One of my favorite films was "The Dish" staring Sam Neil. A slightly fictionalized retelling of how Parkes was used to broadcast the Appollo 11 Moon landings.
The issue is there are too many insurance companies. The core is the same, as in there's a claim and there's standardized billing codes for procedures. However, each insurance company has a different set of policies on how visits should be coded.
This has lead to health care providers hiring claims optimizers that help them code the visit to extract the most money from the insurance company. Which leads to insurance companies hiring claims optimizers to shape policy to reduce the amount they pay. Then times that by the number of insurance companies they might deal with. Add a little more complication if you're insurance is out of state and they use another companies network and policies. It's a giant clusterfuck.
This is also one of the major drivers of health care cost. There are plenty of other countries that have private health insurance. The difference is the gov't sets a common claims format and policy. They typically also set the base cost of each service (adjusted for cost of living for the area). That means the insurance companies compete on having lower administration costs and programs to make the members healthier.
Ironically they said the VP they said that to was a women. She hired two female programers. I rolled off that contract soon after and my understanding is pretty much all the IT resources in the building were replaced by "prevailing wage" H1-B workers.
My first experience with them was back in 1999. They came into our office saying they could provide programmers at 60% of the cost of the existing contractors. Even less if we were willing to hire a woman.
I'm sure the Chinese Gov't would be more than happy to have the US Gov't check the serial numbers on those Xeon chips to tell were the source is. Obviously not. As long as the chips are allowed to be exported to China for general business use I don't see any way for the US to control it. At best whatever quasi Gov't agency in China has to buy through a 3rd party and falsify some paperwork
It's not like China doesn't have FABs and engineers that could make a similar CPU. What Intel fears the most is this will kickstart some national pride that's going to end with gov't funded R&D to make high end CPUs and GPUs.
Because "Flyover Land" is still pretty expensive. There's a lot of reasons to choose H1-B. The biggest being that they need to be sponsored. That sponsorship puts the employee under the thumb of the employer. They can revoke that sponsorship at any time forcing the employee to leave the country if they cannot find a new sponsor.
Some corporate bean counter figures he can pay a college hire and a H1-B about the same. The college hire will gain experience and will want a raise. If they don't get it they'll leave. The H1-B visa holder doesn't have that flexibility.
The problem for the companies is that the current Visa caps means even H1-B workers are in short supply. This has not gone unnoticed to the folks that run the consulting companies that often sponsor the Visa candidates. I was talking to an IT manager a few months ago and they were complaining the Wipro wanted to raise their rates for Business Analysts to over $100/hr. Mind you the worker isn't going to see most of that money.
The current bill in the senate that has bi-partisan support entirely removes all H1-B visa caps. It's the nuclear option more or less for American Tech workers.
In in a modest market in the midwest the wages are closer to 70-80K. The issue is likely that he's doing hardware programming. You're competing with Chinese engineering firms.
My experiences with IBM is you get a couple true blue IBM guys that act as front men that go to meetings while the real work is done by off-shore workers. Sometimes the offshore folks are IBM, but a lot of the time they are someone IBM has contracted to do the work. Which is why increasingly American companies have been dumping IBM and cutting deals directly with the offshore companies. Why pay IBM to be a middle-man? It's unclear to me exactly what value IBM brings in China outside a name to make executives and investors feel like good decisions are being made. Maybe that's enough.
If you needed someone to write device drivers or interact with low level hardware I could see that. If you need someone to write a web application or service based API, not so much.
They really screwed over the MST3K guys. Unless the shows are broadcast on TV the cast doesn't get jack squat. None of the cast gets jack squat for the DVDs and box sets.
Kilborn did 5 questions when he hosted the Late Late show. I used to think Kilborn was playing this self absorbed D-Bag host (think of it as a pre-Colbert), but after seeing the longer format interviews on the Late Late show (not to meant ion the blow up with Liz Windstead), I'm not sure if it was an act.
It's really the wrong question. The industry is going in the direction where the OS is simple and secure while the App deployment package is responsible for having all the required bits and pieces required to make the app work.
For instance for a Java application we might use something like Spring-Boot to assist in creating the deployment artifact. That artifact will include the Apache Tomcat server. So all we need is a simple Linux server that has a JVM installed. Comes in handy for automation for running stuff at one of the many "cloud" providers.
That was a Unix system. Specifically File System Navigator for Silicon Graphics's unix system IRIX. At the time SGI was pretty popular in movie production. Albeit quite unrealistic for a tween to have a $15k unix workstation.
But hey, at her age I had Slackware running on a machine, installed from a from a bunch of floppy disks.
I've work in the Minneapolis/St. Paul market for over a decade. I get calls from recruiters daily. Clients can never find enough experienced people. There's tons of H1Bs working in the market. It's been like that for since about 2006. It can be hard as a college grad to find a job because some bean counter is weighing paying an experienced H1B worker a similar wage as a college hire (and the H1B can't easily leave without obtaining a new sponsor.) But, as the H1B cap have tightened it's forced companies to invest in college workers like they did in the 90s.
To summarize, MN's general unemployment rate is 3.9%, it's tech unemployment rate is a fraction of a percent. It's jobs, jobs jobs if you know computers.
Outside of Lufthansa (which bought the 747-800) pretty much every other passenger airline has planes on the book to get rid of their 747s. I would expect by 2020-2022 you'll see them confined to cargo use and third world airlines.
There's a bit of a difference. He now resides in California where the company would be required to spell out IP assignment in an employment contract. It's not uncommon for those contracts to spell out a profit sharing agreement to entice additional development. It's not uncommon for these guys to be serial inventors with many patents to their name. In some states, lack of spelling it out means the employee is free to keep the patent and the company would simple have non-transferable royalty free rights.
That's not to say inventors don't get screwed in the US, but there's at least a chance that if you keep your wits about you that you'll end up with a percentage of the royalties.
Japan has a real hard-on for the company being placed first over everything else. For instance in the entertainment business no one will book you without a talent agency. The agency takes the majority profits and more or less tells you how to live your life. Don't like it, good luck getting on TV or having your stuff produced. There's a lot of stars from the 70s through the 90s that appeared to be living nicely while they were doing well, but it ended up the company owned everything and paid for housing and transport. When they fell from fame they basically had very little money to show to years of stardom.
We are finally to a point where economics are forcing companies to put serious efforts into college hire programs and workforce development of college hires. I consult with many large companies as a programmer. Up until recently I went nearly a decade without seeing a programming department have college hires.
If you were to remove all caps on H1B companies would go back to facing a decision between hiring a college grads that need professional development or H1B workers. The college hire could choose to take a different jobs years later. The H1B worker is far less likely to change jobs because they risk deportation if they fail to secure a sponsor (a fact that does not go unnoticed by employers).
IEEE-USA's position is STEM workers should be afforded Green Cards accommodations (most likely capped) thus not be beholden to employer sponsorship. I personally think any change to H1B or Greencard programs should be dependent on the majority of college hires finding jobs post graduation.
The reason the laws existed in the first place was because at the dawn of the industry the franchise fees were used for capital by the manufactures. Without the legal protections car makers could simply run the franchisees out of business once they became big enough. To a similar extent when foreign makers moved into the USA the franchise fees helped build the infrastructure.
Now we have a conundrum where Tesla doesn't see itself needing the dealers and is going on it's own. A large chunk of that is based on most buyers are going to be in big cities. They only need need 1 or 2 showrooms per state for the foreseeable future. They don't see the need to build out the showroom network which would require having franchisees. For Tesla the Franchisee system would certainly add another 3-4K to the cost of each car. They'll never get the model 3 to fit into the expected price range going that route.
At the same time you can't just get rid of all the dealer protections because Ford, GM, Toyota, Honda, etc would be more than happy to cherry pick the most profitable areas for corporate dealerships. Those dealerships are owed that exclusivity because they invested in the company at the beginning. I personally don't think the dealers give a crap about selling Tesla, but they foresee the big auto makers suing to get rid of franchise laws if Tesla is allowed an exemption.
IMHO Matlab is a dead end. R is a similar language in the statistics and big data fields and the base spec and sample programs are open source. If you're a Math or Stats major you're likely getting a sample of R in school already because the tools are free. In the paid space big data tools like HP's Vertica will split up complicated R functions across it's cluster and crunch the data much faster than Matlab.
ILECs and CLECs don't trust other entities to route good SS7 commends. The gateway to the actual SS7 network is setup to filter most SS7 commands beyond the bare minimum needed to complete a call. I've seen an unrestricted SS7 console in action at an ILEC and you can do all sorts of things to trace out a calls, listen in and pull billing and address information. It's pretty slick, but they are very selective about who gets access.
Most colleges use the intro classes to weed out the sick and the lame. Big group lecture hall with a non-english speaking grad student giving instruction. I think Google sees that it's never going to get colleges to change how they do classes. Moving experienced students to an online class is a way of disrupting the system.
I still am a little dubious. There were plenty of people who go Comp-Sci degrees in the late 90s who had very little interest in computers and programing. But IT was a big money field and Y2K really pumped people at problems. They made the worst programmers and IT Engineers. They either washed out of IT or ended up in management.
We are quite lucky that Russia didn't do what they should have done with the oil money. Create a massive sovereign wealth fund. Norway has the largest that's heading towards a trillion dollars. China is over a Trillion if you combine funds controlled by various entities. Russia on the the other hand has a couple very modest funds (under $100bn).
Why are we lucky? Because Russia has been looking for a way to economically hurt the United States for a very long time. When the financial market crashed in 2008 in the wake of the housing crisis Russia approached China with a plan to dump US currency and bonds. The plan would have created a sell off that would have plummeted the value of the dollar, created hyperinflation and crushing the US economy. Luckily China has no desire to mess with a very beneficial trading relationship and we were able to emerge from the worst parts of the recession.
If Russia had a trillion dollar sovereign wealth fund they could very easily hurt the US companies by triggering sell offs.
Slashdot Mirror
One of my favorite films was "The Dish" staring Sam Neil. A slightly fictionalized retelling of how Parkes was used to broadcast the Appollo 11 Moon landings.
I thought it was okay as long as I posted the insult in both French and English.
The issue is there are too many insurance companies. The core is the same, as in there's a claim and there's standardized billing codes for procedures. However, each insurance company has a different set of policies on how visits should be coded.
This has lead to health care providers hiring claims optimizers that help them code the visit to extract the most money from the insurance company. Which leads to insurance companies hiring claims optimizers to shape policy to reduce the amount they pay. Then times that by the number of insurance companies they might deal with. Add a little more complication if you're insurance is out of state and they use another companies network and policies. It's a giant clusterfuck.
This is also one of the major drivers of health care cost. There are plenty of other countries that have private health insurance. The difference is the gov't sets a common claims format and policy. They typically also set the base cost of each service (adjusted for cost of living for the area). That means the insurance companies compete on having lower administration costs and programs to make the members healthier.
Ironically they said the VP they said that to was a women. She hired two female programers. I rolled off that contract soon after and my understanding is pretty much all the IT resources in the building were replaced by "prevailing wage" H1-B workers.
My first experience with them was back in 1999. They came into our office saying they could provide programmers at 60% of the cost of the existing contractors. Even less if we were willing to hire a woman.
I'm sure the Chinese Gov't would be more than happy to have the US Gov't check the serial numbers on those Xeon chips to tell were the source is. Obviously not. As long as the chips are allowed to be exported to China for general business use I don't see any way for the US to control it. At best whatever quasi Gov't agency in China has to buy through a 3rd party and falsify some paperwork
It's not like China doesn't have FABs and engineers that could make a similar CPU. What Intel fears the most is this will kickstart some national pride that's going to end with gov't funded R&D to make high end CPUs and GPUs.
It's a bit akin to the CarMax approach.
Long and short of this is we're not going to know how well this works (or doesn't) for at least a year.
Because "Flyover Land" is still pretty expensive. There's a lot of reasons to choose H1-B. The biggest being that they need to be sponsored. That sponsorship puts the employee under the thumb of the employer. They can revoke that sponsorship at any time forcing the employee to leave the country if they cannot find a new sponsor.
Some corporate bean counter figures he can pay a college hire and a H1-B about the same. The college hire will gain experience and will want a raise. If they don't get it they'll leave. The H1-B visa holder doesn't have that flexibility.
The problem for the companies is that the current Visa caps means even H1-B workers are in short supply. This has not gone unnoticed to the folks that run the consulting companies that often sponsor the Visa candidates. I was talking to an IT manager a few months ago and they were complaining the Wipro wanted to raise their rates for Business Analysts to over $100/hr. Mind you the worker isn't going to see most of that money.
The current bill in the senate that has bi-partisan support entirely removes all H1-B visa caps. It's the nuclear option more or less for American Tech workers.
In in a modest market in the midwest the wages are closer to 70-80K. The issue is likely that he's doing hardware programming. You're competing with Chinese engineering firms.
My experiences with IBM is you get a couple true blue IBM guys that act as front men that go to meetings while the real work is done by off-shore workers. Sometimes the offshore folks are IBM, but a lot of the time they are someone IBM has contracted to do the work. Which is why increasingly American companies have been dumping IBM and cutting deals directly with the offshore companies. Why pay IBM to be a middle-man? It's unclear to me exactly what value IBM brings in China outside a name to make executives and investors feel like good decisions are being made. Maybe that's enough.
If you needed someone to write device drivers or interact with low level hardware I could see that. If you need someone to write a web application or service based API, not so much.
Maybe Colbert will hire Stewart to be the Late Show's side kick?
They really screwed over the MST3K guys. Unless the shows are broadcast on TV the cast doesn't get jack squat. None of the cast gets jack squat for the DVDs and box sets.
Kilborn did 5 questions when he hosted the Late Late show. I used to think Kilborn was playing this self absorbed D-Bag host (think of it as a pre-Colbert), but after seeing the longer format interviews on the Late Late show (not to meant ion the blow up with Liz Windstead), I'm not sure if it was an act.
It's really the wrong question. The industry is going in the direction where the OS is simple and secure while the App deployment package is responsible for having all the required bits and pieces required to make the app work.
For instance for a Java application we might use something like Spring-Boot to assist in creating the deployment artifact. That artifact will include the Apache Tomcat server. So all we need is a simple Linux server that has a JVM installed. Comes in handy for automation for running stuff at one of the many "cloud" providers.
That was a Unix system. Specifically File System Navigator for Silicon Graphics's unix system IRIX. At the time SGI was pretty popular in movie production. Albeit quite unrealistic for a tween to have a $15k unix workstation.
But hey, at her age I had Slackware running on a machine, installed from a from a bunch of floppy disks.
I've work in the Minneapolis/St. Paul market for over a decade. I get calls from recruiters daily. Clients can never find enough experienced people. There's tons of H1Bs working in the market. It's been like that for since about 2006. It can be hard as a college grad to find a job because some bean counter is weighing paying an experienced H1B worker a similar wage as a college hire (and the H1B can't easily leave without obtaining a new sponsor.) But, as the H1B cap have tightened it's forced companies to invest in college workers like they did in the 90s.
To summarize, MN's general unemployment rate is 3.9%, it's tech unemployment rate is a fraction of a percent. It's jobs, jobs jobs if you know computers.
Outside of Lufthansa (which bought the 747-800) pretty much every other passenger airline has planes on the book to get rid of their 747s. I would expect by 2020-2022 you'll see them confined to cargo use and third world airlines.
There's a bit of a difference. He now resides in California where the company would be required to spell out IP assignment in an employment contract. It's not uncommon for those contracts to spell out a profit sharing agreement to entice additional development. It's not uncommon for these guys to be serial inventors with many patents to their name. In some states, lack of spelling it out means the employee is free to keep the patent and the company would simple have non-transferable royalty free rights.
That's not to say inventors don't get screwed in the US, but there's at least a chance that if you keep your wits about you that you'll end up with a percentage of the royalties.
Japan has a real hard-on for the company being placed first over everything else. For instance in the entertainment business no one will book you without a talent agency. The agency takes the majority profits and more or less tells you how to live your life. Don't like it, good luck getting on TV or having your stuff produced. There's a lot of stars from the 70s through the 90s that appeared to be living nicely while they were doing well, but it ended up the company owned everything and paid for housing and transport. When they fell from fame they basically had very little money to show to years of stardom.
We are finally to a point where economics are forcing companies to put serious efforts into college hire programs and workforce development of college hires. I consult with many large companies as a programmer. Up until recently I went nearly a decade without seeing a programming department have college hires.
If you were to remove all caps on H1B companies would go back to facing a decision between hiring a college grads that need professional development or H1B workers. The college hire could choose to take a different jobs years later. The H1B worker is far less likely to change jobs because they risk deportation if they fail to secure a sponsor (a fact that does not go unnoticed by employers).
IEEE-USA's position is STEM workers should be afforded Green Cards accommodations (most likely capped) thus not be beholden to employer sponsorship. I personally think any change to H1B or Greencard programs should be dependent on the majority of college hires finding jobs post graduation.
The reason the laws existed in the first place was because at the dawn of the industry the franchise fees were used for capital by the manufactures. Without the legal protections car makers could simply run the franchisees out of business once they became big enough. To a similar extent when foreign makers moved into the USA the franchise fees helped build the infrastructure.
Now we have a conundrum where Tesla doesn't see itself needing the dealers and is going on it's own. A large chunk of that is based on most buyers are going to be in big cities. They only need need 1 or 2 showrooms per state for the foreseeable future. They don't see the need to build out the showroom network which would require having franchisees. For Tesla the Franchisee system would certainly add another 3-4K to the cost of each car. They'll never get the model 3 to fit into the expected price range going that route.
At the same time you can't just get rid of all the dealer protections because Ford, GM, Toyota, Honda, etc would be more than happy to cherry pick the most profitable areas for corporate dealerships. Those dealerships are owed that exclusivity because they invested in the company at the beginning. I personally don't think the dealers give a crap about selling Tesla, but they foresee the big auto makers suing to get rid of franchise laws if Tesla is allowed an exemption.
IMHO Matlab is a dead end. R is a similar language in the statistics and big data fields and the base spec and sample programs are open source. If you're a Math or Stats major you're likely getting a sample of R in school already because the tools are free. In the paid space big data tools like HP's Vertica will split up complicated R functions across it's cluster and crunch the data much faster than Matlab.
ILECs and CLECs don't trust other entities to route good SS7 commends. The gateway to the actual SS7 network is setup to filter most SS7 commands beyond the bare minimum needed to complete a call. I've seen an unrestricted SS7 console in action at an ILEC and you can do all sorts of things to trace out a calls, listen in and pull billing and address information. It's pretty slick, but they are very selective about who gets access.
Most colleges use the intro classes to weed out the sick and the lame. Big group lecture hall with a non-english speaking grad student giving instruction. I think Google sees that it's never going to get colleges to change how they do classes. Moving experienced students to an online class is a way of disrupting the system.
I still am a little dubious. There were plenty of people who go Comp-Sci degrees in the late 90s who had very little interest in computers and programing. But IT was a big money field and Y2K really pumped people at problems. They made the worst programmers and IT Engineers. They either washed out of IT or ended up in management.
We are quite lucky that Russia didn't do what they should have done with the oil money. Create a massive sovereign wealth fund. Norway has the largest that's heading towards a trillion dollars. China is over a Trillion if you combine funds controlled by various entities. Russia on the the other hand has a couple very modest funds (under $100bn).
Why are we lucky? Because Russia has been looking for a way to economically hurt the United States for a very long time. When the financial market crashed in 2008 in the wake of the housing crisis Russia approached China with a plan to dump US currency and bonds. The plan would have created a sell off that would have plummeted the value of the dollar, created hyperinflation and crushing the US economy. Luckily China has no desire to mess with a very beneficial trading relationship and we were able to emerge from the worst parts of the recession.
If Russia had a trillion dollar sovereign wealth fund they could very easily hurt the US companies by triggering sell offs.