Most debt is owned by Americans. In fact owning US debt puts China in USA's power not the other way round. There is a saying , if you owe the bank a 1000 dollars you are in trouble, if you owe the bank 2 trillion dollars the bank is in trouble (if you walk away from the debt). The US could retire all foreign debt tomorrow by printing dollars and infalting the debt away. China would have no legal recourse. US doesnt do it because most debt is still owned by US citizens.
Many homeless have jobs but cannot afford housing in the areas the jobs are. In California this is being driven by hot Chinese money being invested in residential real estate. Thousands of homes are kept vacant as investments while working people are homeless. The trade imbalance with China means China has excess dollars and invests it in residential houses in California. If the trade imbalance would go away the housing market would correct and the homeless guy could actually afford housing rather than a phone.
You dont put tariffs on things you have a shortage of. The US education system does not produce enough technically inclined folks for the level of sophitication of the economy. Brains is one of USA's biggest imports.
You forgot the US is still severely dependent on one import even after Shale. Brains. The US does not domestically produce enough smart people to keep running the high technology economy and is severely dependent on importing brains. If the US plays hardball with the home countries the US will lose its image of a nice country to emigrate to and will suffer from a brain shortage. It could then downgrade its economy to a less technological one or reverse its trade policies.
Which humans are you talking about? Hillary Supporters?. Despite 15 months of constant real world input they still havnt been able to learn the basic fact that they had such a bad candidate that even Trump beat her. Maybe shouldnt have diddled with the numbers to get Bernie out.
Same here. Got acute attack of pancreatitis and then got diagnosed as diabetic. Never ate sugar even in coffee as both parents had adult onset. Doctor keeps prescribing meds but nothing works except insulin. I have a weight of 170 pounds on a 5 7 frame so not morbidly obese but the general advice is lose weight. Hell I am taking Insulin 50 units a day and insulin makes you fat. How are you supposed to lose weight when you are barely 10 pounds above normal for the height and the insulin injections you take make you gain weight.
It sucks when the efficiency of your body of changing food into food stores and cell energy is to high that your own body is trying to kill you BTW its almost impossible to find store bought food with no sugar in it. Even Morton's salt has sugar(dextrose) as an anti caking agent. All soups have sugar. The low fat stuff is the worst. Once you take fat out stuff tastes like crap so the companies add sugar to the brew to make it taste better.
Scientists really need to figure out metabolic syndrome. its not as easy as taking a drug to affect one pathway as the body has multiple pathways and hyperactivates other pathways when you try to shutdown one. Take Insulin? The Liver starts converting sugar to fat and dumping it into the bloodstream or starts taking up the insulin to convert sugar to triglycerides and adding it to your belly. As opposed to the insulin being used by cells to take sugar in for burning which was the prescribed aim Try to eat less, body thinks its in starvation mode and slows down metabolism. Try to exercise a lot, the cells start using lactic acid instead of sugar. I also have super high triglycerides like 3000 (150 is normal). Dont drink and eat a low carb , high meat diet but the triglycerides never go down. Fixing diabetes is not easy and not every diabetic is grossly overweight or pigging on sugar.
Youtube is the brain dead part of Google. It is not very high level work so its the perfect place to dump your affrimative hire quotas for the entire company.
I am all for paying H1Bs more but the fact of the matter is the rules for H1Bs are very biased. The employer has too much power and it takes far too long to settle legally (GCs have a 10 year backlog). As long as the playing field is not fair people dont care about playing fair either. They will exploit every loophole they can get away with.
Want to solve the H1 issue - make the visa non capped and individual. Anyone with the qualification should be able to get the visa individually without a 6 month wait. Then they would be able to compete in the market on fair terms and not have to accept bad work conditions.
The social security rules say that if foreign countries have a treaty with US saying they have their own social security than the foreign nationals on work visas dont have to pay social security. e.g. French folks on H1 in the US do not pay FICA taxes. India does not have such a Totalization treaty hence Indian H1Bs get screwed - they have to pay FICA taxes but their H1s are valid for only 6 years and you do not become eligible to claim unless you have 40 quarters or 10 years of contributions so they never get to claim. India can negotiate for a "totalization" treaty and US cant really refuse unless it wants to get pulled up at the WTO that its giving favorable treatment to France over India. Indian politicians have been too busy buying billions of dollars of US military hardware and exporting billions of dollars in software services to bother negotiate a "totalization" treaty but this card is always available to play.
British Dutch and German's do not need the H1 to work in the US. They can come on E3 and E4 treaty visas. India does not have a treaty with US so the only visa open to Indians is the H1 hence the over representation of Indians in the H1 category. BTW some Europeans choose H1 over E3 because H1 is a dual intent visa. It specifically allows applying for greencards whereas the treaty visas do not. Frankly Europeans get 2 months of vacation, free medical care and free college for their kids so not many are interested in moving to the US for work. Its mostly Indians who have both the education level and the motivation to move to the US. For most Indians(from the upper middle class) who apply for the H1 , moving to the US involves a temporary reduction in standard of life in return for an increase in the standard of living of their kids.
"must be an astronaut & Olympic medallist in 17 sports, plus an Oscar"
You must be thinking of the O1 visa. That is the visa that Nativists point to as an alternate to the H1 and for which USCIS makes ridiculous demands of proof.
The H1 was created as industry said the USCIS is slowing down hiring too much for Greencards and the companies needed a faster way to get foreigners over here to work. It was also part of the WTO negotiations where India bargained for access to the US services market in return for US companies' access to the Indian domestic goods market.
The H1 is doing what it was supposed to do, allow companies to quickly hire foreigners for positions they are not finding Americans for. Every H1 costs 10000 out of which 5000 is menat to retrain Americans so that the skills are available locally. Where is that money going?
If there is a mega crackdown on H1Bs, India will negotiate with US for the return of Social Security payments made by H1Bs. In the last 25 years H1Bs have contributed a shitload to SS without taking any payouts. If this money has to be returned SS wil go bankrupt. Say Bye bye to welfare/Disability checks.
How do you define long term? The indentured white laborers brought on the early colony ships were indentured for a term of 7 years and after that they were citizens. Nowadays the GC process has been so restricted for Indians even if they apply the first year they come to the US it can still take 10 years (H! is 6 years but if a GC petition is pending H1 can be extended in 1 yr increments till GC comes through) to get a GC and 5 more to become a citizen. 15 years is pretty much a big chunk of your adult working life. If after 15 years in the US people are not considered Americans than the ancestors of most Americans would not be considered Americans by that benchmark. The problem with both H1 and illegal immigration is that the legal immigration route has been artificially choked to prevent non whites from coming in large numbers. if the same rules were followed as were followed for European immigrants , the west coast would be Asian Majority, after all China is a lot closer to California than Germany is to California. Its an anomaly that most Californians are Germans not Chinese.
Making it tougher to have H1s will mean entire industries will move offshore or nearshore. Many companies like Apple and Google are setting up Canada centers as their vendors TCS, Infosys etc have complained they are not being able to staff in the US. The companies are dependent on the vendors for the backend work so they will play nice with the vendors. A number of Apple employees have been offered bonuses to move offshore to continue to supervise the vendor teams.
That is bull. Many contracting companies provide PTOs, vacations, health insurance, life insurance, 401K match. You cannot brand the entire section of the industry because of a few bad apples. The bad apples have got a chance to flourish because of H1 caps. Because of the lottery the H1 itself is valuable so an employee has to stick with a bad apple company. Take away the visa cap. Let anybody get an H1 anytime of the year and H1s will only work for companies providing all of the benefits you mentioned.
H1B workers are paid more than local citizens. That is ensured by the LCA process. In fact with the cost of applying for the LCA and the H1 visa , an H1 candidate costs 10K more than a local candidate and the hiring process takes 4 weeks more than it would to hire a local. People dont hire H1s because they want to, they hire them because they cant find locals. Also H1s dont change jobs often, this is attractive to employers who are looking to have lesser attrition. This was supposed to be fixed through the AC21 act making it easier for H1s to change jobs so that employers could not just stop giving them raises but with the Trump administration's latest policies on making it difficult to change jobs we are back to the bad old days of the Clinton administration. Infosys and Wipro must have paid huge donations to the Trump campaign. When you make an H1 a scarcity commodity , the companies holding the existing ones can make more money from it.
The govt already has a system in place to verify people before they join. Employers dont like using it as they want to hire illegals. Illegals work harder and dont make any waves as they want to fly under the radar. Look at how illegals mostly work in fields like Chicken processing or Fruit picking. These are fields where people are exploited. Software companies dont use illegals even though there is a clear demand for foreign labor. This is because software companies are more honest employers.
If you ever get stuck in a jam where it would be easier to walk you could do nothing about it if you were in your own car. You cant leave it in the middle of the road but if you are in an Uber you can get out and walk
If you have worked inside Apple you would know that whatever "Business" says is needed goes and to hell with SDLC, plans, QA . Google regularly slips dates to let the Engineers do it right. Apple designers do have a lot of political clout and force a lot of frustating changes on the Engineers. Engineers at Apple are pretty miserable but stay for the stock options. Engineers at Google are having fun.
I think viruses dont spread on Linux is not so much due to the OS as the user base. Windows is used by the proleteriat who will do stupid stuff like sticking a USB drive into a computer. Linux is the preferred choice of nerds who follow good security practices as second nature so virus writers in the Linux space have to be masochists or the Gautam Buddha because they definitely are going to get the satisfaction of seeing their wares take off. Windows is a lot more rewarding to malware writers.
Apple is a consumer electronics company. It was founded by a Product guy not an engineer They dont care about being innovative and the first to come out with a feature - they almost never are the first on anything Their focus is on making a device which just works which even the dumbest user cant screw up too badly. They will copy the innovations of others, round out the rough edges, simplify, dumb down and make something which meets the needs of 80% of the target market They do not invest in core engineering research. They invest in design, ops, integration, QA, service. Its the Nanny state approach not the Ayn Rand approach which most Silicon valley startups have.
Apple was founded by a product manager, Microsoft by an Engineer. Engineer's think features are cool. Product managers are more focused on all of it just working together seamlessly even if has far fewer features. Apple has never innovated and been the lead on any technology. It has always been the fast copier and copied other people's innovations, simplified them, rounded the edges and come out with a product which "just works".
For Apple's model to work there need to be other companies in the market doing the innovation. With the iPhone becoming a monster and capturing 90% of the profits in the smartphone market there is not much money left on the table for other companies to innovate so I do not expect any great advancements in the smartphone market.
However there are other markets like voice assistants, AI, Cars etc where Apple can take the innovations of Engineer led companies like Google, Amazon, Tesla and repackage them as iProducts which "just work". Thats where Apple's growth will come from.
Slashdot Mirror
Most debt is owned by Americans. In fact owning US debt puts China in USA's power not the other way round. There is a saying , if you owe the bank a 1000 dollars you are in trouble, if you owe the bank 2 trillion dollars the bank is in trouble (if you walk away from the debt).
The US could retire all foreign debt tomorrow by printing dollars and infalting the debt away. China would have no legal recourse. US doesnt do it because most debt is still owned by US citizens.
Many homeless have jobs but cannot afford housing in the areas the jobs are. In California this is being driven by hot Chinese money being invested in residential real estate. Thousands of homes are kept vacant as investments while working people are homeless. The trade imbalance with China means China has excess dollars and invests it in residential houses in California. If the trade imbalance would go away the housing market would correct and the homeless guy could actually afford housing rather than a phone.
You dont put tariffs on things you have a shortage of. The US education system does not produce enough technically inclined folks for the level of sophitication of the economy. Brains is one of USA's biggest imports.
You forgot the US is still severely dependent on one import even after Shale. Brains. The US does not domestically produce enough smart people to keep running the high technology economy and is severely dependent on importing brains. If the US plays hardball with the home countries the US will lose its image of a nice country to emigrate to and will suffer from a brain shortage. It could then downgrade its economy to a less technological one or reverse its trade policies.
Do not expose kids to screens at early age. It stunts brain development.
Which humans are you talking about? Hillary Supporters?. Despite 15 months of constant real world input they still havnt been able to learn the basic fact that they had such a bad candidate that even Trump beat her. Maybe shouldnt have diddled with the numbers to get Bernie out.
We dont have a population shortage
Same here. Got acute attack of pancreatitis and then got diagnosed as diabetic. Never ate sugar even in coffee as both parents had adult onset. Doctor keeps prescribing meds but nothing works except insulin. I have a weight of 170 pounds on a 5 7 frame so not morbidly obese but the general advice is lose weight. Hell I am taking Insulin 50 units a day and insulin makes you fat. How are you supposed to lose weight when you are barely 10 pounds above normal for the height and the insulin injections you take make you gain weight.
It sucks when the efficiency of your body of changing food into food stores and cell energy is to high that your own body is trying to kill you
BTW its almost impossible to find store bought food with no sugar in it. Even Morton's salt has sugar(dextrose) as an anti caking agent.
All soups have sugar. The low fat stuff is the worst. Once you take fat out stuff tastes like crap so the companies add sugar to the brew to make it taste better.
Scientists really need to figure out metabolic syndrome. its not as easy as taking a drug to affect one pathway as the body has multiple pathways and hyperactivates other pathways when you try to shutdown one. Take Insulin? The Liver starts converting sugar to fat and dumping it into the bloodstream or starts taking up the insulin to convert sugar to triglycerides and adding it to your belly. As opposed to the insulin being used by cells to take sugar in for burning which was the prescribed aim
Try to eat less, body thinks its in starvation mode and slows down metabolism.
Try to exercise a lot, the cells start using lactic acid instead of sugar.
I also have super high triglycerides like 3000 (150 is normal).
Dont drink and eat a low carb , high meat diet but the triglycerides never go down.
Fixing diabetes is not easy and not every diabetic is grossly overweight or pigging on sugar.
Youtube is the brain dead part of Google. It is not very high level work so its the perfect place to dump your affrimative hire quotas for the entire company.
I am all for paying H1Bs more but the fact of the matter is the rules for H1Bs are very biased. The employer has too much power and it takes far too long to settle legally (GCs have a 10 year backlog).
As long as the playing field is not fair people dont care about playing fair either. They will exploit every loophole they can get away with.
Want to solve the H1 issue - make the visa non capped and individual. Anyone with the qualification should be able to get the visa individually without a 6 month wait. Then they would be able to compete in the market on fair terms and not have to accept bad work conditions.
The social security rules say that if foreign countries have a treaty with US saying they have their own social security than the foreign nationals on work visas dont have to pay social security. e.g. French folks on H1 in the US do not pay FICA taxes. India does not have such a Totalization treaty hence Indian H1Bs get screwed - they have to pay FICA taxes but their H1s are valid for only 6 years and you do not become eligible to claim unless you have 40 quarters or 10 years of contributions so they never get to claim. India can negotiate for a "totalization" treaty and US cant really refuse unless it wants to get pulled up at the WTO that its giving favorable treatment to France over India. Indian politicians have been too busy buying billions of dollars of US military hardware and exporting billions of dollars in software services to bother negotiate a "totalization" treaty but this card is always available to play.
British Dutch and German's do not need the H1 to work in the US. They can come on E3 and E4 treaty visas. India does not have a treaty with US so the only visa open to Indians is the H1 hence the over representation of Indians in the H1 category.
BTW some Europeans choose H1 over E3 because H1 is a dual intent visa. It specifically allows applying for greencards whereas the treaty visas do not.
Frankly Europeans get 2 months of vacation, free medical care and free college for their kids so not many are interested in moving to the US for work. Its mostly Indians who have both the education level and the motivation to move to the US.
For most Indians(from the upper middle class) who apply for the H1 , moving to the US involves a temporary reduction in standard of life in return for an increase in the standard of living of their kids.
"must be an astronaut & Olympic medallist in 17 sports, plus an Oscar"
You must be thinking of the O1 visa. That is the visa that Nativists point to as an alternate to the H1 and for which USCIS makes ridiculous demands of proof.
The H1 was created as industry said the USCIS is slowing down hiring too much for Greencards and the companies needed a faster way to get foreigners over here to work. It was also part of the WTO negotiations where India bargained for access to the US services market in return for US companies' access to the Indian domestic goods market.
The H1 is doing what it was supposed to do, allow companies to quickly hire foreigners for positions they are not finding Americans for. Every H1 costs 10000 out of which 5000 is menat to retrain Americans so that the skills are available locally. Where is that money going?
If there is a mega crackdown on H1Bs, India will negotiate with US for the return of Social Security payments made by H1Bs. In the last 25 years H1Bs have contributed a shitload to SS without taking any payouts. If this money has to be returned SS wil go bankrupt. Say Bye bye to welfare/Disability checks.
How do you define long term? The indentured white laborers brought on the early colony ships were indentured for a term of 7 years and after that they were citizens. Nowadays the GC process has been so restricted for Indians even if they apply the first year they come to the US it can still take 10 years (H! is 6 years but if a GC petition is pending H1 can be extended in 1 yr increments till GC comes through) to get a GC and 5 more to become a citizen. 15 years is pretty much a big chunk of your adult working life. If after 15 years in the US people are not considered Americans than the ancestors of most Americans would not be considered Americans by that benchmark.
The problem with both H1 and illegal immigration is that the legal immigration route has been artificially choked to prevent non whites from coming in large numbers. if the same rules were followed as were followed for European immigrants , the west coast would be Asian Majority, after all China is a lot closer to California than Germany is to California. Its an anomaly that most Californians are Germans not Chinese.
Making it tougher to have H1s will mean entire industries will move offshore or nearshore. Many companies like Apple and Google are setting up Canada centers as their vendors TCS, Infosys etc have complained they are not being able to staff in the US. The companies are dependent on the vendors for the backend work so they will play nice with the vendors. A number of Apple employees have been offered bonuses to move offshore to continue to supervise the vendor teams.
That is bull. Many contracting companies provide PTOs, vacations, health insurance, life insurance, 401K match. You cannot brand the entire section of the industry because of a few bad apples.
The bad apples have got a chance to flourish because of H1 caps. Because of the lottery the H1 itself is valuable so an employee has to stick with a bad apple company. Take away the visa cap. Let anybody get an H1 anytime of the year and H1s will only work for companies providing all of the benefits you mentioned.
H1B workers are paid more than local citizens. That is ensured by the LCA process. In fact with the cost of applying for the LCA and the H1 visa , an H1 candidate costs 10K more than a local candidate and the hiring process takes 4 weeks more than it would to hire a local. People dont hire H1s because they want to, they hire them because they cant find locals.
Also H1s dont change jobs often, this is attractive to employers who are looking to have lesser attrition. This was supposed to be fixed through the AC21 act making it easier for H1s to change jobs so that employers could not just stop giving them raises but with the Trump administration's latest policies on making it difficult to change jobs we are back to the bad old days of the Clinton administration.
Infosys and Wipro must have paid huge donations to the Trump campaign. When you make an H1 a scarcity commodity , the companies holding the existing ones can make more money from it.
The govt already has a system in place to verify people before they join. Employers dont like using it as they want to hire illegals. Illegals work harder and dont make any waves as they want to fly under the radar. Look at how illegals mostly work in fields like Chicken processing or Fruit picking. These are fields where people are exploited. Software companies dont use illegals even though there is a clear demand for foreign labor. This is because software companies are more honest employers.
If you ever get stuck in a jam where it would be easier to walk you could do nothing about it if you were in your own car. You cant leave it in the middle of the road but if you are in an Uber you can get out and walk
If you have worked inside Apple you would know that whatever "Business" says is needed goes and to hell with SDLC, plans, QA . Google regularly slips dates to let the Engineers do it right.
Apple designers do have a lot of political clout and force a lot of frustating changes on the Engineers. Engineers at Apple are pretty miserable but stay for the stock options. Engineers at Google are having fun.
This game is revealing private trade practices which give competitive advantage to MSM. Is noone suing them?
I think viruses dont spread on Linux is not so much due to the OS as the user base. Windows is used by the proleteriat who will do stupid stuff like sticking a USB drive into a computer. Linux is the preferred choice of nerds who follow good security practices as second nature so virus writers in the Linux space have to be masochists or the Gautam Buddha because they definitely are going to get the satisfaction of seeing their wares take off. Windows is a lot more rewarding to malware writers.
Apple is a consumer electronics company.
It was founded by a Product guy not an engineer
They dont care about being innovative and the first to come out with a feature - they almost never are the first on anything
Their focus is on making a device which just works which even the dumbest user cant screw up too badly.
They will copy the innovations of others, round out the rough edges, simplify, dumb down and make something which meets the needs of 80% of the target market
They do not invest in core engineering research. They invest in design, ops, integration, QA, service.
Its the Nanny state approach not the Ayn Rand approach which most Silicon valley startups have.
Apple was founded by a product manager, Microsoft by an Engineer. Engineer's think features are cool. Product managers are more focused on all of it just working together seamlessly even if has far fewer features. Apple has never innovated and been the lead on any technology. It has always been the fast copier and copied other people's innovations, simplified them, rounded the edges and come out with a product which "just works".
For Apple's model to work there need to be other companies in the market doing the innovation. With the iPhone becoming a monster and capturing 90% of the profits in the smartphone market there is not much money left on the table for other companies to innovate so I do not expect any great advancements in the smartphone market.
However there are other markets like voice assistants, AI, Cars etc where Apple can take the innovations of Engineer led companies like Google, Amazon, Tesla and repackage them as iProducts which "just work". Thats where Apple's growth will come from.