot Com bubble bursting is we lost an entire generation of native-born engineers. People weren't going in to CS. At the same time there was an explosion of software positions. This is part of what fed the increasing use of H1B talent. This was also one of the sources of the bootcamp phenomenon. Things are bit more dynamic these days. This is just a nativist, anti-immigrant move.
It's only kind of accurate. It has to be 2 newspapers in the area the person is employed in. Hard to prosecute them for following the rules they are given.
The rule is the job has to be posted with the state workforce agency, 2 Sunday newspapers, and 3 other recruitment methods (mostly at the company’s discretion). PERM is basically a retention tool as h1b is temporary otherwise. Obviously they are going to choose the 3 methods least likely to produce good candidates. As with most immigration issues, it could be trivially fixed by Congress but won't be.
> Hard to prosecute them for following the rules they are given.
Well if that's how one want to proceed. Fine. In that case these companies are not really prosecuted. Government is just doing fraud prevention out of abundance of caution.
Related, I usually hate CRT filters in game, the scan lines usually look too strong (and often the image is darkened inappropriately), but I really liked the one in Cyber Shadow. It just felt right.
It's very hit or miss. Abylight Studios (Super Hydorah, Cursed Castilla) seems to do them pretty well, but then I've seen some that left me wondering how they ever made it past QC. (I won't name them because it's been a while and I don't want to name the wrong game.)
I want to point out though that it's impossible for any CRT filter to have a peak brightness that's not significantly lower than without the filter, since it can darken pixels but not brighten them past what the maximum already is.
I know someone who uses a CRT filter for vscode... I thought that was just a meme theme we all downloaded and clicked once to check it out then turned it off but he likes it along with his exploding text characters, forgot the name of that, powerblock or whatever. His vscode triggers my ADHD like trying to read a too busy restaurant menu, literally can't absorb anything.
One thing that I don't like about American culture is that people are a little too hesitant about adding 'retail' into publicly-owned spaces. There's a reflexive attitude of that being A Bad Thing, even though most Americans who visit, say, Japan, really appreciate the various shops and kiosks they have in transit stations over there.
I also really enjoyed in Germany when at the top of some hike there'd be an inn+restaurant, something Americans seem to treat as nearly anathema.
Given the rest of American culture is intensely commercialised, I can see why there is a desire to protect the remaining non-commercial spaces.
My local library has an indepenently run coffee kiosk out front, the Council (local govt) own the facility and lease it to the operator, and presumably have some lease terms about allowable signage and branding.
I'd probably feel differently if it was a mega franchise like Starbucks or McCafe right at the entrance of a civic building.
I understand why, but it often results in bad outcomes. Part of why transit in other countries is better is often precisely because of greater commercialization. It's not just that it's more convenient for travelers, but also it makes money to fund transit.
this. and of course, the financial structure of these arrangements matters greatly. If the food places in the stations are making good money and the trains themselves are breaking even, you want the money to be flowing to the same people who run the trains, lest the train operator stops operating and the food places suddenly find themselves without customers.
This means you can't for example have both the train operators and the food places pay rent to some third party that owns the station, it has to be the transit company owning the station to benefit from the footfall to it
Traffic fatalities are one of the top 3 causes of death for kids in the US (iirc it's right behind firearms).
reply