The H1B program was created as part of the WTO and US signing on. When India agreed to let US sell Coca Cola in India , US agreed to let India sell Software Services in the US . Now selling services needs people to be onsite hence the H1B. If you want to get rid of H1Bs leave the WTO and watch Caterpillar and Boeing factories close.
Affirmative action by a minority. How come noone ever calls out the Blacks and NFL,NBA or Wall Street and Jews but if its a real Indian its discrimination not affirmative action. Indians were shut out of the country till 1965 by hook and crook and discriminatory immigration laws. Indians will use hook and crook to balance the playing field . Deal with it.
Nope H1Bs are not paid less than Americans. They however do work a lot longer hours including taking phone calls with offshore at night. As these are salaried positions there is no overtime only promise of progress within the companies. American employees who had been working standard 9-5 jobs may not be willing to work longer hours and take calls at night. That is why these companies prefer H1Bs as their onsite presence (after considering the cost of visas H1Bs are actually more expensive). Plus if the offshore team has some communication and cultural mismatch issues the H1Bs will act as a buffer instead of demeaning the offshore teams for their accents. (I will concede you the right to make fun of other peoples English accent once you can speak at least one language besides English. Till then you are just being an ignorant dick)
Nope they cannot pay H1Bs less than market . So why hire H1Bs to be the onsite presence? First they are not hiring these H1bs, they are already on the company payroll. They are deploying them to the companies latest worksite- Disney. Two even if they did hire the ex Disney employees to work for their company the Disney employees would have to be the key interface between the offshore teams and the business. Given that the Disney employees are pissed of enough to sue Disney would YOU as a vendor company hire them in such critical positions? The potential for sabotage is too much. Once your company decides to outsource a function your job is gone - doesnt matter if the outsourced company is IBM with all the contractors onsite or Infosys with half of them offshore.
Not if a job requirement was specified as being able to speak in Telugu. Boom your discrimination lawsuit has as much chance of guys filing a discrimination lawsuit against stripclubs hiring girls only
Its even worse. Its age discrimination. Say I am a 35-40 year old. I join Amex. I have kids and I have already gone through the hell taht is infancy and toddlerhood. My kids are now in school and I pay for after school day care so that I can work. Now I have to pick up the slack for 20 year olds who go off for 6 months ?
Not every job is pleasant to do or not all parts of even a generally pleasant job. There are jobs which have only pleasant parts - they are called hobbies and you dont get paid to do them. Money needs to be the motivator to do the unpleasant parts of a job and all real jobs have unpleasant parts. Hence if you have someone for whom money is not a motivator at all(note I said a motivator not the only motivator) then it is difficult to plan around the person being around when unpleasant stuff comes up.
Oh people with no legal records of their existence are very committed to the job. As they say in Hamilton , if you want it done right get an immigrant to do it.
I would like to know where these people were doing their research. In the Silicon Valley 100K is a bare survival salary if you are supporting a family.
This is kind of the reason we dont like hiring people with family money. They have no commitment to the job. We need to be able to plan on the person being around to do their job when the going gets tough.
26.5% of salary as rent and you are complaining? Try living in the Bay area. Here is a sample Budget
$125000 a year for a mid level person with a family. =$10500 a month Gross =$9500 a month after Social security and Medicare =$8800 a month after federal taxes =$8000 a month after California taxes and SDi =$7000 a month after Health Insurance premiums for a family of 4 =$6000 a month after 401K (retirement contribution as there are no pensions) =$6000 a month take home =$3000 a month after rent (Rent for a crappy 2 Bedroom apt is $3000 and can go all the way upto $6000 in silicon valley) =$2500 a month after utilities (no the 3000 a month does not include utilities or renters insurance) =$2000 a month after Car payments,Insurance and Gas Now family of 4 eating 3 times a day for 30 days a month = 360 meals. Assuming a $5 per person/meal =$1800 =$200 a month after food With that $200 you have to buy school supplies, car repairs, any other emergency. Pretty much the only entertainment you can afford is TV and a little eating out once in a while. No savings for childrens college No savings for replacing car when it breaks down so next car will also have to be on loan No savings for saving a downpayment to actually buy a house No savings for if you lose your job. Plus if you are working on a visa you wont get unemployment even though you pay into Social Security. No scope for signing up children to extra classes so if your public school is messing up they are screwed as you cant pay for college. Their only hope is scholarships No scope for getting a divorce if your marriage is not working out as you cannot afford to pay alimony, child support and rent on 2 places.
Do note 50% of take home goes to rent and another 10% to utilities so the basic cost of keeping a roof over your head is 60% of take home.
Nativists will never agree. 90-95% of the people in the developing world would be able to meet those restrictions. People in the US have no idea how good life here is. People from developing countries will very happily work here and pay taxes and most countries don't even have welfare so these people are not used to living on welfare unlike US citizens. Though I do agree that students on visas should be allowed to work off campus. Working your way through college is the quintessential American dream.
There are many ways to be illegal - you may be in the country legally but work illegally. Tourists on B1 as well as Students on F1 are entitled to get licenses and drive cars. Many students moonlight as cab drivers. Similarly refugees awaiting work permits moonlight as cab driver. Its one of the few jobs you can do without a US based credential as long as you know how to drive.
The Uber business model only works for newly laid off workers who have a nice car with car payments to make. Its not meant to be a fulltime job. The entire gig economy including iOS apps only took off as in 2008 a lot of people lost their jobs but they still had cars, computers and loads of time on their hand. As we closer to full employment people who have a choice have moved away from gigs. Taxi companies are built upon the exploitation of illegal immigrant drivers. Uber as a high visibility company cannot compete with Taxi companies as it cant hire illegal immigrants and pay them sweat wages under the table. At the same time driving a cab will not support a minimum wage so the best thing for Uber would be to go back to being a gig company. Put a hard cap of 10 hours a week on driving for a driver - that will remove the entire pool of drivers expecting to make a living from Uber, stop promoting Uber driving as a full time job and stop giving leases to drivers to buy cars to drive for Uber. Stop trying to grow for growth's sake. Stay at the size of a gig economy company like a temp agency. They have some good software - license it to taxi companies and let them use it for managing their own fleets in a mutli-tenant kind of model.
Its even worse. Out here in Cupertino the Schools have a program where every kid has to have an iPad as homework will be assigned through an iPad. No choice or option for using another platform. The first year Apple donated the iPads.Once the teachers got used to using it now its the parents can buy their own, buy one from the school at a discounted price or if you are really really cant afford an ipad the School will lend out last years iPads. Guess how many parents told their kids no you cant have the shiny new one like all your classmates and should use the older school issued one. Apple donated for one year and now has a yearly revenue stream. You dont even have to wait till they grow up
Even if wind doesnt kill birds its still an Eyesore. As for CNG, CNG or methane can be got from Biogass plants - Cowshit and farm waste fermented anaerobically. it doesnt have to be mined out of the ground so its not causing additional damage. Also we are far from getting off Oil (especially for transport gas is a lot safer than huge batteries which can explode) and as long as Oil is extracted Gas is going to be there.
Eventually we will move to Nuclear Fusion but till that comes around for cities with a grid the best power is Nuclear fission for base load and Gas Turbine plants for peak load. Solar and Wind can be used in Rural areas off the grid where it is not economic to bring the grid. Though in such areas you could use Biogas based Gas Turbines/generators. Hydro should only be used when a dam is being built for flood control or irrigation and Hydro can be built without additional flooding. The damage from flooding is a lot worse than from fossil fuels. We should not abandon our coal reserves. Coal can be changed into Gasoline using Fischer Tropp process and gasoline is still the best fuel for cars. Infact when we have fusion plants we will probably be using fusion plants to generate synthetic gasoline from CO2 and Water. The fad with battery operated cars is not going to last long. Samsung Note 7 showed us a phone battery can explode so definitely car batteries can too.
The problem with Solar is not that you cant make a panel which pays back for itself. The problem is pollution. The manufacturing of a Solar Panel creates a lot of pollution including heavy metals which when they get into the water supply cause cancer. They are also a hazard during a house fire. Plus the battery backup needed for Solar causes more pollution both at manufacture as well as disposal time. All of these societal costs are not charged to the Solar manufacturer or consumer and are paid for by Society. This is not sustainable if Solar becomes more than a fraction of installed power base. At that point Solar consumers would have to be charged the real cost of manufacturing including environmental cleanups and you would find its more expensive that fossil or nuclear. Similar problem with WInd of killing birds, hydro of drowning forests. Probably the least environmental impact is CNG. All it emits is CO2 and Water. Both are Plant Food
Lets say I as an individual indulged in the same behaviour these companies indulge in. Put so much of income into 401K that I could not pay the rent so had to borrow money to pay the rent. There would be an expectation of paying the tax when I take the money out of 401K. But what if I lobbied for a Tax Amnesty to take money out of 401K without paying taxes and till the time that Amnesty got passed kept borrowing money If I indulged in this behaviour would you call the Personal Tax system too high and needing reform or would you say I am delusional?
Here in San Francisco Public Transport Drivers are some of the most overpaid people. They get better pay than Software Engineers with 4 years of college and have fantastic pension schemes. I was talking to one of the drivers of our corporate Shuttle. he drove for VTA for 20 years and now has a pension for life. He can live on the pension but he is bored so he drives for our company's corporate shuttle. What he made as a driver was way more than what Software engineers make in the first 5 years of their career
Its no more BS than DOJ forcing Microsoft to uncouple IE from Windows. Google and Apple just give bigger bribes to Congress than Microsoft. Google has an entire internal Department to lobby Congress. The amount of lobbying is so high that they had to develop an app to keep track of all the dollars going to all the Congressmen and all the causes. It was a very interesting contract to work on for all concerned. Really eye opening on how much Silicon Valley spends to make sure what happened to Microsoft doesn't happen to them.
Some people like buying BMWs. Some like buying Green Power. Its a free market though BMWs can only be sold as govt pays subsidies to create roads on which going over 50 miles an hour is safe.
One word. Storage. Yes it can be 100% renewable. It just needs investment in storage to smooth the power peaks and troughs. Right now as Fossil plants are already built its cheaper to use them for base load instead of putting in storage for peak load. However as these plants get decommisioned they will be replaced with more green plants and more storage till we reach a point where we are fully renewable with storage.
However it does help in getting more investments into Green Power as the electricity companies are able to sell it at a premium. Its like a Ford and a BMW. The difference in specs does not really justify the difference in price. Electricity is electricity and transportation is transportation but if someone is willing to pay a premium you can use the extra money to build in features which are not necessary but nice to have like renewability.
Slashdot Mirror
The H1B program was created as part of the WTO and US signing on. When India agreed to let US sell Coca Cola in India , US agreed to let India sell Software Services in the US . Now selling services needs people to be onsite hence the H1B. If you want to get rid of H1Bs leave the WTO and watch Caterpillar and Boeing factories close.
Affirmative action by a minority. How come noone ever calls out the Blacks and NFL,NBA or Wall Street and Jews but if its a real Indian its discrimination not affirmative action. Indians were shut out of the country till 1965 by hook and crook and discriminatory immigration laws. Indians will use hook and crook to balance the playing field . Deal with it.
Nope H1Bs are not paid less than Americans. They however do work a lot longer hours including taking phone calls with offshore at night. As these are salaried positions there is no overtime only promise of progress within the companies. American employees who had been working standard 9-5 jobs may not be willing to work longer hours and take calls at night. That is why these companies prefer H1Bs as their onsite presence (after considering the cost of visas H1Bs are actually more expensive). Plus if the offshore team has some communication and cultural mismatch issues the H1Bs will act as a buffer instead of demeaning the offshore teams for their accents. (I will concede you the right to make fun of other peoples English accent once you can speak at least one language besides English. Till then you are just being an ignorant dick)
Nope they cannot pay H1Bs less than market . So why hire H1Bs to be the onsite presence? First they are not hiring these H1bs, they are already on the company payroll. They are deploying them to the companies latest worksite- Disney. Two even if they did hire the ex Disney employees to work for their company the Disney employees would have to be the key interface between the offshore teams and the business. Given that the Disney employees are pissed of enough to sue Disney would YOU as a vendor company hire them in such critical positions? The potential for sabotage is too much. Once your company decides to outsource a function your job is gone - doesnt matter if the outsourced company is IBM with all the contractors onsite or Infosys with half of them offshore.
Not if a job requirement was specified as being able to speak in Telugu. Boom your discrimination lawsuit has as much chance of guys filing a discrimination lawsuit against stripclubs hiring girls only
Its even worse. Its age discrimination. Say I am a 35-40 year old. I join Amex. I have kids and I have already gone through the hell taht is infancy and toddlerhood. My kids are now in school and I pay for after school day care so that I can work. Now I have to pick up the slack for 20 year olds who go off for 6 months ?
Not every job is pleasant to do or not all parts of even a generally pleasant job. There are jobs which have only pleasant parts - they are called hobbies and you dont get paid to do them. Money needs to be the motivator to do the unpleasant parts of a job and all real jobs have unpleasant parts. Hence if you have someone for whom money is not a motivator at all(note I said a motivator not the only motivator) then it is difficult to plan around the person being around when unpleasant stuff comes up.
Oh people with no legal records of their existence are very committed to the job. As they say in Hamilton , if you want it done right get an immigrant to do it.
I wonder how many millionaire introverts spend their days posting on Slashdot
I would like to know where these people were doing their research. In the Silicon Valley 100K is a bare survival salary if you are supporting a family.
This is kind of the reason we dont like hiring people with family money. They have no commitment to the job. We need to be able to plan on the person being around to do their job when the going gets tough.
26.5% of salary as rent and you are complaining? Try living in the Bay area. Here is a sample Budget
$125000 a year for a mid level person with a family.
=$10500 a month Gross
=$9500 a month after Social security and Medicare
=$8800 a month after federal taxes
=$8000 a month after California taxes and SDi
=$7000 a month after Health Insurance premiums for a family of 4
=$6000 a month after 401K (retirement contribution as there are no pensions)
=$6000 a month take home
=$3000 a month after rent (Rent for a crappy 2 Bedroom apt is $3000 and can go all the way upto $6000 in silicon valley)
=$2500 a month after utilities (no the 3000 a month does not include utilities or renters insurance)
=$2000 a month after Car payments,Insurance and Gas
Now family of 4 eating 3 times a day for 30 days a month = 360 meals. Assuming a $5 per person/meal =$1800
=$200 a month after food
With that $200 you have to buy school supplies, car repairs, any other emergency.
Pretty much the only entertainment you can afford is TV and a little eating out once in a while.
No savings for childrens college
No savings for replacing car when it breaks down so next car will also have to be on loan
No savings for saving a downpayment to actually buy a house
No savings for if you lose your job. Plus if you are working on a visa you wont get unemployment even though you pay into Social Security.
No scope for signing up children to extra classes so if your public school is messing up they are screwed as you cant pay for college. Their only hope is scholarships
No scope for getting a divorce if your marriage is not working out as you cannot afford to pay alimony, child support and rent on 2 places.
Do note 50% of take home goes to rent and another 10% to utilities so the basic cost of keeping a roof over your head is 60% of take home.
Nativists will never agree. 90-95% of the people in the developing world would be able to meet those restrictions. People in the US have no idea how good life here is. People from developing countries will very happily work here and pay taxes and most countries don't even have welfare so these people are not used to living on welfare unlike US citizens.
Though I do agree that students on visas should be allowed to work off campus. Working your way through college is the quintessential American dream.
There are many ways to be illegal - you may be in the country legally but work illegally. Tourists on B1 as well as Students on F1 are entitled to get licenses and drive cars. Many students moonlight as cab drivers. Similarly refugees awaiting work permits moonlight as cab driver. Its one of the few jobs you can do without a US based credential as long as you know how to drive.
The Uber business model only works for newly laid off workers who have a nice car with car payments to make. Its not meant to be a fulltime job. The entire gig economy including iOS apps only took off as in 2008 a lot of people lost their jobs but they still had cars, computers and loads of time on their hand. As we closer to full employment people who have a choice have moved away from gigs. Taxi companies are built upon the exploitation of illegal immigrant drivers. Uber as a high visibility company cannot compete with Taxi companies as it cant hire illegal immigrants and pay them sweat wages under the table. At the same time driving a cab will not support a minimum wage so the best thing for Uber would be to go back to being a gig company. Put a hard cap of 10 hours a week on driving for a driver - that will remove the entire pool of drivers expecting to make a living from Uber, stop promoting Uber driving as a full time job and stop giving leases to drivers to buy cars to drive for Uber. Stop trying to grow for growth's sake. Stay at the size of a gig economy company like a temp agency. They have some good software - license it to taxi companies and let them use it for managing their own fleets in a mutli-tenant kind of model.
Its even worse. Out here in Cupertino the Schools have a program where every kid has to have an iPad as homework will be assigned through an iPad. No choice or option for using another platform. The first year Apple donated the iPads .Once the teachers got used to using it now its the parents can buy their own, buy one from the school at a discounted price or if you are really really cant afford an ipad the School will lend out last years iPads. Guess how many parents told their kids no you cant have the shiny new one like all your classmates and should use the older school issued one.
Apple donated for one year and now has a yearly revenue stream. You dont even have to wait till they grow up
Even if wind doesnt kill birds its still an Eyesore.
As for CNG, CNG or methane can be got from Biogass plants - Cowshit and farm waste fermented anaerobically. it doesnt have to be mined out of the ground so its not causing additional damage. Also we are far from getting off Oil (especially for transport gas is a lot safer than huge batteries which can explode) and as long as Oil is extracted Gas is going to be there.
Eventually we will move to Nuclear Fusion but till that comes around for cities with a grid the best power is Nuclear fission for base load and Gas Turbine plants for peak load. Solar and Wind can be used in Rural areas off the grid where it is not economic to bring the grid. Though in such areas you could use Biogas based Gas Turbines/generators.
Hydro should only be used when a dam is being built for flood control or irrigation and Hydro can be built without additional flooding. The damage from flooding is a lot worse than from fossil fuels.
We should not abandon our coal reserves. Coal can be changed into Gasoline using Fischer Tropp process and gasoline is still the best fuel for cars. Infact when we have fusion plants we will probably be using fusion plants to generate synthetic gasoline from CO2 and Water. The fad with battery operated cars is not going to last long. Samsung Note 7 showed us a phone battery can explode so definitely car batteries can too.
The problem with Solar is not that you cant make a panel which pays back for itself. The problem is pollution. The manufacturing of a Solar Panel creates a lot of pollution including heavy metals which when they get into the water supply cause cancer. They are also a hazard during a house fire. Plus the battery backup needed for Solar causes more pollution both at manufacture as well as disposal time. All of these societal costs are not charged to the Solar manufacturer or consumer and are paid for by Society. This is not sustainable if Solar becomes more than a fraction of installed power base. At that point Solar consumers would have to be charged the real cost of manufacturing including environmental cleanups and you would find its more expensive that fossil or nuclear. Similar problem with WInd of killing birds, hydro of drowning forests. Probably the least environmental impact is CNG. All it emits is CO2 and Water. Both are Plant Food
Lets say I as an individual indulged in the same behaviour these companies indulge in. Put so much of income into 401K that I could not pay the rent so had to borrow money to pay the rent. There would be an expectation of paying the tax when I take the money out of 401K. But what if I lobbied for a Tax Amnesty to take money out of 401K without paying taxes and till the time that Amnesty got passed kept borrowing money
If I indulged in this behaviour would you call the Personal Tax system too high and needing reform or would you say I am delusional?
Here in San Francisco Public Transport Drivers are some of the most overpaid people. They get better pay than Software Engineers with 4 years of college and have fantastic pension schemes. I was talking to one of the drivers of our corporate Shuttle. he drove for VTA for 20 years and now has a pension for life. He can live on the pension but he is bored so he drives for our company's corporate shuttle. What he made as a driver was way more than what Software engineers make in the first 5 years of their career
This is a benefit which would help Native born more than Immigrants as Immigrant grandparents are probably overseas.
Its no more BS than DOJ forcing Microsoft to uncouple IE from Windows. Google and Apple just give bigger bribes to Congress than Microsoft. Google has an entire internal Department to lobby Congress. The amount of lobbying is so high that they had to develop an app to keep track of all the dollars going to all the Congressmen and all the causes. It was a very interesting contract to work on for all concerned. Really eye opening on how much Silicon Valley spends to make sure what happened to Microsoft doesn't happen to them.
Some people like buying BMWs. Some like buying Green Power. Its a free market though BMWs can only be sold as govt pays subsidies to create roads on which going over 50 miles an hour is safe.
One word. Storage. Yes it can be 100% renewable. It just needs investment in storage to smooth the power peaks and troughs. Right now as Fossil plants are already built its cheaper to use them for base load instead of putting in storage for peak load. However as these plants get decommisioned they will be replaced with more green plants and more storage till we reach a point where we are fully renewable with storage.
However it does help in getting more investments into Green Power as the electricity companies are able to sell it at a premium. Its like a Ford and a BMW. The difference in specs does not really justify the difference in price. Electricity is electricity and transportation is transportation but if someone is willing to pay a premium you can use the extra money to build in features which are not necessary but nice to have like renewability.