Probably some, or at least it makes sense that if they have access to US courts they should have them under the umbrella of constitutional rules.
I get your larger point, though, and I don't completely understand where these rights become all-encompassing. Possibly once on US soil, as there would seem to be reasonable arguments for a risk to US citizens if the government can treat a random person in the US unconstitutionally under the guise that their citizenship status is unknown.
I could see where an elevator capable of both sideways and vertical movement could have some benefit in a building with a large horizontal footprint. I could see it used as a combination of lift and sort of shuttle train in a large, flat building.
It might add flexibility in floor plans where a tenant wanted floor space without a central shaft breaking up the space.
Right, it's the corporation claiming its non-US subsidiary is just following local (non-US) law to not allowing access to data.
The involvement of State would come to convince IE or whatever foreign government it is to recognize that US process was followed and that parent company is playing the border game and to encourage local subsidiary to follow court order.
My guess is that most EU countries would be pretty tepid about defending a US multinational holding US data in their country. There's a point at which dealing with US diplomatic leverage isn't worth the headache when they have marginal intrinsic interest in the data.
They may be less compliant if it was their own nationals data that was being held and requested and the claim to the data was solely that the local subsidiary was a subsidiary of a US multinational.
Ordinarily I think these national boundary constraints would limit the reach of US courts and warrants, but with the "national security" flag raised I think it stops being solely a question of legalism and jurisdiction and then escalates into diplomacy, where there are other tools available to gain compliance.
Microsoft may say to the US government, "No, your warrant doesn't work because MS IE has to follow IE law."
All this will mean is that ultimately the State Department gets involved and begins negotiating with the Irish on what data they want and how Ireland should let them have it. If the national security apparatus wants it bad enough, State will use diplomatic leverage to obtain it. The entire point of the State Department is to obtain agreements with other countries, either by compromise negotiation or leverage.
And don't forget the growing list of useful pain killers and anesthetics that allowed for surgical treatments that weren't worse than the conditions they were meant to cure.
It always strikes me that about 1/3 of medicine is surgical, to either repair or remove something defective, about 1/3 is anti-infective, eliminating illnesses caused by infections or parasites, and the remaining third a blur of pain relief, hormonal therapy and some actual targeted pharmaceutical therapy.
If you can't do surgery even if you can technically perform the procedure because it's so painful to the patient or likely to kill them from infection, you don't have much medicine left.
The people who issue the visa put a ton of effort into verifying the bonafides of the investors, indicating the process is so bureaucratic and slow moving that it really is a token system that doesn't really produce meaningful economic activity. In this case, it should be scrapped simply to save the bureaucratic overhead in running the program.
Or, the written requirements are onerous but there's little in-depth review of applications due to the complexity of unwinding corporate structures to verify the investors and their track records. The program is thus easily exploitable because it's too easy to submit indecipherable investment sources and so it should be scrapped.
Even for businesses that aren't profitable enough for the owner to just cash checks, there's usually ways for them to work at them in a greatly reduced capacity.
We had friends that owned a restaurant. It was wildly successful for years (full tables and waiting lists) but both the owner and his wife worked full time in the business. They owned the entire building and lived in the 3 bedroom apartment above it (which was more like a single-floor house, about 2000 square feet), so they had very little overhead in terms of housing or business space (another aside, another friend who has been looking to start a restaurant says often property owners negotiate the rent as base + percentage of revenue, whereas our friends had a mortgage dating to the late 1970s).
Anyway, while the restaurant was still doing very well they decided to quit because it was too much work. Considering the "jobs" they worked (head cook, lead waitress) the salaries they would have had to pay to get someone else to do those jobs would have been minor in the scheme of things and they would have been doing much less work, mostly the ordering, paying bills and modest supervision.
Their overhead expenses were low (one mortgage covered the business *and* their home) and general supervision of the business didn't require a commute, just a walk downstairs. Maybe their revenue was small enough that hiring a general manager and doing next to nothing would have been impossible, but a cook and a waitress seemed realistic based on their business volume.
I've done a lot of work for SMBs owned by families and I have yet to see one that survived the loss of the founder without serious professional management on hand.
Usually the ones that make it are the ones where the 2nd generation grows up in the business and the 1st generation sticks around for a decade or so after the 2nd takes over. Usually by then there is enough accumulated knowledge and accrued capital investment that the 3rd generation has to really try to fuck it up.
I can think of one in particular where the founder placed his daughter in charge but brought in a seasoned pro to actually manage it, and once he retired she's flailed about burning through a couple of CFOs who keep challenging her decisions. She would literally not be able to keep a job of her stature where she didn't have ownership/money propping her up. She'd probably not even get hired for her own position when they saw that all her work history was as daddy's little CEO.
What I don't get is why people *want* to "run" their own business? If it's a stable business model, why not let a professional manage it? Why do you have to be "in charge"? Cash the fucking checks and have an auditor check up on it.
So a requirement is a known professional investor or investment company, or this is just your assumption on how they would spot shams?
The problem is that investments in many things are often done a custom partnership basis, usually to insulate shareholder assets from losses.
So "Sanjay's Startup" will end up being invested in by "Bay Area Startup Fund XVII" and "Pacific Growth Opportunities Delta 5" and other totally indecipherable names whether legitimate or fraudulent.
I've had Microsoft refund support charges for known bugs and in a couple of cases for situations that could have easily been called user error if they were being hard about it.
5. User had shitty password 6. User left device logged in for someone else to access 7. etc
There's a point where it's vulnerable just through software or it's not. I think you can say its more vulnerable than you'd want, at least because it was an actual software vulnerability and didn't require it to be hooked up to some forensic analysis hardware.
Except in very small houses where there's really only 1-2 "logical" floor plans, I think the best idea is a 3D printed concrete shell strong enough for totally open floors on each level, with enough structural integrity for 1-2 additional stairway voids to be added later if reconfiguration was desired.
You'd have to live with fixed window placements, but it would give the user the option to reconfigure walls pretty easily. I would embed a chase grid in the floor/ceiling sections for utilities, so they didn't occupy wall voids.
You might get it flexible enough that walls could just be unitized modules that could be rearranged like stage scenery. The house with a giant master bedroom and 2 regular bedrooms could become 4 regular bedrooms, or two large bedrooms.
It's like that because nobody wants to advocate for simple exclusions. And for every reasonable exclusion you can think of, there's a constituency who wants exceptions for their specific cases -- countries of origins, family ties, sponsors, assets, various flavors of civil and military conflict, etc.
Simplifying is a great idea, but you have to be willing to decide who you won't let in without creating any exceptions.
It's all in the enforcement and the loopholes. How many "investors" are required? Are they required to be actual American firms or citizens? How many employees is your "startup" required to actually have?
What's to prevent a H-1B farmer from simply creating sham startups and importing "entrepreneurs"?
Sure, if the enforcement is rigorous and there is some kind of auditing to insure that these are bonafide startups, entrepreneurs and investors then on the surface it doesn't seem like a bad idea at all. If it's just filing paperwork listing a bunch of shell companies that can't easily be unwound, then its ripe for exploitation.
But what kind of maintenance other than what would be needed in any house?
It goes without saying that roofing and probably siding (depending on material) and ultimately windows, but these are all items exposed to the weather. Although I live in a house that's 60 years old with mostly original painted cedar siding that's in good shape (other than having had it painted twice in my 18 years here).
But structural? There are some narrow eras where excessive tightness caused interior moisture problems and poor window installation allowed moisture ingress around windows, possibly leading to rot in surrounding structure, and probably some points in siding development where it had similar problems, although it's not like painted wood clad houses were immune from similar siding issues if the paint was neglected.
From what little I've seen, new construction houses seem to have superior foundations -- well-laid block or even poured concrete, often with asphalt and foam clad exteriors for moisture resistance. I've seen some "golden era" houses with shit foundations, bad cinder block or limestone that's been basically epoxied or shotcrete coated.
I think you're right about the lumber, though. Douglas fir isn't around and most of the pine used is so damn new it lacks any structural integrity and may be prone to warping. And I would worry about the long-term viability of the glues used in engineered building materials, especially TJIs.
When I've had my house appraised for initial purchase and some refinancing there has been verbiage in the appraisal for the "useful life of the house" in there, which I assume is some kind of underwriting legalism to prevent a falling down house from being financed with a 30 year mortgage.
However, the above poster's claim of a 50 year useful life on new construction actually makes me wonder if "modern" houses (those built since the 1980s or later) actually have a shorter expected lifespan due to the mass production techniques and engineered components which actually might not last, like truss joists, LVLs and some of the chipboard materials. Older houses often have beams which are single giant pieces of wood, for example, and never used chipboard.
I would think, though, that housing codes, especially in suburbs, wouldn't go for building methods that *literally* became structurally unsound in 50 years. If it was true, entire suburbs could become uninhabitable when their housing stock became obsolete. I'd also guess that the real estate and mortgage industry might have issues, especially when original owners found that their houses were unsalable because no financing would be offered due to structural expiration.
Strangely enough, the actual dimensions of some calibers are essentially the same as their nominal dimensions.
10mm &.40 S&W (AFAIK, the latter was developed from the former) are modern designs and match their nominal dimensions closely.
The whole.45 caliber family is.45x" with only ~4 thousandths of an inch variation between bullets for various guns, possibly because it was a purpose designed load..38s were evolved from much older designs, IIRC.38 caliber rounds actually match the external dimensions of the case, not bullet.
I had ONE client do this with his personal cell phone, which is what I had to call from time to time to get ahold of him. When you called, it would connect almost immediately and say "please enjoy this music while we reach your party" and then his song would play.
The crazy/stupid thing was his music choice was some kind of thrash metal which was almost not even discernible as music due to the limited frequency response of the phone. IMHO, pretty much all music would have sounded pretty bad, but this genre was really awful.
Maybe it would work better with the new "high fidelity" calling in use now. If you get on a call like that now it's disturbingly high quality.
What I want to know is why you couldn't just have this functionality programmed into your phone -- your phone answers the call and then just plays whatever sound file you have selected and then plays your ringtone like normal so you can "answer" it (or not). And of course you could go off the deep end and have specific sounds associated with specific numbers.
I don't think the ship idea is far-fetched myself, if you can find it a way to build it big enough to survive pretty much anything the sea can dish out and if you can find a way to power it without constant refueling.
What would be interesting would be a private party buying a decommissioned oil platform someplace. Oftentimes these wells don't run empty, they just don't yield enough oil for commercial exploitation. Near my dad's home town in Kansas there were still oil wells producing enough oil to be worth an individual's time and effort to keep the pumps running but not enough for it to be a commercial effort.
If you had an oil platform that could produce enough oil to provide whatever couldn't be provided by wind and solar, you might have the basis of a long-term sea base.
I think being at sea has other challenges, though, like the sea's desire to dissolve anything that goes into it. The maintenance challenges would be legion.
I seem to remember Walmart trying to do the Silicon Valley thing a couple of years ago, opening an office there (run by SV cultural standards, not Benton, Ark. standards) and making a bunch of noise about developing a cloud portability system that would let vendors easily move workloads (which I understood to be more like virtualization workloads than docker-type containers) between cloud providers.
Whatever happened to this? Did OpenStack meet their needs and they gave up on the concept, or what? Maybe my memory fails me, but I seem to recall that they were definitely interested in portability to AWS at the time.
I don't agree with all the H1-B hate. The alternative is that those jobs are leaving altogether and not coming back. Like you said, billions saved, so if H1-Bs didn't exist than those American tech companies would go broke to international competitors due to higher cost, or the companies would simply outsource the IT to an international company.
Baloney. If those jobs could have been moved overseas, they would have. These workers are imported because the work itself is not mobile -- the systems, data and other personnel can't be moved to India for practical or regulatory reasons.
Even a badly paid H1-B worker is much more expensive to employ in the US than in India. To achieve savings, they have to bring the worker here.
This is undercutting American wages, pure and simple. And don't start on me with "if you have the skills", either. A lot of people getting dumped for H1-Bs aren't zit-faced 20-somethings clicking next, but older workers with deep skills and experience.
Don't buy into the fantasy that YOUR job isn't oursourcable because of your unique knowledge and skills. That's the self-reinforcing myth of the long-term IT expansion -- I'm too valuable to be outsourced or replaced. No, it's just that t the demand for IT talent *in your area of expertise* just hasn't reached equilibrium yet. When it does, I'm sure you'll enjoy being lectured by someone on how you should have kept up, but you still have the chance to start your career over with "skills the market needs."
I just wish that people who voted for him could come to terms with the fact that they aren't getting any, not even one, of the things he promised to get their vote. That way they could start finding a candidate for the next cycle who isn't a Simpson's character made flesh.
I've been looking for that candidate since the 1990s and haven't found them yet. IMHO, Trump was the less dangerous candidate among all the Republicans. Hillary is a more competent administrator, but honestly, she wouldn't have accomplished much of anything either besides trivial changes at the margins.
I don't think this is nearly as far-fetched as it sounds, but what I'm curious about is if the rich will eventually pursue depopulation strategies to simply wipe out the masses of poor people.
I would assume that further wealth concentration would be destabilizing. Even if you have fortified zones and robotic soldiers, it's a lot of resources to deploy just to keep the poor at bay. Even if keeping them at bay is wildly successful, there would still be armed factions to contend with and some small existential threat they could topple the order.
Slashdot Mirror
It feels like the whole economy is kind of transforming simultaneously faster than most of its participants can adapt to it.
Probably some, or at least it makes sense that if they have access to US courts they should have them under the umbrella of constitutional rules.
I get your larger point, though, and I don't completely understand where these rights become all-encompassing. Possibly once on US soil, as there would seem to be reasonable arguments for a risk to US citizens if the government can treat a random person in the US unconstitutionally under the guise that their citizenship status is unknown.
I could see where an elevator capable of both sideways and vertical movement could have some benefit in a building with a large horizontal footprint. I could see it used as a combination of lift and sort of shuttle train in a large, flat building.
It might add flexibility in floor plans where a tenant wanted floor space without a central shaft breaking up the space.
Right, it's the corporation claiming its non-US subsidiary is just following local (non-US) law to not allowing access to data.
The involvement of State would come to convince IE or whatever foreign government it is to recognize that US process was followed and that parent company is playing the border game and to encourage local subsidiary to follow court order.
My guess is that most EU countries would be pretty tepid about defending a US multinational holding US data in their country. There's a point at which dealing with US diplomatic leverage isn't worth the headache when they have marginal intrinsic interest in the data.
They may be less compliant if it was their own nationals data that was being held and requested and the claim to the data was solely that the local subsidiary was a subsidiary of a US multinational.
Ordinarily I think these national boundary constraints would limit the reach of US courts and warrants, but with the "national security" flag raised I think it stops being solely a question of legalism and jurisdiction and then escalates into diplomacy, where there are other tools available to gain compliance.
Microsoft may say to the US government, "No, your warrant doesn't work because MS IE has to follow IE law."
All this will mean is that ultimately the State Department gets involved and begins negotiating with the Irish on what data they want and how Ireland should let them have it. If the national security apparatus wants it bad enough, State will use diplomatic leverage to obtain it. The entire point of the State Department is to obtain agreements with other countries, either by compromise negotiation or leverage.
And don't forget the growing list of useful pain killers and anesthetics that allowed for surgical treatments that weren't worse than the conditions they were meant to cure.
It always strikes me that about 1/3 of medicine is surgical, to either repair or remove something defective, about 1/3 is anti-infective, eliminating illnesses caused by infections or parasites, and the remaining third a blur of pain relief, hormonal therapy and some actual targeted pharmaceutical therapy.
If you can't do surgery even if you can technically perform the procedure because it's so painful to the patient or likely to kill them from infection, you don't have much medicine left.
So one of two things is possible:
The people who issue the visa put a ton of effort into verifying the bonafides of the investors, indicating the process is so bureaucratic and slow moving that it really is a token system that doesn't really produce meaningful economic activity. In this case, it should be scrapped simply to save the bureaucratic overhead in running the program.
Or, the written requirements are onerous but there's little in-depth review of applications due to the complexity of unwinding corporate structures to verify the investors and their track records. The program is thus easily exploitable because it's too easy to submit indecipherable investment sources and so it should be scrapped.
Even for businesses that aren't profitable enough for the owner to just cash checks, there's usually ways for them to work at them in a greatly reduced capacity.
We had friends that owned a restaurant. It was wildly successful for years (full tables and waiting lists) but both the owner and his wife worked full time in the business. They owned the entire building and lived in the 3 bedroom apartment above it (which was more like a single-floor house, about 2000 square feet), so they had very little overhead in terms of housing or business space (another aside, another friend who has been looking to start a restaurant says often property owners negotiate the rent as base + percentage of revenue, whereas our friends had a mortgage dating to the late 1970s).
Anyway, while the restaurant was still doing very well they decided to quit because it was too much work. Considering the "jobs" they worked (head cook, lead waitress) the salaries they would have had to pay to get someone else to do those jobs would have been minor in the scheme of things and they would have been doing much less work, mostly the ordering, paying bills and modest supervision.
Their overhead expenses were low (one mortgage covered the business *and* their home) and general supervision of the business didn't require a commute, just a walk downstairs. Maybe their revenue was small enough that hiring a general manager and doing next to nothing would have been impossible, but a cook and a waitress seemed realistic based on their business volume.
I've done a lot of work for SMBs owned by families and I have yet to see one that survived the loss of the founder without serious professional management on hand.
Usually the ones that make it are the ones where the 2nd generation grows up in the business and the 1st generation sticks around for a decade or so after the 2nd takes over. Usually by then there is enough accumulated knowledge and accrued capital investment that the 3rd generation has to really try to fuck it up.
I can think of one in particular where the founder placed his daughter in charge but brought in a seasoned pro to actually manage it, and once he retired she's flailed about burning through a couple of CFOs who keep challenging her decisions. She would literally not be able to keep a job of her stature where she didn't have ownership/money propping her up. She'd probably not even get hired for her own position when they saw that all her work history was as daddy's little CEO.
What I don't get is why people *want* to "run" their own business? If it's a stable business model, why not let a professional manage it? Why do you have to be "in charge"? Cash the fucking checks and have an auditor check up on it.
So a requirement is a known professional investor or investment company, or this is just your assumption on how they would spot shams?
The problem is that investments in many things are often done a custom partnership basis, usually to insulate shareholder assets from losses.
So "Sanjay's Startup" will end up being invested in by "Bay Area Startup Fund XVII" and "Pacific Growth Opportunities Delta 5" and other totally indecipherable names whether legitimate or fraudulent.
I've had Microsoft refund support charges for known bugs and in a couple of cases for situations that could have easily been called user error if they were being hard about it.
5. User had shitty password
6. User left device logged in for someone else to access
7. etc
There's a point where it's vulnerable just through software or it's not. I think you can say its more vulnerable than you'd want, at least because it was an actual software vulnerability and didn't require it to be hooked up to some forensic analysis hardware.
The problem with immigration is there is no Pareto optimal state.
Except in very small houses where there's really only 1-2 "logical" floor plans, I think the best idea is a 3D printed concrete shell strong enough for totally open floors on each level, with enough structural integrity for 1-2 additional stairway voids to be added later if reconfiguration was desired.
You'd have to live with fixed window placements, but it would give the user the option to reconfigure walls pretty easily. I would embed a chase grid in the floor/ceiling sections for utilities, so they didn't occupy wall voids.
You might get it flexible enough that walls could just be unitized modules that could be rearranged like stage scenery. The house with a giant master bedroom and 2 regular bedrooms could become 4 regular bedrooms, or two large bedrooms.
It's like that because nobody wants to advocate for simple exclusions. And for every reasonable exclusion you can think of, there's a constituency who wants exceptions for their specific cases -- countries of origins, family ties, sponsors, assets, various flavors of civil and military conflict, etc.
Simplifying is a great idea, but you have to be willing to decide who you won't let in without creating any exceptions.
It's all in the enforcement and the loopholes. How many "investors" are required? Are they required to be actual American firms or citizens? How many employees is your "startup" required to actually have?
What's to prevent a H-1B farmer from simply creating sham startups and importing "entrepreneurs"?
Sure, if the enforcement is rigorous and there is some kind of auditing to insure that these are bonafide startups, entrepreneurs and investors then on the surface it doesn't seem like a bad idea at all. If it's just filing paperwork listing a bunch of shell companies that can't easily be unwound, then its ripe for exploitation.
But what kind of maintenance other than what would be needed in any house?
It goes without saying that roofing and probably siding (depending on material) and ultimately windows, but these are all items exposed to the weather. Although I live in a house that's 60 years old with mostly original painted cedar siding that's in good shape (other than having had it painted twice in my 18 years here).
But structural? There are some narrow eras where excessive tightness caused interior moisture problems and poor window installation allowed moisture ingress around windows, possibly leading to rot in surrounding structure, and probably some points in siding development where it had similar problems, although it's not like painted wood clad houses were immune from similar siding issues if the paint was neglected.
From what little I've seen, new construction houses seem to have superior foundations -- well-laid block or even poured concrete, often with asphalt and foam clad exteriors for moisture resistance. I've seen some "golden era" houses with shit foundations, bad cinder block or limestone that's been basically epoxied or shotcrete coated.
I think you're right about the lumber, though. Douglas fir isn't around and most of the pine used is so damn new it lacks any structural integrity and may be prone to warping. And I would worry about the long-term viability of the glues used in engineered building materials, especially TJIs.
When I've had my house appraised for initial purchase and some refinancing there has been verbiage in the appraisal for the "useful life of the house" in there, which I assume is some kind of underwriting legalism to prevent a falling down house from being financed with a 30 year mortgage.
However, the above poster's claim of a 50 year useful life on new construction actually makes me wonder if "modern" houses (those built since the 1980s or later) actually have a shorter expected lifespan due to the mass production techniques and engineered components which actually might not last, like truss joists, LVLs and some of the chipboard materials. Older houses often have beams which are single giant pieces of wood, for example, and never used chipboard.
I would think, though, that housing codes, especially in suburbs, wouldn't go for building methods that *literally* became structurally unsound in 50 years. If it was true, entire suburbs could become uninhabitable when their housing stock became obsolete. I'd also guess that the real estate and mortgage industry might have issues, especially when original owners found that their houses were unsalable because no financing would be offered due to structural expiration.
Strangely enough, the actual dimensions of some calibers are essentially the same as their nominal dimensions.
10mm & .40 S&W (AFAIK, the latter was developed from the former) are modern designs and match their nominal dimensions closely.
The whole .45 caliber family is .45x" with only ~4 thousandths of an inch variation between bullets for various guns, possibly because it was a purpose designed load. .38s were evolved from much older designs, IIRC .38 caliber rounds actually match the external dimensions of the case, not bullet.
I had ONE client do this with his personal cell phone, which is what I had to call from time to time to get ahold of him. When you called, it would connect almost immediately and say "please enjoy this music while we reach your party" and then his song would play.
The crazy/stupid thing was his music choice was some kind of thrash metal which was almost not even discernible as music due to the limited frequency response of the phone. IMHO, pretty much all music would have sounded pretty bad, but this genre was really awful.
Maybe it would work better with the new "high fidelity" calling in use now. If you get on a call like that now it's disturbingly high quality.
What I want to know is why you couldn't just have this functionality programmed into your phone -- your phone answers the call and then just plays whatever sound file you have selected and then plays your ringtone like normal so you can "answer" it (or not). And of course you could go off the deep end and have specific sounds associated with specific numbers.
I don't think the ship idea is far-fetched myself, if you can find it a way to build it big enough to survive pretty much anything the sea can dish out and if you can find a way to power it without constant refueling.
What would be interesting would be a private party buying a decommissioned oil platform someplace. Oftentimes these wells don't run empty, they just don't yield enough oil for commercial exploitation. Near my dad's home town in Kansas there were still oil wells producing enough oil to be worth an individual's time and effort to keep the pumps running but not enough for it to be a commercial effort.
If you had an oil platform that could produce enough oil to provide whatever couldn't be provided by wind and solar, you might have the basis of a long-term sea base.
I think being at sea has other challenges, though, like the sea's desire to dissolve anything that goes into it. The maintenance challenges would be legion.
I seem to remember Walmart trying to do the Silicon Valley thing a couple of years ago, opening an office there (run by SV cultural standards, not Benton, Ark. standards) and making a bunch of noise about developing a cloud portability system that would let vendors easily move workloads (which I understood to be more like virtualization workloads than docker-type containers) between cloud providers.
Whatever happened to this? Did OpenStack meet their needs and they gave up on the concept, or what? Maybe my memory fails me, but I seem to recall that they were definitely interested in portability to AWS at the time.
I don't agree with all the H1-B hate. The alternative is that those jobs are leaving altogether and not coming back. Like you said, billions saved, so if H1-Bs didn't exist than those American tech companies would go broke to international competitors due to higher cost, or the companies would simply outsource the IT to an international company.
Baloney. If those jobs could have been moved overseas, they would have. These workers are imported because the work itself is not mobile -- the systems, data and other personnel can't be moved to India for practical or regulatory reasons.
Even a badly paid H1-B worker is much more expensive to employ in the US than in India. To achieve savings, they have to bring the worker here.
This is undercutting American wages, pure and simple. And don't start on me with "if you have the skills", either. A lot of people getting dumped for H1-Bs aren't zit-faced 20-somethings clicking next, but older workers with deep skills and experience.
Don't buy into the fantasy that YOUR job isn't oursourcable because of your unique knowledge and skills. That's the self-reinforcing myth of the long-term IT expansion -- I'm too valuable to be outsourced or replaced. No, it's just that t the demand for IT talent *in your area of expertise* just hasn't reached equilibrium yet. When it does, I'm sure you'll enjoy being lectured by someone on how you should have kept up, but you still have the chance to start your career over with "skills the market needs."
I just wish that people who voted for him could come to terms with the fact that they aren't getting any, not even one, of the things he promised to get their vote. That way they could start finding a candidate for the next cycle who isn't a Simpson's character made flesh.
I've been looking for that candidate since the 1990s and haven't found them yet. IMHO, Trump was the less dangerous candidate among all the Republicans. Hillary is a more competent administrator, but honestly, she wouldn't have accomplished much of anything either besides trivial changes at the margins.
I don't think this is nearly as far-fetched as it sounds, but what I'm curious about is if the rich will eventually pursue depopulation strategies to simply wipe out the masses of poor people.
I would assume that further wealth concentration would be destabilizing. Even if you have fortified zones and robotic soldiers, it's a lot of resources to deploy just to keep the poor at bay. Even if keeping them at bay is wildly successful, there would still be armed factions to contend with and some small existential threat they could topple the order.