All these temporary visas come with a mountain of restrictions which end up giving a ridiculous amount of power to the employers and nothing to the employees. They should be scrapped for flat out green cards, not a temporary visa then to a green card 10-15 years down the road for Indians. There shouldn't be a second class, temporary worker thing at all.
However, all the newspaper want to do is make Indian IT workers as a cheap villain, robbing American jobs and sometimes taking them to India.
People really think implementing a newer version of the "Asian/Indian exclusion act" is going to solve the problem. "If we restrict the Indians from coming here, my job will be safe" mentality.
We are fighting the powerful forces of economics here. India has a massive surplus of highly trained and educated work force. That's their export. H1B is a tiny tiny little window.
Those accounting jobs at ToysRUs were going to India no matter what, H1B was just used as a quick way for the new workers to get up to speed. If you stop the Indians from coming here, the companies can simply ask the workers to go to India to train their replacements to get their severance packages.
All the people who complain that it is the 1% getting all the benefits of workers while the middle class hollows out - guess why that is. Convoluted and restrictive government regulation. Only the 1% can circumnavigate the complex legal maze to get the benefits of cheap labor in India while a new startup or a small business will struggle to utilize it.
Make the whole thing simple and not so exploitative. The middle class will blossom because lots of startups and small businesses will benefit from cheap Indian labor.
Maybe it was Sears or it was some other chain store. They decided to measure the value of the mechanics by the dollar value of the business they brought to the company.
All that ended up doing was making the mechanics cheat customers by asking them for extra repairs.
Same thing with the Detroit police department. They used homicide rate as a measure of effectiveness. The police started to classify homicides as suicides and accidents to make the metric look better.
The moral of the story is that for a lot of people, metrics are more powerful than ethics. They will cheat to get better metrics, even in times when those metrics are meaningless.
Slashdot moderation system used to measure us as a total of karma over all posts to measure the contribution to Slashdot.
Slashdot had to stop using those because of karma whores.
Even meaningless numbers are a strong motivators to cheat a system. You have to be very careful about what you do. Improving those metrics will triumph over quality and ethics.
I think the work cycle is just about done evolving. For example:
- Hunter-gatherers organized into agrarian societies
- Mechanization and industrialization led to many farm workers transitioning to factory work
- Societal pressures on education, etc. led to many factory workers transitioning to office and service work
- Offshoring of all manufacturing from first world countries shifted smart people to office work, less-than-smart people to crappy service jobs
- Offshoring of office work including IT shifted a bunch of the smart people to crappy service jobs or the "gig economy"
- Automation or offshoring of the rest of the office work will lead to....chaos? Revolution? A country of people being paid to rate cat videos on YouTube?
Whatever it leads to, there isn't any work left for most people to move to. Smart people are still relatively OK, but there are A LOT of not-smart people holding down random corporate jobs and the few factory jobs that are left. When there's nowhere to go, and society still uses money to value things, basic income is a good idea. It also formally recognizes that there are people who just can't contribute to society at the same levels as others and provides a humane existence for them.
Except that billionaires like JK Rowling were once on the dole.
Guaranteed income allows people to take risks. Instead of being stuck on a dead end job treadmill to keep the apartment or health insurance, they can do risky things that could reap huge rewards.
One of the reasons that children of successful parents are more successful is because of that safety net. Even if they fail, its not so bad. The cost of failure for a regular person would be loss of home and enormous difficulty just to make ends meet.
Plus, the whole notion of smart and not-so smart doesn't hold true. There is a "smart enough" and after that is just luck. Kind of like how basketball isn't all just the tallest people in the world. They are generally tall but after you're tall enough, extra height doesn't really matter.
Just like it happened in the auto industry, workers got used to high wages and are unwilling to consider the actual value of their contribution in a world where programming is now a commodity, so they end up replaced by cheap labor from a developing country.
This kind of thinking is why US workers are in such deep shit. There are people who actually believe that setting a price for your labor is somehow bad.
When a company sets a price on a product based on a desired level of profit, it's considered "the Free Market". But when a worker does the same thing we're told it's bad for everyone.
It's the Stockholm Syndrome, and the supply-side is holding you hostage. You think everyone's wages should be on a runaway train to the bottom of the barrel. What's funny is how many of these same people think it's just horrible that low-wage workers come across to border to pick lettuce. It just may be that programming is the new farm labor and has become another job that US workers don't want to do, at least at the price that's on the table.
Sooner or later, someone will figure out that labor comes first. It precedes capital. There is no capital without labor to make it happen. When you reverse the hierarchy, economies (and societies) suffer.
Companies can put high prices but nobody will buy them. Then, they will be forced to cut prices to sell their products.
If you give a company monopoly, then they don't have to cut prices since you have no choice but to buy from them.
Monopolies are bad for the economy. Competition is good. If you're the monopoly, competition is bad but for the overall economy, competition is good.
There is some truth to harming the economy with labor fixing prices and monopolizing labor like with unions. The US auto industry has struggled and lost its huge lead in the automotive industry partially because of this.
We got bought out by Paychex, but even that couldn't help us get any experienced people.
Pay more. If you can't get experienced people, it's because you're not paying enough.
Let me put in a metaphor.
Suppose you put an ad that you want to buy the iPhone 6 for $50. Even if you get one, it will probably be illegally acquired.
Consider another situation. You visit every store and they say they don't have an iPhone 6 and you can only get it off someone else by offering them above market price.
I don't which situation we are in or at which point between the two extremes we are in. Are employers looking for stupidly cheap workers or is the situation that the only way employers can get workers is to poach it off some other company?
As an engineer, I'd like to believe its the first. I wouldn't know since the company hides all the financials from us so I have no idea even to the ballpark of what revenue I contribute to the company against what I'm paid.
It could present a political conundrum of sorts for the Obama administration.
How naive... they will respond as they always do with almost all these petitions - with a generic form letter statement that will provide vague reassurances that they are "looking into the issue", give no concrete plan for addressing the core demands while mostly evading the question. Anybody who thinks these petitions are worth the paper they are signed on and that the White House actually pays attention to them is deluded.
However, if white house responds positively, the Democrats immediately get support from the immigrant diaspora.
With the republican being so anti-immigration, perhaps Democrats don't have to go the extra mile. Or, perhaps friendly immigration moves will capture those moderate with the strong anti-immigration vibes from the other camp.
If they reduce the number of H-1s, and keep the people here who were educated here, it seems like a reasonable solution.
There's a risk that universities would open to merely subvert the immigration process, so safeguards against that should be taken. Also, why limit it to just STEM? If we train a great philosopher, America will be improved if that philosopher chooses to stay here.
The problem is that the primary way to keep those educated here is to make them H1Bs. For most, there is no other way to stay afterwards.
Why don't we reduce the number of foreign students attending our Universities and make room for, you know, Americans? I believe that a good part of the reason that so many foreign students are admitted is the huge premium on tuition that the school collects. Foreign students pay WAY more in tuition than American students do so the schools have a vested interest in having as many foreign students as possible.
Classroom seats, like so many other things in life, is a zero sum game. For every foreign student admitted there is one American student that misses the cut. Why not take care of American students first and then, if there are any seats left, admit foreign students? Would this not address the supposed shortage of skilled STEM workers that business is always whining about?
Classroom seats are not zero sum games.
Universities can build buildings, hire teachers and can create as many classroom seats as needed.
Microsoft, since its only product is software, has to go to great lengths to protect and extend that property base. "Extend" here is Googly data mining.
Apple, on the other hand, makes money by selling you the hardware. The protection is the physical ownership of the device. You might not believe Apple when it says "we don't want your personal information", but you have to respect that they're not depending on either data or software to make the great majority of their revenue.
This may not be a popular opinion, but I trust Microsoft more than Google, Apple -way more- than Microsoft, and the NSA more than any commercial company.
Microsoft sells software, not advertising like Google. Apple's hardware and Microsoft's software are comparable. Both say similar things about privacy when Android talk comes up.
Both Apple and Microsoft want to get the advertising and data mining dollars like Google.
In the modern era, large corporations are always looking to expand and expand and expand. Both Apple and Microsoft are looking to leverage what they have to muscle into the online advertising industry. So, I think your trust is misplaced.
Toronto police are reporting that 2 unconfirmed suicides have been linked to the data breach.
so, basically corollary conjecture pertaining to sets of potential outcomes of a data breech.
Dont get me wrong, as a homosexual I'm not at all condoning the death of a person for their sexuality. I think puritanical elation is at best inappropriate as a response to the incident. But frankly Ashley Madisons catchphrase was 'lifes short, have an affair.' As a saudi national, someone is unfortunately about to find out exactly how short that life can really be. Standard issue infidelity aside there are numerous gay dating sites you could have chosen. numerous potential outlets for gay, straight, questioning, bisexual, whatever your heart desires. But selecting Ashley Madison shows a puerile approach to interpersonal relationship as well as sexual orientation in general. Homosexuality is not the same as a casual extramarital affair.
When I first came across the ad of the website (when they were in their blanket advertising phase), the slogan stuck me as clever and humorous. It never stuck me as foul or evil.
However, their main logo has a woman with a finger on her lips, evoking discretion. Perhaps people signed up with this website because it feels so hush hush and secretive, exactly what a Saudi gay man would want.
But, I don't know how they got millions of people to sign up for the website. It shows up next to foot-long penis ads so...
But you can compensate for it by making racist jokes.
Seriously though, you mean when only America had science. It is a good thing that a country with a billion people are doing scientific achievements. We should be ecstatic that China is in the game and the rate of scientific progress for humanity will increase by multiple factors. The science performed by a Chinese scientist versus an American one doesn't matter, everyone can benefit.
I am glad that your experience on the H1-B Visa program has been a trivial task for you. That is not always the case though.
At a previous company, we had an H1-B visa employee that we hired from another company and despite the fact he was sponsored by the other company and we were willing to sponsor him, he almost got deported because of the process of handing off from 1 company to another did not go smoothly.
He worked for us for 3 years, and then went to another job and again, almost ended up deported. It was a nightmare on both ends.
I also know a few H1-B visa employees at my current place of employee who have had similiar fears.
Citizen loses a job or goes to another job, nothing happens. H1-B Visa person always has the possibility of being kicked out of the country if HR screws up the sponsorship.
I am not part of the IT tech industry, but chemical manufacturing and the people I know have been electrical or chemical engineers and not working for Google or other big names like those you mention. So while ti can be smooth, you are 1 HR screw up away from losing your status and being deported.
I am glad you have worked for companies who have it down well enough that their HR has worked for you, but that is by no means the norm for smaller companies.
You're sensationalizing things. Saying almost got deported is like saying you almost died in a car crash due to a reckless driver cutting you off this morning.
Plus, deportation is involuntary removal. Without a job and a means to make money, who would sit around and wait for to be deported? They would voluntarily go back.
Plus, there is a grace period to look for a job (6 months without incurring a penalty). Additionally, you can always come back when you find a new job.
Plus, it's not HRs to screw up. You have immigration lawyers do most of the paperwork. There is nothing an HR can do to screw anything up. The process is identical to hiring anyone else on the HR end. The lawyers might screw up but they can always make up with additional paperwork.
The H1B system was created for a specific purpose - very short temporary workers who should become permanent green card holders very quickly. The problem is that it has morphed into a decade long temporary work program that dangles the green card to make the worker work for longer hours and less pay than a green card holder, under the threat of losing it all after being fired.
What really needs to happen is that US and India should sit down and figure this out. Over 60% of the H1B visa users are from India. US should have a special visa program similar to H1B for Indians but without the exploitative nature of it.
And, the reason why H1Bs are cheaper is because the US doesn't want them to go into the general labor pool but exist in their own special labor pool, not competing with the general labor pool. But, this creates a secondary job market and when corporations see the labor price differences between the two job pools, there will be incentive to do what Disney did. So, US should loosen these artificial restrictions that so that everyone is competing on the same level field.
H1B really needs to be revised so that is does not place so much emphasis on "sponsorship". The employer can dangle the sponsorship for years denying raises, promotions and starting with low wages and long hours.
Ideally, there should be generic visa that gives blanket work authorization for a certain period of time (like 3 years) and a path to green card without an employer "sponsorship". When a foreign worker comes to the US, they should be in the same market as everyone else, commanding the same salary, benefits etc. There is too much power with employers right now and so there is exploitation.
I have switched to low sugar, low carb, and started working out five times a week, two days of lifting, three days of cardio with running 5K or more on the weekends and managed to lose 40 lbs in 8 weeks. That's over 15% of my body mass.
While the level of insanity that I endured for this is a bit much, I can attest to the fact that the amount of crap we add in American diets is excessive to the point of "we need to stop hurting ourselves"
The biggest guidelines that I have for myself is if it's designed to sit on a shelf for a long time, it's not designed to be consumed and carbs are great, only if you have a plan to burn them off.
Losing weight is not the hardest part.
The hard part is maintaining the weight after you've lost it.
Most people who have lost weight eventually gain it back.
I find it hard to trust a company like Microsoft to give away an upgrade (that supposedly improves a thing or two) for free without some catch. Do they guarantee full service and support? Will there never be a subscription fee for any features? Will windows 10 never pester me with any advertisements or force software on me that I don't want? Will all the features remain active indefinitely in the future? Will the new rolling release upgrade schedule never send my PC into some infinite upgrade loop or blue screen of death?
If I had good faith that the answer is "yes" to all of these questions, then I'd upgrade. But I don't have this faith, so I'll rather pass this upgrade until I buy a new machine or until there is some compelling reason to upgrade.
My suspicions are the Windows Store thing.
Kind of like giving Internet Explorer for free back then but free Windows 10 to gain access to the app download market. Microsoft could become Steam + App Store. Plus, this probably would lead to phone and XBox sales as well.
Plus, Windows 10 is a minor upgrade anyways. It is just some minor UI improvements. Plus, moving people from Windows 7 and 8 to free 10 makes it easier to support since they can just tell people to upgrade to 10 if they have a problem.
H1Bs instead need to be paid more than the prevailing wage for the position, the theory being that they will therefore not be favoured over Americans.
Here's how it *really* works:
First, realize that the largest two companies who hoover up H1-B visas are... companies HQ'd in India. Infosys and Tata, to be specific, who combined swallow the vast majority of the visas. They in turn offer their 'consultants' to companies like Disney on a contract basis. This in turn means that Disney actually pays way less per head... here's why:
* The contractor status of each H1-B means that Disney no longer has to pay the 401k/insurance/regulatory/etc costs that they would have to pay an employee, thus cutting their base cost per head by roughly half.
* To comply with your assertion (which is correct, BTW), Disney pays Tata/Infosys something like 110% of the typical posted (not actual, but "posted") salary for the job per head, thus fulfilling your requirement, but still saving Disney roughly half the cost per head or more, depending on what they were paying the guy that the H1-B replaced.
* Tata/Infosys in turn pay their 'consultants' a pittance - say 50-70% of what they get - which generates profit for them.
Now you may be thinking that the consultants are victims, but in reality they're not: In return, the H1-B 'consultant' comes here, busts his ass, and tries like Hell to find a means to stay here permanently. He doesn't mind the pittance, because he's after the opportunity to stay on after the contract is up. Failing that, he is still infinitely more marketable job-wise back in India once he returns, so it's all upside for him, in exchange for busting ass here.
Make Disney, Tata, Infosys and the average Indian H1B worker be the villains when the real villain here is the broken immigration system.
The immigration system has been static for decades. It should change to the situations of the economy and adjust accordingly.
H1Bs shouldn't be this long term thing. It should lead to a green card in 6-9 months without the employers being able to hold that up. Problems like these would disappear. H1B would not be a cheap option.
There are complicated quotas, lotterys and queues all over the places with the employers wielding lots of control. It's a total mess right now.
Steve Albini has been a slashdot darling because of his outspoken nature. However, it is all empty BS that is just armchair philosophy. It doesn't look like he's involved in the guts of the music industry to provide real insight but just out there to reflect our outsider slashdot user views.
Copyright is very important. Streaming revenues are based on copyright. Digital downloads are based on copyright.
Also streaming can be as high a quality as needed. I don't know why he think it is supposed to be low quality. It can be higher quality than radio and with 24 bit audio higher quality than CDs.
They are selling billions of tracks through digital downloads, people are listening to billions of songs through streaming services and there are many services that are working on music being aggressively categorized by moods, styles and what not. Cloud management of music library and instant access to the library has been a huge.
The music industry has been ridiculously dynamic and new innovations have changed where music is heading. Maybe great recommender systems that will boost music sales. Maybe super high quality music and services that provide a great music experience are on the way that people will want to build up a huge library.
I don't think the SAT is really that useful of a test. However colleges seem to use them for entrance criteria, as a number is easier to evaluate than judging a person on the whole.
But if they are willing to cheat on the SAT test to get in, I don't think colleges really want people of such questionable moral caliber to enter the school.
My experience with Chinese students, this isn't too surprising, they are far more willing to cheat, than take the consequences of getting a low grade. That is why when they show statistics showing where China is succeeding, I really question it, because their culture seems to want to win, with the actual objectives of the grading as not important. A Sr.Year computer science major the student was the curve breaker on the tests. Went to me asking how in C++ can he use decimal numbers (the answer was using the float data type, which we learned about on day 3 in the freshman class, and had used such a data type all threw the program. Made me realize, this student was either cheating technically (threw nefarious methods), or cheating himself (Only test prep, once the test is done, it brand dumps out of the system). Because in anything practical he was useless.
You cannot use floats for decimal numbers since floats are approximate types.
In banking, you would never use float to represent money, which are decimals.
There is so much free stuff available (so I've heard;) ), how does anyone make any money with it at all?
Who pays for porn with so much free stuff available?
Is porn just advertising for the actors who engage in for-hire sex with anyone with adequate funds?
Are us poor slobs just enjoying the commercials while the rich guys get the real stuff?
There is so much open source and free software available on the internet. Does anyone even make any money selling software?
There is so much free music. There is so much free movies. So much free news, books, educational material, and so on and so on.
I'm 100% against using race or gender as a first pass system for sorting HOWEVER, it's a private school, they can accept who ever they want to. If the government was flipping the bill for post secondary education then the story would be different but the second you are funded by the students, then you can the decision about which students you want to let in . If you really want to fix this issue, you need to conceil the identity of the student down to a numeric identifier.
Harvard takes a lot of government money one way or another.
One is NSF, NIH and other research oriented grants and funds. Those funds are in some ways also designed to develop future scientists and if you're racially biasing against one group, then Harvard would be ineligible to receive any such grants.
I know a poster long time ago said that a lot of money for Harvard comes from the alumni and the race of the people with money do not correspond to the race of the potential student body. Before the immigration reform act in the 60s, non-whites were less preferred as potential immigrants compared to whites. So, the racial distribution of the alumni with money is very different than the racial distribution of the most qualified applicants.
Has this ever worked before? Has anyone ever shown that it's possible for children in developing countries to teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic? And have they published their results in peer-reviewed journals?
I thought that most of the research found that computers weren't too useful in teaching basic reading, writing and arithmetic, even when students had assistance.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10...
Inflating the Software Report Card
By TRIP GABRIEL and MATT RICHTEL
October 8, 2011
(United States Department of Education's What Works Clearinghouse review of 10 major software products for teaching algebra and elementary and middle school math and reading found that 9 “did not have statistically significant effects on test scores.”)
Excellent question.
What is the major problem that limits children from learning from apps now? Most children in the US are glued to the iPad and I'm sure people have tried to create learning apps.
Is it lacking in apps and games, or lacking in content? Or, is it lacking in algorithms or just a charismatic personality for the students to learn from?
Also, how are app/content developers going to test their stuff against children in the developing world or children in general? Are there schools or organizations in place where the app can be tested? In a lot of ways, it would require children psychology for the apps to be engaging to learn, and without testing it in kids and in the third world environment, it would be very effective.
Did OLTP have the impact it was designed to have? I think OLTP kicked off the market for netbooks or whatever they were called back then - cheap small computers with cheap CPU and OSes.
Perhaps this will create an avalance of educational websites and apps. There are sites like Coursra, Udemy etc that do education market that have good content and platform.
Why can't the kids learn basic reading, writing and arithmetic from regular teachers ?
As it says in the youtube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Dnn7NFQPbQ#t=52), the traditional model of education is not sustainable or scalable for those living in developing countries.
The automotive electronics is in terrible shape. The auto engineers do not understand security, their computers have existed without network connections in isolation for a long time. Now data connections are making their way deep into the cars and recently BMW had a security update affecting some 2 million cars. It was apparently communicating to the servers nearly in clear text.
Further the bean counters think the dash space to be some sort of profit center. "They bought our car right? Let us make them pay 200$ for map DVD upgrade, 1800$ for navigational package, ha ha haa, you negotiated 800$ using edmunds.com and truecar.com? Well buddy, I will get that money back, 900$ for mp3 player! ".
Further they are used to product cycles running into decade or more and taking 9 months to admit the ignition switch has a problem and six years to hide it from NTSB. They are not used to software release cycle speeds of once in 8 months or once a year.
They used to do this with car radios and make it impossible to install after market radios. Then SAE defined standard connectors and that market got some real competition. It is high time SAE define user interface API for the common things and allow third parties to come in with custom made tablets to be integrated into the cars. With the 3D printing advances, we could get clean molded plastic brackets that fit almost as good as factory made dash with custom tablets. The market is ripe. Hope two really big companies with good customer base enter and do a serious fight for market share.
Automotive electronics developers would say the same thing about consumer communication protocols. It is a mess that can't guarantee anything for even a simple control setup.
There are plenty of people putting car computers etc in their cars. When manufacturers put in an entertainment system and someone crashes and dies because of something in it, fingers are pointed to the car manufacturers. They always have to worry about SAFETY!
This isn't like a consumer device that if it crashes or freezes, it's not a big deal. If a car software system crashes, people die.
Speaking of GM ignition switch problem, it perhaps affected one person or at most a few and they had to do multi-billion dollar recall. Windows has security holes that affects millions and they just issue a fix whenever they feel like it and just tell the users not to do stupid things. Completely different systems.
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I harbor a bit of empathy for anyone willing to put personal beliefs on the line for principle.
Too few people nowadays (and politicians en masse) are willing to speak from a core belief set for fear of {horrors} offending someone!
Even ridiculous courage is refreshing these days.
I would normally agree but historically a few German racists have gone on to become mass-murderers.
All these temporary visas come with a mountain of restrictions which end up giving a ridiculous amount of power to the employers and nothing to the employees. They should be scrapped for flat out green cards, not a temporary visa then to a green card 10-15 years down the road for Indians. There shouldn't be a second class, temporary worker thing at all.
However, all the newspaper want to do is make Indian IT workers as a cheap villain, robbing American jobs and sometimes taking them to India.
People really think implementing a newer version of the "Asian/Indian exclusion act" is going to solve the problem. "If we restrict the Indians from coming here, my job will be safe" mentality.
We are fighting the powerful forces of economics here. India has a massive surplus of highly trained and educated work force. That's their export. H1B is a tiny tiny little window.
Those accounting jobs at ToysRUs were going to India no matter what, H1B was just used as a quick way for the new workers to get up to speed. If you stop the Indians from coming here, the companies can simply ask the workers to go to India to train their replacements to get their severance packages.
All the people who complain that it is the 1% getting all the benefits of workers while the middle class hollows out - guess why that is. Convoluted and restrictive government regulation. Only the 1% can circumnavigate the complex legal maze to get the benefits of cheap labor in India while a new startup or a small business will struggle to utilize it.
Make the whole thing simple and not so exploitative. The middle class will blossom because lots of startups and small businesses will benefit from cheap Indian labor.
Reminds of an story about car mechanics.
Maybe it was Sears or it was some other chain store. They decided to measure the value of the mechanics by the dollar value of the business they brought to the company.
All that ended up doing was making the mechanics cheat customers by asking them for extra repairs.
Same thing with the Detroit police department. They used homicide rate as a measure of effectiveness. The police started to classify homicides as suicides and accidents to make the metric look better.
The moral of the story is that for a lot of people, metrics are more powerful than ethics. They will cheat to get better metrics, even in times when those metrics are meaningless.
Slashdot moderation system used to measure us as a total of karma over all posts to measure the contribution to Slashdot.
Slashdot had to stop using those because of karma whores.
Even meaningless numbers are a strong motivators to cheat a system. You have to be very careful about what you do. Improving those metrics will triumph over quality and ethics.
I think the work cycle is just about done evolving. For example: - Hunter-gatherers organized into agrarian societies - Mechanization and industrialization led to many farm workers transitioning to factory work - Societal pressures on education, etc. led to many factory workers transitioning to office and service work - Offshoring of all manufacturing from first world countries shifted smart people to office work, less-than-smart people to crappy service jobs - Offshoring of office work including IT shifted a bunch of the smart people to crappy service jobs or the "gig economy" - Automation or offshoring of the rest of the office work will lead to....chaos? Revolution? A country of people being paid to rate cat videos on YouTube?
Whatever it leads to, there isn't any work left for most people to move to. Smart people are still relatively OK, but there are A LOT of not-smart people holding down random corporate jobs and the few factory jobs that are left. When there's nowhere to go, and society still uses money to value things, basic income is a good idea. It also formally recognizes that there are people who just can't contribute to society at the same levels as others and provides a humane existence for them.
Except that billionaires like JK Rowling were once on the dole.
Guaranteed income allows people to take risks. Instead of being stuck on a dead end job treadmill to keep the apartment or health insurance, they can do risky things that could reap huge rewards.
One of the reasons that children of successful parents are more successful is because of that safety net. Even if they fail, its not so bad. The cost of failure for a regular person would be loss of home and enormous difficulty just to make ends meet.
Plus, the whole notion of smart and not-so smart doesn't hold true. There is a "smart enough" and after that is just luck. Kind of like how basketball isn't all just the tallest people in the world. They are generally tall but after you're tall enough, extra height doesn't really matter.
This kind of thinking is why US workers are in such deep shit. There are people who actually believe that setting a price for your labor is somehow bad.
When a company sets a price on a product based on a desired level of profit, it's considered "the Free Market". But when a worker does the same thing we're told it's bad for everyone.
It's the Stockholm Syndrome, and the supply-side is holding you hostage. You think everyone's wages should be on a runaway train to the bottom of the barrel. What's funny is how many of these same people think it's just horrible that low-wage workers come across to border to pick lettuce. It just may be that programming is the new farm labor and has become another job that US workers don't want to do, at least at the price that's on the table.
Sooner or later, someone will figure out that labor comes first. It precedes capital. There is no capital without labor to make it happen. When you reverse the hierarchy, economies (and societies) suffer.
Companies can put high prices but nobody will buy them. Then, they will be forced to cut prices to sell their products.
If you give a company monopoly, then they don't have to cut prices since you have no choice but to buy from them.
Monopolies are bad for the economy. Competition is good. If you're the monopoly, competition is bad but for the overall economy, competition is good.
There is some truth to harming the economy with labor fixing prices and monopolizing labor like with unions. The US auto industry has struggled and lost its huge lead in the automotive industry partially because of this.
We got bought out by Paychex, but even that couldn't help us get any experienced people.
Pay more. If you can't get experienced people, it's because you're not paying enough.
Let me put in a metaphor.
Suppose you put an ad that you want to buy the iPhone 6 for $50. Even if you get one, it will probably be illegally acquired.
Consider another situation. You visit every store and they say they don't have an iPhone 6 and you can only get it off someone else by offering them above market price.
I don't which situation we are in or at which point between the two extremes we are in. Are employers looking for stupidly cheap workers or is the situation that the only way employers can get workers is to poach it off some other company?
As an engineer, I'd like to believe its the first. I wouldn't know since the company hides all the financials from us so I have no idea even to the ballpark of what revenue I contribute to the company against what I'm paid.
It could present a political conundrum of sorts for the Obama administration.
How naive... they will respond as they always do with almost all these petitions - with a generic form letter statement that will provide vague reassurances that they are "looking into the issue", give no concrete plan for addressing the core demands while mostly evading the question. Anybody who thinks these petitions are worth the paper they are signed on and that the White House actually pays attention to them is deluded.
However, if white house responds positively, the Democrats immediately get support from the immigrant diaspora.
With the republican being so anti-immigration, perhaps Democrats don't have to go the extra mile. Or, perhaps friendly immigration moves will capture those moderate with the strong anti-immigration vibes from the other camp.
If they reduce the number of H-1s, and keep the people here who were educated here, it seems like a reasonable solution. There's a risk that universities would open to merely subvert the immigration process, so safeguards against that should be taken. Also, why limit it to just STEM? If we train a great philosopher, America will be improved if that philosopher chooses to stay here.
The problem is that the primary way to keep those educated here is to make them H1Bs. For most, there is no other way to stay afterwards.
Why don't we reduce the number of foreign students attending our Universities and make room for, you know, Americans? I believe that a good part of the reason that so many foreign students are admitted is the huge premium on tuition that the school collects. Foreign students pay WAY more in tuition than American students do so the schools have a vested interest in having as many foreign students as possible.
Classroom seats, like so many other things in life, is a zero sum game. For every foreign student admitted there is one American student that misses the cut. Why not take care of American students first and then, if there are any seats left, admit foreign students? Would this not address the supposed shortage of skilled STEM workers that business is always whining about?
Classroom seats are not zero sum games.
Universities can build buildings, hire teachers and can create as many classroom seats as needed.
Microsoft, since its only product is software, has to go to great lengths to protect and extend that property base. "Extend" here is Googly data mining.
Apple, on the other hand, makes money by selling you the hardware. The protection is the physical ownership of the device. You might not believe Apple when it says "we don't want your personal information", but you have to respect that they're not depending on either data or software to make the great majority of their revenue.
This may not be a popular opinion, but I trust Microsoft more than Google, Apple -way more- than Microsoft, and the NSA more than any commercial company.
Microsoft sells software, not advertising like Google. Apple's hardware and Microsoft's software are comparable. Both say similar things about privacy when Android talk comes up.
Both Apple and Microsoft want to get the advertising and data mining dollars like Google.
In the modern era, large corporations are always looking to expand and expand and expand. Both Apple and Microsoft are looking to leverage what they have to muscle into the online advertising industry. So, I think your trust is misplaced.
Toronto police are reporting that 2 unconfirmed suicides have been linked to the data breach.
so, basically corollary conjecture pertaining to sets of potential outcomes of a data breech. Dont get me wrong, as a homosexual I'm not at all condoning the death of a person for their sexuality. I think puritanical elation is at best inappropriate as a response to the incident. But frankly Ashley Madisons catchphrase was 'lifes short, have an affair.' As a saudi national, someone is unfortunately about to find out exactly how short that life can really be. Standard issue infidelity aside there are numerous gay dating sites you could have chosen. numerous potential outlets for gay, straight, questioning, bisexual, whatever your heart desires. But selecting Ashley Madison shows a puerile approach to interpersonal relationship as well as sexual orientation in general. Homosexuality is not the same as a casual extramarital affair.
When I first came across the ad of the website (when they were in their blanket advertising phase), the slogan stuck me as clever and humorous. It never stuck me as foul or evil.
However, their main logo has a woman with a finger on her lips, evoking discretion. Perhaps people signed up with this website because it feels so hush hush and secretive, exactly what a Saudi gay man would want.
But, I don't know how they got millions of people to sign up for the website. It shows up next to foot-long penis ads so ...
Those were good years.
But you can compensate for it by making racist jokes.
Seriously though, you mean when only America had science. It is a good thing that a country with a billion people are doing scientific achievements. We should be ecstatic that China is in the game and the rate of scientific progress for humanity will increase by multiple factors. The science performed by a Chinese scientist versus an American one doesn't matter, everyone can benefit.
I am glad that your experience on the H1-B Visa program has been a trivial task for you. That is not always the case though.
At a previous company, we had an H1-B visa employee that we hired from another company and despite the fact he was sponsored by the other company and we were willing to sponsor him, he almost got deported because of the process of handing off from 1 company to another did not go smoothly.
He worked for us for 3 years, and then went to another job and again, almost ended up deported. It was a nightmare on both ends.
I also know a few H1-B visa employees at my current place of employee who have had similiar fears.
Citizen loses a job or goes to another job, nothing happens. H1-B Visa person always has the possibility of being kicked out of the country if HR screws up the sponsorship.
I am not part of the IT tech industry, but chemical manufacturing and the people I know have been electrical or chemical engineers and not working for Google or other big names like those you mention. So while ti can be smooth, you are 1 HR screw up away from losing your status and being deported.
I am glad you have worked for companies who have it down well enough that their HR has worked for you, but that is by no means the norm for smaller companies.
You're sensationalizing things. Saying almost got deported is like saying you almost died in a car crash due to a reckless driver cutting you off this morning.
Plus, deportation is involuntary removal. Without a job and a means to make money, who would sit around and wait for to be deported? They would voluntarily go back.
Plus, there is a grace period to look for a job (6 months without incurring a penalty). Additionally, you can always come back when you find a new job.
Plus, it's not HRs to screw up. You have immigration lawyers do most of the paperwork. There is nothing an HR can do to screw anything up. The process is identical to hiring anyone else on the HR end. The lawyers might screw up but they can always make up with additional paperwork.
The H1B system was created for a specific purpose - very short temporary workers who should become permanent green card holders very quickly. The problem is that it has morphed into a decade long temporary work program that dangles the green card to make the worker work for longer hours and less pay than a green card holder, under the threat of losing it all after being fired.
What really needs to happen is that US and India should sit down and figure this out. Over 60% of the H1B visa users are from India. US should have a special visa program similar to H1B for Indians but without the exploitative nature of it.
And, the reason why H1Bs are cheaper is because the US doesn't want them to go into the general labor pool but exist in their own special labor pool, not competing with the general labor pool. But, this creates a secondary job market and when corporations see the labor price differences between the two job pools, there will be incentive to do what Disney did. So, US should loosen these artificial restrictions that so that everyone is competing on the same level field.
H1B really needs to be revised so that is does not place so much emphasis on "sponsorship". The employer can dangle the sponsorship for years denying raises, promotions and starting with low wages and long hours.
Ideally, there should be generic visa that gives blanket work authorization for a certain period of time (like 3 years) and a path to green card without an employer "sponsorship". When a foreign worker comes to the US, they should be in the same market as everyone else, commanding the same salary, benefits etc. There is too much power with employers right now and so there is exploitation.
This and more.
I have switched to low sugar, low carb, and started working out five times a week, two days of lifting, three days of cardio with running 5K or more on the weekends and managed to lose 40 lbs in 8 weeks. That's over 15% of my body mass.
While the level of insanity that I endured for this is a bit much, I can attest to the fact that the amount of crap we add in American diets is excessive to the point of "we need to stop hurting ourselves"
The biggest guidelines that I have for myself is if it's designed to sit on a shelf for a long time, it's not designed to be consumed and carbs are great, only if you have a plan to burn them off.
Losing weight is not the hardest part.
The hard part is maintaining the weight after you've lost it.
Most people who have lost weight eventually gain it back.
I find it hard to trust a company like Microsoft to give away an upgrade (that supposedly improves a thing or two) for free without some catch. Do they guarantee full service and support? Will there never be a subscription fee for any features? Will windows 10 never pester me with any advertisements or force software on me that I don't want? Will all the features remain active indefinitely in the future? Will the new rolling release upgrade schedule never send my PC into some infinite upgrade loop or blue screen of death?
If I had good faith that the answer is "yes" to all of these questions, then I'd upgrade. But I don't have this faith, so I'll rather pass this upgrade until I buy a new machine or until there is some compelling reason to upgrade.
My suspicions are the Windows Store thing.
Kind of like giving Internet Explorer for free back then but free Windows 10 to gain access to the app download market. Microsoft could become Steam + App Store. Plus, this probably would lead to phone and XBox sales as well.
Plus, Windows 10 is a minor upgrade anyways. It is just some minor UI improvements. Plus, moving people from Windows 7 and 8 to free 10 makes it easier to support since they can just tell people to upgrade to 10 if they have a problem.
H1Bs instead need to be paid more than the prevailing wage for the position, the theory being that they will therefore not be favoured over Americans.
Here's how it *really* works:
First, realize that the largest two companies who hoover up H1-B visas are... companies HQ'd in India. Infosys and Tata, to be specific, who combined swallow the vast majority of the visas. They in turn offer their 'consultants' to companies like Disney on a contract basis. This in turn means that Disney actually pays way less per head... here's why:
* The contractor status of each H1-B means that Disney no longer has to pay the 401k/insurance/regulatory/etc costs that they would have to pay an employee, thus cutting their base cost per head by roughly half.
* To comply with your assertion (which is correct, BTW), Disney pays Tata/Infosys something like 110% of the typical posted (not actual, but "posted") salary for the job per head, thus fulfilling your requirement, but still saving Disney roughly half the cost per head or more, depending on what they were paying the guy that the H1-B replaced.
* Tata/Infosys in turn pay their 'consultants' a pittance - say 50-70% of what they get - which generates profit for them.
Now you may be thinking that the consultants are victims, but in reality they're not: In return, the H1-B 'consultant' comes here, busts his ass, and tries like Hell to find a means to stay here permanently. He doesn't mind the pittance, because he's after the opportunity to stay on after the contract is up. Failing that, he is still infinitely more marketable job-wise back in India once he returns, so it's all upside for him, in exchange for busting ass here.
Make Disney, Tata, Infosys and the average Indian H1B worker be the villains when the real villain here is the broken immigration system.
The immigration system has been static for decades. It should change to the situations of the economy and adjust accordingly.
H1Bs shouldn't be this long term thing. It should lead to a green card in 6-9 months without the employers being able to hold that up. Problems like these would disappear. H1B would not be a cheap option.
There are complicated quotas, lotterys and queues all over the places with the employers wielding lots of control. It's a total mess right now.
Steve Albini has been a slashdot darling because of his outspoken nature. However, it is all empty BS that is just armchair philosophy. It doesn't look like he's involved in the guts of the music industry to provide real insight but just out there to reflect our outsider slashdot user views.
Copyright is very important. Streaming revenues are based on copyright. Digital downloads are based on copyright.
Also streaming can be as high a quality as needed. I don't know why he think it is supposed to be low quality. It can be higher quality than radio and with 24 bit audio higher quality than CDs.
They are selling billions of tracks through digital downloads, people are listening to billions of songs through streaming services and there are many services that are working on music being aggressively categorized by moods, styles and what not. Cloud management of music library and instant access to the library has been a huge.
The music industry has been ridiculously dynamic and new innovations have changed where music is heading. Maybe great recommender systems that will boost music sales. Maybe super high quality music and services that provide a great music experience are on the way that people will want to build up a huge library.
Saying copyright is not working is wrong.
I don't think the SAT is really that useful of a test. However colleges seem to use them for entrance criteria, as a number is easier to evaluate than judging a person on the whole. But if they are willing to cheat on the SAT test to get in, I don't think colleges really want people of such questionable moral caliber to enter the school.
My experience with Chinese students, this isn't too surprising, they are far more willing to cheat, than take the consequences of getting a low grade. That is why when they show statistics showing where China is succeeding, I really question it, because their culture seems to want to win, with the actual objectives of the grading as not important. A Sr.Year computer science major the student was the curve breaker on the tests. Went to me asking how in C++ can he use decimal numbers (the answer was using the float data type, which we learned about on day 3 in the freshman class, and had used such a data type all threw the program. Made me realize, this student was either cheating technically (threw nefarious methods), or cheating himself (Only test prep, once the test is done, it brand dumps out of the system). Because in anything practical he was useless.
You cannot use floats for decimal numbers since floats are approximate types.
In banking, you would never use float to represent money, which are decimals.
There is so much free stuff available (so I've heard ;) ), how does anyone make any money with it at all?
Who pays for porn with so much free stuff available?
Is porn just advertising for the actors who engage in for-hire sex with anyone with adequate funds?
Are us poor slobs just enjoying the commercials while the rich guys get the real stuff?
There is so much open source and free software available on the internet. Does anyone even make any money selling software?
There is so much free music. There is so much free movies. So much free news, books, educational material, and so on and so on.
I'm 100% against using race or gender as a first pass system for sorting HOWEVER, it's a private school, they can accept who ever they want to. If the government was flipping the bill for post secondary education then the story would be different but the second you are funded by the students, then you can the decision about which students you want to let in . If you really want to fix this issue, you need to conceil the identity of the student down to a numeric identifier.
Harvard takes a lot of government money one way or another.
One is NSF, NIH and other research oriented grants and funds. Those funds are in some ways also designed to develop future scientists and if you're racially biasing against one group, then Harvard would be ineligible to receive any such grants.
I know a poster long time ago said that a lot of money for Harvard comes from the alumni and the race of the people with money do not correspond to the race of the potential student body. Before the immigration reform act in the 60s, non-whites were less preferred as potential immigrants compared to whites. So, the racial distribution of the alumni with money is very different than the racial distribution of the most qualified applicants.
Has this ever worked before? Has anyone ever shown that it's possible for children in developing countries to teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic? And have they published their results in peer-reviewed journals?
I thought that most of the research found that computers weren't too useful in teaching basic reading, writing and arithmetic, even when students had assistance.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10... Inflating the Software Report Card By TRIP GABRIEL and MATT RICHTEL October 8, 2011 (United States Department of Education's What Works Clearinghouse review of 10 major software products for teaching algebra and elementary and middle school math and reading found that 9 “did not have statistically significant effects on test scores.”)
Excellent question.
What is the major problem that limits children from learning from apps now? Most children in the US are glued to the iPad and I'm sure people have tried to create learning apps.
Is it lacking in apps and games, or lacking in content? Or, is it lacking in algorithms or just a charismatic personality for the students to learn from?
Also, how are app/content developers going to test their stuff against children in the developing world or children in general? Are there schools or organizations in place where the app can be tested? In a lot of ways, it would require children psychology for the apps to be engaging to learn, and without testing it in kids and in the third world environment, it would be very effective.
Did OLTP have the impact it was designed to have? I think OLTP kicked off the market for netbooks or whatever they were called back then - cheap small computers with cheap CPU and OSes.
Perhaps this will create an avalance of educational websites and apps. There are sites like Coursra, Udemy etc that do education market that have good content and platform.
Why can't the kids learn basic reading, writing and arithmetic from regular teachers ?
As it says in the youtube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Dnn7NFQPbQ#t=52), the traditional model of education is not sustainable or scalable for those living in developing countries.
The automotive electronics is in terrible shape. The auto engineers do not understand security, their computers have existed without network connections in isolation for a long time. Now data connections are making their way deep into the cars and recently BMW had a security update affecting some 2 million cars. It was apparently communicating to the servers nearly in clear text.
Further the bean counters think the dash space to be some sort of profit center. "They bought our car right? Let us make them pay 200$ for map DVD upgrade, 1800$ for navigational package, ha ha haa, you negotiated 800$ using edmunds.com and truecar.com? Well buddy, I will get that money back, 900$ for mp3 player! ".
Further they are used to product cycles running into decade or more and taking 9 months to admit the ignition switch has a problem and six years to hide it from NTSB. They are not used to software release cycle speeds of once in 8 months or once a year.
They used to do this with car radios and make it impossible to install after market radios. Then SAE defined standard connectors and that market got some real competition. It is high time SAE define user interface API for the common things and allow third parties to come in with custom made tablets to be integrated into the cars. With the 3D printing advances, we could get clean molded plastic brackets that fit almost as good as factory made dash with custom tablets. The market is ripe. Hope two really big companies with good customer base enter and do a serious fight for market share.
Automotive electronics developers would say the same thing about consumer communication protocols. It is a mess that can't guarantee anything for even a simple control setup.
There are plenty of people putting car computers etc in their cars. When manufacturers put in an entertainment system and someone crashes and dies because of something in it, fingers are pointed to the car manufacturers. They always have to worry about SAFETY!
This isn't like a consumer device that if it crashes or freezes, it's not a big deal. If a car software system crashes, people die.
Speaking of GM ignition switch problem, it perhaps affected one person or at most a few and they had to do multi-billion dollar recall. Windows has security holes that affects millions and they just issue a fix whenever they feel like it and just tell the users not to do stupid things. Completely different systems.