The fight between Ketamine Boy and the MAGAts is definitely a time to root for injuries, but of course it’s being played as immigrant vs anti-immigrant, when really the H-1B program isn’t a good deal for immigrants or, really, for anyone but big corporations.
In my experience, the overhead associated with having H-1B visa holders is way too expensive for small companies to shoulder. So, it’s a big tech company program, allowing them to have a set of lower-paid immigrant engineers. Then, there’s the issue with the length of the H-1B, which is nominally 6 years, and while visa holders can apply for permanent residency, that’s by no means guaranteed. Finally, the H-1B holder has to exit the US in 60 days or less if they’re laid off or fired. Put all of these requirements together, and H-1B holders are essentially indentured to the corporation that hired them initially.
There’s also the question of whether H-1B keeps tech salaries down, and denies qualified US residents jobs, because cheaper labor is available. Noah Smith has a long post on this whole issue, and the consensus among economists is that it basically doesn’t, because when H1-B employment grows, so does tech employment as a whole, and when tech employment grows, salaries go up. He also makes the point that companies will generally offshore instead of hiring more US residents if they can’t get all the H-1B employees they want. I’m sure the research shows what Noah reported, but it’s far, far better for US tech firms to be able to hire visa holders and integrate them with their teams, than it is to offshore. Most people who have experienced offshoring will tell you it’s a false economy when all of the hidden costs (communication, software quality) are factored in. And, for the last year, we’ve been in a “soft” hiring period for skilled white-collar workers, so I’m doubtful that H-1B has no effect on salaries or job availability.
There was also a nasty back-and-forth between Elon/ stans and MAGAts on Twitter’s, where Elon et. al. argued that the reason that US residents aren’t hired is because they’re stupid (they used the r-word instead).
I’d put it a different way: in times of peak employment, there are not enough US residents who have the aptitude and attitude (it’s both, not just one) to become software engineers. There’s a lot of tedium in the job, and the reason that Indians completely dominate the numbers of H-1B visa holders is that there are a ton of them and therefore there are more with aptitude and attitude. Plus, the ability to make, by Indian standards, a phenomenal living, tends to adjust one’s attitude towards tedium. (And — this is critical — they have English skills that the Asian candidates generally lack.). This, btw, is why the “job training” programs that try to re-skill coal miners and steel workers are almost always ineffective. Even if they have the aptitude, they usually lack the attitude. Democrats should no longer support these chimerical programs.
I’ve interviewed a lot of Indian students for internships, and some of them are indeed brilliant, and some of them aren’t. From what I’ve seen, the non-brilliant ones get added to the group of H-1B holders hired in groups by large consulting firms, and basically the team adjusts for the less brilliant workers. One of the non-brilliant ones that I mistakenly hired told me that they were basically forced to go to the US to get a job by their family, who had scraped together enough to get this person a paid-for college undergrad degree (of dubious quality) which was their entry to a US MS degree and US employment. Like a lot of immigrant communities, the Indian students lived together and watched out for each other, and this person succeeded only with a lot of help from fellow country-men and women.
The H-1B program is what happens when rich interests (tech companies) use their massive political pull to get a visa program tailored to their needs. The fact that no analogous visa program exists for unskilled workers (the H-2A and H-2B program — that Trump uses — are much shorter term) shows that the Elons of the world get the immigrants they want when they want them. H-1B is probably in no real danger, but pointing out Elon’s hypocrisy is certainly worthwhile, and fun.
Athenspets – Walter’s Fund, The Year In Review 2025
Baud
Learned something new
Raflw
I’ll repost here what I said on Bsky earlier today, which was in response to someone saying they did not like Musty, but would defend H1Bs and they should be expanded:
“I will argue against expanding these visas that allow workers to be muzzled and abused. Most H1B people should be fast tracked to full green cards, and green cards should be dramatically easier to get in general.
H1Bs are a bullshit, pro-corporate-power kludge.”
JoyceH
Degree programs in the US have become so expensive, I wonder if we’re missing out on Americans with the aptitude and attitude who simply can’t afford the training.
TBone
Tiedrich on Blue-sky
Old Man Shadow
The indentured servitude bit is the key part.
Since their immigration status is tied to their continued employment, they are more likely to accept bad bosses, abusive working conditions, and long hours demanded that essentially reduce their wages (if calculated hourly) to near minimum wage standards.
Plenty of Americans can fill those jobs, but not at the terms Musk and his ilk want to dictate.
Baud
Top H1B employers list here. Amazon is the biggest.
Raflw
And the idea that these are nonimmigrant aliens is a complete confection. Sugary sweet for the general public, but the empty calories of false assurance about how it all works.
I am aquatinted with an H1Ber, and he’s been in the US I think 10 years. That’s a non-immigrant? Huh.
TBone
Uncle Buck in the Assistant Principal’s office
twbrandt
Given the virtual fistfights that broke out in the previous thread about H-1Bs, you are a brave man for broaching this topic again.
I recently concluded a 46 year career as a computer programmer/software developer/software engineer/engineering manager/VP development/etc. I worked with a lot of foreign engineers and a lot of homegrown engineers. Many in both categories were excellent, some should have found something else to do. The foreign engineers from whatever country – India, China, Taiwan, etc – in general were more nose-to-the-grindstone types because, I believe, their situation was more tenuous.
Good summary, M2.
stinger
What exactly is the “war” the likes of which we cannot comprehend that Musk plans to engage in? What can he do to his Twitter critics besides kick them off his already shrinking social media platform?
ArchTeryx
I hate to say I am absolutely against H-1B, down to the very core of my being. I’ve seen its absolute worst parts in medical research. I saw a NIAID (National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, part of the NIH) faculty member so sociopathic he was rumored to be a serial killer, use H-1B specifically to get foreign postdocs to abuse the shit out of. Those that couldn’t take his abuse were promptly fired and deported. Another used H-1B to get postdocs only from foreign countries and reject all American applicants. There was way more than enough American bioscience PhDs willing to work; they just wanted exploitable, abusable labor. And the whole academic establishment was following in their footsteps.
Note: None of these are private organizations. These are government and academic organizations. And they were using H-1B shamelessly to freeze out Americans that might, y’know, demand that labor laws be followed even in the mighty Ivory Towers. I’m amazed that Loomis hasn’t banned me from LGM yet, because I keep pointing out to these fucking overbred, overstarched tenured professors how corrupt an enterprise they work for, corrupt on a level that makes corporations look like honest dealers!
I Got Mine Fuck You is what academia and the NIH runs on. And considering the extreme imbalance of PhDs – American PhDs – to jobs available, IGMFY never wavers. Not even during the COVID years. It wasn’t all hands on deck in molecular virology, it was a bunch of sinecured tenures ordering a bunch of cheap H-1B labor to do all the work actually researching vaccines. For which they got little if any credit.
Rant over.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@twbrandt:
I was out yesterday and I don’t read comments on other posts (no time), so I live in blissful ignorance.
I think our experience is similar with foreign-born engineers.
WTFGhost
Musk isn’t here because of H1B. He overstayed a student visa, as an illegal, and started working without a work permit.
I don’t trust economists who say that they don’t hold back US born folks, because, due to the indentured-servant nature of their situation, they are, perforce, working harder than an American who can go on unemployment and find another job. That means US workers are competing with people who are working much harder, which creates unrealistic working conditions.
I know, I know, Republican_Needs_H1B says “YOU’RE SAYING AMERICAN WORKERS ARE LAZY!!!
No, I’m saying indentured servants work longer and harder, due to the need to retain their employment, because they can’t just have for a couple-three months looking for another job.
And I’m saying I believe this kills people. Real people, just, you know, people you never have to *see*. So they don’t count as real, because you never see a corpse or coffin, nor really have to care, except to get impatient during the funeral procession.
Sorry if everyone else is all puppies and kittens and rainbows.
Well, not all of them, of course.
different-church-lady
“Immigrants are bad unless they’re the good kind.”
“Which kind are the good kind?”
“The kind that help me get rich.”
Starfish (she/her)
@Baud: This made me think of our former first lady.
Anonymous At Work
1. @Baud: Where can I find numbers as a percentage of total employment?
2. @mistermix, H1-B isn’t in danger of going away, but Musk has increased the chances that Congress could reform them. Losing a caste of indenture servants would hurt worse.
@mistermix.bsky.social
@WTFGhost:
This is a good point. From what I can tell, in general, the culture of software engineering in large companies is just one foot in front of the other drudgery. I’m talking about large banks and other organizations that hire a lot of H-1Bs and also offshore a lot of work.
KatKapCC
So glad I was around to witness the first time someone closely entwined with an incoming president told millions of random strangers to “FUCK YOURSELF in the face”.
different-church-lady
@KatKapCC: [shrug] “It’s what they voted for.”
ArchTeryx
@different-church-lady: Or help me keep my paper factory churning out publications, so I can rake in all those sweet, sweet grant kickbacks, get paid trips all over the world to conferences and symposia, and be recognized as a leading light in my field without lifting a finger to do actual lab work.
trollhattan
Work exclusively with engineers, despite having never driven a train myself even once. All but one were born outside the U.S. and I have zero idea what their status may be, because one does not ask such things.
I have no further point.
KatKapCC
@different-church-lady: I mean, I suppose I’d have to be impressed with someone’s flexibility if they were able to comply with Musk’s suggestion.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@@mistermix.bsky.social:
You should go back and go thru those comments as they are applicable to this discussion. Also too, No Opinion is a Libertarian in a Trench Coat, basically one of the Four Horsemen of the Neoliberal Apocalypse (Yglesias is one of the other three). Anything he says, data sources he cherry picks, are no better than something from the Cato Inst or other Koch/Theil supported “think” tank or academic department that’s whored itself out for those sweet, sweet, glibertarian/techbro dollars.
And what Old Man Shadow said at #5, ArchTeryx said at #11 and what I said yesterday at:
https://balloon-juice.com/2024/12/27/clown-fight-at-the-dipshit-corral/#comment-9474165
https://balloon-juice.com/2024/12/27/clown-fight-at-the-dipshit-corral/#comment-9474229
(Everybody should read thru that link to the Daily Kos diary and read the comments).
More links worth reading:
http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/h1b.html
http://www.cringely.com/2015/06/15/the-h-1b-visa-program-is-a-scam/
And from the comments in a DougJ post from 10 years ago:
http://www.balloon-juice.com/2015/08/18/born-in-the-usa/#comments
Starfish (she/her)
@@mistermix.bsky.social: A specific person derailed by saying that discussing the H1-B workers was racist and brought her beef with racist things people have said on Twitter to the thread. I will give you one guess as to who it was.
stinger
@KatKapCC: The Convict himself has been debasing our public discourse for the past ten years, and openly called his political opponent a “shit vice president” at his rallies. Disgraceful.
Another Scott
@stinger: My interpretation is that he will throw around a few hundred million to defeat anyone who wants to make the H1-B laws and regulations worse for him.
Or make people think that he will, so that they obey in advance.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Professor Bigfoot
@different-church-lady: Welcome to America, where, if it’s profitable, it is by definition moral.
TBone
@ArchTeryx: you just made me remember that guy who lit himself on fire outside of Donold’s trial, wasn’t he convinced that NYU was mafia?
@mistermix.bsky.social
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: That Kos piece is interesting because it’s such a false economy to have a person who isn’t remotely qualified as part of an engineering team. They just drag everything down.
That’s consistent with the one bad hire I made — that person was absolutely a drag and I gave them the worst reference I ever had given (warned them in advance) — basically 20 respirations per minute and they want to work. Didn’t matter, some consulting firm hired them as part of a mega team since the consultants take a big fee for every live body they provide.
Starfish (she/her)
@JoyceH: This is a really complicated question.
There is a book called “Unlocking the Clubhouse” that was discussing why women were leaving the computer science major at Carnegie Mellon and trying to figure out how not to lose them.
It came down to a lot of men had earlier exposure to technology and were feeling cocky about their knowledge, so the school updated the freshman programming class to be in a language called Miranda that no one knew to even out the playing field.
Foreign-born women (whose families relied on their financial success) and those less likely to be pressured by gender stereotypes were more likely to stay.
During the past few years of just throwing bodies at tech, there were code schools with programs that were less than a year long that helped some people get in tech. Some of them were good. A lot of them were scams. This year, some of the ones that were not scams are going out of business because no one wants training for a career that is not there.
different-church-lady
@Professor Bigfoot: Not just moral: virtuous.
Bill Arnold
@trollhattan:
Name a famous living engineer.
Bonus points: name two.
Suzanne
@JoyceH:
This is absolutely happening. The high cost and risk of education drives some people away, especially from fields like medicine. I would take the anti-H1-B people more seriously (if still disagree with their position) if they wanted to make college free or much lower cost for any American who wants to go. But they don’t. They just want to drive out anyone who isn’t white, and reduce the market value of degrees.
JaneE
My experience with H1bs was a quarter century ago and it looks like nothing has changed. The workers were little better than slaves. About half Indian and half South African. If they complained about anything, back they went, and good luck finding another opportunity to come back. The big consulting company made money. The workers were paid about an average salary until you calculated the hourly rate.
Not all employers were like that. We hired one whose employer gave him a couple of months notice of when his job would be terminated and facilitated his hunt for another job. But he had also put in long hours.
At the very least the program needs a top to bottom rethink.
The Audacity of Krope
Beyond a doubt in my mind.
Professor Bigfoot
@different-church-lady: Better.
cmorenc
For all the flaws in the H1B program that open foreign workers to exploitation, for all the other heinously bad things about Musk and Ramaswamy, in the context of their ability and self-interest to mount financially potent resistance against Trump’s immensely damaging Xenophobically racist passion to categorically expel all noncitizens, they are momentarily useful thugs armed with immense $$. Much of the business community is on-board with their desire to retain the ability to keep and import more H1B workers. We progressives simply don’t have enough traction ourselves at the moment in Washington to successfully lobby for a properly reformed version of H1B that eliminates its more exploitative flaws – in the moment, the achievable goal is preventing Trump from eliminating every contributing noncitizen from the US and preserving the principle that many foreigners are productively worth allowing to be here.
A Ghost to Most
There has always been a shortage of qualified computer professionals in this country, which is filled by H-1B. I retired 6 years ago, and still get badgered.
Fuck Elon, but not enough Americans will do the work.
Baud
@cmorenc:
True.
twbrandt
@JoyceH: Some public universities are addressing that. The University of Michigan, for example, offers free tuition to students from families with incomes of $125,000 or less. There is tuition support for students from families with incomes greater than $125K up to $180K.
UncleEbeneezer
@KatKapCC: No kink-shaming!
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Anyone trying to conflate valid criticisms here of the H1B program as it’s currently written and applied with some broader anti-higher education agenda restricted by whatever criteria is no different than s_c was doing yesterday in trying to conflate such criticisms with racist attitudes toward Indians.
Most of the people behind the fundamental change in how higher education’s accessibility and cost are the same, trickle-down, market-uber-alles clowns that have driven economic policy in this country since 20 Jan 1981.
I watched this play out first hand in the 80s as somebody with no money and able to manage college while watching those really important funding mechanisms go away under the onslaught of the Reagan Revolution. The worst effects of the current funding scenario for college hurts people like me back in the day, liberal arts majors, because of the obvious cost/benefit of going that route. Thank goodness I got in on the tail end of that because today? Not sure if it would work.
Many of us here are outspoken proponents of *public* education for *all*. And that extends to college. It needs to be accessible and affordable and what’s happened in those areas over the last 40 years are things many of us have hated to see.
The fact that the same people who promote aspects of this in other policy areas who are also supportive of H1B as it’s currently applied, should come as no shock to anybody.
And from cmorenc in #37:
This.
Michael Bersin
I took a lot of photos this year:
The year in pictures – 2024 – part 3
Suzanne
@Starfish (she/her): So I have talked about a related issue in my field before.
For my master’s degree, I attended Very Large Not Selective State University. Said university is one of the largest educators of international students, I think they had the 3rd or 4th largest international population at the time. I finished my degree in 2010. At the time, there was one university in the country offering the PhD in architecture.
Now, the PhD in architecture is a weird degree. It doesn’t entail anything about professional practice — you can sit for licensing exams with a 5-year bachelor’s degree or a master’s, and you still have to log 3 years of internship. It’s not necessary for teaching architecture at the university level. It’s for research, consulting, specialization in fields like building science, sustainability, etc.
But…. wouldn’t you know it, architecture departments fell all over themselves in the past decade to add it to their offerings. And whenever I meet these students (I do a lot of recruitment)….. I think I’ve literally only ever met one American student on that degree track. I’m not exaggerating when I estimate that probably a third of the students I’ve met pursuing that degree are Persian women.
It’s obvious that public schools need international students — who pay, or usually their families pay, full freight. Now, I’m very happy to have international students here, as many as want to come…. but I am also aware that there’s Americans who would also like to pursue these tracks, and because of decades of hollowing out public education…. they cannot do so.
JaySinWA
This war illustrates two racist wings of the R party. The old fashioned genteel country club racists are aspiring for re-ascending over the even older fashion in your face racists that T liberated.
The CC Racists are trying to send that basket of IYF racist deplorables down the river. Will their Moses be saved? Who plays Pharos’s daughter? Can I beat this metaphor to death?
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@A Ghost to Most: Not now. The move to aggressively offshore meant lot of talented American born software engineers have been laid off. There is available talent. They just don’t want people who aren’t indentured servants.
Lobo
So many dynamics going on here:
First this:
Vivek and Elon briefly talking about white Americans the way white Americans talk about everyone else has the entire Republican coalition fractured and in disarray. They know now what it feels like. Unfortunately, I am still included in that.
“Stupid & Lazy”
Next: Maga’ts saying out loud what they really thing of non-white folx.
“Stupid and Dirty”
HB1’s: There is a difference between coding and software engineering. Software engineering has a theory and approach behind it. The actual code is cleaner and maintainable. It takes a lot more training. Coding is often hacked up.
I have seen it. Also, HB1 often downgrade the status of the immigrants and use those as comparisons and say see, “We pay them as much as entry level people,” when they are often more senior. They then take on the more senior level work. And if they do not have senior level knowledge, they take on the work anyway. They push people out from the bottom with the companies shedding the senior level salaries.
different-church-lady
@twbrandt: When a law school has more progressives policies than the tax system, you know you have a problem.
Captain C
@Baud: I mean, the ability to pork TCFG without puking is a kind of distinguished ability.
The Audacity of Krope
No such person has yet been found. Lucky for Trump, he’s into that.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: H1-B is the employment based work visa and is not just for software and tech companies. Everyone has an opinion but very few have actual knowledge.
Also first hand knowledge and lived experience under various statuses including the immigrant visa or the Green Card is handwaved away by the esteemed commentariat here.
They read an article in the Daily KOS where the author knew a guy called Raj so they know everything that there is to know about the visa.
The anti-immigrant sentiment is strong here not just on the right.
trollhattan
@Bill Arnold:
Will go with Wozniak and Jensen Huang.
stinger
@Another Scott:
Thanks. So, he’ll use his money to buy legislation and legislators he likes. I can comprehend that! But does he comprehend that he can’t silence his critics? I suspect not.
The Audacity of Krope
Those cheap cigars at the gas station aren’t for being hollowed out and their contents replaced, but that’s how they get used. Mounjaro wasn’t made for losing weight. That’s largely how it’s being used.
Shalimar
@ArchTeryx: Loomis dislikes other professors as much as you do. He isn’t going to ban you for that.
Another Scott
@A Ghost to Most: My step mom went to a small women’s college in Mississippi in the ’60s. She got a BS in mathematics. She (and a lot of other women there) was recruited by Boeing to do programming in Seattle. They trained her.
These billion dollar companies could do that again. But they don’t want to. They want the rest of us to pay instead.
Grr…
Best wishes,
Scott.
KatKapCC
@Michael Bersin: Great shot of the comet :D
twbrandt
@different-church-lady: not sure I understand your comment? Michigan has an undergrad enrollment of over 45,000 students across all three campuses (Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Flint), and god knows how many undergraduate and graduate degree programs. It’s more than just the law school.
hrprogressive
Would love to see a coordinated effort to get people such as Loomer, etc, to talk about Elon’s “India First” policy being completely antithetical to Trump’s “America First” policy.
Let these fascist fuckwads eviscerate each other, but give them occasional squirts of lighter fluid on the dumpster fire to keep it going.
Both combatants are kind of clueless enough I think if the non-fascist forces worked together, they could really get this to take off.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
I just unfollowed someone on Blue sky for veering too far into MAGA territory on this for my taste.
Musk vs. MAGA is a right wing fight, which means it’s between two sets of bad actors. We have nothing to offer except to help exacerbate the conflict on their side. Dems don’t have the power to implement our preferred policies even if we had one.
different-church-lady
@Shalimar: Yeah, but whatever you do, don’t poke him about how bad he is at house breaking puppies.
(Voice of experience.)
Captain C
@Shalimar:
Also, everyone else in the world, including the musicians whose music he claimes to like.
Poe Larity.
When on-shoring started, they sent their best. As they explained to me, there really are only a few top notch programs in India and they can only pump out so much. Those folks have options, but in down turns I had to intervene to help keep them here. One is now a VP, one a Director, and another a DE. They were smart and ambitious.
The masses, they don’t have options. But that’s somewhat true of natives who hit 40 and aren’t culture fits anymore. It’s interesting to see the libertarian tech bros of the aughts struggling with the libertarian AI bros.
Off-shoring is a cost control. It works for awhile, and then it goes to Egypt, Czech, Albania, Indonesia. Rising tides? IDK.
Another Scott
@Suzanne: I had a good friend in grad school who was from Iran. He said that architects and engineers are the high status professions there – ranking the way lawyers and surgeons and high finance people do here. I thought that was interesting…
Best wishes,
Scott.
Starfish (she/her)
@Suzanne: Oh my gosh. You have just described my family to me.
There is this weird immigrant family thing where “you are going to be an engineer or a doctor, no other major exists.” When I discuss this with other people they used to find this deeply relatable OR now they might think I am making fun of their people. I am an engineer.
So when my sister wanted to be an architect, and my mom had her misgivings, I told my mom to leave her alone and let her do what she wanted. She has an M. Arch.
My cousin who was not an American citizen is the Persian woman who started the architecture Ph.D. I don’t think she quite finished it, and I think she is a software project manager or something now. She got caught up in the Muslim travel ban, and it was not at all clear that she would be able to come back and continue her Ph.D. program.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@twbrandt:
Back in the day, UMich in Ann Arbor and CU-Boulder were considered the two most expensive, state supported, universities in ‘Murka by whatever criteria was used to judge. I was able to to to CU-Boulder because of *federal* aid, nothing came from them.
So, my question is what’s the total cost to go to UMich Ann Arbor (we’ll use the probable worst-case (most expensive) location)? What portion of tuition would cover that?
Okay, I “did my own research” in 2 minutes and while numbers are different, it would appear that tuition makes up around 50% of the cost which right hovers around $17-18K for the tuition part.
It’s great they’re doing that.
rikyrah
This was pretty deep by DL Hughley.
He hit it on the nose.
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZP8NKBxUg/
rikyrah
We have had massive layoffs in the tech industry in the past two years.
We don’t need any H1B visas
trollhattan
@rikyrah: Shhh, not “layoffs”, “right-sizing.”
twbrandt
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: I lived in Ann Arbor for 27 years. The cost of housing is really expensive due to A2’s popularity and rampant NIMBYism. But it’s good that the university is doing this.
ArchTeryx
@twbrandt: Yeah that was a shocker when I worked for U of Mich’s Medical Center. The one good thing was that Ann Arbor is small; I ended up outside of it (only place I could afford) but a very short drive put me on a bus stop, and that took me into work. Parking was vastly cheaper at the campus bus stations, too. On an average day the entire commute was 30-40 minutes – not bad for getting an apartment that was about 30% below market average rent at the time.
It also had the worst roads I’ve ever driven on in my life, and I’ve driven in rural Georgia and Tennessee! And that was because the Republicans running the state specifically diverted road funds away from A2 and to the north and west parts of the state – I.e., the most white and most Republican. Some things never change.
twbrandt
@ArchTeryx: Ann Arbor thinks it’s Berkeley but it’s really Palo Alto.
ETA: And I like Ann Arbor! I miss living there a lot! But it drove me crazy sometimes.
Kayla Rudbek
@different-church-lady: and when the physics department is less sexist than the law school, you know there’s a massive problem with the law school
ArchTeryx
@twbrandt: Having avoided living in California like the plague, I’m not sure I get the reference. Berzerkley I know a fair amount about, Palo Alto, zip.
Fair Economist
@cmorenc:
I would say the goal is levering whichever side Trump eventually acts against out of the Republican coalition. Our reps should vote against any proposal he makes for reform on that basis.
As Josh Marshall says, the duty of an opposition party is to oppose. This is doubly so when the ruling party is so reprehensible.
twbrandt
@ArchTeryx: sorry. Justified or not Berkeley has this cool, hip, countercultural image. Palo Alto is incredibly expensive and incredibly NIMBY.
Kayla Rudbek
@Starfish (she/her): the old problem of the pipeline of women in STEM, it was known back in the 1990s that this was a problem.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: People are taking the latest Elon and Vivek’s blatherings and using them as a stick to beat up on Indians and Indian Americans.
Including Kamala Harris.
Barry A-H-S-S
My brother was a (rent-a-body) system analyst for two and a half decades. He had the experience several times of working in a position as a contractor for six to twelve months, getting positive feedback from the boss on his work product, then finding one day that a H1B worker had been brought in to do his job and be asked to train them. The corporation requesting the H1B has to certify to the govt that no domestic workers are available in the area who have the education and training to do the job.
It’s an anti-labor scam.
The Audacity of Krope
Sad if true. What do you mean?
ArchTeryx
@twbrandt: No apologies needed. I’m just fighting a nasty infection on my face right now and I’m a wee bit cranky as a result.
Elizabelle
I remember Disney’s IT department being forced to train their H-1B replacements. The visa is not meant to be replacement. It is to supplement, when those skills cannot be found and hired.
Not a fan of H-1Bs, although they have their place where actual (temporary!) shortages exist. They are way too often a gimmick for controllable indentured servitude. Further, the employers frequently have to game their way through applications from legitimately qualified people. They don’t want an employee. They want a widget.
rikyrah
I will put it in union terms
I view H1B visas as scabs.
Yeah, scabs😒😒
Villago Delenda Est
Leon wants indentured servants. That is the bottom line.
sab
@twbrandt: Both cities are extremely NIMBY. I couldn’t wait to get back to urban midwest where city government isn’t focused on bothering people.
Elizabelle
@Barry A-H-S-S: You got there first. That is exactly what it is.
The Audacity of Krope
I don’t see the difference under our current capitalist system. Employees as they currently exist, no matter the intent of an individual employer, are nothing more than an extractable resource.
Villago Delenda Est
@Elizabelle: We had a saying in the Army. Managers are for things. Leaders are for people.
Leon wants things to manage, not people he has to lead.
PhaedrusOnBass
A wonderful treatment of a complex issue. Too bad the participants in the argument can’t read more than 10 words at a time.
Signed,
A near-40-year veteran in the software industry.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Haven’t seen Harris mentioned in this context yet. But you’re correct that some people are going overboard.
trollhattan
Turning Florida purple postponed until we fix the operating system.
The Audacity of Krope
As is temp work by contract, generally.
Fair Economist
I’ve known a couple of H1-Bs and they all complained about how they had to (metaphorically) kowtow to and fellate their employers to keep their jobs because otherwise they’d be fired and probably end up leaving the country. I didn’t discuss pay with most of them, because you don’t do that in the US, but one bagged a big pay raise once he got his green card.
Baud
FWIW. Note, no link to original source
rikyrah
@trollhattan:
This shyt enrages me.
That district ELECTED A DEMOCRAT.
If you can’t serve as what they elected…they need to resign, so that the district can get what they wanted 🤬🤬🤬
Bill Arnold
@trollhattan:
Ah, good. A decade or two ago that question was more difficult.
Had to look up Jensen Huang. Am familiar with Nvida tech, know in detail their tech roadmap/codenames and have access to thousands of their gpus, but the name didn’t pop into mind.
Raflw
@Another Scott: “My interpretation is that he will throw around a few hundred million to defeat anyone who wants to make the H1-B laws and regulations worse for him.”
If Musty isn’t careful, he’ll get Republicans to pass an excess wealth tax! Perhaps with a floor of, say, 150Bn. (Three digits too high a floor for my liking, but really it’d just be Elon and Jeffy B they’d probably want to target).
John S.
@schrodingers_cat:
Again with this bullshit.
I’m sure you will fail to provide even one example of this just like yesterday.
John S.
@Baud:
Like who?
She keeps insisting that there is widespread evidence of this happening here, yet there have been zero examples of it actually happening.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Yep. Pretty deceitful. She’ll make a good Republican.
KatKapCC
@schrodingers_cat: You got links for what Harris has said?
Villago Delenda Est
@rikyrah: It’s sad, but it’s true. That ideal is what we should always strive for, despite the long odds. The arc of history…
Baud
@John S.:
Blue sky comments for me.
Harrison Wesley
@Baud: And don’t even get him started on that H5N1 – the best, bigliest visa!
Elizabelle
@schrodingers_cat:
I was an immigration paralegal, and have absolutely seen the system gamed.
Yes, in principle the H-1B visa is very useful and can provide communities with healthcare etc. that would not otherwise be available. In practice, it is very much being abused, and especially in the the tech and finance sectors.
Go whinge somewhere else.
Villago Delenda Est
@trollhattan: From what I’ve read, she’s cited Democratic “antisemitism” as the reason to switch. Yet again conflating the fascist pigs of Likud with all Jews.
The Audacity of Krope
@John S.: There’s a reason I agree with her so vehemently on things like immigration, the fact of white liberal racism, and adhering to democratic process and yet I still
don’t fuck wit hermostly avoid directly engaging with her (though I tried today).schrodingers_cat
So should international students who get their degrees here, from undergrad to PhD should they have an option to work here if they want? The H visas are one avenue to make that happen.
H1-B needs an overhaul as does the entire immigration system. It is not pro immigrant or pro worker (both citizen and non-citizen)
rikyrah
😱 Scary Larry 😱 🇺🇦✊🏻🇺🇸🗽 (@aintscarylarry) posted at 1:44 PM on Sat, Dec 28, 2024:
😂😂😂 MAGAts voted for trump because they wanted to fuck over immigrants. Only to have a South African immigrant purchase the government and defend his policy of hiring immigrants by telling the MAGAts to go fuck themselves in the face. You just can’t make this shit up. https://t.co/oNTFZiMR40
(https://x.com/aintscarylarry/status/1873092581288231223?t=A8T_dhpOuyk-w6lDOExPtg&s=03)
Baud
@Villago Delenda Est:
The Jews apparently didn’t get the message. They came out strong for Harris.
Almost Retired
I’ve been a plaintiff-side labor and employment lawyer in a city full of immigrants for over 35 years. So you’d think I’d be up to speed on H1-B visa employment issues. But I’m not.
Partly that’s because I’m old and don’t want to learn new things.
But mostly because they never call me. They’re too intimidated or misinformed about their rights to reach out for legal help in any but the most egregious circumstances.
The very few matters I’ve handled have involved poison-pill penalties in the employment contract that impose “liquidated damages” for leaving early, regardless of the circumstances.
Elizabelle
@schrodingers_cat: Yes! Absolutely!
Another Scott
@Bill Arnold: Shuji Nakamura
Robert Dennard (though he died a few months ago).
;-)
Best wishes,
Scott.
The Audacity of Krope
This has been a very popular position with many Democrats this year. Probably a big contributor to losing the election. People might not vote on things like Palestine per se; but people like Fetterman are slandering young students, contributing to the general idea that Democrats don’t really have our back, while encouraging real, consequential stochastic terrorism against student bodies, not just the protestors.
schrodingers_cat
@Elizabelle: H1B makes that possible right now.
@Baud: Tankies and MAGAs are calling her India first.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Awful people say awful things.
Thanks.
MobiusKlein
It’s such a landmine rich terrain here, in the immigration space. How can I as a cog in the corporate machine do the best for folks in my team, while also not encouraging the use of so called “scabs”
I would love to see the green card process be faster, so job mobility is no longer a lever for employers to use against a notable fraction of the job market.
John S.
@Baud:
Many Jews may look white, but we have never been treated as such (or accepted as white), and therefore do not have the same sense of privilege or entitlement.
We vote accordingly.
MagdaInBlack
@schrodingers_cat: I thought that might be what you were referring to. I had seen them go after Vance and his wife. I had not seen the Kamala attack.
We are not surprised, are we?
The Audacity of Krope
I, for one, am very concerned at the notion that Kamala Harris, whom I just voted to be President, might be out there spewing harmful rhetoric about Indian immigrants.
Oh, if only someone making such a claim could provide documentary evidence to evaluate the claim…
schrodingers_cat
@MagdaInBlack: Nope. Not one iota.
John S.
@The Audacity of Krope:
I find her schtick to be just as ridiculous as some of our worst trolls.
rikyrah
The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, is the flagship University of the State
A state that is 30% Black.
Now, Alabama could invest in the public schools of the state to create their own base of students , they choose to have a State flagship school where 57.7 % come from out of state
As opposed to a school like University of Illinois, where 71% come from in- state
UVA-68%
UMICHIGAN-52%
Circle back to Apartheid Clyde saying that they could invest in American education, but easier to pull cheap pliable labor from elsewhere.🤬🤬
Will point out again….huge layoffs in tech over the past two years…but, we supposedly need H1B visas?😒
John S.
Nice to see that today’s discussion of H1b visas is much more reality based than yesterday where we had several commenters insisting that H1b was not a predatory program, and that it was the most awesome thing to hit the workforce since child labor laws were enacted.
Okay, that last part is a little hyperbolic, but not by much.
trollhattan
@Villago Delenda Est:
The Republican embrace of all things Jewish is one of their bedrock principles, I guess. 🙄
rikyrah
@The Audacity of Krope:
The Jewish community didn’t get the message.
Their turnout for Harris is the community closest to the Black community’s for Harris in 2024.😒
John S.
@rikyrah:
Exactly.
Or as you would say, get the phuck outta here with that. 😉
The Audacity of Krope
@rikyrah: Sorry if I wasn’t clear. I wasn’t accusing the Democrats of antisemitism. I was accusing them of Islamophobia and wielding the notion of antisemitism as a cudgel against those who didn’t approve.
John S.
@rikyrah:
Jews went for Harris by almost 80%.
If other demographics went for her as much as us and the Black vote, we would have won the election handily.
different-church-lady
@Baud: That decision is going to break some brains.
sab
@rikyrah: They got the message, and also too they understood the message, very much like Black ladies.
My White cohort was very dim, as always. God gave us the 4th amendment so that we could shoot ourselves in our feet every election.
KatKapCC
@John S.: What we have is conditional access to white privilege. Those of us who are white absolutely benefit from that, but in certain situations, if it is discovered that we’re Jews, that privilege disappears in a nanosecond.
John S.
@different-church-lady:
Why? It’s just as consistent as Trump is on just about any topic he opines about.
Cognitive dissonance is a way of life.
sab
@The Audacity of Krope: Muslims in America trend very Republican. Like my White people. Shoot ourselves in the foot every election.
KatKapCC
@schrodingers_cat: Okay, so wait. You meant that people who are going after Indian immigrants are also going after Harris, NOT that Harris is also going after Indian immigrants?
John S.
@KatKapCC:
Precisely. When we can pass as white, everything is honky dory.
But the second someone spots a yarmulke, Star of David or any other Hasidic accoutrement, that acceptance goes right out the window.
Having been the target of antisemitic violence disabused me of provisional access to white privilege.
ETA: As Professor Bigfoot often points out, we will never be just American. We are hyphenated Americans.
The Audacity of Krope
@sab: That may be. Doesn’t justify bigotry against Muslims.
azlib
I worked in IT for 49 years before I finally retired. I really do not have an opinion one way or the other about the H-1B Visa program. I have little doubt it was created to fill a gap in the tech talent pool here in the US. I think that is something we can all agree on. Whether there is a better solution to this problem is kind of irrelevant. What we as Dems and presumably Progressives should be focusing on is not the evils or merits of the H-1B program, but rather how can we throw more sand in the gears of the fight between Musk and the anti-immigrant MAGA Right. The more they are in disarray and in particular the more Trump is seen to to be not in charge of the situation the better. That disarray makes Trump look weak and that is what we need to accomplish.
MagdaInBlack
@KatKapCC: Correct.
sab
@The Audacity of Krope: I totally agree.
TONYG
About ten years ago I worked for a couple of years at IBM as an I.T. “contractor”. IBM at that time took advantage of low-wage labor without the hassle of H1B visas. IBM “management” just broke every project into tiny pieces and outsourced most of the pieces to India, China, Latin America and Eastern Europe — basically anywhere that had low wages. This arrangement made it difficult to get anything done. If any screw-up or oversight occurred 10,000 miles away it was never clear who to talk to. IBM probably lost money with this arrangement.
Starfish
@rikyrah: A lot of states don’t want to fund higher education, and they fill the education funding gap with rich out of state students and rich international students.
Geminid
@Villago Delenda Est: I saw Rep. Cassel’s statement last night and it sounded like bullshit to me. I’m not talking about the assertion that Democrats tolerate anti-Semitism (which is obvious bullshit). I’m saying that Cassell has other reasons to switch parties and the alleged anti-Semitism is a convenient excuse.
The Audacity of Krope
One which top Democratic officials have been feeding all year. Thanks, Fetterman.
Baud
@sab:
I saw a stat in Bluesky that we actually got a good majority of the Muslim vote. Not sure about turnout. And haven’t confirmed the data.
Geminid
@The Audacity of Krope: I’m not sure what you mean here. Evidently Fetterman has been critical of “pro-Palestinian” protesters, but who says these protesters are Democrats? They themselves would vehemently deny such an affiliation.
Starfish (she/her)
@Kayla Rudbek: That book that I was discussing was published in 2003.
sab
A close relative of mine has worked in computer support for big Pharma scientists for twenty years.
She is sixty. They cannot replace her with Americans because our kids have astronomical student loans, and so cannot afford to work for them. They pay well, but not that well.
They are trying to outsource overseas. Nothing in Europe worked. They used to use Russia and Ukraine, but obviously that is a problem now. Currently they are trying for India. Good bright workforce but the timezones are way out of whack. The best and the brightest in India don’t want to work in the middle of the night for European and American companies.
Bill Arnold
@KatKapCC:
Yes. There were two (main) ways to parse her comment. One that made sense, and one that did not.
A few argumentative people here locked onto the second and did not even notice the first.
The Audacity of Krope
They would have been gettable by Democrats if Democrats weren’t encouraging Islamophobia and stochastic terrorism against our nation’s students.
And it’s wrong in any case. If every decision is about what attracts more voters, you’ve abdicated morality.
ETA: And the perception you are making decisions that way…drives away voters.
sab
@Baud: I hope that is true and that we can confirm it. It should make sense.
Professor Bigfoot
@rikyrah: Acceptance.
This is what America is, this is what America is gonna be. This is what America WANTS to be.
sab
@The Audacity of Krope: I know Fetterman is on our side but he is still a horse’s ass.
Starfish (she/her)
@sab: The tech companies are putting jobs in Ireland because it has been a tax haven, and you can work for a lot of them from their Dublin office.
The Audacity of Krope
@sab: Not my side.
ETA: I pick on him for being the most prominent voice lately, but plenty of Dems pushed this angle and few pushed back.
sab
@rikyrah: But they don’t know they are scabs. American scabs know what they are doing. These guys just want to be Americans.
Dorothy A. Winsor
My son continues to work for a defense contractor at a lower wage than other companies offer partly because security requirements mean his job cannot be outsourced. Other bad things can happen. But not that.
sab
@Starfish (she/her): Are there many Irish amazing at computers? Like above the normal population? Ireland is tiny. India is huge.
Starfish (she/her)
@sab: Some of them want to be Americans. Some of them miss home a lot and want to move back in a few years. And some of them were living impossible lives during the pandemic with their families spread across multiple countries.
Starfish (she/her)
@sab:Well, with globalization, things are very weird. Some of my coworkers in Ireland may be originally from Ireland, but some of them may be from other parts of Europe that have higher unemployment rates. I think people in the EU can find jobs in other parts of the EU, right?
sab
@The Audacity of Krope: Yes, what with her mom being an Indian immigrant.
Sometimes people are so stupid.
rikyrah
@schrodingers_cat:
Those students who have degrees from here have the same education as an American…
They didn’t get their degree from the “international” entrance..
So, there is no reason for the compensation to be any lower, just because an H1B visa is attached to it. It’s predatory.
sab
@Starfish (she/her): Kind of like my family. From everywhere. Just want a home.
Kay
@Geminid:
Balloon Juice shakes a fist at those protestors! How dare they remind people of the war crimes and ethnic cleansing going on, as reported in every single news source both in the US and abroad (including Israeli media) and verified by virtually every human rights org that exists and the international law judicial system.
Wacky. Its like the protesters committed the war crimes. Well, we can all relax because their constitutionally protected political speech was shut down, so that’s a truly wonderful precedent we’ve enthusiastically endorsed. Because THAT will be limited to protesters calling attention to war crimes, I’m sure. Like hell it will.
MagdaInBlack
@Bill Arnold: Oh, you caught that contortion too.
The Audacity of Krope
Almost as bad as throwing out the results of 50+ democratic elections for convenience, huh?
Geminid
@sab: No one said Vice President Harris was attacking foreign visa holders. A commenter was talking about Harris being targeted by the people attacking visa holders. They did not make that clear but that’s what I got from their comment, and they confirmed it at #115.
Starfish (she/her)
@sab: Muslim like Christian is probably not a meaningful category to use to break down voters.
With Christians, you know that there are some white supremacist branches of Christianity and black churches, and those are going to vote in very different ways.
With Muslims, you have a lot of Eastern Europeans, Middle Eastern folks, North African folks, Indian folks, and Indonesian folks. Those are a lot of different people with various experiences.
sab
Kay has kind of lost her mind since the election. The Michigan she retired to and thinks she knows is nothing like the Michigan I saw after law school. That Michigan was Betsy deVos country. Kay can dream on, but it didn’t vote the way it did for generations and suddenly change. Maybe moved a bit left, but that is just a blip in their politics.
Melancholy Jaques
@rikyrah:
Should we be taking Hillary Cassel at her word, that she is leaving because Democrats do not fully support Israel?
Or is this a bullshit shit excuse like “voted for Trump because of the price of eggs?”
Was it for the money, like Sinema? Or was she always kind of a right-winger, like Manchin?
sab
@Starfish (she/her): I agree. Apparently I misspoke because everyone is arguing at me from where I am already.
Kay
@The Audacity of Krope:
This blog used to have a norm where we didn’t drag comments or attacks on other commentors from thread.to thread. The blog worked a lot better when people didn’t do that.
What you do is commentary on the comments and commenters. That is boring and endlessly repetitive.
trollhattan
@Starfish (she/her):
Description of places Muslims come from can be repeated for Christians to a significant degree. Ratios will differ while their nations of origin have considerable overlap.
tobie
The nativism on display in some of the comments here is appalling. It rivals MAGA attacks on H1B’s. I’d love to see improvements in the program but H1B holders are not robbing full-blooded Americans of jobs. That’s BS. We’re in the midst of a labor shortage in the US in all arenas and especially in the tech sector. We should be welcoming immigration. Immigrants have always driven the US economy. I do not get the resentment.
Starfish (she/her)
@sab: There was definitely some miscommunication going on in this thread, and there is also some people really wanting to argue like the comment section is Twitter debate club.
I am hoping that we can fix the first one by trying to truly understand each other, and I am hoping the people who want to turn the comments section into Twitter debate club knock it off.
Because to win at Twitter debate club, you ultimately have to be a billionaire named Elon Musk.
trollhattan
@Melancholy Jaques:
Reasonable question. Am WAY to far from Florida to know even who she is but we know of plenty Republicans who cosplay a Democrat to get elected then pop the jack-in-a-box surprise, always with a version of “I did not leave the Democrat Party, the Democrat Party left me.”
Kay
I myself think the protestors are owed an apology. All of their allegations have proved to be correct. You can hate them saying it, but the vast, vast weight of the evidence is on their side, and their case gets stronger every day. Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton were dead wrong and the much maligned college students were right. Maybe we should ask them how we begin to rectify this stain in Gaza. They can’t do any WORSE, right?
The Audacity of Krope
Not my observation. Hell, people have dragged things other people have said over from different platforms that have nothing to do with me or my argument. There are regular commenters here who do nothing but cherry pick bullshit off Twitter to disparage the supposed horseshoe left.
You were talking about Democrats, through cowardice and complicity with bigotry, making a harmful decision that sets horrible precedents. I agreed and brought up another example.
I didn’t even really directly criticize you. If you can’t read that without taking personal offense, oh well.
Geminid
@The Audacity of Krope: If you are talking about the “Pro-Palestinian” student protesters, that was a numerically insignificant group even within the larger student population.
Defections among Arab Americans who would otherwise have voted Democratic were a different matter. Those may well have shifted Michigan into the Republican column this year. But I don’t think they were taking their cues from the students. They voted like they did because of what was happening in Gaza, not what was happening on Michigan campuses.
Harry
A friend told me today this is called “salary arbitrage.” It’s the same thing that happens with “off-shoring”.
Gretchen
@tobie: there absolutely is not a labor shortage in entry level tech jobs, which are the jobs we’re talking about. My son in law finished a software engineering program just when Google laid off 5000 workers. Despite a hundred applications he got 2 interviews and no job offers. He’s still in his old job. Sure, engineers WTH years of experience are getting lots of offers but that first job is hard to get
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Gretchen: it wasn’t just Google, there has been a wave of layoffs in Silicon Valley.
The Audacity of Krope
@Geminid: And there are people, like me, who aren’t part of either group but can empathize with what they are being put through. Students have parents. Gazans have relatives. Voters can obtain information when and if they choose.
I supported Democrats this year, but I’m going to have a real hard time doing so going forward. The unwillingness to push back on our long-held colonialist Israeli policy is among the bigger reasons for that.
Really, though, Democrats screwed the pooch over and over and over this year.
Miss Bianca
@Raflw:
Now *that* would be sweet karmic revenge!
RevRick
@A Ghost to Most: With the youngest Baby Boomers soon reaching retirement age, the shortfall of skilled workers across vast sectors of the economy will place great stress on our system. Boomers were the first generation to attend college in huge numbers, which led to many careers demanding college degrees. Nursing is just one which comes to mind. Since that was one career option historically open to women, who now have many more, and with the explosion of the over-65 age group needing more health care, the question becomes who will not only replace, but expand that employment pool?
I have to wonder when was there ever a time when powerful capitalists didn’t exploit foreign labor? Nineteenth century railroad barons routinely broke strikes with foreign workers whom labor called scabs. The Chinese Exclusion Act was passed at the behest of white laborers in California who complained that the Chinese men were willing to work at much lower wages.
And it’s not just foreign born who were targets of white working class ire. African Americans, fleeing the predations of the Jim Crow South, were often exploited by capitalists as strike-breakers. How many pre-1960 race riots began with attacks by whites on black communities who were angered by the competition of black labor?
We can argue about the merits of H1-B programs until the cows come home, but we shouldn’t be surprised at the exploitative relationship of capitalists to this labor market. But we also shouldn’t be surprised that there is a pool willing to endure this exploitation, because the alternatives back home may be even worse. India, after all, is ruled by a rigid and brutal caste system that may be the impetus to flee.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay: Weren’t you just lecturing people about their criticisms of student protesters? If that isn’t dragging a topic from thread to thread, I am not sure what is.
Gretchen
@Mr. Bemused Senior: Yes. Lots of experienced people looking for jobs. No labor shortage there now.
NaijaGal
@schrodingers_cat: Right. My family wouldn’t be here if not for the H-1B visa and most of the people I’ve known to have one work for universities across the US, not tech companies. My family’s H-1B experience was the furthest thing from the sweatshop scenario many are describing, but I’ll grant that other than a wonderful internship at AT&T Bell labs, I’ve never really worked for a “tech company,” so I don’t have first hand knowledge of how people are potentially being exploited.
I really don’t want to agree with Elon Musk about anything but the US does need to understand what holds people’s interest and what doesn’t, education-wise. I remember someone wondering why names like Ifeoma and Omolola were more common in my computer science PhD program than Lisa. There were lots of US-born people at the undergraduate and masters level who saw no need to get a PhD, which is fine. Almost every one of us who were non-US-born who got doctorates stayed on and became naturalized citizens. Of course, that may change if Stephen Miller’s deportation scheme for naturalized citizens takes off.
schrodingers_cat
@KatKapCC: Yes that’s what I meant. There are 2 handles in this thread that are actively distorting my comments.
Kay
@Omnes Omnibus:
It’s in this thread. Actually the only time Gaza (in the news daily) is mentioned is when someone is shitting on the people who oppose war crimes and ethnic cleansing protestors. Who, btw, were right. And have been validated by just about every human rights org that exists – the same orgs we rely on for Ukraine data, BTW.
Starfish (she/her)
@Mr. Bemused Senior: A large collection of those tech jobs can be found at https://layoffs.fyi/
The Audacity of Krope
@Kay: 🎶🎶Justice when convenient…power plays when not🎶🎶
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Now here’s a shock:
https://www.commondreams.org/news/average-ceo-pay
Can we get H1B visas to bring in lower-priced foreign CEOs? I’d be all for exploiting the hell outta that.
The guys we have here are waaaay overpaid, and some foreign competition would increase shareholder returns and company profitability.
The market just isn’t functioning properly at the executive level.
Kay
@schrodingers_cat:
oh for gods sake say the names! Christ. This is why this PETTY SHIT goes on and on here, thread to thread, day to day. I know you dislike me. I don’t care. Are we done now or do you want to discuss my comment for a fucking month?
sab
Sadie the cat just spent fifteen minutes kneading my lap into the perfect resting place. Then I got up. My husband laughed and said ” Bitch”. I said ” Sadie”? He said ” No. You. You got up.”
Suzanne
I see that the I DIDN’T THINK THE LEOPARDS WOULD EAT MY FACE contingent has some members here, too.
Starfish (she/her)
@sab: So your household is running like this comments thread?
Sphex
@Baud: and the 17th, 28th, 30th, 74th…
The Audacity of Krope
@Kay: I’m sure I’m one of the people she’s talking about. Here, though, I didn’t criticize what she was saying, I only asked for more information.
I was legitimately confused and concerned by her statement. The structure of that comment does appear to implicate Harris in that bias. I never said she lied, never said she was wrong to point it out. I asked for a goddamned link to understand better and it turned into a thing.
The Audacity of Krope
@Suzanne: When your choices are leopards eating faces v leopards who swear they’re on a diet but keep putting on weight…
Starfish (she/her)
@The Audacity of Krope: I think you genuinely misunderstood her. I found your misunderstanding to be very weird, but I am a person who has misunderstood things in very weird ways so that is okay.
sab
@Starfish (she/her): Naw. Lower decibels here at home.
tobie
@Gretchen: Yes, I would expect that when Google was laying off 5000 workers, it would be hard to find a job in the tech sector. A more helpful metric may be the 10-year job growth rate in tech. Perhaps it’s a declining industry. A larger window would tell.
NaijaGal
@Suzanne: Really? Balloon Juice is full of MAGA voters who want others punished when they’re really punishing themselves? Good to know.
Suzanne
@NaijaGal: There’s commenters who frequently slander others here, who frequently misrepresent others’ views, who have been caught in straight-up lies…. now claiming their comments are being “distorted”.
The leopards are hungry, man.
sab
One of my nephews got a mortgage for a house in the Oakland Hills: $10k a month mortgage! Yikes! Around here in Ohio that gets you into the fanciest dementia ward in a nursing home. Then he got laid off. He’s a tech-bro professionally but not politically.
Kay
@The Audacity of Krope:
Oh, whatever. Forget it. I don’t think you understood a word I wrote and it doesn’t matter, so forget it.
Go back to the endlessly fascinating meta commentary on the commemtary/ commetariat. Nothing is as interesting as US, right?
Starfish (she/her)
@tobie: The tech companies got high off their own supply during COVID. They hired more people than they needed because they were convinced that COVID-related trends would accelerate permanent changes in the economy, like we were all going to pay for Zoom accounts to talk to nana when we could go see her in person.
The salaries got quite high. Then, when the tech economy turned, they started laying off their most senior folks because Elon did it and Twitter didn’t end so we should all do that.
Anyway, those senior folks are getting new jobs that may or not have a salary quite as high as the old ones. But it may take a while. They are not getting the numerous offers $$$ they were getting during the pandemic.
Frank Wilhoit
Another neglected aspect is that no companies are willing to train unless they absolutely must. This is because the accounting manual classifies training as an operational expense.
Lobo
Here is a link on what Musk said about these visas. Please correct it, if it is wrong.
matt
@azlib: As I see it the only real play is that we could move in strongly to support Musk and Ramaswamy if it looks like they will win easily, to provoke a reaction and try to prolong and intensify the conflict.
Starfish (she/her)
@Frank Wilhoit: Is that what happened with training?
trollhattan
@sab:
Was that a starter home or a movey-uppy house? Oakland Hills is no place for a first-timer.
Starfish (she/her)
@matt: Trump already made this play. He said he supports H1-Bs.
tobie
@Starfish (she/her): I can well imagine that the tech industry misread how much people would still want to use the internet tools they relied on during COVID. That’s an interesting explanation of the downturn in 2023 and early 2024. I gather hiring has started up again. This article from TechTarget is projecting robust growth…but it’s an industry organ so it may not be the most reliable news source. I’ll take what it says with a grain of salt.
matt
@trollhattan: I try never to vote for the ‘cop’ Democrat candidate in a primary or local race for that reason.
The Audacity of Krope
Well, when the conversation is about how we treat each other and habits like supporting one’s own claims; yeah, that’s where our interest should be.
Seeing how many Democrats are so fragile about accepting criticism is…illuminating. If we can’t get a small website with a relatively high proportion of educated professionals to stick to facts and engage criticism, I don’t have a lot of hope for the country.
matt
@Starfish (she/her): well that probably ends it for now, though I doubt it will sit well with the 2/3 of his party that hates nonwhites.
Dangerman
Fucking yourself in the face. Is that advanced yoga?
trollhattan
@Starfish (she/her): Can confirm. Today, even.
You see that? He has visas, just lying about on his many, many properties. Come and get-em!
[Am led to understand an H-1B is not required to clean hotel rooms, but we will try to verify before the end of broadcast.]
Gin & Tonic
@sab: On our side for now. I’d be completely unsurprised to find him caucusing with R’s before the end of the upcoming Congress.
rikyrah
Kathy Barnette (@Kathy4Truth) posted at 3:03 PM on Sat, Dec 28, 2024:
This conversation to H1B or not to H1B has followed the red herring and gone way off topic.
The original and most significant part of this discussion addressed the call to REMOVE ALL CAPS off H1B. To which we rightly said, “Hold up. No!”
The tech bros immediately followed our response with “MAGA is racist.” “MAGA doesn’t understand what we understand.” And of course, “MAGA is racist.”
Then it swiftly pivoted to tech bros declaring they just want “highly-skilled” workers to fill jobs Americans are either too dumb to do or too lazy to do.
Then it moved to, “Wait, we want to bring in the next Einstein… the next Musk… what we really want is to use H1B visas to bring in geniuses from around the world.”
This was immediately followed by MAGA going out to publicly available information and looking at the actual H1B job requests from major companies where we quickly discovered these were no geniuses we were bringing into our country. Instead, they were janitors and mid-level accountants.
And now we’re here, where Trump announces H1B is good. 👍🏾
Red herring.
Do we want all caps removed from H1B visas and allow our country to be flooded by those who will suppress wages and occupy jobs Americans could fill? 🤔 This is the only question we should be asking. ✌🏾
(https://x.com/Kathy4Truth/status/1873112591297306819?t=YssA7eHANemKRcIa8_9IUQ&s=03)
Captain C
@Dangerman: Either that or a fortuituous body type.
Starfish (she/her)
@tobie: I am skeptical of the word “shortage” because there is some nonsense going on in there.
Right now, a lot of companies have adopted a Google-like hiring process. Google’s hiring process was always stupid, but they could do that because people wanted to work at Google. Basically, they ask everyone about some skills you learn as maybe a second or third year computer science major. More senior people are not good at this because they are not regularly using all the skills they used as second and third year students so this process can serve as an age-discrimination machine against tech workers. These interviews are so bananas that some schools are teaching classes in how to pass these screening interviews.
Anyway, the companies can then say, “Oh, we couldn’t find anyone.”
Companies may be looking for a new skillset and unwilling to retrain people. Some folks treat engineers as “Oh, you know that one programming language, therefore you know them all” if that engineer is already on the payroll. But when hiring engineers, they act like no one can possibly learn the skills they don’t have. It is all exhausting.
Michael Bersin
@KatKapCC:
That image was taken from the street in front of our house with the camera on a tripod. There was a lot of light pollution, so it was difficult to see with the naked eye. A father with his young son (maybe first grade) strolled by – his dad held him up to the camera so he could see the long exposure(s) on the LCD monitor. The kid was really excited to see the images.
Gin & Tonic
@rikyrah: So they should be called h1b not H1B? I’m confused.
tobie
@trollhattan: No doubt he’d claim that being a valet requires rare skills that only the sharpest minds on the planet since can master. We’re talking Archimedes or Isaac Newton-level smarts. And for this reason he will appoint his valet as head of the Department of Energy. Or NASA.
Princess
@rikyrah: I see her Twitter bio calls her the “former national grassroots director” for Vivek Ramaswamy.
Fair Economist
@tobie: cites:
Hard to square that with the massive tech layoffs we’re getting:
SF area loses 7,000 jobs in August due to tech layoffs
tobie
@Starfish (she/her): I dunno. Everyone I know who works at Google, Amazon and Microsoft has a PhD. When I visited Redmond about 10 years ago, everyone I met working in research at Microsoft had a PhD. I’m not involved enough in the industry to say how large or small the research divisions are in these companies.
Sergey Brin may not have completed a PhD but he was working toward it at Stanford and with funding from the NSF was able to conceive Google. I’ve always wondered why we decided it was okay to let tools and and knowledge developed with public funds be privatized for personal gain.
tobie
@Fair Economist: It’s based on a 10-year window, not a single year. I don’t know if it’s accurate. I’m citing it. The projection squares apparently with what the BLS was predicting according to the article.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Gin & Tonic: just press CAPS LOCK again. Or, in Emacs, control-x control-l
The Audacity of Krope
Capitalism is about moving money, not the actual work being done. I think that explains this.
So laying people off now has what effect on the availability of experienced workers ten years down the road?
Steve LaBonne
@The Audacity of Krope: Silicon Valley in particular is about moving fast and breaking things rather than creating real, long-term value. The latter is far less lucrative.
Steve LaBonne
@tobie: Now do pharmaceuticals.
Steve LaBonne
@Fair Economist: Just wait until the AI bubble bursts, which I think is not far off.
Starfish (she/her)
@tobie: Numerous people that I know who were at all those companies do not have Ph.D.s. The person I do know with a Ph.D. who was at one of the above was laid off by the company, but he had a new job within the year.
The Audacity of Krope
@Steve LaBonne: This too. Indeed, it’s true in a few industries and trending up. That’s why I blame capital, the unifying source.
Steve LaBonne
@The Audacity of Krope: Capitalism “works” (while destroying the planet) until it doesn’t.
Poe Larity.
Here is the weekly tech brogressive they-took-our-jerbs thread at HackerNews, ground zero for current & recovering David Sacks and Peter Thiel fanbois.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42531830
Lick the tears.
tobie
@The Audacity of Krope: Umm…industries have upturns and downturns. This is not unusual.
@Steve LaBonne: I know. It’s unbelievable the number of therapies developed with NIH grants that become the intellectual property of one pharmaceutical company or another.
The Audacity of Krope
That is if by “works” you mean it creates a space for the continuation of feudal aristocracy alongside and in direct competition with democratic government, yeah.
Harrison Wesley
@tobie: Dean Baker wonders that, too.
The Audacity of Krope
Well, it’s a good thing when we make these decisions we prioritize the immediate needs of owners over the immediate needs of workers or the long term needs of the industry.
Fair Economist
Unemployment in the information sector was 3.1 percent in early 2023, barely tighter than the general unemployment rate of 3.5%. Other highly trained sectors are much lower – lawyers were at 0.8%.
There’s no particular shortage of tech workers.
I’d be OK with H1Bs when tech unemployment got below 1%, like it does with lawyers. Otherwise they should be economically disadvantageous for the companies compared to domestic employment.
Glory b
@rikyrah: Girl! He did!
Harrison Wesley
@Starfish (she/her): He thinks everyone should drink at least three glasses a day.
Kayla Rudbek
@Fair Economist: I’m shocked that the unemployment rate for lawyers is that low, as law schools make money for universities and so there’s always a glut of lawyers coming out of law school. Very few of whom can afford to work in areas of law with high demand but not much pay, due to their student loans.
tobie
@The Audacity of Krope: I’m not close enough to the industry to say what its long-term prospects are and I’m not a macroeconomist who can make these kinds of predictions. Are you? Do you know why layoffs are happening? Is it because of reduced profit margins, outsourcing, or automation? Or is it simply to hike the dividend payments to investors? These are the questions I’d love to see answered in a long-form article that I as a non-economist or business type could understand. Have any suggestions?
Poe Larity.
Trump:
The Audacity of Krope
@tobie: No, I don’t have any suggestions. I just know what society I live in and have eyes.
If a business is usefully serving a community and an investor comes to the owner with a proposal to strip the business for parts and make the owner and investors money, that is usually what will happen.
This problem is endemic, it isn’t unique to tech companies. We treat business owners like petty kings, workers like serfs, and rate community needs below the market.
CVS isn’t the biggest pharmacy company in the US because it’s the best at delivering pharmacy services. They work with pharmacy benefit managers to exclude competition; hurting patients, workers, and the communities served.
Chetan Murthy
@tobie: The tech sector has been on a roll for a long, long time. And on top of that, they hired like crazy during COVID. Nothing like that lasts forever, and so it ain’t surprising that they’re cutting back.
I don’t think of it as all that surprising.
Bona fides: I’ve been programming professionally since 1986 and was in Enterprise I/T 1995-2013 and worked in Sili Valley for a big Internet company 2013-2015, have many friends in that sector, keep in touch with them.
Kay
@Geminid:
No, that’s not what happened. The shift Right was THE SAME thru all the swing states so this attempt to blame Arab voters for objecting to the slaughter of 50,000 Arabs is wrong.
Pennsylvania moved Right along with Michigan. So your theory is wrong. Like the claims that they weren’t bombing hospitals was wrong. They blew up the last hospital in Northern Gaza yesterday.
Lobo
“America First” = Outsourcing Jobs? OK
Starfish (she/her)
@trollhattan: The recall petition can begin in six months. Some people are a little TOO comfortable doing this nonsense.
https://ballotpedia.org/Laws_governing_recall_in_Florida
Kay
@Geminid:
If the US was bombing any other ethnic/religious/nationality group in this country no one would demand that that ethnic group sit down, shut up and vote for the party doing the bombing. But somehow that was okay to say to Arab Americans. Why is that, I wonder?
The Audacity of Krope
Likud? They weren’t on the ballot.
Both US parties have supported funding this, so that should be a wash, though the Republicans are more emphatic about it.
The simple fact of the matter is Biden was the first President to poke his head out of the hidey hole Democrats have been in for decades and gently suggest Israel might have overstepped. For this, he got his head bitten off.
John S.
@Poe Larity.:
Sadly, we have people here who are just as enthusiastic about H1B visas as Donald Trump.
They should feel really great about being on the same side of an issue as that piece of shit.
Another Scott
Made me look. FRED – Layoffs and Discharges: Information.
Gigantic spike in the 2020 Covid Depression. Smaller spike in 2022. Otherwise, there are +/- 20,000 swings every month but it doesn’t seem that much different than the other data since around 2005. The post August 2024 drop (click on the 1 yr button) might be a good sign (fairly uniformly decreasing layoffs).
Hang in there, everyone.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Glory b
@Kay: Matbe because thay couldn’t figure out that Bibi was digging in his heels in order to get the exact result we have today?
Besides, Muslims were on both sides of the political spectrum & went towards the Dems for protection after 9/11.
Recently they were trending more Republican well before 10/7, disrupting school board meetings and meeting with Mike Flynn and QAnon, based on their shared animosity towards LGBTQ people. Remember the newly elected local Muslim officials taking down rainbow flags, the mayor of Hamtramck calling his black citizens a bunch of animals, etc.
I think Dems were mistaken to include them as more than fair weather voters anyway.
The majority of the ones in Deaborn voted for Trump. Now they’re anxious?
Glory b
@Kay: Because Trump promised to be worse?
They voted for the party that promised to reinstate the Muslim ban (remember, Trump has 3 more justices in his pocket than the last time), end birthright citizenship, “revisit” Brown v Bd of Ed, repeal the Voting Rights Act, etc.
So be it.
Baud
@John S.:
As opposed to his fascist racist MAGA base?
How about we stick to merits rather than trying to tar people by weak association?
The Audacity of Krope
Just so much side-eye…
John S.
@Baud:
Gimme a break, man.
We had a 500+ count thread yesterday with full throated support for the Musk/Trump position. If they don’t like being tarred with what they are advocating for, then they can rethink their position.
I could give a fuck about the MAGAs. They are unpersuadable and unrepentant.
Baud
@John S.:
You don’t get a break if you’re going to falsely tie people to Trump. You go there, you might as start wearing a red trucker cap
schrodingers_cat
In every comment I have made on this issue I have mentioned my own misgivings about the H1-B program and yet in comment after comment I am being pilloried as if I were Musk or Ramaswami. calling for more H1-Bs.
The merits of this particular visa aside, it is being used as a cudgel against Indians and Indian Americans in the US. This is nothing new. This was the case during 4 years of Trump administration.
Someone wanted proof. Well here it is. H1-B has been trending on Twitter for over a day.
#H1-B
It has over 238 K tweets.
Or just check this comment section.
Closing this tab for my peace of mind. Happy New Year if I don’t post until then.
Lily
@Kay: This a.m., after reading about the forcible evacuation of all the hospital’s patients, and the IDF’s current disappearing of the hospital director, I remembered my older cousin in the 90s. She was one of the tax resistors and in the larger protest movement against US military aid to Central Am. countries. Is this the only thing we can do (as well as calls/letters to reps) I wondered. What do we do. I don’t know.
John S.
@Baud:
When someone has the same position as Trump, do pray tell how that is falsely tying them to Trump’s position.
Kay
@Glory b:
Lots of Ukrainian Americans voted for JD Vance. That doesn’t change my support for Ukraine or my fervent hope that Putin is tried for the war crimes he committed when he slaughtered 30,000 civilians.
20,000 Palestinian children have been killed. US physicians told the NYTimes some were shot in the head. They provided x rays. The Biden Administration did nothing.
Arab Americans not voting for Harris is the least of this. It just doesn’t matter in context. This is way, way beyond a political problem and the whole rest of the world knows it.
Baud
@John S.:
The same way taking a position against Trump on this ties someone to his racist base that hates Trump’s position.
MAGA are your allies, apparently.
John S.
@schrodingers_cat:
Hit dog hollers again.
The problem I have with your comments on this issue is that you constantly make spurious claims, fail to provide any evidence, dismiss others who provide evidence to refute your claims and then act like you’re the victim.
Omnes Omnibus
@John S.: There is a tendency to conflate positions on H1Bs with positions on immigration in general. There is also a tendency for people to dig in on positions when pushed. This is a much more nuanced discussion. Why do we go with it?
Another Scott
@tobie:
[ flashback! ]
IDC folks used to put out press releases on their survey that would predict 75% compounded growth rates for ZYX for the next decade. Anything less was a coming depression.
They seemed to be captive industry cheerleaders. Dunno if they’re still that way.
Similarly, there have been predictions of shortages of X million engineers and Y million nurses and Z million farm workers for the last 40 years or more. We’ve muddled through. We’ll continue to muddle through.
And if history is any guide, industries that can’t find enough people will find ways to automate as they did with bookkeeping and auto manufacturing and grain harvesting. Ultimately, it makes us all wealthier (insert Dean Baker rant about productivity growth here) and gets people out of soul-crushing jobs, but the transitions are wrenching unless there’s enough government support. Not “retraining coal miners to be web developers” but providing pensions and investing in education so their kids and nieces and nephews have jobs prospects when the mines and factories close.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
John S.
@Baud:
That’s some pretty supreme pretzel logic there.
Stick to your pithy one liners.
Baud
@John S.:
Haha. Your logic used against you, and you blink.
Lily
@Kay: In MA the # of Tp voters increased too, though not enough to affect the result.
The Audacity of Krope
@Baud: Personally, when I consider my position, I try to do it irrespective of what Trump or other Republicans are doing. To do otherwise is still letting them influence your thinking.
They also love themselves a false dichotomy, so to worry too much about which side of a MAGA civil war is right let’s them set the terms of the debate and put solutions not within those terms out of consideration and even completely out of mind.
John S.
@Omnes Omnibus:
You’re correct, but I’m not the one doing that. Mainly I see schrodingers cat conflating visas with immigration, and making claims she cannot back up.
You even called her out on it on the thread yesterday.
If I made a claim that I couldn’t substantiate and someone provided me evidence to the contrary, I would not dig in. Clearly other people’s mileage may vary.
The Audacity of Krope
Democrats should never have tried to appeal to Massachusetts voters…
John S.
@Baud:
LOL, really? Ok, chalk this up as a win for yourself to preserve your ego.
ETA: Maybe you can find a helpful explainer from the Cato Institute that validates how you think logic works.
Baud
@The Audacity of Krope:
Agreed. That’s how it’s done. Using Trump as a weapon to dismiss people’s opinions is underhanded.
Kathleen
@rikyrah: I love his “Notes From The GED Section”.
John S.
@Baud:
I didn’t dismiss the opinion. I said they had the same opinion as Trump on this particular issue.
Perhaps we’re having an issue with reading comprehension more than logic.
Sister Golden Bear
@Chetan Murthy: There’s been massive layoffs in Silicon Valley, totaling thousands of jobs, every year for the past three years. It’s routine these days for dozens, sometimes hundreds, of applicants to apply for a single job. There’s definitely a huge pool of people out there.
Not to mention there’s the rampant ageism that means companies won’t even look at resumes from experienced workers. Ask me how I know.
There’s not a shortage of tech workers, there’s a shortage of tech workers who CEOs think can be exploited more easily, whether that’s folks on HB-1s, young workers who can be convinced to put in lots of unpaid hours, single workers without families who don’t have to leave at a reasonable hour, etc.
trollhattan
Biden’s reelection is sunk now, buddy.
Gyna!
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Lily:
Hunter over at Daily Kos had a comment on this that’s resonated:
I’ve observed that Dems who take the base for granted (and I use the term “the base” broader than I usually do here so that includes “those inclined to vote Dem but want to be aware that their vote is wanted, not just assumed”) pay for it.
Perhaps this helps explain, in part, the unsettling results in otherwise die-hard blue places.
Kay
@Glory b:
I chided people for not using links the other days, so here’s the Gaza children’s injuries. Sixty five doctors, nurses and paramedics told the NYTimes, not one. I misremembered.
I have as much as you can read. Reports from international orgs, legal complaints, the brief that Ireland filed alleging war crimes, the report that Spain collected, and on and on. The only people denying this at this point are the Biden Administration and Israel’s government (but not the Israeli media).
Baud
@John S.:
And why would you say that except to dismiss the opinion? It’s completely irrelevant to any merits of the issue. You’re trying to put people down for fake reasons, but don’t want to admit you’re aligned with MAGA under your own logic.
Lily
@sab: I probably misunderstand what you mean. I thought the Mich vote for president has switched back and forth between D and R for years.
Edited to incl. my uncertainty.
The Audacity of Krope
Just saying if Democrats are so great; why are Wall St., Hollywood, and the NYPD all in blue states?
John S.
@Baud:
Again, you fail at reading comprehension.
I spent ample time yesterday arguing with people using evidence to refute this notion that H1b visas are great and not predatory. So I’m not simply trying to dismiss someone’s opinion.
You’re making an inference that doesn’t exist based on something I never said.
I am dismayed that anyone would find themselves agreeing with Trump on anything. For me, that would prompt some soul searching.
How you make this fantastic leap of what you call logic based on that I frankly do not understand, other than to score cheap rhetorical points and defend commenters who are saying the indefensible.
Like so many other commenters who think they own this place.
Baud
@John S.:
We’re just going around in circles. You keep believing your being reasonable and fair to folks. I really don’t care.
Glory b
@Kay: AND Sonwar said Hamas welcomed the blood of innocents, it helps to fuel their cause.
He could have returned the hostages, that was an option.
The Muslim population cares first about their own, so do I, I can’t afford to do otherwise.
They cheered the Democratic defeat, reap the whirlwind.
Another Scott
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Devil’s Advocate:
Hillary was dragged because she didn’t go to Wisconsin. Maybe Harris-Walz was trying their best to address that criticism and learn from any mistakes made there?
(Emphasis added.)
tl;dr – It’s easy to be an armchair quarterback, especially for a woman’s campaign.
FWIW.
Best wishes,
Scott.
John S.
@Baud:
Yup, we’re definitely going around in circles. Only you’re smart enough to do it with far less words.
I kneel at your altar.
MagdaInBlack
Anyone else remember the comic strip ” The Bickersons?” For some reason it came to mind.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kay: That doesn’t mean that Trump isn’t going to be worse.
The Audacity of Krope
@John S.: I believe that our trade policy allows investors and foreign trade partners, particularly China, to exploit the US and it’s workers. So does Trump.
That is not, in and of itself, a flaw in my belief. It isn’t completely outlandish that Trump might occasionally correctly diagnose a problem, see the broken clock principle.
And if you stop your assessment at that superficial level, you may assess that I “agree with Trump,” before we get to considering the possibility (indeed, fact) that I view his proposed his solutions as a destructive race to lower ourselves to their standards.
trollhattan
@MagdaInBlack:
I don’t, and I sure as hell don’t follow what’s got the collective panty-wad formed and fighting, either. Swear I actually went to class, back in the day.
How about them ‘Niners?
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Another Scott:
Lemme be clear, Hunter wasn’t talking about visiting per se, he was talking about setting up meaningful campaign operations across a broader swath of ‘Murka than apparently (I honestly don’t know) was done.
What he’s suggesting is simply another possible element in analyzing the results; it goes along with the easier hot takes people have thrown out (raises hand) like gender and race. Lord knows I look at so much thru a racial lens that it was interesting to see a more “strategic campaigning” take on the outcome.
A Ghost to Most
@Another Scott:
Anyone looking for computer work should learn how to work with Oracle databases. People throw up big numbers for Oracle talent, even old farts like me.
Kathleen
@MagdaInBlack: It was also a radio show with Don Ameche and Frances Langford. Pretty funny stuff!
Geminid
@Kay: What theory? I wasn’t blaming Arab Americans for Harris’s loss. I was distinguishing between their numbers and those of the student protesters, and said the latter were insingnificant compared to the 10s of thousands of Arab American voters who “may well have” shifted Michigan into the Republican column. Harris would have lost even if she’d carried Michigan.
And I wasn’t condemning Michigan’s Arab Americans for their votes even if they were based on what was happening in Gaza. That was their right. I said those votes were not conditioned by what was happening on Michigan campuses.
John S.
@The Audacity of Krope:
The broken clock principle is apt here.
If my watch has the same time as a broken clock, I would double check my watch to make sure it was accurate. If I found that it was, then so be it.
That doesn’t make the broken clock accurate, nor does it make my watch broken for telling the same time.
The Audacity of Krope
@John S.: Right, but if the broken watch says it’s 3 and so do other functioning clocks, you can’t dismiss the idea that the time is in fact 3 because you are so opposed to accepting the value on the broken clock.
Much like you can’t deny everything Trump said simply because he was the one saying it. Check, sure, but things tend not to be so simple.
Geminid
@Kay: I have never said Arab Americans should sit down and shut up.about their family members being bombed in Gaza. I have said the opposite and you know that.
Glory b
@Another Scott: BUT remember, she had a visit to WI planned. It was interrupted by the Pulse nightclub mass murder, the LGBTQ community cried out for a visit to FL and acknowledgement of the violence directed towards them.
Too many people acted like she just arrogantly blew off WI, the media didn’t correct that either.
The Audacity of Krope
@Glory b: It isn’t the media’s job to report facts, just claims.
John S.
@The Audacity of Krope:
Pretty sure that’s not what I said.
Harrison Wesley
Since this thread is moving in several directions, how about another one? I saw a piece on The Guardian website reporting that Joe Biden regrets dropping out and believes he would have beaten Trump. Also regrets hiring Merrick Garland. Alternate history time.
Glory b
Lol, true.
divF
@Kay:
Likud was running candidates in the US elections ? I never noticed.
Kay, you’ve gone over the deep end. Pied, so don’t bother responding to this comment – I won’t see it.
The Audacity of Krope
@John S.: That’s not what you said specifically about the watch. That’s exactly what you appear to be saying here about Trump.
For the record, I don’t have strong opinions on H1B. Trump’s opinion one way or the other shouldn’t matter, especially considering how fractured their coalition seems over this issue.
rikyrah
@Melancholy Jaques:
I always say check the bank accounts when something like this happens😒😒
MagdaInBlack
@Harrison Wesley: Oh dear god no! Let’s not crank that one up again. Please!
Glory b
@Harrison Wesley: Merrick Garland was probably the most successful prosecutor in the DOJ, and hindsight is 20/20.
I do think he had a better chance of winning. I think we have to concede that black candidates, especially black FEMALE candidates don’t have a chance to win in today’s USA.
White adjacency is a hell of a drug.
rikyrah
@Fair Economist: either we did have all those tech layoffs.
Or we didn’t.
If we did, that is a large pool of previously employed American tech workers……
So, once again, I ask….why would we need H1B visas when we have this pool of American workers.
matt
@tobie: Larry Ellison did a project for the NSA before the founding of his company, to build a practical relational database (which was just a theoretical concept before that). It was called Project Oracle.
Bill Arnold
@tobie:
I’m not close to any hiring (or firing) processes, but in tech and work with a bunch of startups of varying maturity. From vibes, there seems to be a lot of faddishness among the tech industry upper management; some of the large-corp tech layoffs appeared to have little to do with economic conditions or rational economic forecasts, or with corporate troubles. They seemed to be driven by “the other tech bros are laying people off; must be the right thing to do”.
Frankly, if I wanted to damage the tech industry, I would feed/stoke not-fully-rational management fads within their communications channels.
John S.
@The Audacity of Krope:
Nope, that’s not what I’m saying.
Chiding folks for having the same position as Trump and not evaluating their own position is the problem. It’s the equivalent of not checking your watch to see if it has the right time as the broken clock because it’s your watch and of course it tells the right time and how dare anyone question its accuracy.
That’s just plain old ego and digging in.
Glory b
@divF: Why did some people (like Kay) decide to just lose their s**t over this issue?
Other slaughters, much worse ones, were happening all over the world, they were “meh.”
But then again, the topic was never as popular as they thought, Americans are famously unconcerned with foreign affairs.
rikyrah
@Harrison Wesley:
He didn’t have the support from the backstabbing caucus… So, I have nothing to say on that.
Merrick Garland….yeah, he was a mistake.
The Audacity of Krope
Who said they didn’t evaluate it? Does this require a fresh evaluation every time someone makes a demand based on a passing resemblance to Trump’s mental effluvia?
Gvg
@schrodingers_cat: no. It is not anti immigration and quite a few have experience. There may not be too many immigrants themselves, but they worked with many. Listen to them too. Different fields and jobs and even employers seem to have different impacts. I am noticing that the specific job and field seems to matter a lot. Companies in an industry seem to copy each other for good or bad.
it’s not anti immigration, and it’s anti bosses. Reform would be faster green cards plus some other things.
Some of it is tied to cuts to education here, which really has happened. The same bosses also exploit the American workers, of course. That is a character trait, probably company wide, and they encourage the workers to resent the foreign workers instead of the bosses who have the power to make choices. I cynically suspect a reason for hiring some foreign workers is to make a scapegoat for workers resentments. They could probably do without the foreign worker in the past except for that.
Now that the demographics of the retirement and or death of the baby boom is upon us, and immigration has been choked off for decades below what we should have had, we are going to have all kinds of worker shortages. It’s going to be interesting.
ArchTeryx
@Barry A-H-S-S: That is one of THE things that frosts my ass – being asked to train your replacement when you are about to be fired just because they want cheaper labor. If you refuse, they fire you for cause and try and blackball you. If you don’t, it’s insult on top of injury.
Denali5
@Kay,
I have always respected your postings, but this continuous harping on Biden and Gaza is very old. Gaza is a tragedy, a war crime. No one is defending what has happened. We had a terrible alternative to Biden. Should we have abandoned him? Please stop.
Geminid
@Glory b: I think what has happened in Gaza is terrible and people are right to be appalled regardless of where they lay the blame. But it’s true that there has been as bad or worse going on elsewhere in this decade and even this year. Sudan and Syria are two examples.
I was struck by a response posted by a Lebanese Druze citizen in early November, when the Israeli/Hezbollah conflict was at it’s peak. “Radical Druze” was condemning Hezbollah for its actions undermining the safety and rights of Lebanese citizens that began long before the current war. When someone told him he was wrong to condemn Hezbollah, that its support for Hamas outweighed his concerns, Mr. Druze fired back:
I’m pretty sure from his other posts that this person was what he said he was: a Lebanese Druze citizen. His country had been drafted into Iran’s Axis of Resistance against its will, and Hezbollah had murdered Lebanese who tried to stand in its way including President Hariri in 2007. He wasn’t willing to see his country destroyed for the sake of Hamas’s reckless adventure that began with its savage attack October 7 of 2023.
Bill Arnold
@The Audacity of Krope:
Donald Trump, 2016:
Statement by Donald J. Trump on Position on Visas (March 03, 2016)
John S.
@The Audacity of Krope:
I’m too tired to rehash this shit between yesterday’s 500+ thread and this one.
Feel free to think whatever you want.
The Audacity of Krope
@Bill Arnold: Wait, so are you telling me Trump has no real position and is only saying what he thinks will benefit him at any given moment?
Shock. Horror. Yawn.
Will
Going to help some of you with your efforts to talk to low information voters.
He didn’t call them the R word.
He called them retards. Learn to speak like normal people and they might listen. Your welcome.
Starfish (she/her)
@Glory b: People like Kay got upset because of this one because Balloon Juice commenters decided that they were going to purity police other commenters on this issue.
If I say, the Democratic Party consists of me, and those to the left of me are tankies and those to the right of me are MAGA, please sort yourself accordingly, it is pretty stupid, and yet some folks here just absolutely cannot resist behaving just like this.
Kay
@Denali5:
“your continued harping”. The single person who comments on this, about once a month. But okay – as I said, the reason so many are angry at the protestors is the protestors kept bringing up the war crimes.
It was front page news again today – another hospital blown up.
Law enforcement, politicians in both parties and the colleges these students are paying thru the nose for managed to smear and silence the protestors but the war crimes continue – daily. Because it isn’t mentioned here doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
The Audacity of Krope
I comment on this and am of roughly the same mind on the issue.
Geminid comments on this and appears profoundly well informed.
Indeed, this has been a topic many here have engaged in more than once.
Kay
Actually, Adam Silverman was right on the money on what did/ would happen in Gaza. I should have just relied on him from the beginning.
rationalman
ah, Musk was not being random. He was very specific to anybody who disagreed with him.
tobie
@Kay: I’ll wait till more investigations are conducted. This sounds to me like an al-Ahli incident again…i.e., a case where Hamas ends up inflicting damage on itself. We know that 15 people arrested participated in the massacre on Oct 7 and that rather substantial arms caches were discovered in Kamal Adwan hospital. Really, nothing is black and white in the Middle East…except our own prejudices.
Leela
As an engineer myself for over 20 years I can tell you that the foreign engineers are mostly male and usually single. They don’t usually rent apartments by themselves and double up with others. They don’t have a lot of money. And that’s because they get paid less. I have worked with some very talented ones and some not so talented ones. On the whole the quality of their work is not as good as the work of most natives. Despite the fact that they allegedly speak English I have never seen any of them capable of participating in meaningful discussions on business rules. Their English just isn’t good enough for that
maybe there is a shortage. But I think we should not import tech workers wholesale.
Nettoyeur
Musk and Vivek are both dishonest jerks, and neither of them are actual engineers, but they are right that not many Americans are willing to do the hard work required to get STEM degrees, and many who do try are hampered by poor secondary educational backgrounds. I know this from first gand experience as have three degrees in engineering/physics from MIT and U Wisconsin and have worked in a number of countries as a researcher and professor. There are many outstanding American STEM grads, but nowhere near enough to fulfill the needs of the US economy. In many US universities, 50% or more of the STEM graduate students are foreign born, and many of the rest are the children of immigrants. So it’s not surprising that many US STEM faculties have large numbers of foreign born professors. While the H1B visas can be abused by employers to tie STEM staff to jobs at lower wages, I know of many organizations that do not do that. In addition to STEM education shortfalls, US foreign language education has collapsed in the delusion that the whole world speaks English. Very few US born students have any real non English competence unless they are children of immigrants. Implementation of the MAGA dream of near zero immigration, combined with the destruction of federal support for education (to suit the Talibangicals and racists, but I repeat myself) would be catastrophic for the US economy and national defense. We would lose in both trade wars and real wars.
Chris T.
@twbrandt:
Was justified in the past, less so now. Still has its charms but Oakland is (or was) outdoing Berkeley that way in the 2010s. (I lived in Berkeley and El Cerrito, and a few other nearby places in between, in the 1990s, was away in the 2000s, and then back in the 2010s until moving to far-north-WA in 2020. Miss the great food, don’t miss the cost of living though.)
Chris T.
@Elizabelle:
Sure (and likewise), but by the same token, it seems like it would be better to just give out more green cards. (Of course I’m the kind of person who thinks we should just throw the immigration doors wide open in the first place and not bother with distinctions like green cards either.)
Chris T.
@tobie:
It is “fluctuate”-ing (as JPMorgan said of the stock market).
It’s turned into a kind of major boom-and-bust cycle. In the mid-1990s, Sun Microsystems was hiring CS grads for $70k (at that time a really good salary) so a whole bunch of people went into CS. In 2000 the dot-com bust hit, with layoffs left and right. Then tech came back, then 2008, then tech came back again, then …
I’m kind of glad I’m out of it now. 🤪
Chris T.
@sab:
Yep. I had one of those (not a $10k/mo mortgage as I put about $1M into home equity, so the mortgage itself was a mere $2k/mo). Add in taxes and insurance (another $2k/mo) and you see why an income of $250k+ is usually required to live there (achievable with a 2-income household if each person gets $130k, for instance, which is kind of low end for tech salaries in the area).
Fire insurance has gone way up, and the above doesn’t include earthquake insurance either. I suspect the $10k quote above is “$6-7k P+I, $3-4k T+I” (and remember, that’s taxes and insurance per month: the taxes alone on a 1200-sqft $1M house run $14k/yr).
Chris T.
@Dangerman:
It requires extreme flexibility, for sure. Well, that or, er, unusual (ahem) anatomy. A removable head makes it a lot easier though. Perhaps Portal technology?
Uncle Cosmo
@Kathleen:
Dad used to listen to reruns of that on WBAL AM1090 in Baltimore. (He grew up on radio & stayed a radio guy to his dying day.)
The one I recall had John (Don Ameche) under his car changing the oil while Blanche (Frances Langford) harangued him about various personal shortcomings including using their cat (Nature Boy) to wipe his hands. He shot back that he’d never do that to a (IIRC) “poor dumb animal.”
So at the end of the audio clip he comes out from under the vehicle & she says Look at your hands, they’re covered with oil! & he responds
Petlitically incorrect fershur…but funny!
YY_Sima Qian
Late to this thread, but IMHO the entire H1B process has been broken for quite some time. Those on it in corporate American are completely beholden to their employers, & this is worse in Big Tech platforms on the West Coast.
OTOH, a great deal of the US’ historical success across a multitude of endeavors are due to its ability to attract foreign talent. Right now, there is a dire shortage of STEM talent in the US relative to its ambitions for re-industrialization, & that shortage becomes debilitating if we consider domestic talent only. What STEM talent the US does develop & attract are drastically overweighed to computer science (which may be crowding out other engineering disciplines in many institutions) & biotech, & a lot of the STEM talent ended up gravitating toward where the money is – finance & Big Tech. Even in AI, nearly a third of the talent in the US originate from the PRC, as the PRC is producing ~ 50% of the global undergraduates in AI.
Of course, the SV TechBros want to expand the H1B visa program to import more cheap Indian coders to exploit, & not the more traditional chemical/mechanical/electrical engineering types that will be critical to the development of US industries, especially green tech, robotics, automation & telecom, even defense.
If the US is indeed locked in a zero sum competition w/ the PRC (which I have always argued is a dangerous way to approach bilateral relationship & the world), it is currently at a lopsided disadvantage in terms of industrial capacity & value added, & supply chain breadth, depth & resilience, which is downstream of the growing disparity in both the stock & the growth in the human capital in STEM. If you look at the teams in the PRC achieving major breakthroughs either in the domestic or the global context (Lunar/Mars missions, 5th/6th gen fighters, AI LLMs, EVs, batteries, solar/wind/nuclear, mil/civilian drones, passenger airliners, high speed rail, high performance turbines, high performance computing, quantum computing/comm, etc.), the average age is often in the late 20s to early 30s, full of people on the upswing of their careers & w/ decades of productivity left. Outside of a few hot & hyped sectors, their counterpart teams in the US are often people in their 50s, heading toward the twilight of their careers. I see this in the US company I work for (& our Japanese/German competitors), where we have always prided ourselves in being the global leader in technology, versus the Chinese competition. Even as the overall Chinese labor force is set to drop rapidly in the coming decades, the number of people w/ at least undergraduate degrees is set to rise rapidly through the 2040s.
So, the US urgently needs to develop homegrown STEM human capital, while attracting & absorbing as much foreign STEM human capital as possible in the meantime. To the latter end, both the O1 & the H1B visa programs need to be revamped. However, I have zero confidence that Trump, Musk & Ramaswamy are ones to do it.