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Elon Musk and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick Will Advise Trump On Business Issues (theverge.com)
SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick have joined President-elect Trump's Strategic and Policy Forum, which will regularly meet with the soon-president to advise on business issues, the Trump transition team said in a statement. From a report on The Verge: The now 19-member council, established earlier this month, also includes Disney CEO Bob Iger and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty. Members will "share their specific experience and knowledge as the President implements his economic agenda," according to the transition statement. PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi also joins today. The announcement suggests a new link between the president-elect and Silicon Valley, which has been generally wary of the Trump presidency, with the notable exception of Facebook board member and Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who supported Trump despite controversy and has been working as an adviser for the transition team.
They're going to advise him they need even more H-1Bs.
They might say that, but that's not the same as Trump will do as they say. Trump said he will talk to companies and figure out why they aren't hiring American workers and then try to solve the problems. During his campaign, he already discovered one reason: regulations. It's much cheaper, faster and easier to just build a plant in Mexico than to go through regulations set by Washington. For all we know he is investigating which specific regulations, which works to push out companies.
Just assuming he will do as the CEOs request and assume what the CEOs will request is like assuming Trump will pick Romney. (which he didn't despite the press presenting it as a safe bet)
Trump is highly toxic in SV, there he is viewed as a KKK grand wizard and a serial molester in one. Anything but loud criticism would be career-damaging.
So I am surprised Musk and Kalanick decided to work with him. Did they forget what happened to Brendan Eich?
$65K workers to replace $80K locals and to drive wages down
You mean how an 'unpaid' mule replaced a farm hard earning a wage? Throughout the course of history everything has been pushed down, simplified and cheapened. The way to stay ahead of that is to adapt.
Your average RN these days can do as much, if not more, than a doctor could do 100 years ago. Your average Physicians Assistant does what a doctor would do 20-30 years ago. My wife's a doctor, she doesn't complain that the RNs and PAs are "taking her job". Or that it's pushing down the wages of doctors. The doctors have moved on to doing something else. Doctors no longer take blood pressure even though at one time that was a cutting edge diagnostic. They don't put in IVs. They don't do a lot of what is medical grunt work. It has allowed them to specialize and as a result medicine has improved. However the doctor that refused to do continuing education has found themselves irrelevant in 2016.
Once upon a time people were paid a living wage drafting, then CAD took off and we eliminated those positions because they weren't relevant jobs anymore. However if you asked the drafters I'm sure they would insist they were highly skilled. As a rule of thumb every 20 years you should be able to replace someone making $100k with someone making $50k, it doesn't mean that "no one makes" good money any more. It means that that the $100k job has moved on to a different skillset. You've never been able to learn something when you were 20 and continued doing that, exactly as you learned it, until retirement. Look at office photos from the 1940s, 1960s, 1980s and 2000s. You should notice a big progression in the skills required to operate in each of those office environments. If someone graduated college in 1940 and refused to pickup anything new in 40 years they would be absolutely irrelevant by 1980.
Seeing how slashdotters whine about anything new I completely understand why some of them are being replaced by H1Bs. Left up to some people we'd still be using punch cards because "That's the way it's done". The 'old people' I know that are still gainfully employed are ones that have continued to reinvent themselves every 10-15 years and stay ahead of what is coming. They're the ones that worked on the tools that replaced other people.
A college education is not a guarantee you can't be replaced, it just gives you a head start. My local highschool's VocTech IT program looks a lot like what a BS IT program looked like 20 years ago. We've created tools and simplified it to the point that we can teach a bulk of it to highschool students. That's the position H1Bs are filling.
So yes, we are all cogs. The trick is you need to make sure you're a cog that is hard to find an expensive to replace because the rest of the world is coming after your position.
From your article:
Wow, one percent reduction in revenue - people were clearly quite ticked off....
(Given that newspapers are a declining industry to begin with, I wouldn't be surprised if that beats the industry average)
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
I've given up on Slashdot because the lowering of the quality of the posts (the level of detail, precision and insight) is directly correlated to number of conservative dipsticks here on Slashdot. The constant denial of global warming. The defending of the pussy grabber in Chief. Pizzagate level bullshit is fairly common on slashdot.
There's really little difference between slashdot and r/the_donald.
trash talk or support Trump you're alienating fully half the readership.
I suspect your stats are actually wrong here - you're assuming 100% of the readership is American. I can speak for my small piece of the rest of the world when I say that pretty much unanimously the response in Toronto is "Umm, we tried electing someone like that as our mayor... did you not follow the late night comedy jokes about him? It didn't go so well."
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
anti Trump posts, including those critical in a reasonable way got modded straight to hell. I am not talking about flamebait or trolls, just attempts at discussion.
Please provide some links to support your claim. In particular, link to anti-Trump posts that are "critical in a reasonable way" or "just attempts at discussion" that "got modded straight to hell".
I consider myself to be non-partisan (I'm registered as an independent and I didn't vote for Trump or Clinton), but I have actually observed the opposite effect. When I look at stories such as this one from Sunday, the very first post is a profanity-laden anti-Trump post that somehow was modded 3 (Interesting). The discussion is domninated by the anti-Trump poster such as AmiMoJo (12 posts), PopeRatzo (17 posts), and Jzanu (32 posts).
Take Jzanu's posts, for example. His posts are so full of profanity that it is difficult to confuse his posts with anything close to "reasonable". Nevertheless, in Sunday's story he is modded 3 (Interesting), 2, 1, 1 (Insightful), 4 (Insightful), 3 (Informative), 0, 3, 2, 1, 0, 2, 0 (Flamebait), 2, 0 (Flamebait), -1 (Flamebait), 2, 1, 0 (Troll), 2, 0 (Troll), 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 3 (Interesting), 2, 1, and 0. Of his 32 posts, 5 were modded Interesting, Insightful, or Informative, 5 were modded Flamebait or Troll, and only one post was modded -1. It certainly doesn't seem to me that he was "modded straight to hell". And in fact, I find this surprising, because his posts are generally of such low quality that they cannot be classified as "just attempts at discussion".
> This article is another example of this: it's a forum for
> people to wail about how awful Trump will be, because
> they can see the future with perfect clarity.
One doesn't need to be precognisant to know how awful the future will be under drumpf's reign. He's already told us his beliefs and intentions... repeatedly over nearly two years... and he has a rubber-stamp congress in his pocket. The Supreme Court could theoretically put a brake on things. But it is currently crippled, and he is a single retirement or death away from having a rubber stamp there as well; and ruling as a dictator, in fact if not in name. So why should I believe for a second that any of the awful things he's announced his intention to do will not come to pass?
Imagine all the people...
What the rule should be for H1B visas is that one cannot displace existing workers in the organization in order to bring in contractors on H1B status. Don't allow an abstraction layer between the job to be performed and the original company in the form of the middle-man contractor company to allow this kind of BS.
Excellent Idea, and good catch on the 'abstraction layer' BS!
H1B visas are only supposed to be used when an American worker with the same skills cannot be found, yet we keep hearing about cases where American workers train their H1B visa worker replacements before the Americans are fired. This should be a big red flag. The job should not be H1B eligible because there is an American worker available to do the job, the person currently doing the job.
How do employers get away with this obvious visa fraud with no penalties whatsoever? They use the job description equivalent of 'creative accounting'.
With a few simple re-definitions of employee roles and employee tasks you can avoid fines and still engage in blatant visa fraud.
My point would be, in a large sense, that the choice of what to post as news (this is actually news, it is stuff that matters) is not the problem.
It's not fucking bait, it's an actual story that actually happened that we should (regardless of what color armband you wear) be interested in. These are the people who are going to be drivers for tech related economic policy for the next 4+ years.
If we can't discuss that without diving into partisan bullshit we're the problem, not the editors. What this guy is basically asking for is to turn /. into a fucking safe space from anything to do with government because we're all emotional about it. That's fucking stupid.