Voter registration is required in the US because the state and federal governments do not always track where people live. If you get a driver's license, "motor voter" laws typically give you the option to register to vote at the same time, but there are people have driver's licenses, pay taxes, or do other things to show up in government databases. Voter registration gives them a way to vote. Voter registration rolls are also used to select people for jury duty.
Localities in the US may allow non-citizen residents to vote on local candidates and issues, and some have -- mostly more "progressive" cities and counties. I think states may allow non-citizens to vote for state candidates and issues, but my understanding is that it is currently forbidden in all states. It is illegal under federal law for a non-citizen to vote in federal elections, which I assume includes presidential elections, even though technically the votes only work to select state-level delegates to the college of electors.
Maybe it would be better and simpler if we just stuck peoples' thumbs in purple ink when they vote. That would give other people a chance to police non-citizen voters (in places where it is illegal), reliably prevent multiple voting, and reduce paperwork overhead. However, that scheme is incompatible with absentee and early voting, which are considered important voting methods by both conservatives and liberals in the US.
With enough effort and expense, sure, the plaintiff (complainant? whatever) could probably *eventually* find a working address to serve notice at. That would delay the proceedings an unpredictable, and almost certainly undue, length of time. Neither the US Post Office nor the state's "Support Collection Unit" (which handles alimony) have a newer address for her. The husband in this case tried to call and text his two children (with the ex), but they did not respond. How long is the guy supposed to wait to argue that he shouldn't have to pay child support for his 21-year-old son?
The key element of a tortious interference claim is not the existence of a contract, it is third-party interference with a business or contractual relationship. sixoh1 was suggesting that someone might have a cause of action against Rightscorp, not the ISP, so the ISP's prerogative to terminate customer contracts is not relevant.
Similar logic applies to having the ISP cut off your connection entirely -- if they got statutory authority for one of them, I bet they could get the same kind of permission for the other (if the original language of the law doesn't cover both already).
Next up: Booting all of your connectivity -- mobile as well as hardline -- through one, integrated, Big Brother-ish app.
In the US, a typical manager earns some amount more than the people they manage. As a result, the average software engineer earns significantly more than the average non-engineering manager, and more than many engineering managers.
And in the US, doctors and lawyers are not comparable to software developers for two main reasons: they have significant legal duties towards their clients (and must carry malpractice insurance as a result), and it is a serious crime to practice medicine or law without a license (which is granted by the people already in the field). Doctors and lawyers typically have further education, as well, which is not required for software developers. We also hear chronic complaints about doctor shortages, too -- but thankfully none for lawyers:) The kind of doctors with the worst shortages are "primary care" doctors, rather than specialists and surgeons, who also make much less money than the specialists, and I think in the same neighborhood as software developers.
You missed the key word "potential" in that sentence. There are many thousands of good programmers in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco area, although basically are already as employed as they wish to be. In the kind of places where you think a company might be able to relocate, there are probably dozens of programmers with the same level of skills. When a company wants to hire hundreds of good engineers, that is not very useful: they'd need to convince most of their workforce to relocate.
Meanwhile, in the reality-based community, Apple et al. *found* a free-market solution to their woes, and are now in court because government regulations say that their solution is not allowed.
US software developer salaries are much higher than in Europe when you control for cost of living. For example, most of the big cities in Europe have higher costs of living than Silicon Valley, but software developers earn much less there. You have to look pretty far down the list of US cities -- say, Charlotte (NC) or Peoria (IL) -- to find salaries that are roughly in line with expensive places in Europe. Companies stay in Silicon Valley because of infrastructure, network effects, and because there are a lot of potential employees in the area.
You're applying single-stage reasoning to an iterated game, which is a good way to lose in the iterated game. If company X hires an employee from company Y by making a better offer, how should company Y respond in order to maximize its own revenue? (It will almost always involve a counter-offer to the employee, and if that fails, company Y will probably try to hire away another experienced engineer for reasons that Fred Brooks described in The Mythical Man-Month.)
If you don't think there is a shortage of software developers in the US, why are developers in the US paid so much more than ones in Europe?
Also, there is no hard threshold to define an "actual" shortage when you're talking about such a large job market.
Standard Oil and Ma Bell were broken up because they exploited monopoly power. There's nothing remotely similar for tech employers. You claimed there was some kind of supplier boycott, I pointed out that there obviously wasn't one in the usual sense, and you fell back to "maybe this kind of harm happened, you can't prove it didn't!"
Those who tried to leave probably succeeded. Can you cite to a single case where this anti-poaching agreement prevented an active searcher from getting a job offer?
Not really. People consider factors besides salary when choosing jobs -- location, fringe benefits, work content, prestige, and more -- and there are other constraints on worker/job compatibility. A married person might become a homemaker if it takes too much effort to find a job that is sufficiently attractive; moving to a different city is expensive, especially for someone who expects low earnings; an employer cannot have a workforce that consists entirely of people who are learning to be productive in their jobs; the list goes on.
Most fundamentally, though, the number of available jobs is flexible in a way that defies quantification. If an employer has unmet demand, they could hire more workers if they can find workers at a low enough salary. It might be cheaper for the employer to hire more people who are individually less productive than to hire more-skilled workers. Automation and other forms of labor substitution further complicate the equilibrium. In contrast, the number of people who have applied for unemployment assistance is very easy to measure.
You failed economics, didn't you? If they recruit employees from other companies, they have to make better offers, and they will have to make better counter-offers to their own employees to counteract poaching by other companies. They do not have bottomless pits of money for salary; they calculated that it was better to have a conspiracy against poaching than to try to poach. (There was also Apple's threat of patent lawsuits if Google in particular didn't agree to the deal.)
People would turn down jobs at Google or Apple on salary grounds if there were a surplus of workers. Almost everyone seems to agree that there is a shortage (according to the usual definition in economics). This case was brought because large companies -- by all accounts -- illegally colluded to counteract that shortage, and thereby suppress their employees' wages.
They could say that with a straight face because the two ideas ("worker shortage" and "cheaper labor") are two sides of the same coin. If there are more workers in a market, the average (or median) salary of an arbitrary engineer goes down. By definition, a shortage exists in any market when the price exceeds what buyers would like to pay. This is essentially why the "natural rate" of unemployment is not zero: There are workers who are not willing to accept the jobs that companies are willing to offer them.
As a trivial case, imagine two companies trying to hire one very specialized worker: A canny worker will be able to get the greatest salary that either company is willing to pay. If there are suddenly two workers available, that leverage goes away, and it is much harder for either worker to bargain up a salary.
The service is still in beta, too -- I would hope they rationalize the pricing (especially for first-party games) by the time they end the beta. Personally, I can't see myself paying these rates ever -- I have a perfectly functional PS3 that I still use more than my PS4, and I somewhere have a PS2 for all my really old disc games.
Does India have anything like the US Constitution's requirement for due process of law before someone is punished? It is conceivable for the government to ban the collection or publication of national security information, with the burden on the collector/publisher to figure out whether they have done so. This would be a recipe for arbitrary enforcement and unjust outcomes, but similar schemes have been implemented in the past -- between restaurant reviews and search engines, recent European cases provide examples for comparison and contrast of laws that are only really decidable with hindsight or by judicial dictate.
You did not answer any of my questions. Did you just want to highlight that India seems to be whining about Google instead of trying to work with them?
North Korea makes it extremely hard to get map information! Face recognition algorithms sometimes go awry! A power plant is shown with similar resolution to neighboring buildings! News at 11!
At least 15 of the 25 places on the list you link to are closed to the general public, several others might be (not clear from quick Google searches), and several appear to have high-quality satellite imagery now. It is not surprising that Google blurs out places that governments intentionally make it hard to see. This is perhaps even a good idea by default for military installations and high-level government buildings, with exceptions to be made for plausible allegations of malfeasance or abuse of authority.
The government body trying to protect its turf from competition did not cite any privacy issues, either. It cited security issues, which of course it could not describe in detail because security.
Did Google specifically solicit information about defense installations, perhaps as a particular example of hospitals or restaurants? If not, did Google have any way to know which information about which installations is considered secret? (Obviously, the government would never publish such a list for general consumption, because that would both reveal the data that they want to protect and distinguish the sensitive data from information that they consider non-sensitive.) Did Google republish this data, or is the perceived offense merely that Google has the data?
Verizon does not advertise unlimited bandwidth. They advertise(d) unlimited data usage -- and in this case, "unlimited" is read to mean "no artificial [or carrier-imposed] caps", not "no caps at all" or even "LTE everywhere".
To clarify, both sentences in the first paragraph of my earlier comment were sarcastic. Working that many hours per week might be a BFOQ in rare instances of personal service work, and maybe (I personally doubt it) some operations jobs, but there is no way it would be accepted as a BFOQ for a development job.
Unions are an incredibly poor way to control abusive employer tactics unless workers in the bargaining unit are basically fungible -- and knowledge workers are not. A much better approach would be something like an online exchange for H-1B job postings, where US-based employees can register their interest for a job opening (along with their current and/or target salary) and see whether the job eventually goes to someone with permanent work authorization in the US and what the salary is, and perhaps see an anonymized summary of the eventual hire's qualifications relative to the posting's requirements. This would give employees most of the information necessary to (decide whether to) file a complaint either with immigration authorities or in court.
Hey, working 60+ hours per week is a bona fide occupational qualification for some jobs! These immigrants are just filling jobs that Americans don't want to do.
Another problem is that these companies tend to tailor H-1B job requirement statements to particular foreign candidates in such a way that essentially every US-based candidate who might see the posting would not qualify or would ignore it (for example, because of that pay disparity or the work week or other conditions listed in the job description).
If you like looking like a whiny, hypocritical moron, be my guest. I take it that you concede that illegal immigration is in fact a crime, and that you didn't read far enough into my earlier comment to see where I explained that, because you haven't done a thing to rebut either of those. I'm not going to use soft words to save the feelings of someone who is a lazy, useful idiot or worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Voter registration is required in the US because the state and federal governments do not always track where people live. If you get a driver's license, "motor voter" laws typically give you the option to register to vote at the same time, but there are people have driver's licenses, pay taxes, or do other things to show up in government databases. Voter registration gives them a way to vote. Voter registration rolls are also used to select people for jury duty.
Localities in the US may allow non-citizen residents to vote on local candidates and issues, and some have -- mostly more "progressive" cities and counties. I think states may allow non-citizens to vote for state candidates and issues, but my understanding is that it is currently forbidden in all states. It is illegal under federal law for a non-citizen to vote in federal elections, which I assume includes presidential elections, even though technically the votes only work to select state-level delegates to the college of electors.
Maybe it would be better and simpler if we just stuck peoples' thumbs in purple ink when they vote. That would give other people a chance to police non-citizen voters (in places where it is illegal), reliably prevent multiple voting, and reduce paperwork overhead. However, that scheme is incompatible with absentee and early voting, which are considered important voting methods by both conservatives and liberals in the US.
With enough effort and expense, sure, the plaintiff (complainant? whatever) could probably *eventually* find a working address to serve notice at. That would delay the proceedings an unpredictable, and almost certainly undue, length of time. Neither the US Post Office nor the state's "Support Collection Unit" (which handles alimony) have a newer address for her. The husband in this case tried to call and text his two children (with the ex), but they did not respond. How long is the guy supposed to wait to argue that he shouldn't have to pay child support for his 21-year-old son?
The key element of a tortious interference claim is not the existence of a contract, it is third-party interference with a business or contractual relationship. sixoh1 was suggesting that someone might have a cause of action against Rightscorp, not the ISP, so the ISP's prerogative to terminate customer contracts is not relevant.
Similar logic applies to having the ISP cut off your connection entirely -- if they got statutory authority for one of them, I bet they could get the same kind of permission for the other (if the original language of the law doesn't cover both already).
Next up: Booting all of your connectivity -- mobile as well as hardline -- through one, integrated, Big Brother-ish app.
In the US, a typical manager earns some amount more than the people they manage. As a result, the average software engineer earns significantly more than the average non-engineering manager, and more than many engineering managers.
And in the US, doctors and lawyers are not comparable to software developers for two main reasons: they have significant legal duties towards their clients (and must carry malpractice insurance as a result), and it is a serious crime to practice medicine or law without a license (which is granted by the people already in the field). Doctors and lawyers typically have further education, as well, which is not required for software developers. We also hear chronic complaints about doctor shortages, too -- but thankfully none for lawyers :) The kind of doctors with the worst shortages are "primary care" doctors, rather than specialists and surgeons, who also make much less money than the specialists, and I think in the same neighborhood as software developers.
You missed the key word "potential" in that sentence. There are many thousands of good programmers in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco area, although basically are already as employed as they wish to be. In the kind of places where you think a company might be able to relocate, there are probably dozens of programmers with the same level of skills. When a company wants to hire hundreds of good engineers, that is not very useful: they'd need to convince most of their workforce to relocate.
Meanwhile, in the reality-based community, Apple et al. *found* a free-market solution to their woes, and are now in court because government regulations say that their solution is not allowed.
US software developer salaries are much higher than in Europe when you control for cost of living. For example, most of the big cities in Europe have higher costs of living than Silicon Valley, but software developers earn much less there. You have to look pretty far down the list of US cities -- say, Charlotte (NC) or Peoria (IL) -- to find salaries that are roughly in line with expensive places in Europe. Companies stay in Silicon Valley because of infrastructure, network effects, and because there are a lot of potential employees in the area.
You're applying single-stage reasoning to an iterated game, which is a good way to lose in the iterated game. If company X hires an employee from company Y by making a better offer, how should company Y respond in order to maximize its own revenue? (It will almost always involve a counter-offer to the employee, and if that fails, company Y will probably try to hire away another experienced engineer for reasons that Fred Brooks described in The Mythical Man-Month.)
If you don't think there is a shortage of software developers in the US, why are developers in the US paid so much more than ones in Europe?
Also, there is no hard threshold to define an "actual" shortage when you're talking about such a large job market.
Yeah, I figured you had nothing.
Standard Oil and Ma Bell were broken up because they exploited monopoly power. There's nothing remotely similar for tech employers. You claimed there was some kind of supplier boycott, I pointed out that there obviously wasn't one in the usual sense, and you fell back to "maybe this kind of harm happened, you can't prove it didn't!"
Those who tried to leave probably succeeded. Can you cite to a single case where this anti-poaching agreement prevented an active searcher from getting a job offer?
Not really. People consider factors besides salary when choosing jobs -- location, fringe benefits, work content, prestige, and more -- and there are other constraints on worker/job compatibility. A married person might become a homemaker if it takes too much effort to find a job that is sufficiently attractive; moving to a different city is expensive, especially for someone who expects low earnings; an employer cannot have a workforce that consists entirely of people who are learning to be productive in their jobs; the list goes on.
Most fundamentally, though, the number of available jobs is flexible in a way that defies quantification. If an employer has unmet demand, they could hire more workers if they can find workers at a low enough salary. It might be cheaper for the employer to hire more people who are individually less productive than to hire more-skilled workers. Automation and other forms of labor substitution further complicate the equilibrium. In contrast, the number of people who have applied for unemployment assistance is very easy to measure.
You failed economics, didn't you? If they recruit employees from other companies, they have to make better offers, and they will have to make better counter-offers to their own employees to counteract poaching by other companies. They do not have bottomless pits of money for salary; they calculated that it was better to have a conspiracy against poaching than to try to poach. (There was also Apple's threat of patent lawsuits if Google in particular didn't agree to the deal.)
People would turn down jobs at Google or Apple on salary grounds if there were a surplus of workers. Almost everyone seems to agree that there is a shortage (according to the usual definition in economics). This case was brought because large companies -- by all accounts -- illegally colluded to counteract that shortage, and thereby suppress their employees' wages.
How was it a boycott if the engineers in question still had jobs?
They could say that with a straight face because the two ideas ("worker shortage" and "cheaper labor") are two sides of the same coin. If there are more workers in a market, the average (or median) salary of an arbitrary engineer goes down. By definition, a shortage exists in any market when the price exceeds what buyers would like to pay. This is essentially why the "natural rate" of unemployment is not zero: There are workers who are not willing to accept the jobs that companies are willing to offer them.
As a trivial case, imagine two companies trying to hire one very specialized worker: A canny worker will be able to get the greatest salary that either company is willing to pay. If there are suddenly two workers available, that leverage goes away, and it is much harder for either worker to bargain up a salary.
The service is still in beta, too -- I would hope they rationalize the pricing (especially for first-party games) by the time they end the beta. Personally, I can't see myself paying these rates ever -- I have a perfectly functional PS3 that I still use more than my PS4, and I somewhere have a PS2 for all my really old disc games.
Does India have anything like the US Constitution's requirement for due process of law before someone is punished? It is conceivable for the government to ban the collection or publication of national security information, with the burden on the collector/publisher to figure out whether they have done so. This would be a recipe for arbitrary enforcement and unjust outcomes, but similar schemes have been implemented in the past -- between restaurant reviews and search engines, recent European cases provide examples for comparison and contrast of laws that are only really decidable with hindsight or by judicial dictate.
You did not answer any of my questions. Did you just want to highlight that India seems to be whining about Google instead of trying to work with them?
North Korea makes it extremely hard to get map information! Face recognition algorithms sometimes go awry! A power plant is shown with similar resolution to neighboring buildings! News at 11!
At least 15 of the 25 places on the list you link to are closed to the general public, several others might be (not clear from quick Google searches), and several appear to have high-quality satellite imagery now. It is not surprising that Google blurs out places that governments intentionally make it hard to see. This is perhaps even a good idea by default for military installations and high-level government buildings, with exceptions to be made for plausible allegations of malfeasance or abuse of authority.
The government body trying to protect its turf from competition did not cite any privacy issues, either. It cited security issues, which of course it could not describe in detail because security.
Did Google specifically solicit information about defense installations, perhaps as a particular example of hospitals or restaurants? If not, did Google have any way to know which information about which installations is considered secret? (Obviously, the government would never publish such a list for general consumption, because that would both reveal the data that they want to protect and distinguish the sensitive data from information that they consider non-sensitive.) Did Google republish this data, or is the perceived offense merely that Google has the data?
Verizon does not advertise unlimited bandwidth. They advertise(d) unlimited data usage -- and in this case, "unlimited" is read to mean "no artificial [or carrier-imposed] caps", not "no caps at all" or even "LTE everywhere".
To clarify, both sentences in the first paragraph of my earlier comment were sarcastic. Working that many hours per week might be a BFOQ in rare instances of personal service work, and maybe (I personally doubt it) some operations jobs, but there is no way it would be accepted as a BFOQ for a development job.
Unions are an incredibly poor way to control abusive employer tactics unless workers in the bargaining unit are basically fungible -- and knowledge workers are not. A much better approach would be something like an online exchange for H-1B job postings, where US-based employees can register their interest for a job opening (along with their current and/or target salary) and see whether the job eventually goes to someone with permanent work authorization in the US and what the salary is, and perhaps see an anonymized summary of the eventual hire's qualifications relative to the posting's requirements. This would give employees most of the information necessary to (decide whether to) file a complaint either with immigration authorities or in court.
Hey, working 60+ hours per week is a bona fide occupational qualification for some jobs! These immigrants are just filling jobs that Americans don't want to do.
Another problem is that these companies tend to tailor H-1B job requirement statements to particular foreign candidates in such a way that essentially every US-based candidate who might see the posting would not qualify or would ignore it (for example, because of that pay disparity or the work week or other conditions listed in the job description).
If you like looking like a whiny, hypocritical moron, be my guest. I take it that you concede that illegal immigration is in fact a crime, and that you didn't read far enough into my earlier comment to see where I explained that, because you haven't done a thing to rebut either of those. I'm not going to use soft words to save the feelings of someone who is a lazy, useful idiot or worse.