What we ought to do, is abolish all the special rules and requirements for the visas, and just make it even easier to hire workers.
You do understand that the basic welfare benefits provided by the US exceed the average wage earned by 80% of the world's population? So if there was unrestricted immigration to the US a few billion people would migrate to the US.
Of course no qualified US computer person is going to take work at $35,000/yr.
Looks like there's America's problem, right there. Why are we so expensive? Why are foreign programmers so much better than us, that they're able to work cheap while still living in America with all the same expenses?
What we ought to do, is abolish all the special rules and requirements for the visas, and just make it even easier to hire workers. Stop using government to prevent a free market, so that the market can force programmers either accept $35k/yr or else find a job where they're more competitive. Remove all the weird rules and you can squeeze out the need for the body shops' legal expertise; i.e. remove the parasitic middlemen and save $45k/yr. The programmers ought to be applying directly to the employer.
Duh? The US programmer won't take $35,000/yr because they can easily get twice that or more.
The Indian is willing to take $35,000 since they are indentured servants. If they complain in any way they are on the next plane back to India where they are going to earn $15,000. They do this because it pays more than working in India, they get US experience on their resume, and they improve their English. Many of these people live ten to an apartment to reduce expenses.
To understand how this scam works... H1-B Indian will have BS/MS degrees (from India) and they are willing to work for $35,000. So the body shop takes out tiny ads in local newspapers offering to hire programmers/testers with a BS/MS for $35,000. Of course no qualified US computer person is going to take work at $35,000/yr. These ads generate the "proof" needed that these jobs can't be filled by Americans.
The body shop then brings in 500 H1-B people and pays them $35,000/yr. According to the law this is allowed, there are no US citizen willing to take these jobs at $35,000/yr. But then the owner of this body shop turns right around and places these people as temp workers for $80,000/yr. He undercuts the US temp workers who would get $90,000/yr.
This is a great business $80,000 - $35,000 = $45,000 profit per H1-B visa per year. This is how you make $100M from owning a body shop over the course of a few years.
Haven't you noticed hundreds of tiny ads in the classified sections of local newspapers asking for programmers or testers and they include salary information? But when you contact them you never hear anything back? Those ads are generating the "proof" needed for the government that the position can't be filled by American workers.
Abuse of the H1-B program is not primarily done by large corporations. Instead there are specialized "body shops" doing it. These body shops pretty much only employ H1-B Indian software/testing people and then rent them out to business in the US as temporary staff. These body shop companies make huge profits for the owners since they bring in the H1-B people at very low wages and then rent them out at 90% of a normal salary. The savings to the large corporation is not much since most of the profits accrue to the body shops. One of these shop owners lives near me in a $20M house and has made over $100M profit from renting out H1-Bs. These body shops are where the bulk of the abuse occurs and they need to be outlawed.
Why is Social Security going to collapse? Simple the government never invested the money that was contributed, Congress just spent it and gave IOUs to the Social Security Administration. When the SSA ask Congress to give the money back -- duh, it's gone, it's not coming back. The Social Security surplus is one of the main things that has allowed Congress to do deficit spending for decades.
Most people don't realize this but Social Security is actual a great deal for someone his age. Statically he is likely to get back 10x what he put into it. Current retirees should not complain for a minute over what they paid into Social Security. While it might not be enough to live on it sure was a great investment for him.
The people who are going to get toasted are people who have not retired yet. Looking at my personal Social Security projection I will statistically only get back about $0.67 on each dollar that was contributed. Sticking my Social Security contributions in a mattress would be a better investment. Consider how awful the ROI on this investment is -- the money has been invested forty years and it earned a 33% nominal loss plus probably double that loss due to inflation
Millennials are likely to see a total loss of their Social Security contributions. .
You probably want to move to Hong Kong. Very low taxes, lots of people speak English. And you are very close to the tech hub in Shenzhen - just a subway ride away.
What you are missing is that the order in that list only applies to a person earning at the 50th percentile. Earn at the 25th or 75th percentile and the order of the list will change a lot. So you really need to know the ordering for the salary level you expect to earn.
50th percentile people certainly pay taxes. They pay sales tax, state taxes, gas taxes, property tax, social security tax, car licensing tax, etc. They also pay a small amount of federal income tax, articles put it at 3-5% of their income. Usually the largest tax in this list is property tax. But that makes sense - you get direct benefits of police, fire, roads, schools, etc for that tax. And you have local control over property tax, if it is too high go to a town meeting and complain.
The US income tax system is highly progressive. Currently the bottom 45% of US households pay no federal income tax. So when you look at the tax burden of the average American family (ie at the 50th percentile) that family is only paying a little federal income tax. To get to the number in the article it is other taxes like property tax, social security, state tax, etc.
Pai does not represent Republicans voters, in a recent poll 77% of registered Republicans disagreed with his proposals. Pai has been bought by lobbyists and represents his corporate constituency, not voters. Trump does not seem to care about FCC so I doubt if he has a clue what is happening there.
Of course the ISPs will agree to this and they won't even cheat. But your Internet service is going to have a 10GB cap on it and everything else is going to be "zero rated". And of course you'll be paying $100/mth for this 10GB to get "connectivity". Then the ISP will charge those other companies another $100 to zero rate and escape the ridiculous cap. If you want more "neutral" bandwidth, that'll cost you $5/GB.
I use a laptop with multiple monitors. The laptop does not move very often, but I occasionally need to take it out to the factory where the hardware is made.
RAM demand is heavy because I work on networking code. I might have three copies of Android studio open simultaneously hooked to three phones. I am trying to debug the network traffic between the phones. Building AOSP takes a huge amount of RAM. There is one link in there that needs 10GB. The RAM also functions as a cache to keep everything from beating on the disk. I have 1TB SSD too.
It is true that application development is not as RAM intensive as OS development. Today's OS's are huge and take a lot of resources to build.
Often IT does not understand how important a lot of RAM is to developers. I basically can't use anything with less than 32GB of RAM. Anything less and my environment will start pounding on the disk and everything takes 5x as long to run. One time I was forced to use a 4GB machine and a build that normally took an hour turned into 18 hours. Phooey on that, I made myself an EC2 login on AWS and started building there until I got my 32GB laptop back. CPU performance doesn't seem to matter that much, current Intel CPUs are all reasonably fast. Best bang for the buck is to use ASUS ROG gaming laptops for developers.
I've also observed the demand for electrical and mechanical engineers falling in North America as production has shifted to Asia. In general those classes of engineers need to be close to the factories.
Governments need to promote the right mix of university, trade school, and unskilled workers. Every economy needs a mix of these, no economy needs everyone to have a college degree. If too many people end up with degrees the result is heavy debt load and under employment for the excess workers. In general, more people need to choose the trade school route. You can earn some pretty good money as a plumber, electrician or mechanic and you won't have a giant pile of debt. A lot of the trade people I know earn more than many of my recently college educated friends, some of them earn double.
There may be many transit providers between you and that third party speed test site. Any one of those transit provider could be the reason why you can't get 10Mb/s. I'm not defending the last mile ISPs. I agree that many of them are underprovisioning their interconnects. I am just pointing out that it is difficult for a normal consumer to accurately identify where the problem is.
I dropped FIOS a couple of years ago when Verizon was fighting with Netflix and Level3. Verizon refused to provision more ports in a router in NYC that was under a lot of load from Netflix use. The problem with Verizon's behavior was that by not adequately provisioning this router they made every Level3 customer behind that router effectively unusable. One on my clients was behind that router and I couldn't reach their site after the Netflix/Verizon fight started. I got very angry with Verizon over this and they hid behind the "upto" clause in their contract. Luckily my Verizon contract expired about 30 days after the fight started and I was able to drop Verizon and switch to another ISP. Meanwhile I used a VPN as a work around before the contract expired.
1. If you advertise X speed, then the users gets X speed, every time, all the time.
It you download from a third party server who's owner has it throttled to 1Mb/s per connection you're never going to get anything but 1Mb/s out of it. You might have a 100Mb/s ISP connection but it doesn't make any difference if the server is implementing throttling. Many people do not understand this and complain to their ISPs about slow download speeds.
My adblock current reports having blocked 1.6M ads -- 1.6 million! No one looks at 1.6M ads, they are just clutter.
I loaded my RSS feed yesterday. 1,200 ads blocked from a single use of my RSS reader. No one looks at 1,200 ads from a single use of an RSS feed. These ads are just clutter to be ignored and blocked.
And I truly hate autoroll video ads with sound. Good way to guarantee I will never buy your product.
A 115 comments and no one has yet mentioned that the device plugged into the AC outlet and it did not have a UL listing.
The problem here is that UL listings (or equivalent) are voluntary and there is no legal requirement for a product to carry one. But there is a common sense requirement. Where were the parents when it came to looking at the product for safety approvals? It was free to ship it back to Amazon if they didn't like what they saw.
And I really believe this "It alleges the family was sold a counterfeit product from China instead of a brand with a Samsung lithium ion battery they believed they were buying from Amazon" So they were sophisticated enough to have researched that Samsung Lion batteries were better, but they were not sophisticated enough to notice the lack of a UL listing.
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What we ought to do, is abolish all the special rules and requirements for the visas, and just make it even easier to hire workers.
You do understand that the basic welfare benefits provided by the US exceed the average wage earned by 80% of the world's population? So if there was unrestricted immigration to the US a few billion people would migrate to the US.
Looks like there's America's problem, right there. Why are we so expensive? Why are foreign programmers so much better than us, that they're able to work cheap while still living in America with all the same expenses?
What we ought to do, is abolish all the special rules and requirements for the visas, and just make it even easier to hire workers. Stop using government to prevent a free market, so that the market can force programmers either accept $35k/yr or else find a job where they're more competitive. Remove all the weird rules and you can squeeze out the need for the body shops' legal expertise; i.e. remove the parasitic middlemen and save $45k/yr. The programmers ought to be applying directly to the employer.
Duh? The US programmer won't take $35,000/yr because they can easily get twice that or more.
The Indian is willing to take $35,000 since they are indentured servants. If they complain in any way they are on the next plane back to India where they are going to earn $15,000. They do this because it pays more than working in India, they get US experience on their resume, and they improve their English. Many of these people live ten to an apartment to reduce expenses.
To understand how this scam works... H1-B Indian will have BS/MS degrees (from India) and they are willing to work for $35,000. So the body shop takes out tiny ads in local newspapers offering to hire programmers/testers with a BS/MS for $35,000. Of course no qualified US computer person is going to take work at $35,000/yr. These ads generate the "proof" needed that these jobs can't be filled by Americans.
The body shop then brings in 500 H1-B people and pays them $35,000/yr. According to the law this is allowed, there are no US citizen willing to take these jobs at $35,000/yr. But then the owner of this body shop turns right around and places these people as temp workers for $80,000/yr. He undercuts the US temp workers who would get $90,000/yr.
This is a great business $80,000 - $35,000 = $45,000 profit per H1-B visa per year. This is how you make $100M from owning a body shop over the course of a few years.
Haven't you noticed hundreds of tiny ads in the classified sections of local newspapers asking for programmers or testers and they include salary information? But when you contact them you never hear anything back? Those ads are generating the "proof" needed for the government that the position can't be filled by American workers.
Abuse of the H1-B program is not primarily done by large corporations. Instead there are specialized "body shops" doing it. These body shops pretty much only employ H1-B Indian software/testing people and then rent them out to business in the US as temporary staff. These body shop companies make huge profits for the owners since they bring in the H1-B people at very low wages and then rent them out at 90% of a normal salary. The savings to the large corporation is not much since most of the profits accrue to the body shops. One of these shop owners lives near me in a $20M house and has made over $100M profit from renting out H1-Bs. These body shops are where the bulk of the abuse occurs and they need to be outlawed.
Why is Social Security going to collapse? Simple the government never invested the money that was contributed, Congress just spent it and gave IOUs to the Social Security Administration. When the SSA ask Congress to give the money back -- duh, it's gone, it's not coming back. The Social Security surplus is one of the main things that has allowed Congress to do deficit spending for decades.
No need to worry, just look at the deficit graph for social security.
Most people don't realize this but Social Security is actual a great deal for someone his age. Statically he is likely to get back 10x what he put into it. Current retirees should not complain for a minute over what they paid into Social Security. While it might not be enough to live on it sure was a great investment for him.
The people who are going to get toasted are people who have not retired yet. Looking at my personal Social Security projection I will statistically only get back about $0.67 on each dollar that was contributed. Sticking my Social Security contributions in a mattress would be a better investment. Consider how awful the ROI on this investment is -- the money has been invested forty years and it earned a 33% nominal loss plus probably double that loss due to inflation
Millennials are likely to see a total loss of their Social Security contributions. .
You probably want to move to Hong Kong. Very low taxes, lots of people speak English. And you are very close to the tech hub in Shenzhen - just a subway ride away.
What you are missing is that the order in that list only applies to a person earning at the 50th percentile. Earn at the 25th or 75th percentile and the order of the list will change a lot. So you really need to know the ordering for the salary level you expect to earn.
50th percentile people certainly pay taxes. They pay sales tax, state taxes, gas taxes, property tax, social security tax, car licensing tax, etc. They also pay a small amount of federal income tax, articles put it at 3-5% of their income. Usually the largest tax in this list is property tax. But that makes sense - you get direct benefits of police, fire, roads, schools, etc for that tax. And you have local control over property tax, if it is too high go to a town meeting and complain.
The US income tax system is highly progressive. Currently the bottom 45% of US households pay no federal income tax. So when you look at the tax burden of the average American family (ie at the 50th percentile) that family is only paying a little federal income tax. To get to the number in the article it is other taxes like property tax, social security, state tax, etc.
Pai does not represent Republicans voters, in a recent poll 77% of registered Republicans disagreed with his proposals. Pai has been bought by lobbyists and represents his corporate constituency, not voters. Trump does not seem to care about FCC so I doubt if he has a clue what is happening there.
Of course the ISPs will agree to this and they won't even cheat. But your Internet service is going to have a 10GB cap on it and everything else is going to be "zero rated". And of course you'll be paying $100/mth for this 10GB to get "connectivity". Then the ISP will charge those other companies another $100 to zero rate and escape the ridiculous cap. If you want more "neutral" bandwidth, that'll cost you $5/GB.
I can't begin to imagine the bills from a group of consultants evaluating a group of consultants. Is that billing squared?
I use a laptop with multiple monitors. The laptop does not move very often, but I occasionally need to take it out to the factory where the hardware is made.
RAM demand is heavy because I work on networking code. I might have three copies of Android studio open simultaneously hooked to three phones. I am trying to debug the network traffic between the phones. Building AOSP takes a huge amount of RAM. There is one link in there that needs 10GB. The RAM also functions as a cache to keep everything from beating on the disk. I have 1TB SSD too.
It is true that application development is not as RAM intensive as OS development. Today's OS's are huge and take a lot of resources to build.
Often IT does not understand how important a lot of RAM is to developers. I basically can't use anything with less than 32GB of RAM. Anything less and my environment will start pounding on the disk and everything takes 5x as long to run. One time I was forced to use a 4GB machine and a build that normally took an hour turned into 18 hours. Phooey on that, I made myself an EC2 login on AWS and started building there until I got my 32GB laptop back. CPU performance doesn't seem to matter that much, current Intel CPUs are all reasonably fast. Best bang for the buck is to use ASUS ROG gaming laptops for developers.
Comcast price list:
$150/mth - TV, Phone, Internet ....
$150/mth - TV, Internet
$150/mth - TV
$150/mth - Internet
I've also observed the demand for electrical and mechanical engineers falling in North America as production has shifted to Asia. In general those classes of engineers need to be close to the factories.
Governments need to promote the right mix of university, trade school, and unskilled workers. Every economy needs a mix of these, no economy needs everyone to have a college degree. If too many people end up with degrees the result is heavy debt load and under employment for the excess workers. In general, more people need to choose the trade school route. You can earn some pretty good money as a plumber, electrician or mechanic and you won't have a giant pile of debt. A lot of the trade people I know earn more than many of my recently college educated friends, some of them earn double.
There may be many transit providers between you and that third party speed test site. Any one of those transit provider could be the reason why you can't get 10Mb/s. I'm not defending the last mile ISPs. I agree that many of them are underprovisioning their interconnects. I am just pointing out that it is difficult for a normal consumer to accurately identify where the problem is.
I dropped FIOS a couple of years ago when Verizon was fighting with Netflix and Level3. Verizon refused to provision more ports in a router in NYC that was under a lot of load from Netflix use. The problem with Verizon's behavior was that by not adequately provisioning this router they made every Level3 customer behind that router effectively unusable. One on my clients was behind that router and I couldn't reach their site after the Netflix/Verizon fight started. I got very angry with Verizon over this and they hid behind the "upto" clause in their contract. Luckily my Verizon contract expired about 30 days after the fight started and I was able to drop Verizon and switch to another ISP. Meanwhile I used a VPN as a work around before the contract expired.
1. If you advertise X speed, then the users gets X speed, every time, all the time.
It you download from a third party server who's owner has it throttled to 1Mb/s per connection you're never going to get anything but 1Mb/s out of it. You might have a 100Mb/s ISP connection but it doesn't make any difference if the server is implementing throttling. Many people do not understand this and complain to their ISPs about slow download speeds.
Since last time I reset Adblock -- probably four years ago or so.
My adblock current reports having blocked 1.6M ads -- 1.6 million! No one looks at 1.6M ads, they are just clutter.
I loaded my RSS feed yesterday. 1,200 ads blocked from a single use of my RSS reader. No one looks at 1,200 ads from a single use of an RSS feed. These ads are just clutter to be ignored and blocked.
And I truly hate autoroll video ads with sound. Good way to guarantee I will never buy your product.
A 115 comments and no one has yet mentioned that the device plugged into the AC outlet and it did not have a UL listing.
The problem here is that UL listings (or equivalent) are voluntary and there is no legal requirement for a product to carry one. But there is a common sense requirement. Where were the parents when it came to looking at the product for safety approvals? It was free to ship it back to Amazon if they didn't like what they saw.
And I really believe this "It alleges the family was sold a counterfeit product from China instead of a brand with a Samsung lithium ion battery they believed they were buying from Amazon" So they were sophisticated enough to have researched that Samsung Lion batteries were better, but they were not sophisticated enough to notice the lack of a UL listing.
And who was being counterfeited?
There is a web page at the FTC dedicated to dealing with them -- What’s the deal with “Rachel from Card Services”? Your top 3 questions answered.