If their productivity is negative 1 and they're paid $60k/year, and your productivity is 10x average, then doesn't that imply being paid negative $600k/year?:-P
As an aside, the "dead weight" you refer to, I've also encountered. And I would suggest some of them have negative productivity--meaning your team would have been farther ahead had you never hired them in the first place. (Which means you're paying money to slow your team down.)
I've seen much bigger productivity gaps between the best developers and average guys who have maybe 1 to 3 years of experience under their belt. I'm talking about folks who have mastered their art over the corse of a couple of decades and who could (for example) design and build a new programming language and a basic compiler proof of concept in a month.
I understand that there are a lot of folks out there who are down on the idea of "superstar programmers" and who believe the idea that anyone mastering the art of development is somehow detrimental. But in my experience the ones who are the loudest to complain about substantial productivity differences are ones who have risen to "Senior Developer" status but who still engage in "voodoo stick" programming.
It's well known that the productivity difference between someone just starting in software development and someone who is proficient in the art of development can be as much as a factor of 20. (Source: Mythical Man Month, and personal experience.) Yet somehow the difference in compensation (unless you win the lottery in some startup IPO) is more like a factor of 2.
This, unlike all other industries, where the difference in compensation correlates with the difference in productivity.
I hope this starts a trend. And I hope the trend also correlates with a trend towards weeding out unproductive--but politically connected--developers who seem to be managerial favorites but couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag.
Look, a polar bear or a shark are not "intelligent" in the sense we think of intelligence--yet they will rip you to shreds because they can, because they're hungry and driven to eat.
So what makes something dangerous is its will to act--it's desire to take an action based on a set of built-in motivations that lead it to kill.
Without that desire to act, at best a super-intelligent AI is going to... what? Stumble in your way, causing you to trip?
I can tell you why so many mobile UIs have such teeny, tiny little fonts.
It's because most UIs are laid out in Photoshop, on computers with screens with 100dpi screens. And they're being deployed on screens with 300dpi or more.
I once had a fight with a UI designer telling him his 11-point/9-point font simply would not work on a mobile device, and he needed to bump it up to 17-point/14-point, minimum. He didn't believe me until I held my phone up to the screen next to his photoshop window, then asked him to shrink the photoshop window down to 290 px by 193 px--which is the same size on a 100dpi screen as the iPhone 4. Then he realized the hot mess he was creating.
I get so sick and tired of designers calling for itty-bitty fonts thinking that nearly 1 foot diagonal photoshop window is representative of a 3.5 inch screen.
Ohmygod, you mean getting rid of door knobs and those silly "push"/"pull" signs makes it harder to figure out where the damned door is and how to open it? Who would have guessed? </sarcasm>
This shows how government without breaking the law on spying on Americans (yeah, I know - like they care) can build a dossier on folks that would be an East German Stasi agent's wet dream.
It's worse than this.
I don't think it's settled law if it is considered spying if all your personal information is processed by a computer algorithm without ever being seen by a human being.
I agree that there's some subjectivity to the idea of hate crimes, but documenting the most egregious does not seem to be a slippery slope toward totalitarianism.
No, of course not. Until someone cuts off your Internet access and starts controlling the content you are allowed to post on the Internet in general. After all, as we all know, the Great Firewall of China is no big deal. Right?
Seriously I don't think we're going to go down that path, but only because in the weeks or months to follow, all this virtue signaling will no longer matter, and cooler heads will prevail. (Or at least be reminded of their legal obligations as a common carrier not to editorialize the content that travels through their systems, or run the risk of liability for every. last. byte that travels over their service. I mean, you can't stand for Net Neutrality, but only for people you like, right?)
What would be funny to me is if they accept all stories based on "being struck or physically assaulted based on my own personal beliefs."
I guarantee the database would then be overran with a million stories of folks on the right being attacked by Union members or Antifa marchers attacking reporters. Worse, we may even incentivize idiots like the person who went to the Durham NC left-wing protests organized by the communist Workers World Party with a pro-Trump message, just so they can become a right-wing martyr. Source
(I don't care what your politics are. If you walk into an organized protest as a counter-protester, you're not there to make friends.)
At that point the database would become useless, because it would be filled not with spontaneous acts of criminal "hate" committed on innocent bystanders, but filled with provocateurs seeking a fight so they can add their name to the database.
Being a provocateur seeking to pick a fight to become a martyr is not unheard of in U.S. history. Rosa Parks, famous for refusing to give up her seat to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, was not some innocent bystander who stumbled onto a bus, was a little tired and decided not to move. She was a civil rights activist and was picked specifically by the NAACP in order to provoke a confrontation, in order to have standing in court so as to attack the racial bias laws in Alabama.
If I'm permitted to punch someone for aspects they can change, then I can punch a Democrat for being a Democrat, or a Muslim for being Muslim, or a Liberal for being Liberal, or--if we assume homosexual behavior (as opposed to internal feelings or desires) is elected behavior (you can choose not to kiss someone, for example)--I can punch a homosexual for acting gay. Is that the world you wish to live in?
I suspect not.
Which takes us right back to the problem with 'hate crimes', in that, at the bottom of the stack, they become subjective as hell.
Personally if I were to call something a "hate crime", it would include punching people because of their religion or because of the way they choose to express their sexuality. But that's my own subjective opinion.
You mean the CEOs of companies like Google and Apple and Amazon have become modern-day Robber Barons, seeking to control governments and culture without being accountable to anyone, even going so far as to suggest laws that lock in their power?
Huh. Odd how power corrupts even the most "woke" folks. Almost like it'd be nice if we had things like checks and balances or something.
The problem with developing an AI to detect "hate crimes" is "garbage in, garbage out": you can never create a race-free AI if you train it using bad data which may be racially biased. And because we cannot train AIs without input data, and because the input data is all bad--all we would be doing is hard-coding bad assumptions into inscrutable and unaccountable algorithms.
The problem I have with the data sources that may then be used by organizations like Google is that they inherently become subjective as all hell.
For example, if we were to use the definition of a "hate crime" as one where a group or organization engages in violent actions in order to create social change, you not only scoop up White Separatists, but you also scoop up many in the Civil Rights movement, who used violence to get change. You also scoop up the labor rights activists of the early 1900's who engaged in violence in order to promote social change.
So inherently the definition of a "hate crime" becomes inherently tied up in who is doing the hating and what is being hated.
A Westboro Church member punches a homosexual because of who he is, and of course it's a "hate crime." But a homosexual punches a Westboro Church member because of who he is--well, the fact pattern is exactly the same: A punches B because of who B is. But should that be classified as a hate crime?
It's why I'd like to see us do away with the whole concept of "hate crimes" and prosecute the underlying crime instead. And if you want social change badly enough you are willing to sacrifice your life (and become a prisoner for your actions) then so be it. The public can then judge if you're a martyr or a murderer based on the social currents rather than by overt definition.
I think the real problem is that, at the bottom of the ontological stack, we don't really have a coherent theory of what government should actually be.
I mean, on the Right it's basically a limited laundry list, more or less corresponding to the enumerated powers in the Constitution (and forgetting the 10th Amendment, prior to the 12th, permitted States to do whatever the hell they wanted, including religious tests to qualify for state office--meaning we'd have 50 little tyrannies instead of one big one). And for the Left, it's basically a utopian vision of the future for which government should intervene (meddling and even restricting little liberties if it serves this Star-Trek utopian vision).
That is, we define government by our laundry list of pet projects, rather than defining government based on what government should actually be--what role government serves in the greater society.
So of course both sides are completely contradictory: the whole "big government"/"small government" seems hypocritical because they're just branding: slogans they use to help sell their laundry list of pet projects.
Personally, I believe government is three things.
First, it is the agency which assures trust between citizens. Thus, things like the police and the FDA and agencies which makes sure when you buy a new car you don't buy a lemon. That is, it helps guarantee trust between strangers so we can build a complex economic society based on complex interactions with people we barely know. (Do you know the name of the manager at the bank which holds thousands of your money?)
Second, it is an agency capable of mobilizing a massive first response in the event of an emergency. (Again, think police officers and fire fighters who arrive on scene when an airplane crash lands, or when a tornado strikes.)
And third, it is the agency capable of funding or managing projects where there is a market failure, where normal market forces run contrary to desired social outcomes. (Think, for example, of government back-stopping the desperately ill, or funding the interstate highway system.) The key, however, is "market failure"; sadly too many people want to claim a market failure because they hate their neighbors. I believe this power needs to be limited in light of the first point as well; having the government claim "market failure" left and right actually reduces trust.
In light of this, I think we can then have a debate over which laundry list items on the Left and the Right actually belong on the government's plate. (And yes, I know; the third point makes that debate contentious because the Left sees market failures in the fact that you ate a banana this morning while I didn't, while the Right sees no market failures when an insurance company drops someone because they got cancer. But at least we're having the right debate.)
Sure, Trump may have groused to several of the people who he works with--but for this to be made a condition of the sale would open a huge legal can of worms.
Which is why I would take a wait and see attitude here. My guess is it won't happen: the Trump Administration won't meddle with the inner workings of CNN as a condition of the sale.
On the flip side, if the Trump Administration does do this, pop some popcorn and watch the feathers fly! Because this would guarantee that the anti-trust regulations and the business regulation powers of the government would fly up against some hard Constitutional limits--and my guess is it would define how we see the SEC in the news for at least a few years. Worse, I think this would make some very interesting bedfellows as right-of-center anti-regulation conservatives (who think mergers like this should never require oversight) find themselves in bed with left-of-center "don't mess with my journalism we hate Trump" types.
I'm reminded of the policies of the U.S. in managing national forests at the start of the 20th century. For decades the policy of the U.S. was to put out all forest fires immediately, not realizing that forest fires play a role in forest ecology out West. (Some pine trees cannot reproduce, for example, without a fire to help open up pine cones full of seeds. Fire also helps to clear out dry undergrowth which chokes out forests.)
That policy lead to several unintended consequences. Without fire, timber harvests shrank as trees wound up competing with undergrowth for resources. Fuel for fire also accumulated (as it was not being regularly burned off)--and that lead to several incredibly catastrophic forest fires which persist to this day.
It doesn't help that, thinking the risk of fire had been controlled, a lot of homes have been built adjacent to at-risk forests.
Every time I hear of some group wanting to engage in planet-scale geo-engineering, I think of how poorly we understand the ecology of forests, and the forest fires out west which regularly burn millions of acres each year. I think of the 2007 California wildfires which caused the evacuation of towns all over the Southern California area--at one point displacing 1 million people.
But I'm sure today's geo-hackers will do a better job. </sarcasm>
I suspect this will be an unpopular opinion, but I can't see any particularly good reason for any kind of restrictions on the flow of labor.
Personally I'm in complete agreement.
Generally I find arguments against the free flow of labor to be protectionist in nature--and while in the short term protectionism provides short-term gains to whomever is being protected, in the long term they tend to create drags on the economy. And that's true regardless of what you import: cars, soap or workers.
Besides, one reason why the quality of immigrants we get in the United States has historically been better than those who stay behind is because the cost (in terms of expense and effort) to immigrate to a foreign country is high, and rather risky. So historically those who immigrate to the United States generally self-select: they are the ones with the means to come here and the willingness to take risks that make them good entrepreneurs.
Fact of life: any time you change regulations there are always losers. When you talk about regulations at the federal level, sadly, you need to approach the problem by recognizing you're trying to maximize overall "good", recognizing the fact that some folks will always fall between the cracks.
Even creating exceptions for every fiddly little fringe case doesn't solve the problem, since the folks who fall between the cracks are those of average intelligence who can't navigate the list of exceptions.
Republican here, though my answer to you will be more thought out than your typical response.
First, it's important to separate between regulations and regulatory burdens. The former is something you have to comply with. The later is your cost to assure compliance.
A simple example of this is taxes. The former is the fact that you have to pay taxes. The later is you sweating over your tax returns every year, making sure you fill in all the right forms or talk to the right tax professional, and hoping you got it right so you don't get a mail audit. (Fun fact: for the first few years out of college I did my own taxes and used a mail audit to both learn what I did wrong, and as a sort of "return receipt" on my taxes.)
Most other civilized countries in the world assure regulatory compliance differently: they send you your completed taxes based on information provided to you by your bank, your employer, and other sources. Then you can either ignore it (which is interpreted as meaning your taxes were done correctly) or you can file a form indicating corrections.
The regulations are the same, more or less. But compliance is far easier.
In today's world there are plenty of regulations where compliance is a royal pain in the neck. The worst examples I can think of all revolve around starting your own freelance company: do you know what the legal requirements and licensing requirements are in your district or municipality regulating working at home? In some cases, just finding out what you need to do can be an all-day process, which is why some people working at home are actually breaking the law: they just don't know it.
Setting aside your complaints of racism, one reason why some of us would like to eliminate H-1B and replace it with something else is because the rules behind H-1B creates some onerous requirements that resemble indentured servitude.
When you receive an H-1B visa, you must be sponsored by a company, and that creates a situation where if you lose your job, you may also lose your apartment, your friends, and everything you own that you can't carry on the airplane as you are shipped back "home." This puts H-1B holders at a significant disadvantage during salary negotiations, since their status (including the path towards citizenship or green card status) can effectively be held hostage by the sponsoring corporation.
Further, there is a cap on how long someone on an H-1B can stay in the United States. After that period, it's not uncommon for people (usually computer programmers and systems analysts) to return back to the country where they originally came from--but retain their jobs via telecommuting, but at a lower salary (on the theory the cost of living is cheaper). This contributes to off-shoring of jobs.
Personally I would rather see this system replaced with one which greatly simplifies the process of gaining a green card (permanent residency). This would prevent many of the abuses of the H-1B program, as a permanent resident doesn't have to rely on a corporate sponsor to stay. Just as I'd like to see the path to citizenship greatly simplified as well.
The International Entrepreneur Rule... doesn't offer a visa but rather a type of "parole"...
The rule grants a stay in the US of 30 months, which can be extended for an additional 30 months. Founders can't apply for a green card during that time.
If I were President I'd scrap this rule too--because it's just too confusing. But then, everything having to do with visiting and obtaining permission to work within the United States, as well as with immigrating to the United States, is just terribly confusing. And I say this as a U.S. citizen.
Personally I would rather we simplify all these regulations regarding immigration--and make it easier for people who qualify to immigrate here without all this weird mumbo-jumbo "parole, no green card, 30 months, can't visit overseas for longer than so many days, do not pass go, must recite ancient Aramaic to come back" nonsense. I swear; just talking to my friends who immigrated here from overseas about what they had to do to become U.S. citizens gives me a massive headache.
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If their productivity is negative 1 and they're paid $60k/year, and your productivity is 10x average, then doesn't that imply being paid negative $600k/year? :-P
As an aside, the "dead weight" you refer to, I've also encountered. And I would suggest some of them have negative productivity--meaning your team would have been farther ahead had you never hired them in the first place. (Which means you're paying money to slow your team down.)
I've seen much bigger productivity gaps between the best developers and average guys who have maybe 1 to 3 years of experience under their belt. I'm talking about folks who have mastered their art over the corse of a couple of decades and who could (for example) design and build a new programming language and a basic compiler proof of concept in a month.
I understand that there are a lot of folks out there who are down on the idea of "superstar programmers" and who believe the idea that anyone mastering the art of development is somehow detrimental. But in my experience the ones who are the loudest to complain about substantial productivity differences are ones who have risen to "Senior Developer" status but who still engage in "voodoo stick" programming.
It's well known that the productivity difference between someone just starting in software development and someone who is proficient in the art of development can be as much as a factor of 20. (Source: Mythical Man Month, and personal experience.) Yet somehow the difference in compensation (unless you win the lottery in some startup IPO) is more like a factor of 2.
This, unlike all other industries, where the difference in compensation correlates with the difference in productivity.
I hope this starts a trend. And I hope the trend also correlates with a trend towards weeding out unproductive--but politically connected--developers who seem to be managerial favorites but couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag.
But I doubt it.
Look, a polar bear or a shark are not "intelligent" in the sense we think of intelligence--yet they will rip you to shreds because they can, because they're hungry and driven to eat.
So what makes something dangerous is its will to act--it's desire to take an action based on a set of built-in motivations that lead it to kill.
Without that desire to act, at best a super-intelligent AI is going to... what? Stumble in your way, causing you to trip?
Doesn't matter the number passed or the metric; the point is that for his design, you'd need a friggin' microscope.
I can tell you why so many mobile UIs have such teeny, tiny little fonts.
It's because most UIs are laid out in Photoshop, on computers with screens with 100dpi screens. And they're being deployed on screens with 300dpi or more.
I once had a fight with a UI designer telling him his 11-point/9-point font simply would not work on a mobile device, and he needed to bump it up to 17-point/14-point, minimum. He didn't believe me until I held my phone up to the screen next to his photoshop window, then asked him to shrink the photoshop window down to 290 px by 193 px--which is the same size on a 100dpi screen as the iPhone 4. Then he realized the hot mess he was creating.
I get so sick and tired of designers calling for itty-bitty fonts thinking that nearly 1 foot diagonal photoshop window is representative of a 3.5 inch screen.
Ohmygod, you mean getting rid of door knobs and those silly "push"/"pull" signs makes it harder to figure out where the damned door is and how to open it? Who would have guessed? </sarcasm>
It's worse than this.
I don't think it's settled law if it is considered spying if all your personal information is processed by a computer algorithm without ever being seen by a human being.
And in today's world, it is increasingly easier to spy on people by algorithm.
Presently that is not the law in the United States.
No, of course not. Until someone cuts off your Internet access and starts controlling the content you are allowed to post on the Internet in general. After all, as we all know, the Great Firewall of China is no big deal. Right?
Seriously I don't think we're going to go down that path, but only because in the weeks or months to follow, all this virtue signaling will no longer matter, and cooler heads will prevail. (Or at least be reminded of their legal obligations as a common carrier not to editorialize the content that travels through their systems, or run the risk of liability for every. last. byte that travels over their service. I mean, you can't stand for Net Neutrality, but only for people you like, right?)
What would be funny to me is if they accept all stories based on "being struck or physically assaulted based on my own personal beliefs."
I guarantee the database would then be overran with a million stories of folks on the right being attacked by Union members or Antifa marchers attacking reporters. Worse, we may even incentivize idiots like the person who went to the Durham NC left-wing protests organized by the communist Workers World Party with a pro-Trump message, just so they can become a right-wing martyr. Source
(I don't care what your politics are. If you walk into an organized protest as a counter-protester, you're not there to make friends.)
At that point the database would become useless, because it would be filled not with spontaneous acts of criminal "hate" committed on innocent bystanders, but filled with provocateurs seeking a fight so they can add their name to the database.
Being a provocateur seeking to pick a fight to become a martyr is not unheard of in U.S. history. Rosa Parks, famous for refusing to give up her seat to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, was not some innocent bystander who stumbled onto a bus, was a little tired and decided not to move. She was a civil rights activist and was picked specifically by the NAACP in order to provoke a confrontation, in order to have standing in court so as to attack the racial bias laws in Alabama.
This is how this sort of thing is done.
If I'm permitted to punch someone for aspects they can change, then I can punch a Democrat for being a Democrat, or a Muslim for being Muslim, or a Liberal for being Liberal, or--if we assume homosexual behavior (as opposed to internal feelings or desires) is elected behavior (you can choose not to kiss someone, for example)--I can punch a homosexual for acting gay. Is that the world you wish to live in?
I suspect not.
Which takes us right back to the problem with 'hate crimes', in that, at the bottom of the stack, they become subjective as hell.
Personally if I were to call something a "hate crime", it would include punching people because of their religion or because of the way they choose to express their sexuality. But that's my own subjective opinion.
You mean the CEOs of companies like Google and Apple and Amazon have become modern-day Robber Barons, seeking to control governments and culture without being accountable to anyone, even going so far as to suggest laws that lock in their power?
Huh. Odd how power corrupts even the most "woke" folks. Almost like it'd be nice if we had things like checks and balances or something.
Remember Microsoft's racist AI? Or how about the racist algorithms being used in criminal sentencing?
The problem with developing an AI to detect "hate crimes" is "garbage in, garbage out": you can never create a race-free AI if you train it using bad data which may be racially biased. And because we cannot train AIs without input data, and because the input data is all bad--all we would be doing is hard-coding bad assumptions into inscrutable and unaccountable algorithms.
The problem I have with the data sources that may then be used by organizations like Google is that they inherently become subjective as all hell.
For example, if we were to use the definition of a "hate crime" as one where a group or organization engages in violent actions in order to create social change, you not only scoop up White Separatists, but you also scoop up many in the Civil Rights movement, who used violence to get change. You also scoop up the labor rights activists of the early 1900's who engaged in violence in order to promote social change.
So inherently the definition of a "hate crime" becomes inherently tied up in who is doing the hating and what is being hated.
A Westboro Church member punches a homosexual because of who he is, and of course it's a "hate crime." But a homosexual punches a Westboro Church member because of who he is--well, the fact pattern is exactly the same: A punches B because of who B is. But should that be classified as a hate crime?
It's why I'd like to see us do away with the whole concept of "hate crimes" and prosecute the underlying crime instead. And if you want social change badly enough you are willing to sacrifice your life (and become a prisoner for your actions) then so be it. The public can then judge if you're a martyr or a murderer based on the social currents rather than by overt definition.
There. FTFY.
I think the real problem is that, at the bottom of the ontological stack, we don't really have a coherent theory of what government should actually be.
I mean, on the Right it's basically a limited laundry list, more or less corresponding to the enumerated powers in the Constitution (and forgetting the 10th Amendment, prior to the 12th, permitted States to do whatever the hell they wanted, including religious tests to qualify for state office--meaning we'd have 50 little tyrannies instead of one big one). And for the Left, it's basically a utopian vision of the future for which government should intervene (meddling and even restricting little liberties if it serves this Star-Trek utopian vision).
That is, we define government by our laundry list of pet projects, rather than defining government based on what government should actually be--what role government serves in the greater society.
So of course both sides are completely contradictory: the whole "big government"/"small government" seems hypocritical because they're just branding: slogans they use to help sell their laundry list of pet projects.
Personally, I believe government is three things.
First, it is the agency which assures trust between citizens. Thus, things like the police and the FDA and agencies which makes sure when you buy a new car you don't buy a lemon. That is, it helps guarantee trust between strangers so we can build a complex economic society based on complex interactions with people we barely know. (Do you know the name of the manager at the bank which holds thousands of your money?)
Second, it is an agency capable of mobilizing a massive first response in the event of an emergency. (Again, think police officers and fire fighters who arrive on scene when an airplane crash lands, or when a tornado strikes.)
And third, it is the agency capable of funding or managing projects where there is a market failure, where normal market forces run contrary to desired social outcomes. (Think, for example, of government back-stopping the desperately ill, or funding the interstate highway system.) The key, however, is "market failure"; sadly too many people want to claim a market failure because they hate their neighbors. I believe this power needs to be limited in light of the first point as well; having the government claim "market failure" left and right actually reduces trust.
In light of this, I think we can then have a debate over which laundry list items on the Left and the Right actually belong on the government's plate. (And yes, I know; the third point makes that debate contentious because the Left sees market failures in the fact that you ate a banana this morning while I didn't, while the Right sees no market failures when an insurance company drops someone because they got cancer. But at least we're having the right debate.)
Sure, Trump may have groused to several of the people who he works with--but for this to be made a condition of the sale would open a huge legal can of worms.
Which is why I would take a wait and see attitude here. My guess is it won't happen: the Trump Administration won't meddle with the inner workings of CNN as a condition of the sale.
On the flip side, if the Trump Administration does do this, pop some popcorn and watch the feathers fly! Because this would guarantee that the anti-trust regulations and the business regulation powers of the government would fly up against some hard Constitutional limits--and my guess is it would define how we see the SEC in the news for at least a few years. Worse, I think this would make some very interesting bedfellows as right-of-center anti-regulation conservatives (who think mergers like this should never require oversight) find themselves in bed with left-of-center "don't mess with my journalism we hate Trump" types.
I'm reminded of the policies of the U.S. in managing national forests at the start of the 20th century. For decades the policy of the U.S. was to put out all forest fires immediately, not realizing that forest fires play a role in forest ecology out West. (Some pine trees cannot reproduce, for example, without a fire to help open up pine cones full of seeds. Fire also helps to clear out dry undergrowth which chokes out forests.)
That policy lead to several unintended consequences. Without fire, timber harvests shrank as trees wound up competing with undergrowth for resources. Fuel for fire also accumulated (as it was not being regularly burned off)--and that lead to several incredibly catastrophic forest fires which persist to this day.
It doesn't help that, thinking the risk of fire had been controlled, a lot of homes have been built adjacent to at-risk forests.
Every time I hear of some group wanting to engage in planet-scale geo-engineering, I think of how poorly we understand the ecology of forests, and the forest fires out west which regularly burn millions of acres each year. I think of the 2007 California wildfires which caused the evacuation of towns all over the Southern California area--at one point displacing 1 million people.
But I'm sure today's geo-hackers will do a better job. </sarcasm>
Personally I'm in complete agreement.
Generally I find arguments against the free flow of labor to be protectionist in nature--and while in the short term protectionism provides short-term gains to whomever is being protected, in the long term they tend to create drags on the economy. And that's true regardless of what you import: cars, soap or workers.
Besides, one reason why the quality of immigrants we get in the United States has historically been better than those who stay behind is because the cost (in terms of expense and effort) to immigrate to a foreign country is high, and rather risky. So historically those who immigrate to the United States generally self-select: they are the ones with the means to come here and the willingness to take risks that make them good entrepreneurs.
Fact of life: any time you change regulations there are always losers. When you talk about regulations at the federal level, sadly, you need to approach the problem by recognizing you're trying to maximize overall "good", recognizing the fact that some folks will always fall between the cracks.
Even creating exceptions for every fiddly little fringe case doesn't solve the problem, since the folks who fall between the cracks are those of average intelligence who can't navigate the list of exceptions.
Republican here, though my answer to you will be more thought out than your typical response.
First, it's important to separate between regulations and regulatory burdens. The former is something you have to comply with. The later is your cost to assure compliance.
A simple example of this is taxes. The former is the fact that you have to pay taxes. The later is you sweating over your tax returns every year, making sure you fill in all the right forms or talk to the right tax professional, and hoping you got it right so you don't get a mail audit. (Fun fact: for the first few years out of college I did my own taxes and used a mail audit to both learn what I did wrong, and as a sort of "return receipt" on my taxes.)
Most other civilized countries in the world assure regulatory compliance differently: they send you your completed taxes based on information provided to you by your bank, your employer, and other sources. Then you can either ignore it (which is interpreted as meaning your taxes were done correctly) or you can file a form indicating corrections.
The regulations are the same, more or less. But compliance is far easier.
In today's world there are plenty of regulations where compliance is a royal pain in the neck. The worst examples I can think of all revolve around starting your own freelance company: do you know what the legal requirements and licensing requirements are in your district or municipality regulating working at home? In some cases, just finding out what you need to do can be an all-day process, which is why some people working at home are actually breaking the law: they just don't know it.
Setting aside your complaints of racism, one reason why some of us would like to eliminate H-1B and replace it with something else is because the rules behind H-1B creates some onerous requirements that resemble indentured servitude.
When you receive an H-1B visa, you must be sponsored by a company, and that creates a situation where if you lose your job, you may also lose your apartment, your friends, and everything you own that you can't carry on the airplane as you are shipped back "home." This puts H-1B holders at a significant disadvantage during salary negotiations, since their status (including the path towards citizenship or green card status) can effectively be held hostage by the sponsoring corporation.
Further, there is a cap on how long someone on an H-1B can stay in the United States. After that period, it's not uncommon for people (usually computer programmers and systems analysts) to return back to the country where they originally came from--but retain their jobs via telecommuting, but at a lower salary (on the theory the cost of living is cheaper). This contributes to off-shoring of jobs.
Personally I would rather see this system replaced with one which greatly simplifies the process of gaining a green card (permanent residency). This would prevent many of the abuses of the H-1B program, as a permanent resident doesn't have to rely on a corporate sponsor to stay. Just as I'd like to see the path to citizenship greatly simplified as well.
If I were President I'd scrap this rule too--because it's just too confusing. But then, everything having to do with visiting and obtaining permission to work within the United States, as well as with immigrating to the United States, is just terribly confusing. And I say this as a U.S. citizen.
Personally I would rather we simplify all these regulations regarding immigration--and make it easier for people who qualify to immigrate here without all this weird mumbo-jumbo "parole, no green card, 30 months, can't visit overseas for longer than so many days, do not pass go, must recite ancient Aramaic to come back" nonsense. I swear; just talking to my friends who immigrated here from overseas about what they had to do to become U.S. citizens gives me a massive headache.