This study was undertaken to quantify the nature and extent of use by Canadians of medical services provided in the United States. It is frequently claimed, by critics of single-payer public health insurance on both sides of the border, that such use is large and that it reflects Canadian patients' dissatisfaction with their inadequate health care system. All of the evidence we have, however, indicates that the anecdotal reports of Medicare refugees from Canada are not the tip of a southbound iceberg but a small number of scattered cubes. The cross- border flow of care-seeking patients appears to be very small.
They looked at hospital administrative data from hospitals in border states and also from "America's Best Hospitals", to see how many people from Canada got medical services there to avoid the potentially longer wait-times in Canada for some high-tech tests and for some procedures. They found that:
The vast majority of services provided to Canadians were emergency or urgent care, presumably coincidental with travel to the United States for other purposes. They were clearly unrelated... to waiting times north of the border.
The second-biggest, but much smaller, category of Canadians receiving health care in the US are people who live in very rural or remote areas of Canada that are near the US border and where the nearest advanced hospital is in the US.
This also quotes an earlier study done in Canada, which found that
... only 0.11 percent (20 of 18,000 respondents) said that they had gone there for the purpose of obtaining any type of health care, whether or not covered by the public plans.
I am aware of the several anecdotes and examples of Canadians who have chosen to travel to the US for some procedures or tests - I do not dispute them.
Seriously, there is no reason this needs to be done at the national level.
I agree. It's not done at a national level in Canada, either. Health care falls under provincial jurisidiction - that's why I have an OHIP (Ontario Health Insurance Plan) card, not a CHIP card.
However, by any measure you care to name--longer lives, lower infant mortality, lower morbidity...--we have considerably better health care outcomes in Canada than Americans have, and we pay less for them.
To further clarify, this is true even controlling for the fact that there are groups that tend to have worse health outcomes in the US and which are less numerous in Canada. So even comparing between just middle-class white people in Canada and the US, you get significant differences in those metrics.
The macro effect is that we spend more of our GDP on health care than any other country in the world...
I'm not sure if you are only counting government spending, or also private spending by individuals and companies.
Obviously, there would be more private spending on health care in the US than in other developed countries. But let's just look at government spending:
If you add up all the government spending on health care in the US and in Canada, including federal, state/provincial, and local/municipal governments, and then divide that total by the population of the respective countries, you'd see that government spending on health care, per-capita, is higher in the US than in Canada! In one sense, that means that the US is further down the path to socialism than Canada is (not that I think that either of those countries are very socialist in any practical sense). In theory, a switch in the US to Canadian-style health care systems should allow for lower government expenditures...
There is no point arguing with anyone who quotes E=MC^2 as part of relativity. The correct formula, which anyone who studied physics at school, let alone university, would know has a momentum component as well.
You mean the total energy of an object also includes its kinetic energy? Thank you, Captain Obvious! You've certainly toppled damburger's house of cards.
"Can't currently detect in a direct way" would be a better description.
I thought we could detect dark matter relatively easily, by its gravitational effects. It's not being able to "see" it, in the sense of detect photons that it has emitted or interacted with that is the problem.
Off-mike, Rush is probably a very down-to-earth and friendly guy, just like Colbert.
So what?
They both say stupid, offensive things, labeling their corrosive vitriol as satire.
There's a big difference. You apparently really don't get Colbert. When Rush Limbaugh showed a picture of Chelsea Clinton, when she was just a child, and called her a "dog", if he claimed "satire" as his defence then he certainly wasn't claiming that he wasn't really making fun of her, he would have just been claiming that he was "satirizing" her and so it was OK to be cruel to a child.
However, when Colbert is over-the-top and goes after some target like saying that California's 50th Congressional District is "dead" to him for not supporting his friend Duke Cunningham enough, that is satire because he is not actually mad at the people of that district at all.
His satire is directed at the bombastic partisan space cadets that he emulates, like Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, and Bill O'Reilly.
Well, it seems that I agree with you 99%. I just don't consider there to be any reason to consider "monarchy" and "democracy" to be mutually exclusive. Britain is ~100% democracy and ~100% monarchy. I think that a meaningful description of the UK is something like "unitary parliamentary democratic constitutional monarchy", whereas the US is a "federal presidential democratic constitutional republic" and Canada is a "federal parliamentary democratic constitutional monarchy".
The Brits like to pretend they are a monarchy, but in reality they are not.
Actually, I think that Americans like to pretend that they know what the meanings of the words "monarchy" and "republic" are, but they do not.
Too many of them like to pretend that "monarchy" means "absolute monarchy", "democracy" means "direct Athenian-style democracy", and "republic" means "constitutional representative democracy with separation of powers". Which leads to claims like "Britain isn't really a monarchy" or "you are a subject not a citizen" (as if the two were mutually exclusive) or "the United States is a republic, not a democracy".
Actually, she might. She has a weekly meeting with the PM. No-one knows what they talk about but I'm sure some of it will be sensitive, especially what is technically her army is fighting a war.
Indeed. Winston Churchill said, after the fact of course, that King George (Queen Elizabeth's father) was one of the very, very few people with whom he would discuss all the secret plans and his thoughts about the war.
Sure, she has a role, but it's not like she's making the battle plan for Afghanistan or anything.
She has regular private discussions with the prime minister of the UK, where they presumably and traditionally discuss some sensitive government/political topics, and also infrequent private meetings with her other prime ministers.
If you asked a scientist who works on calibrating the leap seconds added to UTC to make up for irregularities in the rotation of the earth he might well answer "we don't know exactly".
Yes, but if that scientist were presented with the multiple choice answers of A) a day; B) a week; C) a month; D) a year; and E) I don't know, then they would clearly choose D unless they were trying to be a jackass and prove a point. Those were the options in this survey.
If you take a scientific basis that times should be measured in basic defined units (SI second) then saying "it takes a year" is roughly equivalent of saying "it takes as long as it takes".
I think that is the whole point of that question - what is the definition of a year? Yes, the question is meant to be so simple that if you know what a "year" is then the answer is the equivalent to "it takes as long as it take" or "a year is one year".
You very often find that what might seem to be a trivial question to someone with basic high-school science is actually difficult to give a clear-cut answer to.
That's true, but I'm sure that >99% of the many people who gave wrong answers did not do so because there wasn't an option that included leap seconds. Such nit-picking and hair-splitting really does have a good use in education after people understand the basics. After people know what a year is by definition, it is good to talk about leap seconds as an illustration of the fact that the amount of time in a year/orbit varies and to discuss why it varies.
Similarly, in a history class it could be useful to discuss when the USA was founded. What does founded mean? Was it when the colonies were first settled? In 1776 with the declaration of independence? In 1789 with the adoption of its current constitution? In 1783 with the Treaty of Paris that recognized the USA as independent by foreign countries including Great Britain? But if the test question says
When was the United States founded?
A) 1 BC
B) 1763
C) 1776
D) 1812
E) 1917
then answering anything other than C does not prove that you are smarter or grasp the subtleties that are above most people.
the national gendarmerie (a military body charged with police duties among civilian populations) and military police force. Its missions include:
The policing of the countryside, rivers and coastal areas, and small towns with populations under 10,000. About half the French population is under the direct jurisdiction of the Gendarmerie.
Criminal investigations under judiciary supervision.
Crowd control and other security activities.
The security of airports and military installations, as well as all investigations relating to the military, including in foreign interventions.
Participations in ceremonies involving foreign heads of states or heads of governments.
Provision of Military police services to the Military of France.
the main civil law enforcement agency of France, with primary jurisdiction in cities and large towns. In those larger cities and towns, its mission includes:
Conducting criminal enquiries, serving search warrants, etc under the orders and supervision of the Investigating magistrates of the judiciary. It maintains specific services ("judicial police") for criminal enquiries.
I know this might only seem like a small consolation, but the fifth amendment was designed to protect against this very type of situation. One of the most invaluable things I have *ever* seen since being on the internet is this video by law professor James Duane.
He also gives half of his lecture time to a police officer in hope that he might discredit anything he has said. Pay close attention to him quoting a Supreme Court justice and what that man has to say about the fifth.
P.S. I make it a point of watching this video at least once a year. Every US citizen should do the same.
Thanks, that is a very interesting video. I'm not a US citizen - I'm a Canadian and obviously we don't have the same literal "fifth amendment", but we have a similar right against self-incrimination (and I would think/hope that other common law jurisdictions do, too), even though the exact limits and situations in which that right is guaranteed here will differ somewhat from the protections in the US. But the really interesting and useful parts of the video are not about the legal theory of that right, but about the practical reasons why one should use that right to its fullest extent. I was skeptical at first, but the lawyer in the video convinced me to not talk to the police if I am even remotely a suspect, no matter how innocent I am.
One thing that troubled me, and I wish the lawyer had clarified this, is if he just meant not to talk to the police if you are a suspect (or a potential suspect)? I think that's what he implied, and I hope that's what he meant. I would hope that he isn't suggesting that people should refuse to talk to the police if they are canvasing a neighbourhood after a murder to see if anyone has seen anything suspicious, etc.
It's not a complex problem. People like to pretend that it's a complex problem because they like to "bargain", they like to "negotiate" with reality. "I don't want to take this responsibility, but I want the outcome, so how about I just do lots of this other thing instead.", they say.
But it's all smoke, mirrors and bullshit. The problem is based on simple, fundamental principles, and the lack of attention that has been paid to them.
They had a choice, all of them. They could have followed in the footsteps of good men like my father, or President Truman. Decent men, who believed in a day's work for a day's pay.
Instead they followed the droppings of lechers and communists and didn't realize that the trail led over a precipice until it was too late. Don't tell me they didn't have a choice. Now the whole world stands on the brink, staring down into bloody hell, all those liberals and intellectuals and smooth-talkers... and all of a sudden nobody can think of anything to say.
Just because the US federal administration argues that something is constitutional does not necessarily mean that they think it is a good or fair policy.
Ontario is a country called Canada.
Virginia is in a country called The United States of America.
Comparisons between the laws of two separate countries are useless, because they have their own separate laws, governments and courts.
They most certainly are not useless, because the country called Canada and the country called the United States and the jurisdictions called Ontario and Virginia are all common law systems and their legal systems are not just derived from, but are direct descendants and continuations from the English legal system. It is not unusual for courts in one common law system to look to the reasoning given for a decision from other common law systems for insight into how to consider a case in a new area.
Certainly there are many important differences between Virginia criminal law and procedures and those in Canada (I say Canada instead of Ontario because criminal law and procedures are uniform throughout Canada, unlike civil law and procedure which are a different in each province). However, there is enough commonality and similarity to make a comparison useful.
If Iowa adopts this measure, it would be noteworthy, but the summary seems to imply that this is a new idea or something unique that Iowa is considering. It is not. See the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact:
The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact is an agreement among U.S. states that would effectively replace the current electoral college system of presidential elections with a direct, nationwide vote of the people. As of September 2008, this interstate compact has been joined by Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, and New Jersey; their 50 electoral votes total amount to almost 19% of the 270 needed for the compact to take effect. Bills to join the compact are currently pending in ten additional states.
The compact is based on Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution, which gives each state legislature the right to decide how to appoint its own electors....
States joining the compact will continue to award their electoral votes in their current manner until the compact has been joined by enough states to represent a controlling majority of the Electoral College (currently 270 electoral votes). After that point, all of the electoral votes of the member states would be cast for the winner of the national popular vote in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. With the national popular vote winner sure to have a decisive majority in the Electoral College, he or she would automatically win the Electoral College and therefore the presidency.
As I've said before, if public libraries were a new concept that someone had just thought of recently, and some town had opened one for the first time this year, they'd get their assed sued off.
The idea that they can buy one copy of a book and then let people borrow and read it (and repeat this process indefinitely), without any extra fee going to the publisher or author and without any special ongoing licence, would be considered preposterous.
The idea (if it were new) that a public library could charge a small membership fee to out-of-towners to be able to borrow books would definitely be considered profiting off copyright infringement. And the idea of a municipal government opening libraries with public funds and not charging residents anything to become members would be considered socialism.
Even if true, the stated purpose of the H1B program is NOT to replace "C" citizens with "A" foreigners. You are redefining "shortage".
That's interesting; I really don't know much about the "stated purpose" of the H-1b program. I wanted to provide a first hand account of how H-1b workers were selected, hired, treated, and paid at Microsoft. My motivation is to dispel some of the slander that Microsoft uses the H-1b program to underpay desperate foreigners in indentured servitude. As far as other criticisms go, I really don't know whether MS followed the letter or spirit of the law in recruitment, for example. I'm not claiming that MS is necessarily spotless in those areas of the H-1b program that are outside my own experience.
I do know that "A" foreigners were at least as hard to find and hire as "A" US citizens, in my experience at that time. I realize that this is not relevant to your point that the H-1b program isn't supposed to be about replacing "C" citizens with "A" foreigners. I just mention it in case it seemed like I was implying that Americans weren't smart enough so us brainy foreigners were required - that's definitely not my intention.
Perhaps MS needs more employees who address "why" instead of just "how". MS seems to throw feature quantity at problems instead of really deep thinking about big-picture design.
But Thank You for your candid opinion.
I think I worked with a lot of smart people during my time at MS, but I don't disagree with your assessment. And thanks for your candid reply.
Really? Folks openly talked about how much they were being paid? Hmmm. Interesting.
No, my co-workers didn't tell me their salary or bonus. But my manager showed me tables showing the expected salary ranges for each "job level", as preparation for my yearly performance review. Those ranges weren't really that wide, I obviously knew where my salary fit in the range, and I had a good idea of which "job levels" my co-workers were in. Besides, when some of my American co-workers who became my friends told me how much they spent on their new house, car, etc, I had a good idea that I wasn't being significantly underpaid relative to them.
The candidate was asked, "How many diapers are sold in the US?" (Saying I'll Google it is the 'wrong' answer, BTW.)
The successful candidate said something like, "Well, there are 300 million people in the US and 1% are having kids. Therefore, there are 3 million babies. Now, babies need to be changed 3 times a day. So that's 9 million diapers a day. Which is 63 million diapers per week."
She got the job. BTW, all of those numbers were pulled out of her ass, but she got the job because of her "logical" thinking.
Yes, that is a good example of one type of question that is given at MS interviews. The point isn't to say "this person is great at estimating diaper usage - hire them!" Rather, the point is to weed out those who freeze up or give up when asked a question about something that is large and outside their experience or knowledge, whether it is the total number of diapers sold in the US, or the number of gas stations or manhole covers or drops of water in a rainstorm. Thinking logically and trying to make justifiable assumptions in a situation where you have incomplete knowledge is not an insignificant skill.
If your friend was hired for a technical role, she would have also been asked several more technically relevant questions, but that also required her to think on her feet and make reasonable assumptions, during her 5 hour-long interviews. "Write a procedure in a programming language of your choice (on paper) to do X, just trying to write it quickly so that it works". "Now how could you make it more efficient?" "Now modify it to do Y." "Now tell me how you would test it." "What would be reasonable behaviour if the you gave unexpected input like Z to your procedure? Why?"
I can create hiring standards that no one can satisfy. Are those standards pertinent to the job? Nope. But it sure makes my standards look exclusive.
If you consider how un-innovative MS is, I think their standards are completely bogus.
Maybe you're right, that Microsoft's hiring standards and interviewing techniques are not pertinent or are just an attempt to look exclusive. That's an interesting discussion, but not relevant to my point, which is that MS does have high hiring standards that are not easily satisfied, pertinent or not. Their standards certainly aren't just a scam to say that not enough American workers are qualified so they can bring in foreign workers - foreign applicants for technical positions go through the same interview process.
Another thing, how may people coached you about the interviewing process?
I wasn't coached, and certainly didn't have a network of interview cheats. A friend who got hired a few months before me told me basically the same information that I've just told you. He gave me an example of a question (estimate how many gas stations in the US, I think) and told me to make sure I remembered my sorting algorithms. So I studied my algorithms text book on the trip to Redmond for the interview, and I never was asked the gas stations question.
As such, neither they, nor their employer pay FICA or Social Security taxes.
That's a lie. When I was an H-1b worker in the US, only a few years ago, my employer and I both paid Medicare and Social Security taxes. I remember seeing a significant cut of my pay being deducted for those payroll taxes every two weeks and knowing that I would never be able to collect them: medicare because of my legal non-immigrant status and social security because I knew that I would not be working in the US long enough to contribute enough social security credits.
I didn't mind, really. I felt is was only fair that I pay the same taxes as any other employee.
I worked at Microsoft in Redmond with H1B work status for four years. In 2007, I left MS because I found a job opportunity that was better for my family. (This new job happened to be back in my country.)
I can't comment about the overall H1B program in the US, or the overall US labour market, or even on any new changes at MS over the past year, but I do definitely know about the experiences of H1B employees in the developer and testing roles at MS.
I (and all other non-US-citizen employees) were treated exactly the same as every other employee. We had the same job descriptions and responsibilities as other employees and the same opportunities for promotion. We were integrated in teams that included US citizens, other H1B-status workers, and people with other immigration statuses. We were certainly paid the same as any other employee with a similar job and similar experience.
I also know that Microsoft has very high hiring standards for developer and tester roles. I was not in a management/lead position, but I occasionally reviewed resumes and took part in interviewing applicants. Interviews were tough all-day affairs, including questions that required the use of logic, math, programming, and testing methodologies. The point wasn't to see if the applicant could regurgitate the knowledge, but to view his or her thinking process, creativity, and problem solving abilities as they tried to come up with a solution, and handle complications or restrictions that the interviewer throws at the candidate after they come up with an initial solution.
During the time I was there, my group and most others were always trying to hire more people. The major bottleneck was waiting to get any resumes for candidates that seemed worth interviewing. Most interviews ended with frustration that the candidate wasn't up to standards. Just because you applied to MS and didn't get a job or even an interview is not proof that Microsoft didn't need to look outside the US to find candidates up to their standards.
So, you might have valid criticisms about the quality of Microsoft software, but MS really does have very high standards for their employees, and employees with H1B status are treated the same as any other full-time employee there.
Slashdot Mirror
The same place they go now... Canada. See Phantoms In The Snow: Canadians' Use Of Health Care Services In The United States
They looked at hospital administrative data from hospitals in border states and also from "America's Best Hospitals", to see how many people from Canada got medical services there to avoid the potentially longer wait-times in Canada for some high-tech tests and for some procedures. They found that:
The second-biggest, but much smaller, category of Canadians receiving health care in the US are people who live in very rural or remote areas of Canada that are near the US border and where the nearest advanced hospital is in the US.
This also quotes an earlier study done in Canada, which found that
I am aware of the several anecdotes and examples of Canadians who have chosen to travel to the US for some procedures or tests - I do not dispute them.
I agree. It's not done at a national level in Canada, either. Health care falls under provincial jurisidiction - that's why I have an OHIP (Ontario Health Insurance Plan) card, not a CHIP card.
To further clarify, this is true even controlling for the fact that there are groups that tend to have worse health outcomes in the US and which are less numerous in Canada. So even comparing between just middle-class white people in Canada and the US, you get significant differences in those metrics.
I'm not sure if you are only counting government spending, or also private spending by individuals and companies.
Obviously, there would be more private spending on health care in the US than in other developed countries. But let's just look at government spending:
If you add up all the government spending on health care in the US and in Canada, including federal, state/provincial, and local/municipal governments, and then divide that total by the population of the respective countries, you'd see that government spending on health care, per-capita, is higher in the US than in Canada! In one sense, that means that the US is further down the path to socialism than Canada is (not that I think that either of those countries are very socialist in any practical sense). In theory, a switch in the US to Canadian-style health care systems should allow for lower government expenditures...
Hard to believe it's been 10 years eh. Greatest movie ever.
Too bad they didn't make any sequels.
There is no point arguing with anyone who quotes E=MC^2 as part of relativity. The correct formula, which anyone who studied physics at school, let alone university, would know has a momentum component as well.
You mean the total energy of an object also includes its kinetic energy? Thank you, Captain Obvious! You've certainly toppled damburger's house of cards.
"Can't currently detect in a direct way" would be a better description.
I thought we could detect dark matter relatively easily, by its gravitational effects. It's not being able to "see" it, in the sense of detect photons that it has emitted or interacted with that is the problem.
There's a big difference. You apparently really don't get Colbert. When Rush Limbaugh showed a picture of Chelsea Clinton, when she was just a child, and called her a "dog", if he claimed "satire" as his defence then he certainly wasn't claiming that he wasn't really making fun of her, he would have just been claiming that he was "satirizing" her and so it was OK to be cruel to a child.
However, when Colbert is over-the-top and goes after some target like saying that California's 50th Congressional District is "dead" to him for not supporting his friend Duke Cunningham enough, that is satire because he is not actually mad at the people of that district at all.
His satire is directed at the bombastic partisan space cadets that he emulates, like Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck, and Bill O'Reilly.
Well, it seems that I agree with you 99%. I just don't consider there to be any reason to consider "monarchy" and "democracy" to be mutually exclusive. Britain is ~100% democracy and ~100% monarchy. I think that a meaningful description of the UK is something like "unitary parliamentary democratic constitutional monarchy", whereas the US is a "federal presidential democratic constitutional republic" and Canada is a "federal parliamentary democratic constitutional monarchy".
Actually, I think that Americans like to pretend that they know what the meanings of the words "monarchy" and "republic" are, but they do not.
Too many of them like to pretend that "monarchy" means "absolute monarchy", "democracy" means "direct Athenian-style democracy", and "republic" means "constitutional representative democracy with separation of powers". Which leads to claims like "Britain isn't really a monarchy" or "you are a subject not a citizen" (as if the two were mutually exclusive) or "the United States is a republic, not a democracy".
Indeed. Winston Churchill said, after the fact of course, that King George (Queen Elizabeth's father) was one of the very, very few people with whom he would discuss all the secret plans and his thoughts about the war.
She has regular private discussions with the prime minister of the UK, where they presumably and traditionally discuss some sensitive government/political topics, and also infrequent private meetings with her other prime ministers.
See Canada-United States Permanent Joint Board on Defence and NORAD.
Yes, but if that scientist were presented with the multiple choice answers of A) a day; B) a week; C) a month; D) a year; and E) I don't know, then they would clearly choose D unless they were trying to be a jackass and prove a point. Those were the options in this survey.
I think that is the whole point of that question - what is the definition of a year? Yes, the question is meant to be so simple that if you know what a "year" is then the answer is the equivalent to "it takes as long as it take" or "a year is one year".
That's true, but I'm sure that >99% of the many people who gave wrong answers did not do so because there wasn't an option that included leap seconds. Such nit-picking and hair-splitting really does have a good use in education after people understand the basics. After people know what a year is by definition, it is good to talk about leap seconds as an illustration of the fact that the amount of time in a year/orbit varies and to discuss why it varies.
Similarly, in a history class it could be useful to discuss when the USA was founded. What does founded mean? Was it when the colonies were first settled? In 1776 with the declaration of independence? In 1789 with the adoption of its current constitution? In 1783 with the Treaty of Paris that recognized the USA as independent by foreign countries including Great Britain? But if the test question says
When was the United States founded?
then answering anything other than C does not prove that you are smarter or grasp the subtleties that are above most people.
Actually, there are two separate national police forces in France.
The Gendarmerie Nationale is, (adapted from Wikipedia):
The Police Nationale is, (adapted from Wikipedia):
Thanks, that is a very interesting video. I'm not a US citizen - I'm a Canadian and obviously we don't have the same literal "fifth amendment", but we have a similar right against self-incrimination (and I would think/hope that other common law jurisdictions do, too), even though the exact limits and situations in which that right is guaranteed here will differ somewhat from the protections in the US. But the really interesting and useful parts of the video are not about the legal theory of that right, but about the practical reasons why one should use that right to its fullest extent. I was skeptical at first, but the lawyer in the video convinced me to not talk to the police if I am even remotely a suspect, no matter how innocent I am.
One thing that troubled me, and I wish the lawyer had clarified this, is if he just meant not to talk to the police if you are a suspect (or a potential suspect)? I think that's what he implied, and I hope that's what he meant. I would hope that he isn't suggesting that people should refuse to talk to the police if they are canvasing a neighbourhood after a murder to see if anyone has seen anything suspicious, etc.
It's not a complex problem. People like to pretend that it's a complex problem because they like to "bargain", they like to "negotiate" with reality. "I don't want to take this responsibility, but I want the outcome, so how about I just do lots of this other thing instead.", they say.
But it's all smoke, mirrors and bullshit. The problem is based on simple, fundamental principles, and the lack of attention that has been paid to them.
They had a choice, all of them. They could have followed in the footsteps of good men like my father, or President Truman. Decent men, who believed in a day's work for a day's pay. ... and all of a sudden nobody can think of anything to say.
Instead they followed the droppings of lechers and communists and didn't realize that the trail led over a precipice until it was too late. Don't tell me they didn't have a choice. Now the whole world stands on the brink, staring down into bloody hell, all those liberals and intellectuals and smooth-talkers
Just because the US federal administration argues that something is constitutional does not necessarily mean that they think it is a good or fair policy.
Ontario is a country called Canada. Virginia is in a country called The United States of America.
Comparisons between the laws of two separate countries are useless, because they have their own separate laws, governments and courts.
They most certainly are not useless, because the country called Canada and the country called the United States and the jurisdictions called Ontario and Virginia are all common law systems and their legal systems are not just derived from, but are direct descendants and continuations from the English legal system. It is not unusual for courts in one common law system to look to the reasoning given for a decision from other common law systems for insight into how to consider a case in a new area.
Certainly there are many important differences between Virginia criminal law and procedures and those in Canada (I say Canada instead of Ontario because criminal law and procedures are uniform throughout Canada, unlike civil law and procedure which are a different in each province). However, there is enough commonality and similarity to make a comparison useful.
If Iowa adopts this measure, it would be noteworthy, but the summary seems to imply that this is a new idea or something unique that Iowa is considering. It is not. See the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact:
As I've said before, if public libraries were a new concept that someone had just thought of recently, and some town had opened one for the first time this year, they'd get their assed sued off.
The idea that they can buy one copy of a book and then let people borrow and read it (and repeat this process indefinitely), without any extra fee going to the publisher or author and without any special ongoing licence, would be considered preposterous.
The idea (if it were new) that a public library could charge a small membership fee to out-of-towners to be able to borrow books would definitely be considered profiting off copyright infringement. And the idea of a municipal government opening libraries with public funds and not charging residents anything to become members would be considered socialism.
Even if true, the stated purpose of the H1B program is NOT to replace "C" citizens with "A" foreigners. You are redefining "shortage".
That's interesting; I really don't know much about the "stated purpose" of the H-1b program. I wanted to provide a first hand account of how H-1b workers were selected, hired, treated, and paid at Microsoft. My motivation is to dispel some of the slander that Microsoft uses the H-1b program to underpay desperate foreigners in indentured servitude. As far as other criticisms go, I really don't know whether MS followed the letter or spirit of the law in recruitment, for example. I'm not claiming that MS is necessarily spotless in those areas of the H-1b program that are outside my own experience.
I do know that "A" foreigners were at least as hard to find and hire as "A" US citizens, in my experience at that time. I realize that this is not relevant to your point that the H-1b program isn't supposed to be about replacing "C" citizens with "A" foreigners. I just mention it in case it seemed like I was implying that Americans weren't smart enough so us brainy foreigners were required - that's definitely not my intention.
Perhaps MS needs more employees who address "why" instead of just "how". MS seems to throw feature quantity at problems instead of really deep thinking about big-picture design.
But Thank You for your candid opinion.
I think I worked with a lot of smart people during my time at MS, but I don't disagree with your assessment. And thanks for your candid reply.
Really? Folks openly talked about how much they were being paid? Hmmm. Interesting.
No, my co-workers didn't tell me their salary or bonus. But my manager showed me tables showing the expected salary ranges for each "job level", as preparation for my yearly performance review. Those ranges weren't really that wide, I obviously knew where my salary fit in the range, and I had a good idea of which "job levels" my co-workers were in. Besides, when some of my American co-workers who became my friends told me how much they spent on their new house, car, etc, I had a good idea that I wasn't being significantly underpaid relative to them.
The candidate was asked, "How many diapers are sold in the US?" (Saying I'll Google it is the 'wrong' answer, BTW.)
The successful candidate said something like, "Well, there are 300 million people in the US and 1% are having kids. Therefore, there are 3 million babies. Now, babies need to be changed 3 times a day. So that's 9 million diapers a day. Which is 63 million diapers per week."
She got the job. BTW, all of those numbers were pulled out of her ass, but she got the job because of her "logical" thinking.
Yes, that is a good example of one type of question that is given at MS interviews. The point isn't to say "this person is great at estimating diaper usage - hire them!" Rather, the point is to weed out those who freeze up or give up when asked a question about something that is large and outside their experience or knowledge, whether it is the total number of diapers sold in the US, or the number of gas stations or manhole covers or drops of water in a rainstorm. Thinking logically and trying to make justifiable assumptions in a situation where you have incomplete knowledge is not an insignificant skill.
If your friend was hired for a technical role, she would have also been asked several more technically relevant questions, but that also required her to think on her feet and make reasonable assumptions, during her 5 hour-long interviews. "Write a procedure in a programming language of your choice (on paper) to do X, just trying to write it quickly so that it works". "Now how could you make it more efficient?" "Now modify it to do Y." "Now tell me how you would test it." "What would be reasonable behaviour if the you gave unexpected input like Z to your procedure? Why?"
I can create hiring standards that no one can satisfy. Are those standards pertinent to the job? Nope. But it sure makes my standards look exclusive.
If you consider how un-innovative MS is, I think their standards are completely bogus.
Maybe you're right, that Microsoft's hiring standards and interviewing techniques are not pertinent or are just an attempt to look exclusive. That's an interesting discussion, but not relevant to my point, which is that MS does have high hiring standards that are not easily satisfied, pertinent or not. Their standards certainly aren't just a scam to say that not enough American workers are qualified so they can bring in foreign workers - foreign applicants for technical positions go through the same interview process.
Another thing, how may people coached you about the interviewing process?
I wasn't coached, and certainly didn't have a network of interview cheats. A friend who got hired a few months before me told me basically the same information that I've just told you. He gave me an example of a question (estimate how many gas stations in the US, I think) and told me to make sure I remembered my sorting algorithms. So I studied my algorithms text book on the trip to Redmond for the interview, and I never was asked the gas stations question.
As such, neither they, nor their employer pay FICA or Social Security taxes.
That's a lie. When I was an H-1b worker in the US, only a few years ago, my employer and I both paid Medicare and Social Security taxes. I remember seeing a significant cut of my pay being deducted for those payroll taxes every two weeks and knowing that I would never be able to collect them: medicare because of my legal non-immigrant status and social security because I knew that I would not be working in the US long enough to contribute enough social security credits.
I didn't mind, really. I felt is was only fair that I pay the same taxes as any other employee.
I worked at Microsoft in Redmond with H1B work status for four years. In 2007, I left MS because I found a job opportunity that was better for my family. (This new job happened to be back in my country.)
I can't comment about the overall H1B program in the US, or the overall US labour market, or even on any new changes at MS over the past year, but I do definitely know about the experiences of H1B employees in the developer and testing roles at MS.
I (and all other non-US-citizen employees) were treated exactly the same as every other employee. We had the same job descriptions and responsibilities as other employees and the same opportunities for promotion. We were integrated in teams that included US citizens, other H1B-status workers, and people with other immigration statuses. We were certainly paid the same as any other employee with a similar job and similar experience.
I also know that Microsoft has very high hiring standards for developer and tester roles. I was not in a management/lead position, but I occasionally reviewed resumes and took part in interviewing applicants. Interviews were tough all-day affairs, including questions that required the use of logic, math, programming, and testing methodologies. The point wasn't to see if the applicant could regurgitate the knowledge, but to view his or her thinking process, creativity, and problem solving abilities as they tried to come up with a solution, and handle complications or restrictions that the interviewer throws at the candidate after they come up with an initial solution.
During the time I was there, my group and most others were always trying to hire more people. The major bottleneck was waiting to get any resumes for candidates that seemed worth interviewing. Most interviews ended with frustration that the candidate wasn't up to standards. Just because you applied to MS and didn't get a job or even an interview is not proof that Microsoft didn't need to look outside the US to find candidates up to their standards.
So, you might have valid criticisms about the quality of Microsoft software, but MS really does have very high standards for their employees, and employees with H1B status are treated the same as any other full-time employee there.