IF the job market hadn't burst, their exponential growth would have been realized- based upon the high paychecks of happy.com workers. Thus, nothing you've stated disproves the idea that when you decrease the number of consumers, otherwise viable business plans go bust.
Very doubtful - for them to be profitable (at *any* level) they needed Soccer Mom dollars - regular families to do their weekly shopping online. They did not get that. Instead, they got us - the dot.com urban workers. And while we may have loved their service, there were *never* enough of us to make them profitable - single guys ordering biweekly is not the same as families of 4 ordering weekly. Remember - white collar professionals with not a lot of spare time remain a small percentage of the total workforce. This was true even at the height of the boom in '99.
In the race to 'capture market share' they expanded too far, too fast, and were bitten when their funding dried up. Again, I point to the lone survivor, Peapod, which weathered the storm by focusing on core metro areas and cutting overheads by partnering with an existing brick and mortar store. They fill a niche market, because that's what home grocery delivery is - a niche market in the top ten metro areas. Exponential growth was not attainable, although they deluded themselves into believing it. There simply aren't enough people (and wouldn't be, even had the boom continued) who a) have broadband and b) earn plenty of money and c) value their time enough to do their grocery shopping online rather than hit the store on the way back from work. The market just wasn't there. Many dot coms suffered from the same problem - Pets.com a good example of that - who'd pay to *ship* a 10lb bag of catfood? Same basic problem.
I have not yet raised the irony of someone called "Marxist Hacker" denouncing the field of Economics. I seem to recall Mr. Marx having his own views on the subject, and his own 'science' to explain it all.
Does this mean you consider Marxism to also be a religion and/or scam? Or is it the only branch of economic theory you hold to be accurate?
I'm not a huge fan of economists myself, having studied it at college, but they're not *all* Smithies. Some of them like Keynes.:)
Anyway - duly noted that you think all economists are scam artists. I stand by my contention, however, that the prevailing opinion of economic 'professionals' is still more valid than those you'll find from most amateurs on single-issue forums.
The big classic example was homegrocer.com- a complete luxury for the high tech worker who was pulling 70-hour weeks, whose clientele ENTIRELY went away as loads of Americans were laid off to make room for the labor surplus of H-1bs that came in. Heck, in 1999 and 2000, I was using homegrocer on a biweekly basis myself- in October 2001 when I got laid off paying an extra $20 for delivery of food just didn't make any sense anymore.
I used Homeruns myself. But did you look at their financials? You'll find that they collapsed for one reason : their income exceeded their revenue. Their business plan was predicated on almost exponential growth, and they spent themselves into bankrupcy, relying on a huge IPO to get them more capital to expand. When the bubble burst, the huge IPO was out of the question, VC funds dried up, and Homegrocer and Homeruns went out of the market.
I note that the one survivor was Peapod. Why? Because they aggressively cut costs, reduced markets and partnered with a brick and mortar store. It was only by using the existing infrastructure and profit center of an existing, profitable grocery chain that they were able to survive, as a luxury 'value-added' service in key markets.
It was a quite common theory in most of the anti-H-1b forums in 2002.
I'm sure it was. Aside from the obvious problem of the agenda of such forums, I must again state that no economic analysis I have ever seen, be it in WSJ or Business Week or The Economist or wherever has said that the.com crash was caused by H1-B visa holders. Now, if you got a bunch of citations to credible economic journals that say that, sure - but until then, I'm going to have to stick with the accepted wisdom of real economists, not random people on anti-immigration forums.
Oh, and here's the current State Dept Visa Bulletin which tells you exactly how many immigrant visas there are, and what category they fall into.
As for the H1s running out in a day - you know that was because applications from FY03 (INS years run Oct-Sept. Don't ask why:) ) hit the quota in March '04, right? So any applications for H1-b between March 2004 and October 2004 went into a queue, and when the next year's allocation of H1 became available in October, they all went.
I guess that meant that there was quite a bit of demand (at least 65,000 apps filed in six months). I don't know if that's a case of demand rising to meet supply, or if that's indicative of a true economic need. Interesting, anyway.
I was talking about the October 2000 increase that directly caused the January 2001.Com crash.
Again, I can find no evidence that AC21 was rushed through against the wishes of the Democrats, nor was it signed by Clinton at 6am. Sorry.
As for AC21 causing the.com crash... huh?
No, seriously. Huh? Are you saying that an oversupply of labor, specifically foreign labor, caused a market crash? Because you'll be the only person I've ever met who's claimed that.
I'll tell you what caused the crash - a tonne of.com companies with little or no real business plan, no revenue and lots of VCs getting greedy looking for the next Amazon.com IPO. It was a typical unsustainable market bubble. wiki gives a good general overview of some of the causes, but BusinessWeek sums it up best: Millions of investors, gripped by a mass speculative mania, had driven dot-com equity valuations to ridiculous, perhaps unprecedented, heights of fancy.
And Before AC21, H1-bs were limited to 130,000 a year, under legislation passed in 1998. AC21 extended it for a further 3 years, and added portability provisions to both H visas and green cards.
Which is also a separate problem. We've got so many classes and categories, I don't think anybody has any idea which limits apply to what- or how to control the borders at all.
I assure you that a great many people know exactly what the limits are - including INS. I'm sorry that you don't know them, or the visa categories available.
It was passed at 2:00am after all the Democrats had been told there would be no more legislation proposed that evening- they woke Clinton up at 6:00am to sign it into law, by the time most of the opposition came into the office it was a done deal.
Huh? Citations, please. I can find no evidence this bill was Shanghai'd through any part of Congress - especially when the leading proponents of many of the H1-b legislation were Democrats (Kennedy and Feinstein!). The closest I can find is HR4328, which was an Omnibus spending bill that had a revision of the H1-B code amended to it. That revision was a result of compromise between Democrats and Republicans, and all it really did was raise the yearly cap to 115,000. While your points may be valid, it may be a little much to ascribe the failings of the H1 program to a Vast Government Conspiracy.:)
I have read it- and I've got MANY complaints ranging from not contributing to the green card limit to rates of pay allowed and regulations about job postings.
You do realise that there are many classes of Green Card, right? The largest portion of cards go to relatives of US Citizens, followed by those who marry an American, followed by the Diversity Lottery. *Then* you get the 'skilled worker' green cards - a distant fourth of total cards granted each year. And I note that the first 3 categories don't care what your skills are (if any) or what language you speak. And while H1-B visas are not counted against the number of green cards issued, there *are* annual limits to the number of skilled worker green cards that can be issued.
I think you're simplifying a little bit. I don't know the history of the H1-B legislation, so it's possible it was passed as a rider on some completely unrelated piece of law, or was porked out with special interest payouts. I don't know, but I'm sure there wasn't just *one* reason it got voted through.
We've got well beyond the immigration we can handle for the main purpose that the United States needs open borders to begin with (replenishing a dying population that spends more time working than raising families)
I had a huge write-up here that I decided against posting. If you really believe that the US has too much immigration of skilled workers, then no amount of statistics will convince you otherwise. Suffice to say, I believe the US benefits from it, and greater immigration is one way to solve the looming social security crisis. Raising taxes, increasing borrowing or cutting benefits are other possible solutions.
Which means that this is just yet another loophole-
It's not a loophole. There's nothing wrong with the legislation as written. Really. Read it, and the associated Federal Register articles - you may be surprised. The problem is INS is grossly underfunded and so does not adequately enforce the existing legislation. People with legitimate claims are kept waiting for years, and people with illegitimate claims are getting through. It's purely an enforcement problem.
The DoL is supposed to check the local markets when assessing Labor Certifications. If they do not, again it's not the petitioner's fault - it's a matter of lack of resources.
During the period I was 'in the system', our cases were delayed again and again as resources were shifted around to deal with foreigner registration drives and special exemption cases - INS just did not (and still does not) have the necessary resources to correctly process all applications in a timely manner.
I suspect that many of the problems you believe the system has are simply a result of INS not doing their job properly, for whatever reason. Certainly I suspect the 'indentured servant' aspect of H1-Bs would be much smaller.
The H1-B is a special visa in one respect - it doesn't care about the intent of the applicant. Someone can apply with the intent of seeking an Adjustment of Status to an immigrant visa (i-485/green card). It *is* a non-immigrant visa. If you do nothing else, it limits your time in the US to 6 years - then you must leave. But if you qualify for an immigrant visa while you're on an H1-b, you can Adjust to an immigrant status.
H1-B grants you no special rights to adjust to an Immigrant category - there's nothing in the legislation that says 'because you have an H1-b, you qualify for a green card after x years' - it just does not specifically deny you that right (like a J or F visa does, for example).
And don't forget that it is still expensive and not guaranteeded to change status. Most companies (esp. those that seek to exploit H1-b holders) will not go thru the trouble, especially when it specifically guarantees that the sponsored employee can get up and leave pretty much as soon as it's granted. It's designed that way so only the really good people who come in on H1-b can go on to become Permanent Residents and, hopefully, citizens.
However, it's pretty clear in both the legislation and the Federal Register that it was a dual-purpose visa. It may have been promoted by various pressure groups as being only 'non-immigrant', and while technically that's true, no-one who's actually involved in immigration is misled by that.
If the time it takes for the green card to be processed, from I-485 being filed to being granted, is more than 1 year, then the AC21 Act comes into effect. That says two things:
1. You can change employer to a similar job with no penalty, and your I-485 app comes with you (this is what I did).
2. Once your green card is granted, that's *it*. Done. Total labor mobility. I could have walked out of INS after getting my card and gone worked for Burger Lord if I wanted.
Ever since my green card was granted I could work for whoever I wanted, no ties.
Nope! Funny story. My original employer laid me off *before* my green card came through (cost cutting), but because they didn't want me totally screwed, they gave me 3 months notice - and during that time, I was able to get another job which *also* qualified as green card-able. My lawyer then used the AC21 clause to tell INS that, since my application had been pending for more than the legally-allowed six months, it was fine for me to move to another substantially similar job. So I got a new job (better than the first, actually), had no break in employment *and* my green card application transfered seamlessly to the new employer - they had to do nothing. Indeed, since the filing of the i-485, the petition was all in my hands anyway.
Then, a few months later, my green card got approved. But still, it was a bit traumatic at the time.:)
The British Army pioneered the use of *laser* guided mortars. The US version is called PGMM - Precision Guided Mortar Munition. You laze the target, call for fire, and Johnny over the hill drops a few bombs down the tube in your general direction. The bombs have a guidance package on the nose and moveable fins on the back, giving them a fair amount of maneuverability - just like a laser-guided bomb from a plane.
It's no stretch that you could just swap the laser guidance package out with a GPS package (that's exactly what the US Airforce has done with their laser guided bombs), and use the same firing principle (know roughly where your target is, point the tube in the right direction at roughly the right inclination) to send GPS munitions downrange with *consistent* accuracy. It would be less useful in a military environment than laser designation, but more useful to a terrorist.
I believe this is *way* out of the reach of current terrorist organisations. But 9/11 made people real jumpy. I leave it as an exercise to the reader how GPS guided mortars could be used to really mess up someone's day. Hint: Buildings don't move. And before you say "but regular mortars are just as accurate" I'd say no, they're not - witness the IRA attempt to use mortars to hit 10 Downing Street in the mid 90s. They fired 6 shells, and only 1 hit anywhere near the target, landing in the garden behind the Cabinet room. The story would have been *much* different with GPS guided munitions.
One thing to remember about 'dumb' mortars is that, while they are *reasonably* accurate, you can make them more accurate. - PGMM is an attempt to resurrect the 'copperhead' laser designated artillery round of the '80s. The idea is to replace (expensive) on-call air strikes with organic, indirect-fire munitions with 1m CEP accuracy.
Some people really want to live in America, despite the hurdles and attitudes of some of the natives.
I know. I did exactly what the OP said - H1b to Green Card. It was hard, but do-able. I was fortunate in that my company paid for most of the legal fees (which were a touch over $8K).
Almost like the actual threat posed, and loss of life incurred, is not worth additional security measures that impose too onerous a imposition on law-abiding citizens.
If you do look at it statistically, 9/11, while horrific, really wasn't such an earth-shakingly bad thing that it now justifies draconian measures such as the Patriot act. After all, 12,000 people die on the US roads each year from DUI - 4 times the 9/11 deaths and (arguably) more preventable - about 8,000 of those deaths are single vehicle accidents (read as 'the drunk died'), but 4,000 deaths a year were innocents - other road users who were hit by the drunk. Yet where's the draconian DUI legislation?
I'm all for sensible and practical measures to mitigate likely threats. But the US response to terrorism has been knee-jerk in the extreme - out of proportion to the threat, and directly undermining the nature and intent of US society.
Photographing everyone who buys stamps is a great example of this.
Heck, even GPS guided mortars would be a significant threat.
Whether or not any existing terrorist organisation has the ability to do this is a point of discussion. But I suspect that Bush is worried - now that terrorists have already stolen ideas from a Tom Clancy novel, he's probably worried about all the *other* nasty things terrorists do in those books.
You know, I've only seen the full-screen ad once - months ago. Either they couldn't get sponsors or they've stopped doing it in our market. Or maybe I don't notice it because I don't pause enough, or the screen saver kicks in before the ad is displayed.
I still have 30-sec skip out of the box and the ability to download shows to my PC with free tools over the built in NIC. Sure, it may not run Linux, but it has 2 advantages over TiVO:
1. It doesn't force me to watch commercials while fast forwarding. 2. It doesn't assume I'm a gay octogenarian and record shows it thinks I'll love.
No, really. Whoever thought of this one is either trying to pull a fast one, or is really stupid.
Who is the target audience for this? Early adopter techies? Who already have a broadband connection, bittorrent and a decent PC? Why would they want or need another piece of kit (and a *subscription* piece at that!) to get porn from the internet?
This thing isn't a DVR, but costs the same as a Tivo or ReplayTV. Same price, less functionality! I predict this device will go the way of DivX - the rental DVD idea, not the codec.
There's a company called Acacia that's suing lots of.edu for streaming media patent infringements. Looks like MS has offered a pretty big shield for.edu here - so long as you stream using MS tech, they'll protect you.
That'll be a blow for Acacia - their business plan relies on suing individual institutions in a 'divide and conquor' manner and persuading others to license the right to stream media for a pretty substantial fee. They won't want to take on MS.
Of course not, they are practically commodities. People only shop for them when they move into a house or the old one dies, and no-one cares about being the first to get the latest kenmore.
I'll tell you this for free - a $50 computer game with a $15 production cost is far more of a commodity good than a $300 freezer.
But video game and movie consumers really do want to get the game/movie as soon as they can. The producers encourage this, but the demand would exist even without their encouragement.
Not true. If you didn't know a product existed, you can't want it. Consumers want games because they're told they're being developed, beta versions are reviewed by the trade press, and marketing campaigns are launched by the publishers. Demand does not exist in a vacuum.
If they did do what you said and allowed stores to sell as soon as they got it, that would artificially limit supply on the first days, allowing lucky retailers to gouge people that were willing to buy it, and hurting the sales of unlucky stores whose shipment arrived a day latter.
Again, not quite correct. If the distributer wanted, they could go gold, press a million copies, distribute them to local distributers across the nation, *then* release them simultaneously to retail channels. Everyone would get as much product as they wanted in the first day or so they were available. Supply is *already* artificially limited by retailers - what do you think the pre-order system at Electronics Boutique is for? It's to encourage you to pre-pay for a game so they only have to buy as many units from their distibuter as they can sell. It maximises their product by limiting the overstock.
And you're really not going to die if you don't get that copy of Tony Hawk XXVI Extreeeeme on release day.
Really. You're not.
Instead the publishers deliberately go for these Day One Sales events - they do it to fuel demand and boost their chances at getting the #1 slot in the charts, not as a service to the customer, but to make more money by creating an 'event' around the release of a product. They do not do it out of the goodness of their hearts.
If you believe otherwise, you probably haven't worked with Marketing people enough.:)
By treating their game like a movie, with all the attendant buzz about weekend sales and sales rankings, it is the distributors of the product that are to blame.
Are there 'release dates' for white goods? No. The producer places the product in the channel, and distributors and retailers get it when they get it, without restriction on when they can start *selling* the product.
By trying to artificially control demand through massive 'first day sales', it is the publisher who is to blame, not the stores who sell the product early.
The game has already gone gold. MS and Bungie will still get money from the sales. Some rubes on eBay will be out some more $$$ just for bragging rights. All that will happen is that some PR prick will feel as though their spectacular launch day has been violated.
But tomorrow, the sun will still rise and Halo 2 will remain just a game.
The bees, on the other hand... the bees will soon control the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Very doubtful - for them to be profitable (at *any* level) they needed Soccer Mom dollars - regular families to do their weekly shopping online. They did not get that. Instead, they got us - the dot.com urban workers. And while we may have loved their service, there were *never* enough of us to make them profitable - single guys ordering biweekly is not the same as families of 4 ordering weekly. Remember - white collar professionals with not a lot of spare time remain a small percentage of the total workforce. This was true even at the height of the boom in '99.
In the race to 'capture market share' they expanded too far, too fast, and were bitten when their funding dried up. Again, I point to the lone survivor, Peapod, which weathered the storm by focusing on core metro areas and cutting overheads by partnering with an existing brick and mortar store. They fill a niche market, because that's what home grocery delivery is - a niche market in the top ten metro areas. Exponential growth was not attainable, although they deluded themselves into believing it. There simply aren't enough people (and wouldn't be, even had the boom continued) who a) have broadband and b) earn plenty of money and c) value their time enough to do their grocery shopping online rather than hit the store on the way back from work. The market just wasn't there. Many dot coms suffered from the same problem - Pets.com a good example of that - who'd pay to *ship* a 10lb bag of catfood? Same basic problem.
I have not yet raised the irony of someone called "Marxist Hacker" denouncing the field of Economics. I seem to recall Mr. Marx having his own views on the subject, and his own 'science' to explain it all.
Does this mean you consider Marxism to also be a religion and/or scam? Or is it the only branch of economic theory you hold to be accurate?
DOH! I meant their *expenditures* exceeded their revenue. ;-p Time for me to eat something, I think.
I'm not a huge fan of economists myself, having studied it at college, but they're not *all* Smithies. Some of them like Keynes. :)
Anyway - duly noted that you think all economists are scam artists. I stand by my contention, however, that the prevailing opinion of economic 'professionals' is still more valid than those you'll find from most amateurs on single-issue forums.
I used Homeruns myself. But did you look at their financials? You'll find that they collapsed for one reason : their income exceeded their revenue. Their business plan was predicated on almost exponential growth, and they spent themselves into bankrupcy, relying on a huge IPO to get them more capital to expand. When the bubble burst, the huge IPO was out of the question, VC funds dried up, and Homegrocer and Homeruns went out of the market.
I note that the one survivor was Peapod. Why? Because they aggressively cut costs, reduced markets and partnered with a brick and mortar store. It was only by using the existing infrastructure and profit center of an existing, profitable grocery chain that they were able to survive, as a luxury 'value-added' service in key markets.
I'm sure it was. Aside from the obvious problem of the agenda of such forums, I must again state that no economic analysis I have ever seen, be it in WSJ or Business Week or The Economist or wherever has said that the .com crash was caused by H1-B visa holders. Now, if you got a bunch of citations to credible economic journals that say that, sure - but until then, I'm going to have to stick with the accepted wisdom of real economists, not random people on anti-immigration forums.
As for the H1s running out in a day - you know that was because applications from FY03 (INS years run Oct-Sept. Don't ask why :) ) hit the quota in March '04, right? So any applications for H1-b between March 2004 and October 2004 went into a queue, and when the next year's allocation of H1 became available in October, they all went.
I guess that meant that there was quite a bit of demand (at least 65,000 apps filed in six months). I don't know if that's a case of demand rising to meet supply, or if that's indicative of a true economic need. Interesting, anyway.
Again, I can find no evidence that AC21 was rushed through against the wishes of the Democrats, nor was it signed by Clinton at 6am. Sorry.
As for AC21 causing the .com crash ... huh?
No, seriously. Huh? Are you saying that an oversupply of labor, specifically foreign labor, caused a market crash? Because you'll be the only person I've ever met who's claimed that.
I'll tell you what caused the crash - a tonne of .com companies with little or no real business plan, no revenue and lots of VCs getting greedy looking for the next Amazon.com IPO. It was a typical unsustainable market bubble. wiki gives a good general overview of some of the causes, but BusinessWeek sums it up best: Millions of investors, gripped by a mass speculative mania, had driven dot-com equity valuations to ridiculous, perhaps unprecedented, heights of fancy.
And Before AC21, H1-bs were limited to 130,000 a year, under legislation passed in 1998. AC21 extended it for a further 3 years, and added portability provisions to both H visas and green cards.
Which is also a separate problem. We've got so many classes and categories, I don't think anybody has any idea which limits apply to what- or how to control the borders at all.
I assure you that a great many people know exactly what the limits are - including INS. I'm sorry that you don't know them, or the visa categories available.
Huh? Citations, please. I can find no evidence this bill was Shanghai'd through any part of Congress - especially when the leading proponents of many of the H1-b legislation were Democrats (Kennedy and Feinstein!). The closest I can find is HR4328, which was an Omnibus spending bill that had a revision of the H1-B code amended to it. That revision was a result of compromise between Democrats and Republicans, and all it really did was raise the yearly cap to 115,000. While your points may be valid, it may be a little much to ascribe the failings of the H1 program to a Vast Government Conspiracy. :)
I have read it- and I've got MANY complaints ranging from not contributing to the green card limit to rates of pay allowed and regulations about job postings.
You do realise that there are many classes of Green Card, right? The largest portion of cards go to relatives of US Citizens, followed by those who marry an American, followed by the Diversity Lottery. *Then* you get the 'skilled worker' green cards - a distant fourth of total cards granted each year. And I note that the first 3 categories don't care what your skills are (if any) or what language you speak. And while H1-B visas are not counted against the number of green cards issued, there *are* annual limits to the number of skilled worker green cards that can be issued.
We've got well beyond the immigration we can handle for the main purpose that the United States needs open borders to begin with (replenishing a dying population that spends more time working than raising families)
I had a huge write-up here that I decided against posting. If you really believe that the US has too much immigration of skilled workers, then no amount of statistics will convince you otherwise. Suffice to say, I believe the US benefits from it, and greater immigration is one way to solve the looming social security crisis. Raising taxes, increasing borrowing or cutting benefits are other possible solutions.
Which means that this is just yet another loophole-
It's not a loophole. There's nothing wrong with the legislation as written. Really. Read it, and the associated Federal Register articles - you may be surprised. The problem is INS is grossly underfunded and so does not adequately enforce the existing legislation. People with legitimate claims are kept waiting for years, and people with illegitimate claims are getting through. It's purely an enforcement problem.
The DoL is supposed to check the local markets when assessing Labor Certifications. If they do not, again it's not the petitioner's fault - it's a matter of lack of resources.
During the period I was 'in the system', our cases were delayed again and again as resources were shifted around to deal with foreigner registration drives and special exemption cases - INS just did not (and still does not) have the necessary resources to correctly process all applications in a timely manner.
I suspect that many of the problems you believe the system has are simply a result of INS not doing their job properly, for whatever reason. Certainly I suspect the 'indentured servant' aspect of H1-Bs would be much smaller.
You are correct - kinda.
The H1-B is a special visa in one respect - it doesn't care about the intent of the applicant. Someone can apply with the intent of seeking an Adjustment of Status to an immigrant visa (i-485/green card). It *is* a non-immigrant visa. If you do nothing else, it limits your time in the US to 6 years - then you must leave. But if you qualify for an immigrant visa while you're on an H1-b, you can Adjust to an immigrant status.
H1-B grants you no special rights to adjust to an Immigrant category - there's nothing in the legislation that says 'because you have an H1-b, you qualify for a green card after x years' - it just does not specifically deny you that right (like a J or F visa does, for example).
And don't forget that it is still expensive and not guaranteeded to change status. Most companies (esp. those that seek to exploit H1-b holders) will not go thru the trouble, especially when it specifically guarantees that the sponsored employee can get up and leave pretty much as soon as it's granted. It's designed that way so only the really good people who come in on H1-b can go on to become Permanent Residents and, hopefully, citizens.
However, it's pretty clear in both the legislation and the Federal Register that it was a dual-purpose visa. It may have been promoted by various pressure groups as being only 'non-immigrant', and while technically that's true, no-one who's actually involved in immigration is misled by that.
No, I'm not.
If the time it takes for the green card to be processed, from I-485 being filed to being granted, is more than 1 year, then the AC21 Act comes into effect. That says two things:
1. You can change employer to a similar job with no penalty, and your I-485 app comes with you (this is what I did).
2. Once your green card is granted, that's *it*. Done. Total labor mobility. I could have walked out of INS after getting my card and gone worked for Burger Lord if I wanted.
Ever since my green card was granted I could work for whoever I wanted, no ties.
Nope!
:)
Funny story.
My original employer laid me off *before* my green card came through (cost cutting), but because they didn't want me totally screwed, they gave me 3 months notice - and during that time, I was able to get another job which *also* qualified as green card-able. My lawyer then used the AC21 clause to tell INS that, since my application had been pending for more than the legally-allowed six months, it was fine for me to move to another substantially similar job.
So I got a new job (better than the first, actually), had no break in employment *and* my green card application transfered seamlessly to the new employer - they had to do nothing. Indeed, since the filing of the i-485, the petition was all in my hands anyway.
Then, a few months later, my green card got approved. But still, it was a bit traumatic at the time.
Yes, GPS guided mortars.
The British Army pioneered the use of *laser* guided mortars. The US version is called PGMM - Precision Guided Mortar Munition. You laze the target, call for fire, and Johnny over the hill drops a few bombs down the tube in your general direction. The bombs have a guidance package on the nose and moveable fins on the back, giving them a fair amount of maneuverability - just like a laser-guided bomb from a plane.
It's no stretch that you could just swap the laser guidance package out with a GPS package (that's exactly what the US Airforce has done with their laser guided bombs), and use the same firing principle (know roughly where your target is, point the tube in the right direction at roughly the right inclination) to send GPS munitions downrange with *consistent* accuracy. It would be less useful in a military environment than laser designation, but more useful to a terrorist.
I believe this is *way* out of the reach of current terrorist organisations. But 9/11 made people real jumpy. I leave it as an exercise to the reader how GPS guided mortars could be used to really mess up someone's day. Hint: Buildings don't move. And before you say "but regular mortars are just as accurate" I'd say no, they're not - witness the IRA attempt to use mortars to hit 10 Downing Street in the mid 90s. They fired 6 shells, and only 1 hit anywhere near the target, landing in the garden behind the Cabinet room. The story would have been *much* different with GPS guided munitions.
One thing to remember about 'dumb' mortars is that, while they are *reasonably* accurate, you can make them more accurate. - PGMM is an attempt to resurrect the 'copperhead' laser designated artillery round of the '80s. The idea is to replace (expensive) on-call air strikes with organic, indirect-fire munitions with 1m CEP accuracy.
Some people really want to live in America, despite the hurdles and attitudes of some of the natives.
I know. I did exactly what the OP said - H1b to Green Card. It was hard, but do-able. I was fortunate in that my company paid for most of the legal fees (which were a touch over $8K).
Almost like the actual threat posed, and loss of life incurred, is not worth additional security measures that impose too onerous a imposition on law-abiding citizens.
If you do look at it statistically, 9/11, while horrific, really wasn't such an earth-shakingly bad thing that it now justifies draconian measures such as the Patriot act. After all, 12,000 people die on the US roads each year from DUI - 4 times the 9/11 deaths and (arguably) more preventable - about 8,000 of those deaths are single vehicle accidents (read as 'the drunk died'), but 4,000 deaths a year were innocents - other road users who were hit by the drunk. Yet where's the draconian DUI legislation?
I'm all for sensible and practical measures to mitigate likely threats. But the US response to terrorism has been knee-jerk in the extreme - out of proportion to the threat, and directly undermining the nature and intent of US society.
Photographing everyone who buys stamps is a great example of this.
Twice in 100 years?
versus how many hundreds of millions of postal transactions over the same time frame?
I'd say 'vanishingly small'.
GPS guided missiles.
Heck, even GPS guided mortars would be a significant threat.
Whether or not any existing terrorist organisation has the ability to do this is a point of discussion. But I suspect that Bush is worried - now that terrorists have already stolen ideas from a Tom Clancy novel, he's probably worried about all the *other* nasty things terrorists do in those books.
You know, I've only seen the full-screen ad once - months ago. Either they couldn't get sponsors or they've stopped doing it in our market. Or maybe I don't notice it because I don't pause enough, or the screen saver kicks in before the ad is displayed.
...yet.
I still have 30-sec skip out of the box and the ability to download shows to my PC with free tools over the built in NIC. Sure, it may not run Linux, but it has 2 advantages over TiVO:
1. It doesn't force me to watch commercials while fast forwarding.
2. It doesn't assume I'm a gay octogenarian and record shows it thinks I'll love.
Who is the target audience for this? Early adopter techies? Who already have a broadband connection, bittorrent and a decent PC? Why would they want or need another piece of kit (and a *subscription* piece at that!) to get porn from the internet?
This thing isn't a DVR, but costs the same as a Tivo or ReplayTV. Same price, less functionality! I predict this device will go the way of DivX - the rental DVD idea, not the codec.
There's a company called Acacia that's suing lots of .edu for streaming media patent infringements. Looks like MS has offered a pretty big shield for .edu here - so long as you stream using MS tech, they'll protect you.
That'll be a blow for Acacia - their business plan relies on suing individual institutions in a 'divide and conquor' manner and persuading others to license the right to stream media for a pretty substantial fee. They won't want to take on MS.
Of course not, they are practically commodities. People only shop for them when they move into a house or the old one dies, and no-one cares about being the first to get the latest kenmore.
:)
I'll tell you this for free - a $50 computer game with a $15 production cost is far more of a commodity good than a $300 freezer.
But video game and movie consumers really do want to get the game/movie as soon as they can. The producers encourage this, but the demand would exist even without their encouragement.
Not true. If you didn't know a product existed, you can't want it. Consumers want games because they're told they're being developed, beta versions are reviewed by the trade press, and marketing campaigns are launched by the publishers. Demand does not exist in a vacuum.
If they did do what you said and allowed stores to sell as soon as they got it, that would artificially limit supply on the first days, allowing lucky retailers to gouge people that were willing to buy it, and hurting the sales of unlucky stores whose shipment arrived a day latter.
Again, not quite correct. If the distributer wanted, they could go gold, press a million copies, distribute them to local distributers across the nation, *then* release them simultaneously to retail channels. Everyone would get as much product as they wanted in the first day or so they were available. Supply is *already* artificially limited by retailers - what do you think the pre-order system at Electronics Boutique is for? It's to encourage you to pre-pay for a game so they only have to buy as many units from their distibuter as they can sell. It maximises their product by limiting the overstock.
And you're really not going to die if you don't get that copy of Tony Hawk XXVI Extreeeeme on release day.
Really. You're not.
Instead the publishers deliberately go for these Day One Sales events - they do it to fuel demand and boost their chances at getting the #1 slot in the charts, not as a service to the customer, but to make more money by creating an 'event' around the release of a product. They do not do it out of the goodness of their hearts.
If you believe otherwise, you probably haven't worked with Marketing people enough.
By treating their game like a movie, with all the attendant buzz about weekend sales and sales rankings, it is the distributors of the product that are to blame.
Are there 'release dates' for white goods? No. The producer places the product in the channel, and distributors and retailers get it when they get it, without restriction on when they can start *selling* the product.
By trying to artificially control demand through massive 'first day sales', it is the publisher who is to blame, not the stores who sell the product early.
The game has already gone gold. MS and Bungie will still get money from the sales. Some rubes on eBay will be out some more $$$ just for bragging rights. All that will happen is that some PR prick will feel as though their spectacular launch day has been violated.
But tomorrow, the sun will still rise and Halo 2 will remain just a game.
The bees, on the other hand... the bees will soon control the world.