Yes, that's right. People invest money in companies hoping to get their money back and earn a profit. They are not giving the money to charity. CEOs are hired to provide a return on the investors investment.
Which is the same way Jobs makes his $$$ but it kills jobs but some investors wealthy.
Investors start/fund companies that create jobs. Companies are in no way bound to provide employment to anyone.
To the rest of your post... you are not thinking globally. U.S. companies and U.S. labor are in competition with foreign companies and foreign labor for foreign and domestic cusotmers. If demand for tech jobs is high (which Bill Gates says it is) and supply is low, then the costs for labor will be high. So limiting H1-Bs keeps wages high. That's great for those people who have jobs... for the short term. But since all of the skilled foreigners are now no longer working in the U.S. for U.S. companies, they're going to be working for foreign companies for less money, selling their services to domestic and foreign customers for less money and effectively beating U.S. companies in the marketplace. As U.S. companies lose they will reduce the # of jobs they need, meaning U.S. employees will lose their jobs. As demand drops off for U.S. labor, wages will drop as well. The end result is that you have strong foreign companies and a weekend labor market in the U.S.
BTW, the article's title is misleading. Gates isn't calling for an increase, he's calling for an extension to the temporary limits set on foreign workers.
I did not get that from the article at all. Cite your source.
From the article:
The United States should remove visa limits to allow more skilled foreign citizens to work at U.S. companies if it wants to remain a leader in technology, Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) Chairman Bill Gates said on Wednesday.
"The whole idea of the H-1B visa thing is, don't let too many smart people come into the country. The whole thing doesn't make sense," Gates said.
But he reserved his sharpest criticism for the visa caps, which he called "almost a case of a centrally controlled economy."
"If the demand is there, why have the regulation at all?" he said.
Someone needs to write a piece of software. If an Indian company can do it for $10 and a U.S. company can do it for $50. Who do you think customers are going to buy from? They don't care who makes the software as long as it works. Locking jobs in the U.S. and artifically inflating wages only makes sense if the U.S. is the only provider of a particular resource. We're not when it comes to IT, we are most likely the best provider right now (or one of the best), but by using legislation and not competition to "protect" U.S. jobs and current salary levels all we're doing it enabling foreign companies to grow stronger without the threat of strong U.S. companies with equally competive labor cost structures.
Assuming jobs move offshore because of higher domestics labor costs the total # of jobs will drop reducing the total demand for skilled workers. Either the # of skilled workers will drop as people look for other kinds of work b/c they aren't finding it in IT, or people will take lower salaries in order to get a job.
Why does a programmer, tester, system analyst, or program manager need to know anything about the customer's culture? Why not just have a few marketing/sales guys deal w/ that. You'd need support that understand the customer's culture.
I'm wondering if raising wages might attract the "needed" workers from domestic sources or is Gate's request "necessary to remain competitive and innovative"."
Actually, raising wages here in the States would make offshoring to India, China, Eastern Europe, and other lower cost locations more appealing because the cost differences between hiring a U.S. engineer and a foreign engineer increases in the favor of the foreign engineers. Raising wages make businesses that do offshore parts of their labor force successfully that much more competitive against those that do not offshore, because they have lower cost of doing business, or for that matter it makes foreign businesses that much more competitive to start with. The H1Bs also bolster these developing locations by not allowing the best and brightest to come to the U.S. for more money. Raising wages and keeping the H1Bs will keep wages high in the short term, but will ultimately result in stronger foreing competition and migration of business from the United States to other regions, resulting in lower wages here in the U.S. and fewer jobs too.
H1Bs are a mistake. They need to be done away with. Open up the labor markets now.
Sterling, VA (REUTERS) April 20, 2005 - Correction, in the previous report REUTERS reported that...features will remain, including but not limited to 3+ Google stories per day, and an infinite amount of dupes.
This should have read...features will remain, including but not limited to 3+ Google stories per day, and a new rolling post mirror service that will mirror the posts from prevoius days.
The fact that competitors can enter the market would mean that the market is competive. There are no legal or otherwise insurmountable barriers to entry. I would also think that the proliferation of free finance and market information on the web would be direct competition to this service.
They should offer a paid service for stories over 2 months old and delay stories by 15 minutes to an hour for non-subscribers. In addition, have specialized content for subscribers.
You're on to something, which strengthens my original point that the poster totally screwed up the math here. Since there are multiple profit streams (as you pointed out) individual subscriber cost compared to profit ratios between two different distribution channels does not make any sense. Very astutue insight.
For all of those of you out there who missed the satire here (oh gosh I hope it's satire) please read.
They are in the same business yet the online is making 20 times the profit of print. Take the online subscription fee of $84 per year / 20 times the profit = $4.20 per year is the expected price for subscriptions.
Notice that what is being done is that the total revenue per subscriber is being divided by the profit ratio. This makes no sense. That $84 per customer per year is used to pay for the infrastructure, staff, etc. to provide the service. Let's say that $80 per customer per subscriber. That leaves $4 in profit. Which would mean that the paper version makes $.20 per subscriber per year. My point is not the exact numbers, but that the basic mathematics used is WRONG! You cannot divide revenue by a profit comparison ratio and come up with a meaningful subscriber cost.
People choose to pay this price, they're not forced to. If they don't think it's a value then they won't pay it. If WSJ is making too much profit other companies will see the opportunity to move in, provide a similar service, charge less by taking less profit, and take the WSJs customers away or effectively force them to lower their prices.
..Same with online content, with an almost zero distribution cost.
Do you know how much it costs to run an web-server that can provide consistantly reliable service to millions of subscribers? If it was cheap or easy the Slashdot effect wouldn't exist. There are hardware costs, bandwidth costs, data center maintenance/lease costs, staffing costs, including security, server admins, db admins, middleware admins, application devolopers, web designers, etc.
Distribution cost per user may be less than paper print, but it's definitely not zero.
I think that these online publications and their pricing schemes are only as successful as they are because they have such precedent as being a pricey product. It's why CD's are still $15, why purchasing digital music is around a buck a track, and why people buy books on amazon thinking that their 10% discount is amazing.
Actually it's because people pay these prices. If they didn't pay the prices the company would lower them or go out of business.
the profit on the online business is 20 times that of the paper flavor
You should try reading the WSJ sometime you might learn something about business fundamentals and economics. The PROFIT is NOT equal to the cost to the subscriber. All that is being said is that the online version makes 20x more profit than the paper version. So if the paper version makes $.10 per year of profit per customer, the online version is making $2.00 of profit per customer.
So if every cop car is linked, couldn't you find a way to track the location of each car and then use that to plan a crime? Or see that there are no cars on the road, so you can speed as fast as you want.
Sounds like somebody has some inside information about Google's next new service. Now there is absolutely no doubt they're evil (smirk).
I look forward to the time in the not so distant future where wireless internet access is considered an inherent right.
Yes and free food, and free homes, and free clothing, and free TV, and free video rentals, and free pot (like what you've been smoking) and free computers and free cars... yippee this is fun.
I'm nervous about governments getting into the broadband business--the potential for intrusion and abuse of the citizen's rights to privacy is certainly increased. The fact that this deployment is run by a private company helps a little--but it still concerns me, since the government is providing the funding for it.
Quit your whining. $24 and a set of 12 always-on govenrment monitored webcams in your house is small price to pay for broadband.
I actually spent the last 3 months of my life writing something very similar to this for my PhD thesis. My work was slightly different then what you explained though. Basically I take the Google data, use it to prime the network, and then feed in historical data from a particular news site into the neural network. The app processes the data, and predicts which news events the news site will report on in the coming days. I've run this application against Slashdot, since such a wide range of topics are reported on here, and have found that the application can guess 7 stories from the next day 87% of the time. I didn't have nearly this much success with other news sites, so I decided to figure out why I was so successful. I found that the nueral network was simply reporting on news events that happened more than 3 weeks ago, contained words like 'Star Wars', would search for anything about Google and then would add the question "Are they becoming evil?", would take all Microsoft and EFF press releases, and somehow managed to pull every 17th email from Linus Torvald's inbox, would repost every 19th article, and would occasionally take a story about someone being prosecuted and insert "Your right online" in front of the original news source's title. Unfortunately for me, the nueral network seemed to learn too much from Google and now requires that I become a member of its club before I can see any more future stories.
Would this mean then that according to Slashdot logic (aka. nonsense) Bill Gates is not evil, because he pays FICA and Medicare taxes on his $900k salary. Slashdot may soon need to change their motto to Slashdot: News for Fools. Irrelevant mindless ramblings
We wouldn't want the high income earners to actually help the rest of society, now would we?
I would agree that the tax code is possibly flawed, but at the same time this is a legal tax law so their is not legal issue with this. I'd question whether this actually reduces the overall tax revenue of the U.S at all. Although these 3 people will not be paying taxes, the reduced cost to Google the company would have to taxed, unless of course they took additional losses. Furthermore, what they're basically saying is that we think we can make enough money to make this worthy our time by simply living off our what we get in stock. Which means that for them to make money, the rest of the stockholders need to make money, which means Google either has to turn a profit and pay a dividend or continually innovate and grow it's market share so that the stock purchasing public believes they're worth investing in. Ultimately for the few million (if that?) that they may save in paying taxes directly the overall tax revenue is probably not going to be reduced because of this.
They do contribute to society. The products they create are their contribution to society and the jobs they create are their contribution to society. They're contribution is the product and "society" judges whether or not the contribution is worthwhile by whether or not they're will to pay the price for the product.
Slashdot Mirror
It's all about raising the value of their stock.
Yes, that's right. People invest money in companies hoping to get their money back and earn a profit. They are not giving the money to charity. CEOs are hired to provide a return on the investors investment.
Which is the same way Jobs makes his $$$ but it kills jobs but some investors wealthy.
Investors start/fund companies that create jobs. Companies are in no way bound to provide employment to anyone.
To the rest of your post... you are not thinking globally. U.S. companies and U.S. labor are in competition with foreign companies and foreign labor for foreign and domestic cusotmers. If demand for tech jobs is high (which Bill Gates says it is) and supply is low, then the costs for labor will be high. So limiting H1-Bs keeps wages high. That's great for those people who have jobs... for the short term. But since all of the skilled foreigners are now no longer working in the U.S. for U.S. companies, they're going to be working for foreign companies for less money, selling their services to domestic and foreign customers for less money and effectively beating U.S. companies in the marketplace. As U.S. companies lose they will reduce the # of jobs they need, meaning U.S. employees will lose their jobs. As demand drops off for U.S. labor, wages will drop as well. The end result is that you have strong foreign companies and a weekend labor market in the U.S.
BTW, the article's title is misleading. Gates isn't calling for an increase, he's calling for an extension to the temporary limits set on foreign workers.
I did not get that from the article at all. Cite your source.
From the article:
The United States should remove visa limits to allow more skilled foreign citizens to work at U.S. companies if it wants to remain a leader in technology, Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) Chairman Bill Gates said on Wednesday.
"The whole idea of the H-1B visa thing is, don't let too many smart people come into the country. The whole thing doesn't make sense," Gates said.
But he reserved his sharpest criticism for the visa caps, which he called "almost a case of a centrally controlled economy."
"If the demand is there, why have the regulation at all?" he said.
Someone needs to write a piece of software. If an Indian company can do it for $10 and a U.S. company can do it for $50. Who do you think customers are going to buy from? They don't care who makes the software as long as it works. Locking jobs in the U.S. and artifically inflating wages only makes sense if the U.S. is the only provider of a particular resource. We're not when it comes to IT, we are most likely the best provider right now (or one of the best), but by using legislation and not competition to "protect" U.S. jobs and current salary levels all we're doing it enabling foreign companies to grow stronger without the threat of strong U.S. companies with equally competive labor cost structures.
There will always be some IT jobs kept in the US.
Assuming jobs move offshore because of higher domestics labor costs the total # of jobs will drop reducing the total demand for skilled workers. Either the # of skilled workers will drop as people look for other kinds of work b/c they aren't finding it in IT, or people will take lower salaries in order to get a job.
Why does a programmer, tester, system analyst, or program manager need to know anything about the customer's culture? Why not just have a few marketing/sales guys deal w/ that. You'd need support that understand the customer's culture.
I'm wondering if raising wages might attract the "needed" workers from domestic sources or is Gate's request "necessary to remain competitive and innovative"."
Actually, raising wages here in the States would make offshoring to India, China, Eastern Europe, and other lower cost locations more appealing because the cost differences between hiring a U.S. engineer and a foreign engineer increases in the favor of the foreign engineers. Raising wages make businesses that do offshore parts of their labor force successfully that much more competitive against those that do not offshore, because they have lower cost of doing business, or for that matter it makes foreign businesses that much more competitive to start with. The H1Bs also bolster these developing locations by not allowing the best and brightest to come to the U.S. for more money. Raising wages and keeping the H1Bs will keep wages high in the short term, but will ultimately result in stronger foreing competition and migration of business from the United States to other regions, resulting in lower wages here in the U.S. and fewer jobs too.
H1Bs are a mistake. They need to be done away with. Open up the labor markets now.
Sterling, VA (REUTERS) April 20, 2005 - Correction, in the previous report REUTERS reported that ...features will remain, including but not limited to 3+ Google stories per day, and an infinite amount of dupes.
...features will remain, including but not limited to 3+ Google stories per day, and a new rolling post mirror service that will mirror the posts from prevoius days .
This should have read
The fact that competitors can enter the market would mean that the market is competive. There are no legal or otherwise insurmountable barriers to entry. I would also think that the proliferation of free finance and market information on the web would be direct competition to this service.
They should offer a paid service for stories over 2 months old and delay stories by 15 minutes to an hour for non-subscribers. In addition, have specialized content for subscribers.
Sounds familiar
You're on to something, which strengthens my original point that the poster totally screwed up the math here. Since there are multiple profit streams (as you pointed out) individual subscriber cost compared to profit ratios between two different distribution channels does not make any sense. Very astutue insight.
For all of those of you out there who missed the satire here (oh gosh I hope it's satire) please read.
They are in the same business yet the online is making 20 times the profit of print. Take the online subscription fee of $84 per year / 20 times the profit = $4.20 per year is the expected price for subscriptions.
Notice that what is being done is that the total revenue per subscriber is being divided by the profit ratio. This makes no sense. That $84 per customer per year is used to pay for the infrastructure, staff, etc. to provide the service. Let's say that $80 per customer per subscriber. That leaves $4 in profit. Which would mean that the paper version makes $.20 per subscriber per year. My point is not the exact numbers, but that the basic mathematics used is WRONG! You cannot divide revenue by a profit comparison ratio and come up with a meaningful subscriber cost.
People choose to pay this price, they're not forced to. If they don't think it's a value then they won't pay it. If WSJ is making too much profit other companies will see the opportunity to move in, provide a similar service, charge less by taking less profit, and take the WSJs customers away or effectively force them to lower their prices.
..Same with online content, with an almost zero distribution cost.
Do you know how much it costs to run an web-server that can provide consistantly reliable service to millions of subscribers? If it was cheap or easy the Slashdot effect wouldn't exist. There are hardware costs, bandwidth costs, data center maintenance/lease costs, staffing costs, including security, server admins, db admins, middleware admins, application devolopers, web designers, etc.
Distribution cost per user may be less than paper print, but it's definitely not zero.
I think that these online publications and their pricing schemes are only as successful as they are because they have such precedent as being a pricey product. It's why CD's are still $15, why purchasing digital music is around a buck a track, and why people buy books on amazon thinking that their 10% discount is amazing.
Actually it's because people pay these prices. If they didn't pay the prices the company would lower them or go out of business.
the profit on the online business is 20 times that of the paper flavor
You should try reading the WSJ sometime you might learn something about business fundamentals and economics. The PROFIT is NOT equal to the cost to the subscriber. All that is being said is that the online version makes 20x more profit than the paper version. So if the paper version makes $.10 per year of profit per customer, the online version is making $2.00 of profit per customer.
So if every cop car is linked, couldn't you find a way to track the location of each car and then use that to plan a crime? Or see that there are no cars on the road, so you can speed as fast as you want.
Sounds like somebody has some inside information about Google's next new service. Now there is absolutely no doubt they're evil (smirk).
I look forward to the time in the not so distant future where wireless internet access is considered an inherent right.
Yes and free food, and free homes, and free clothing, and free TV, and free video rentals, and free pot (like what you've been smoking) and free computers and free cars... yippee this is fun.
I'm nervous about governments getting into the broadband business--the potential for intrusion and abuse of the citizen's rights to privacy is certainly increased. The fact that this deployment is run by a private company helps a little--but it still concerns me, since the government is providing the funding for it.
Quit your whining. $24 and a set of 12 always-on govenrment monitored webcams in your house is small price to pay for broadband.
Just cover up the medical data with a bunch of illegal porn.
Have you every tried to use a drill press on a hard drive that is being used? Man... neither have I, but when you do send me the pictures, ok.
what the heck is HIPAA?
Try the Health & Human Services - Office for Civil Right - HIPAA for some information. HIPAA is relevant to the article because it strengthened medical privacy laws.
I actually spent the last 3 months of my life writing something very similar to this for my PhD thesis. My work was slightly different then what you explained though. Basically I take the Google data, use it to prime the network, and then feed in historical data from a particular news site into the neural network. The app processes the data, and predicts which news events the news site will report on in the coming days. I've run this application against Slashdot, since such a wide range of topics are reported on here, and have found that the application can guess 7 stories from the next day 87% of the time. I didn't have nearly this much success with other news sites, so I decided to figure out why I was so successful. I found that the nueral network was simply reporting on news events that happened more than 3 weeks ago, contained words like 'Star Wars', would search for anything about Google and then would add the question "Are they becoming evil?", would take all Microsoft and EFF press releases, and somehow managed to pull every 17th email from Linus Torvald's inbox, would repost every 19th article, and would occasionally take a story about someone being prosecuted and insert "Your right online" in front of the original news source's title. Unfortunately for me, the nueral network seemed to learn too much from Google and now requires that I become a member of its club before I can see any more future stories.
Would this mean then that according to Slashdot logic (aka. nonsense) Bill Gates is not evil, because he pays FICA and Medicare taxes on his $900k salary. Slashdot may soon need to change their motto to Slashdot: News for Fools. Irrelevant mindless ramblings
Is it me or does the article poster spin from the left and ignore facts ?
I think the article poster is a ignorant wretch. Left or right has nothing to do with it.
We wouldn't want the high income earners to actually help the rest of society, now would we?
I would agree that the tax code is possibly flawed, but at the same time this is a legal tax law so their is not legal issue with this. I'd question whether this actually reduces the overall tax revenue of the U.S at all. Although these 3 people will not be paying taxes, the reduced cost to Google the company would have to taxed, unless of course they took additional losses. Furthermore, what they're basically saying is that we think we can make enough money to make this worthy our time by simply living off our what we get in stock. Which means that for them to make money, the rest of the stockholders need to make money, which means Google either has to turn a profit and pay a dividend or continually innovate and grow it's market share so that the stock purchasing public believes they're worth investing in. Ultimately for the few million (if that?) that they may save in paying taxes directly the overall tax revenue is probably not going to be reduced because of this.
They do contribute to society. The products they create are their contribution to society and the jobs they create are their contribution to society. They're contribution is the product and "society" judges whether or not the contribution is worthwhile by whether or not they're will to pay the price for the product.