Every time there is a bit of news about H1Bs or immigration on tech sites, most Americans display their usual xenophobia and blame immigrants for the lack of jobs in the US.
At the same time, every single of them fails to realize that there isn't even a need for foreigners to be in America to take away their jobs.
There are plenty of countries with great universities, which are either free or where students don't have to pay with their life for tuition. India is one of the most extreme examples, but places like eastern Europe or South America are also full of software factories that work for American companies and clients.
The quantity over quality argument is also moot, foreigners not only keep improving but their low cost allows them to make mistakes while still being more affordable than Americans.
So, for the Americans here, the question you should be asking yourself, next time you hear news about H1B and immigration is not whether or not you want your job taken by someone else, but if you would rather to have that people live, contribute and keep most the industry in your country, or not.
That is absolute bullshit, your country does enormous amounts of outsourcing, H1Bs are not even a single digit percent of the American jobs lost to outsourcing.
It is *very* clear that there aren't enough American workers to supply demand, which is why they quickly become too expensive.
H1B solves this for companies, because talented foreign workers will do their jobs for less money, but in the end that only helps a little and the rest goes to outsourcing.
You should look at it from the other side, It's not a matter of not finding americans to fill their jobs, it's a matter that Americans easily become too costly to fill the jobs, and a cheaper alternative is requiered for business to happen.
I have friends who worked on H1Bs at plenty of Silicon Valley companies, where a lot of the workforce were not Americans. Their salaries were not that of slave workforce at all, but still allowed the companies to reduce cost a lot in their intial stages, then they grew and hired more Americans.
Americans have to understand that they are easily becoming too costly, with unheard of salaries anywhere else in the world, you are choking your own business, which would rather outsource or hire H1Bs than hiring you.
Reality is that there is plenty of skilled people and companies everywhere around the world, and that nothing prevents investors, companies and corporations in the US to hire them instead of Americans companies, nothing prevents them to travel to the US looking for jobs (then then go back to their country with a juicy contract), and nothing prevents the money leaving the US banks to foreign banks.
I've been to plenty of business conventions in the US and most business developers were foreigners. Yes, they don't even need to be in America to steal your jobs.
So, do you want money and jobs flying away from your country, or do you want talented people settling in America, where the standard of living is higher, and help retain the jobs there?.
I can understand some people being pissed because they can be replaced by foreigners who are equally talented who don't pretend to earn as much, but the net result is that more talented people allows more business to happen in the US, and more business in the US equals to more American jobs in the long run.
This is why your government is pushing for this, so stop being paranoid.
For those of us who worked with Kinect, we know very well all of it's limitations. It's a promising technology but it's still very green and far from what it is advertised as. It pretty much only works if you are looking to the camera and waving your hands and legs. Any attempt to turn sideways or even put your hands together completely confuses the heck out of it (check their technology demo videos, such scenarios are all purposely avoided). There's even open source implementations of the pose recognition that work better (though they need calibration).
By making it XB1 only hackers will not be able to see how much it really improved (likely not much judging by their videos). So far from what I can tell, only the APIs improved so it's easier to get data from it (full matrices, motion vectors and strain, which you could easily compute yourself anyway), and some stuff was added to detect heart and blood rate (likely based on this MIT stuff. That's pretty much it.
I'm all for open drivers like Noveau or the efforts by Intel and AMD, they are fantastic and very much needed. It almost makes me glad that GLES 2.0 is pretty much almost there.
But for those of us who do 3D programming, 3D modelling or just play games on steam that requiere 3D, the only option is the binary ones. If Ubuntu (because of MIR) takes away support for them, I'll be taking Ubuntu away from my computer.
WebGL is basically almost the same as OpenGL ES 2.0, which is missing on Windows Phone, Windows RT and Windows 8 modern.
Nowadays most mobile apps use this API for 3D, which makes porting to their platform a big hassle (Only D3D in 9_3 profile is supported, which is even more limited than GL ES 2.0).
Im sure that this is done with a wrapper over their D3D driver, so I hope they make it available for the C++ APIs.
He likely has information to negotiate help for a lot of countries, just leak something secretly and they will aid you to reach your destination. The real question is why didnt he go to such countries first.
Simple answer, I fully understand git and tried to use mercurial and git in enterprise and failed (been requested to move back to SVN and learned my lesson):
-commit to local has more downsides than upsides, it's more difficult to understand for newcomers, and non tech people that might also be using the repository. It's also not of much use in enterprise because you work with tight release cycles
-merging is more powerful in git, but again, those that don't fully understand it are prone to make a lot of mistakes, which resulted in more man hours to fix.
-SVN can do many things GIT can't, you probably didn't read my original post carefully, but the ability to commit single files or work in subdirectories is a win for when you have a team working together in the same room. It's also perfect for when you want to give someone from the outside access to the repo and only restrict it to a part of the project, yet everything on the server allows you to tag versions precisely. You could try to do this with multiple repositories in GIT, but it gets much more difficult to create branches for single revisions.
-SVN is just better for managing huge repositories that are mostly BLOBs (web, videogames or enterprise multimedia software in my experience) and uses much less space on disk, server and bandwidth.
It's as simple as that, for typical software factory where everyone works in the same building, SVN is simpler to use, mantain and goes straight to the point. GIT is just not meant for it even if you can simulate that environment, so it's not positive in my opinion to consider GIT a jack of all trades, because it's only really good for distributed.
For applications, it never wasn't much of a problem.
However for games, the biggest problems I faced were the different configurations of the CPU (some included NEON and some didn't, which improves performance enormously), and the GPU ( OpenGL ES implementations were buggy depending on drivers, different texture compression schemes, etc).
Nowadays, everything is coming out with NEON and future phones are starting to support OpenGL ES 3.0, which is much more standarized (that will take some years to settle though). However, it's mainly supporting the 4 main architectures properly by checking the extensions: Tegra, Adreno, Mali and PowerVR. There are more (like the Rockchip ones, but those usually come with crappy hardware), but supporting those means that your app or game will run pretty much anywhere. The challenge is probably dealing with different screen resolutions and aspect ratios, which wasn't a problem on iOS until recently (iPhone 5).
It's more like there is a deep hatred against Subversion. I have no idea where does it come from, but if you are old enough you'll remember that there's been a long list of revision control systems that become trendy, with fanboys claiming they were going to "destroy svn".
Arch was first, then Mercurial and now Git. The main difference is that Git became much more popular thanks to the excellent Github, but for enterprise and large projects where a centralized repo works better, SVN or Perforce are still a better solution than any of the distributed ones
Actually... git fits the workflow better than svn. I have to manage a project that spans multiple institutions and two continents. Instead of forcing everyone to use VPN while they develop, they only need to use VPN to push to the official repository.
Your argument is "Actually, git is better than svn because [insert completely uncommon case that is not the norm]", you can't make a point with an exception to the norm. Most corporate or enterprise scenarios are not like that.
What? I don't think you understand how git works.
No, I don't think you understand how companies work. The most common workflow is update when you arrive and commit when you leave and eventually fix a file and commit it while you are working with something else. Both are difficult to handle with GIT because it involves sending over the whole thing and the complete inability to do the second scenario (send an unrelated simple fix while the rest of the project may not even compile or work).
My anecdotal evidence show that most of my projects left SVN and went with GIT due to its distributive nature.
Your anecdotal evidence, from what you mention, is far from the norm. You said yourself twice it's distributed projects while by far most companies don't do that. Of course GIT is better for that, but it's ignorant to assume that it will work in every other company in the work better than SVN because of that.
While GIT expresses the distributed development nature of open source projects much better nowadays, SVN fits the workflow of enterprise projects much better:
-SVN has much better visual tools and is simpler to operate
-SVN has a simpler merge policies which are friendlier when there isn't a central person pulling the changes.
-SVN is very friendly for projects with a lot of binary objects (ie videogames)
-SVN allows different people to work on different directories individually, GIT doesn't.
-SVN has fine grained permissions, access and authentication controls, very useful when parts of your project (ie, APIs) are under NDA or you don't want them to leak.
They are different systems with different scenarios in mind, comparing them or claiming that GIT is killing SVN is just ignorance.
Most transgendered people are similar to the most extreme religious fanatics. They have a belief that they were born in the wrong body, just like christian people believes in Jesus.
However, they are convinced that everyone else should believe the same thing as they do and get really angry when someone doesn't
Well, tough luck, I respect them the same way as I respect all religions, but I am too in my right to not believe that. I just can't understand how someone can believe they were born the opposite sex, when they have no way to know what being the opposite sex is like, and as much can imagine it, just as I can imagine myself being rich or being a ninja.
They try to become accepted by society using the analogy of gay people or black people being accepted too, but your skin color or sexual preference is a fact, not a belief. It's not the same!
So, yeah, I'm all for them doing whatever they want, believing what they want, doing surgery, be called as female, not be made fun of, etc, but I'm against them pretending me to accept their belief.
The most CPU intensive tasks in videogames are usually Rendering, Physics and AI. They work either in realtime or precomputed to some degree.
There is rarely a situation where you want to offload computation to something that takes a while (network latency), save for maybe pathfinding or geometry regeneration but is this more like a special case and has limited uses.
Can anyone really think of a general case optimization where this can be useful for most games?
The country has public retirement funds. You get paid by the government when you retire depending on how much taxes you paid while you worked.
It's still not very much and you still need help by your familiy anyway.
Nintendo is not Sega. It has plenty of hit first party titles and franchises and knows how to execute them well, Wii U is only selling poorly because such titles have not been released, or even announced, yet. A few years ago, Nintendo adopted a really bizarre politic of not announcing their own games until a short time before they are ready to launch, so the landscape of the Wii U is completely empty.
The situation will likely change after E3 (or not).
Yay for protectionist, isolationist, centrally-managed, paternalistic government-crawling-up-your-pant-legs regulatory over-reach! So stimulating to the economy.
There really were big efforts to move the country to a more open economy, almost 25 years of effort that resulted in chaos and riots.
In other countries, such as Chile, Uruguay or Ecuador, this process was successful, but Argentina failed to shrink the government role enough to not contract more and more foreign debt. This is the same shitty situation that is now happening in Spain and Greece. If you shrink the role of the government, the government has less income, but if you have a huge foreign debt, the government needs more income to pay it so it has to raise taxes and that hurts the economy a lot.
Argentina instead closed the economy, enlarged the government role (and the income) and is now paying it's foreign debt religiously. A horrible regression but not much of a choice.
> Economical stability ? what ?????? where?? in Argentina? there's 25-30% inflation,
Inflation is intended and on purpose.
> Argentina has no US dollars to import energy and other services and so they are taking idiotic measures to obtain those US dollars
That was indeed stupid, and the government should have acted before. But then again, do you realize it's the *government* importing the energy? That is not a common scenario, it's usually just the private sector in charge of that.
> Also, you are basically saying that Argentinian people are stupid and cannot live in an open economy? are you crazy?
Were you alive in the 90s? Argentinians clearly cannot live in an open economy.
> they are now asking people with illegally obtained US dollars to give those US dollars to the government, and in exchange the government will forgive and forget all illegal actions performed to obtain that money... stability? please!
I'm really starting to wonder how old are you. Safe Boxes in banks are packed full of US dollars because, after 2001 (foreign banks decided to flee the country and keep the USD savings of their clients), people does not trust the system. It's not really illegal money, just money out of the system.
> being forced to do illegal activities to be an entrepreneur basically means you cannot be one.
Or, that the government does not really care about some illegal activities.
I live over there. Here's what's going on, I'll try to explain it because even fellow Argentinians don't really understand:
Argentina is a country that is very culturally different to the rest of Latin America, and even the world and likely the right place to look at when you want to see the results of a government being more involved instead of less. By the time of the second world war, Peron did a deep change to the country, created public health, public education (made public university free), public retirement funds, changed labor laws to highly benefit the employees (employeers must pay them many sort of benefits and can't fire them without paying compensation), etc.
Peron tried to made it clear that he wasn't going towards fascism/socialism/communism, but his model was more of creating a capitalism with more social equity through the intervention of the government. Most of the "upper class" did naturally not like this and tried to fight this by financing coup d'etats by the military (It's a little more complex than, but that goes beyond what i'm trying to explain and there's plenty of material to read about dictatorships in Latin America).
My point is that Argentinians are sort of "spoiled" and that has even been transmitted from generation to generation. There is this strange belief that everything that happens is the fault of the government, and that the government should take care of it.
For example, beyond public health, retirement, education, etc. If you are homeless, the government will build you a house. If you are poor and your children can't study, the government will give you money to send them to school. If you are unemployed, you just receive money. Transport is dirt cheap because it's subsidized too, some products are price-fixed to be made more accessible and now the government is even making a line of clothes that is more cheaper and accessible.
The government spends a fortune in social help and taxes are high as the result. But it goes beyond that. The economic model is also designed to ensure that unemployment is really low. They do this by forcing people to spend their money and not keep it, so there is constant inflation and purchasing foreign currency is forbidden. By spending the earned money constantly, the local economy is always very active, restaurants are packed full, and everyone is using credits to buy stuff.
The right wing media opposition to the government is strong and focuses on mainly on corruption and insecurity, to make people feel they are being constantly robbed and freak them out. However, people is employed and is earning decently nowadays so this has a limited effect, which gives place to the saying ("roban pero hacen", translated to "they might steal but they still do for the country") Even the media themselves know they can't mention anything related to a right wing point of view (less state intervention) or people will label them as traitors.
So the big question is if economical stability by this means are worthy. Buenos Aires is a production powerhouse and generates a lot of income, but there is a large part of the population that would not be able to be sustained in a more open economy. As a result, the country is very closed do the rest of the world economy. The rest of the world isn't very healthy economically either.
What's going on with Google is really nothing new. It's extremely hard for Argentinians to be entrepreneurs in this context, so we just open offshore companies in Panama, Delaware or other places and get paid there (otherwise we can't get get paid in us dollars or euros), then transfer our money to the country either illegally (black market price is higher), or legally (needed if you run a company and need to pay your employees). It's not impossible, just harder.
Slashdot Mirror
Every time there is a bit of news about H1Bs or immigration on tech sites, most Americans display their usual xenophobia and blame immigrants for the lack of jobs in the US.
At the same time, every single of them fails to realize that there isn't even a need for foreigners to be in America to take away their jobs.
There are plenty of countries with great universities, which are either free or where students don't have to pay with their life for tuition. India is one of the most extreme examples, but places like eastern Europe or South America are also full of software factories that work for American companies and clients.
The quantity over quality argument is also moot, foreigners not only keep improving but their low cost allows them to make mistakes while still being more affordable than Americans.
So, for the Americans here, the question you should be asking yourself, next time you hear news about H1B and immigration is not whether or not you want your job taken by someone else, but if you would rather to have that people live, contribute and keep most the industry in your country, or not.
answer: read my post again.
That is absolute bullshit, your country does enormous amounts of outsourcing, H1Bs are not even a single digit percent of the American jobs lost to outsourcing.
It is *very* clear that there aren't enough American workers to supply demand, which is why they quickly become too expensive.
H1B solves this for companies, because talented foreign workers will do their jobs for less money, but in the end that only helps a little and the rest goes to outsourcing.
You should look at it from the other side, It's not a matter of not finding americans to fill their jobs, it's a matter that Americans easily become too costly to fill the jobs, and a cheaper alternative is requiered for business to happen.
I have friends who worked on H1Bs at plenty of Silicon Valley companies, where a lot of the workforce were not Americans. Their salaries were not that of slave workforce at all, but still allowed the companies to reduce cost a lot in their intial stages, then they grew and hired more Americans.
Americans have to understand that they are easily becoming too costly, with unheard of salaries anywhere else in the world, you are choking your own business, which would rather outsource or hire H1Bs than hiring you.
Reality is that there is plenty of skilled people and companies everywhere around the world, and that nothing prevents investors, companies and corporations in the US to hire them instead of Americans companies, nothing prevents them to travel to the US looking for jobs (then then go back to their country with a juicy contract), and nothing prevents the money leaving the US banks to foreign banks.
I've been to plenty of business conventions in the US and most business developers were foreigners. Yes, they don't even need to be in America to steal your jobs.
So, do you want money and jobs flying away from your country, or do you want talented people settling in America, where the standard of living is higher, and help retain the jobs there?.
I can understand some people being pissed because they can be replaced by foreigners who are equally talented who don't pretend to earn as much, but the net result is that more talented people allows more business to happen in the US, and more business in the US equals to more American jobs in the long run.
This is why your government is pushing for this, so stop being paranoid.
For those of us who worked with Kinect, we know very well all of it's limitations. It's a promising technology but it's still very green and far from what it is advertised as. It pretty much only works if you are looking to the camera and waving your hands and legs. Any attempt to turn sideways or even put your hands together completely confuses the heck out of it (check their technology demo videos, such scenarios are all purposely avoided).
There's even open source implementations of the pose recognition that work better (though they need calibration).
By making it XB1 only hackers will not be able to see how much it really improved (likely not much judging by their videos). So far from what I can tell, only the APIs improved so it's easier to get data from it (full matrices, motion vectors and strain, which you could easily compute yourself anyway), and some stuff was added to detect heart and blood rate (likely based on this MIT stuff. That's pretty much it.
I'm all for open drivers like Noveau or the efforts by Intel and AMD, they are fantastic and very much needed. It almost makes me glad that GLES 2.0 is pretty much almost there.
But for those of us who do 3D programming, 3D modelling or just play games on steam that requiere 3D, the only option is the binary ones. If Ubuntu (because of MIR) takes away support for them, I'll be taking Ubuntu away from my computer.
It will be hacked anyway and that will teach them.
WebGL is basically almost the same as OpenGL ES 2.0, which is missing on Windows Phone, Windows RT and Windows 8 modern.
Nowadays most mobile apps use this API for 3D, which makes porting to their platform a big hassle (Only D3D in 9_3 profile is supported, which is even more limited than GL ES 2.0).
Im sure that this is done with a wrapper over their D3D driver, so I hope they make it available for the C++ APIs.
He likely has information to negotiate help for a lot of countries, just leak something secretly and they will aid you to reach your destination. The real question is why didnt he go to such countries first.
Simple answer, I fully understand git and tried to use mercurial and git in enterprise and failed (been requested to move back to SVN and learned my lesson):
-commit to local has more downsides than upsides, it's more difficult to understand for newcomers, and non tech people that might also be using the repository. It's also not of much use in enterprise because you work with tight release cycles
-merging is more powerful in git, but again, those that don't fully understand it are prone to make a lot of mistakes, which resulted in more man hours to fix.
-SVN can do many things GIT can't, you probably didn't read my original post carefully, but the ability to commit single files or work in subdirectories is a win for when you have a team working together in the same room. It's also perfect for when you want to give someone from the outside access to the repo and only restrict it to a part of the project, yet everything on the server allows you to tag versions precisely. You could try to do this with multiple repositories in GIT, but it gets much more difficult to create branches for single revisions.
-SVN is just better for managing huge repositories that are mostly BLOBs (web, videogames or enterprise multimedia software in my experience) and uses much less space on disk, server and bandwidth.
It's as simple as that, for typical software factory where everyone works in the same building, SVN is simpler to use, mantain and goes straight to the point. GIT is just not meant for it even if you can simulate that environment, so it's not positive in my opinion to consider GIT a jack of all trades, because it's only really good for distributed.
For applications, it never wasn't much of a problem.
However for games, the biggest problems I faced were the different configurations of the CPU (some included NEON and some didn't, which improves performance enormously), and the GPU ( OpenGL ES implementations were buggy depending on drivers, different texture compression schemes, etc).
Nowadays, everything is coming out with NEON and future phones are starting to support OpenGL ES 3.0, which is much more standarized (that will take some years to settle though). However, it's mainly supporting the 4 main architectures properly by checking the extensions: Tegra, Adreno, Mali and PowerVR. There are more (like the Rockchip ones, but those usually come with crappy hardware), but supporting those means that your app or game will run pretty much anywhere.
The challenge is probably dealing with different screen resolutions and aspect ratios, which wasn't a problem on iOS until recently (iPhone 5).
I remember I couldn't make an APK package properly without JDK jarsigner from Java 6 (Java 7 one would not work).
It's more like there is a deep hatred against Subversion. I have no idea where does it come from, but if you are old enough you'll remember that there's been a long list of revision control systems that become trendy, with fanboys claiming they were going to "destroy svn".
Arch was first, then Mercurial and now Git. The main difference is that Git became much more popular thanks to the excellent Github, but for enterprise and large projects where a centralized repo works better, SVN or Perforce are still a better solution than any of the distributed ones
Actually... git fits the workflow better than svn. I have to manage a project that spans multiple institutions and two continents. Instead of forcing everyone to use VPN while they develop, they only need to use VPN to push to the official repository.
Your argument is "Actually, git is better than svn because [insert completely uncommon case that is not the norm]", you can't make a point with an exception to the norm. Most corporate or enterprise scenarios are not like that.
What? I don't think you understand how git works.
No, I don't think you understand how companies work. The most common workflow is update when you arrive and commit when you leave and eventually fix a file and commit it while you are working with something else. Both are difficult to handle with GIT because it involves sending over the whole thing and the complete inability to do the second scenario (send an unrelated simple fix while the rest of the project may not even compile or work).
My anecdotal evidence show that most of my projects left SVN and went with GIT due to its distributive nature.
Your anecdotal evidence, from what you mention, is far from the norm. You said yourself twice it's distributed projects while by far most companies don't do that. Of course GIT is better for that, but it's ignorant to assume that it will work in every other company in the work better than SVN because of that.
While GIT expresses the distributed development nature of open source projects much better nowadays, SVN fits the workflow of enterprise projects much better:
-SVN has much better visual tools and is simpler to operate
-SVN has a simpler merge policies which are friendlier when there isn't a central person pulling the changes.
-SVN is very friendly for projects with a lot of binary objects (ie videogames)
-SVN allows different people to work on different directories individually, GIT doesn't.
-SVN has fine grained permissions, access and authentication controls, very useful when parts of your project (ie, APIs) are under NDA or you don't want them to leak.
They are different systems with different scenarios in mind, comparing them or claiming that GIT is killing SVN is just ignorance.
How can you censor the element that helped the most to make the internet what it is today?
Most transgendered people are similar to the most extreme religious fanatics. They have a belief that they were born in the wrong body, just like christian people believes in Jesus.
However, they are convinced that everyone else should believe the same thing as they do and get really angry when someone doesn't
Well, tough luck, I respect them the same way as I respect all religions, but I am too in my right to not believe that. I just can't understand how someone can believe they were born the opposite sex, when they have no way to know what being the opposite sex is like, and as much can imagine it, just as I can imagine myself being rich or being a ninja.
They try to become accepted by society using the analogy of gay people or black people being accepted too, but your skin color or sexual preference is a fact, not a belief. It's not the same!
So, yeah, I'm all for them doing whatever they want, believing what they want, doing surgery, be called as female, not be made fun of, etc, but I'm against them pretending me to accept their belief.
The most CPU intensive tasks in videogames are usually Rendering, Physics and AI. They work either in realtime or precomputed to some degree.
There is rarely a situation where you want to offload computation to something that takes a while (network latency), save for maybe pathfinding or geometry regeneration but is this more like a special case and has limited uses.
Can anyone really think of a general case optimization where this can be useful for most games?
The country has public retirement funds. You get paid by the government when you retire depending on how much taxes you paid while you worked.
It's still not very much and you still need help by your familiy anyway.
Nintendo is not Sega. It has plenty of hit first party titles and franchises and knows how to execute them well, Wii U is only selling poorly because such titles have not been released, or even announced, yet.
A few years ago, Nintendo adopted a really bizarre politic of not announcing their own games until a short time before they are ready to launch, so the landscape of the Wii U is completely empty.
The situation will likely change after E3 (or not).
Yay for protectionist, isolationist, centrally-managed, paternalistic government-crawling-up-your-pant-legs regulatory over-reach! So stimulating to the economy.
There really were big efforts to move the country to a more open economy, almost 25 years of effort that resulted in chaos and riots.
In other countries, such as Chile, Uruguay or Ecuador, this process was successful, but Argentina failed to shrink the government role enough to not contract more and more foreign debt. This is the same shitty situation that is now happening in Spain and Greece. If you shrink the role of the government, the government has less income, but if you have a huge foreign debt, the government needs more income to pay it so it has to raise taxes and that hurts the economy a lot.
Argentina instead closed the economy, enlarged the government role (and the income) and is now paying it's foreign debt religiously. A horrible regression but not much of a choice.
It's like a wonderland without the candy
> Economical stability ? what ?????? where?? in Argentina? there's 25-30% inflation,
Inflation is intended and on purpose.
> Argentina has no US dollars to import energy and other services and so they are taking idiotic measures to obtain those US dollars
That was indeed stupid, and the government should have acted before. But then again, do you realize it's the *government* importing the energy? That is not a common scenario, it's usually just the private sector in charge of that.
> Also, you are basically saying that Argentinian people are stupid and cannot live in an open economy? are you crazy?
Were you alive in the 90s? Argentinians clearly cannot live in an open economy.
> they are now asking people with illegally obtained US dollars to give those US dollars to the government, and in exchange the government will forgive and forget all illegal actions performed to obtain that money... stability? please!
I'm really starting to wonder how old are you. Safe Boxes in banks are packed full of US dollars because, after 2001 (foreign banks decided to flee the country and keep the USD savings of their clients), people does not trust the system. It's not really illegal money, just money out of the system.
> being forced to do illegal activities to be an entrepreneur basically means you cannot be one.
Or, that the government does not really care about some illegal activities.
I live over there. Here's what's going on, I'll try to explain it because even fellow Argentinians don't really understand:
Argentina is a country that is very culturally different to the rest of Latin America, and even the world and likely the right place to look at when you want to see the results of a government being more involved instead of less. By the time of the second world war, Peron did a deep change to the country, created public health, public education (made public university free), public retirement funds, changed labor laws to highly benefit the employees (employeers must pay them many sort of benefits and can't fire them without paying compensation), etc.
Peron tried to made it clear that he wasn't going towards fascism/socialism/communism, but his model was more of creating a capitalism with more social equity through the intervention of the government. Most of the "upper class" did naturally not like this and tried to fight this by financing coup d'etats by the military (It's a little more complex than, but that goes beyond what i'm trying to explain and there's plenty of material to read about dictatorships in Latin America).
My point is that Argentinians are sort of "spoiled" and that has even been transmitted from generation to generation. There is this strange belief that everything that happens is the fault of the government, and that the government should take care of it.
For example, beyond public health, retirement, education, etc. If you are homeless, the government will build you a house. If you are poor and your children can't study, the government will give you money to send them to school. If you are unemployed, you just receive money. Transport is dirt cheap because it's subsidized too, some products are price-fixed to be made more accessible and now the government is even making a line of clothes that is more cheaper and accessible.
The government spends a fortune in social help and taxes are high as the result. But it goes beyond that. The economic model is also designed to ensure that unemployment is really low. They do this by forcing people to spend their money and not keep it, so there is constant inflation and purchasing foreign currency is forbidden. By spending the earned money constantly, the local economy is always very active, restaurants are packed full, and everyone is using credits to buy stuff.
The right wing media opposition to the government is strong and focuses on mainly on corruption and insecurity, to make people feel they are being constantly robbed and freak them out. However, people is employed and is earning decently nowadays so this has a limited effect, which gives place to the saying ("roban pero hacen", translated to "they might steal but they still do for the country") Even the media themselves know they can't mention anything related to a right wing point of view (less state intervention) or people will label them as traitors.
So the big question is if economical stability by this means are worthy. Buenos Aires is a production powerhouse and generates a lot of income, but there is a large part of the population that would not be able to be sustained in a more open economy. As a result, the country is very closed do the rest of the world economy. The rest of the world isn't very healthy economically either.
What's going on with Google is really nothing new. It's extremely hard for Argentinians to be entrepreneurs in this context, so we just open offshore companies in Panama, Delaware or other places and get paid there (otherwise we can't get get paid in us dollars or euros), then transfer our money to the country either illegally (black market price is higher), or legally (needed if you run a company and need to pay your employees). It's not impossible, just harder.