You are quite wrong. Companies are required to pay a prevailing wage. This wage is sometimes more than they want to be paying for that position! Also, there is additional cost associated with obtaining the visa, most of which must leagally be paid by the sponsor (ie, the company, not the foreign worker). And they are also required to cover the cost of transportation for the person back into their home country if/when they let them go.
This is NOT a cheap labor option - companies do this only if they very much want those individuals because of their exceptional skills.
I think the prevailing wage issue is an important point. The department of labor has complicated tables to calculate this. In order to be granted an H1-B, you MUST be paid at least the prevailing wage, else the INS will not grant you the visa. The wages are calculated based on what an equally qualified Americans in your jobs get paid on average, to ensure that foreign workers on H1-Bs are not underpaid.
H1-B is a temporary work visa. It is given to foreigners seeking work in their fields. The company must sponsor you for this visa and demonstrate that you are not replacing an American citizen equally qualified for the job.
The way to get to work in Europe is to hit the international giants - big companies that have locations all over the world. What you want to do is apply directly to the site you're interested to work at, or to their "hiring site" for Europe (some companies will have one central hiring site for all of Europe or a few countries).
Often, with companies like these, you will also not have a language problem because the spoken language at the company will be English (since a large fraction of the employees come from countries all over the world).
From my experience, if you have solid education background, this sort of thing is pretty easy to do for engineering positions.
But who's going to pay for all the research & development costs if you're only offering prizes to some and not allowing patents? It costs millions of dollars to get a drug through R&D - noone can just cover that out of their own pockets. More people would die under your strategy because no research would be done.
Not yet, but they do claim at the end that they are hoping to get a five-year life out of those. I wonder what the limitations on the life of the hearts is right now. Battery-related?
Also, did you notice how heavy the heart and the associated equipment will be? That's an extra 7 pounds one will have to carry around - not negligible.
I like the idea of a backup battery power in the heart itself, though. It's appealing not only because it's a backup system, but also because it allows people to do things like go swimming, take a bath, etc. without having to worry about non-waterproof parts that they carry on the outside.
I definitely agree with you that education is an important part of disease prevention. However, I disagree that AIDS is a behavioral-only disease. It is true that you can make changes to your behavior to minimize your risk in some case, but there are other ways of contracting the disease that are also very common which you have no control over:
* being born to a parent with HIV and thus having HIV ever since you were born
* getting blood transfusions with infected blood (not a problem in the US, but still a problem in other countries)
* contracting the disease during doctor or dentist visits/surgical procedures (not common in the US, but very common elsewhere)
These are just a few examples. So yes, individuals should be educated about the risk of contracting the disease, but others, especially health care providers, also need to be educated about ways to stop spreading the disease.
Slashdot Mirror
You are quite wrong. Companies are required to pay a prevailing wage. This wage is sometimes more than they want to be paying for that position! Also, there is additional cost associated with obtaining the visa, most of which must leagally be paid by the sponsor (ie, the company, not the foreign worker). And they are also required to cover the cost of transportation for the person back into their home country if/when they let them go.
This is NOT a cheap labor option - companies do this only if they very much want those individuals because of their exceptional skills.
I think the prevailing wage issue is an important point. The department of labor has complicated tables to calculate this. In order to be granted an H1-B, you MUST be paid at least the prevailing wage, else the INS will not grant you the visa. The wages are calculated based on what an equally qualified Americans in your jobs get paid on average, to ensure that foreign workers on H1-Bs are not underpaid.
H1-B is a temporary work visa. It is given to foreigners seeking work in their fields. The company must sponsor you for this visa and demonstrate that you are not replacing an American citizen equally qualified for the job.
what's S11?
Often, with companies like these, you will also not have a language problem because the spoken language at the company will be English (since a large fraction of the employees come from countries all over the world).
From my experience, if you have solid education background, this sort of thing is pretty easy to do for engineering positions.
But who's going to pay for all the research & development costs if you're only offering prizes to some and not allowing patents? It costs millions of dollars to get a drug through R&D - noone can just cover that out of their own pockets. More people would die under your strategy because no research would be done.
Also, did you notice how heavy the heart and the associated equipment will be? That's an extra 7 pounds one will have to carry around - not negligible.
I like the idea of a backup battery power in the heart itself, though. It's appealing not only because it's a backup system, but also because it allows people to do things like go swimming, take a bath, etc. without having to worry about non-waterproof parts that they carry on the outside.
* being born to a parent with HIV and thus having HIV ever since you were born
* getting blood transfusions with infected blood (not a problem in the US, but still a problem in other countries)
* contracting the disease during doctor or dentist visits/surgical procedures (not common in the US, but very common elsewhere)
These are just a few examples. So yes, individuals should be educated about the risk of contracting the disease, but others, especially health care providers, also need to be educated about ways to stop spreading the disease.