UwU
9d ago
Isn't any sort of immigration a wage suppression tool?
Yet we, the United States, need it. We have 4% of the world's population and a fertility rate of 1.62 (also for the "race conscious crowd" amongst us, don't look closely at which race has the top fertility rates here). We need immigrants to maintain our long-term economic domination, or at least to slow down our decline if it is inevitable. If China or India gets their shit together, they'll out-compete us on demographics alone, and it's increasingly apparent that at least China is getting its shit together.
If we need immigrants, I rather they be from the top percentiles of other countries.
UwU
9d ago
I'll try to reply to the first point since the other two aren't really quantifiable.
I think currently the new grad situation in tech is predominantly caused by two factors: over-supply due to A LOT of recent CS grads and AI having a disproportionate impact on the lower tier of tech jobs. H-1B has always existed and I've not seen evidence that companies are hiring a lot more than they did several years ago. So new grads are mainly not finding jobs right now due to an over-supply issue and AI rather than competition from H-1B.
However, I'm not saying that just because H-1B's impact on new grads is limited, we shouldn't try make their experience better by fixing it. I recognize this is a problem. As you may notice in my first comment here, I advocated for a sliding tax that specifically targets the lower compensation band that will improve new grad's competitiveness against similarly skilled H-1B applicants.
UwU
9d ago
Well there goes most of my complaints.
To be clear:
1.) This is NOT an annual fee. It’s a one-time fee that applies only to the petition.
2.) Those who already hold H-1B visas and are currently outside of the country right now will NOT be charged $100,000 to re-enter.
H-1B visa holders can leave and re-enter the country to the same extent as they normally would; whatever ability they have to do that is not impacted by yesterday’s proclamation.
3.) This applies only to new visas, not renewals, and not current visa holders.
It will first apply in the next upcoming lottery cycle.
I'm surprised they removed the fee for renewals too.
UwU
9d ago
The policy is "directionally correct" but the effective date should be pushed back several months to lessen the immediate shock and the dollar amount has to be reduced to be more effective at encouraging good behavior while discouraging the bad ones.
Even FAANG can't afford 100k on top. The median total comp for an experienced engineer (IC4, IC5) is somewhere around 300k-400k and adding 100k on top of that means H-1B is effectively dead in the water. From personal experience working at big tech companies, it's not the H-1Bs that scare me, it's the off-shoring. Even at FAANG, I'm seeing entire teams getting moved to Brazil and Europe, and for head counts to only be assigned to non-US locations. Eliminating H-1Bs will only hasten this move.
Access to the us labor market should be expensive. There a lot of negative externalities associated with the kind of inequality the us has now and enacting policies which increase wages are one of the best ways to address this. As an aside if you want to understand how detrimental this program has been in terms of suppressing wages for technical professionals just go onto https://www.clearancejobs.com/ and look at how much more these roles pay compare to similar roles in other industries where hiring foreigners is mostly prohibited.
Can you quantify exactly how much the gap is? I looked around and it seems like for comparable roles at Boeing, the salary is in the ball park of median H-1B tech salary. If the difference is small, like 10-20k, then it's more appropriate to levy a smaller fee than 100k.
I posit there's two different worlds in H-1B, one rife with abuse and the other working-as-intended. All the H-1B workers I've met at FAANG were great workers, no different from native born Americans, and they were not paid less. We should solve the abuse problem but not eliminate the program entirely.
Thats not what H1-Bs are for though. The EB-1A is the "genius visa", and it does not appear to have the $100,000 fee.
I don't only mean rockstars or literal geniuses. It's still very worth it to brain drain the top few percentiles of labor from other countries, even if they are not geniuses. Considering we only import tens of thousands per year and there's over a billion people in the work forces of China and India, it's not a stretch to think that we are getting their cream of the crop. And to the extent that we are not, due to cheating and abuse, then that's something we should fix.
UwU
10d ago
This may be "directionally correct" but it's too much and too sudden. This is currently positioned as a direct fuck-you to H-1B holders and the companies who hire them, with policy goals secondary. If they want to fix the abuse problem long term of companies underpaying H-1B, they can put a sliding salary tax for companies hiring under the median H-1B wage, up to a cap on the median wage. E.g. if you pay your tech guy 100k and median is 130k, then pay an addition 15k to the government.
Currently there are two problems:
- America has only 4% of the world's population but 25% of the GDP. We need to brain drain other countries to ensure economic dominance in the long term.
H-1B allows us to do it by attracting the best and brightest from other countries. ~100-200k H-1B holders in the country is only 0.1% of the 160M workforce, which is evidence that it is used to attract exceptional talent, for the most part. Top companies like FAANG plays by the book here, they do not generally pay H-1Bs less than local talent, they just want the best people.
- There's H-1B abuse in lower tier consulting companies, where they use H-1B as a source of cheaper labor.
This is the problem the administration should fix by adding taxes and fees.
The difficulty is to solve both problems at once. I don't think the program is perfect, but effectively killing it will be detrimental to the US in the long term. Yes, instituting a 100k/year fee on top for every H-1B employee will effectively kill this program.
UwU
11d ago
I'm not sure where our disagreement lies. If your point is that the two are not the same, it's true. In my first post I didn't say they were the same, in fact I pointed out that they were different.
If your point is that advocating for state violence is as mundane as paying for a watch like in the Monty Python skit, then I disagree. The takeaway for most is still that "my opposition deserves to die for their crimes" and it does endanger the target, just not as much as an unqualified call for violence.
Secondly, jake said:
Had Kirk agitated for and supported violence against his opposition -- actual violence, not the child's "you said mean words"
And you seem to agree that Kirk "literally [advocated] for violence"?
UwU
12d ago
It's still advocating for violence.
Sure, "my political opposition should be tried for treason and then shot" may have a thin veneer of plausible deniability to chronic overthinkers like you or I, but most people from both sides are just going to hear "my political opposition should be shot".
UwU
13d ago
I don't really understand why we need to tear down Carson some more. He's not a saint but neither was Charlie Kirk. Kirk also has a mountain of quotes that the left can mine to justify celebrating his death, and I believe they are wrong to do so too.
Had Kirk agitated for and supported violence against his opposition -- actual violence, not the child's "you said mean words"
Granted, not extra-judicial violence, so maybe not exactly "living and dying by the sword," but the following is not exactly that either:
The righties criticize Carson for his belief that socioeconomic conditions precipitate the willingness of an 18 year old to wander a city and murder a stranger by repeatedly stabbing him. His beliefs directly related with and contributed to the circumstances of his murder.
That's like arguing Charlie Kirk argued for escalation and turning up the temperature, which produced a political environment that precipitated his assassination. The cause and effect between Carson's beliefs and his murder are just as far removed.
UwU
16d ago
I don't believe Goodguy is part of the group that convinced this person to kill or that he thinks this was a good thing that happened.
UwU
17d ago
As someone who is moderately left-leaning, this assassination also fills me with sadness. I spent quite a bit of time on Reddit in the immediate aftermath getting my share of downvotes telling people he was not a Nazi or a fascist or far-right, and the thinly veiled, and unveiled, elation was disgusting and vile until I had to mentally check out from social media. In the real world, though, people at least seemed to be much more reasonable. I live in a very blue area and work with all blue-tribe people, and when this topic was brought up, the mood was generally of concern and there was not an ounce of celebration. (Though it could just be people I work with know how to conduct themselves properly in a work environment.) Still, I don't know how this country can recover from this death spiral.
UwU
17d ago
It certainly is tone deaf, but it's also par for the course for political discourse in this country. The left hears it all the time after school shootings.
UwU
19d ago
Either you believe trans women are women or you believe trans women are men. Almost no one believes trans women are women when they are law abiding and they are men when they go shoot up a school. Using their style guide for most cases but skipping this one makes no one happy and both sides mad, obviously they wouldn't do it. Ditto for Black vs black.
In the counterfactual scenario where they actually made an exception for these articles like you want them to, we'd get threads about how NYT's selective application of their style guide proves they are intellectually dishonest hypocrites instead.
UwU
2mo ago
Yes, charitably, both can be misogynistic. Saying that a woman is secretly a man is mainly an attack on female politicians in the US, you don't see conspiracy theories that Biden or Trump are actually secretly female. In this way, it's misogynistic since it's an attack that disproportionately targets women.
UwU
2mo ago
The population would mostly flee and be happily snapped up by European union which needs wagies. Baltic sea navigation wouldn't be improved, actually seizing the Baltic state could possibly make western Europe close the Danish straits.
If you read the latter part of his post, I think it's pretty clear he means we shouldn't mind the Baltics getting invaded, but of course correct me if I'm wrong.
I kinda hold a similar opinion. I don't really want to care about the Baltics. But they are in NATO, and we (the US) are allied to them, so we do have to mind the Baltics getting invaded. If there's a politically feasible way to extricate ourselves from having to protect the Baltics, like somehow removing them from NATO, then I would support it.
UwU
2mo ago
I don't see why your argument wouldn't also apply to the most recent operation where they used B2s as decoys for other B2s.
UwU
2mo ago
Not a vegan but it seems internally consistent. Yeast are indeed living things, just like plants! Since vegans haven't quite figured out how to photosynthesize yet, they still need to eat living things to not starve. Yeast is just acceptable casualties.
UwU
3mo ago
This is predicated on Iran not developing a nuke in the next few years without the most recent conflict. It's impossible to know with only public information, but at least the US and Israel believed Iran was close enough to one to warrant an attack.
UwU
3mo ago
No clear evidence that their nuclear program is knocked out, a pretty strong incentive now between the outcomes of Libya, North Korea, Israel and Iran for any country that doesn't want to be a colony of either the eastern or western bloc to develop nukes.
This would be true regardless of whether the US conducted this strike or not. One might argue that allowing Iran to acquire nuclear weapons without any sort of kinetic response would have encouraged state actors to pursue nukes even more rigorously.
UwU
3mo ago
What I'm okay with: Enforcing immigration laws, deporting illegal immigrants. I'm fine with "breaking up families", arresting people at their workplaces, and deporting parents of citizen children with them in tow.
What I'm not okay with: Masked men in plainclothes forcibly ushering people into unmarked vans. As long as they are unmasked and wearing uniforms, or unmasked, plainclothed and are obligated to give their full name and badge/ID upon request, I'd have no problem with it. Yes they may lose the intimidation factor, but it's a necessary trade-off compared to normalizing mask wearing thugs kidnapping people off the streets.
UwU
3mo ago
Also, my P(Doom|no slowdown) is like 0.95-0.97
I think the main point of contention is this. As evidenced by discussions up and down this thread, for most people, the number is closer to 0.05 than 0.95, so there's no political will to do the other things you suggest. A real-world example: Anthropic. When the OpenAI engineers quit the company because it wouldn't slow down for safety, they didn't shoot the remaining employees, instead they created a competitor to sprint faster with the belief that if they reach AGI first, it'll be better aligned for humanity.
UwU
3mo ago
What if you believe that when you reach the finish line, there's a 5% chance that the track will blow up, but if the other guys reach the finish line first, there's a 10% chance the track will blow up. Also you believe the other guys don't take the risks seriously so they won't stop running. Is "sprint harder" a valid option?
Thanks for the correction, I looked at the wrong data.
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