I had to go look at my Costco and Amazon orders to check because my intuition was that I spent so much more money in diapers in the first year and indeed, that was like ~75% of the cost of the first two years. Toddlers get changed so much less often than babies, and you can plan your purchases way more easily, so I’m not even sure they make that much money off those.
I was just objecting to the typical phrase "it costs just as much as a coffee" making it sound like nothing worth thinking about. This stuff adds up to real money over time. I have explained to several people that their Starbucks habit costs more than their car insurance (and also may give them diabetes depending on the drink). It's even worse with Doordash or Uber.
Yeah it's an interesting argument. Also, coffees (especially Starbucks coffees) rarely cost $3 anymore. Maybe if you just get a regular brewed coffee but when I think of Starbucks I don't think of their coffees on tap, I think of their $7+ lattes or frapps that are less coffee and more dessert. Anyway, I digress.
Point being, a small expense once is one small expense. A small expense daily can easily become a huge expense.
That being said, I'm not gonna be prescriptive and say that no one should get their daily coffee. But they need to be aware what it costs them. If they know the cost and are ok with it then by all means, order away! I hope your friends are at least now making a conscious choice to spend $1000+ a year on coffee :)
Yup, Louisianna has the highest combined state and local sales tax rates on average of ~10% which is no where near the VAT standard which seems to be around 20% for most of Europe?
Half of the best engineers I know come from a random state school, from a random country, and we should work way harder than we do on finding those people.
But also… the other half come from prestigious colleges, and the way you solve the first half is not by not hiring the second half.
Hiring costs time, money, and other engineers time and effort. Wasting money and time reviewing a pool with less good candidates will simply lose you business over time, as you waste more resources to obtain the same result.
So you are saying the Ivy League pool is the one with more better candidates?
The same pool where connections, rather than merit count? Where the candidates have (probably) been coddled by their loaded parents all their lives? Where they fake disabilities in order to get affordances such as better housing, "support" animals and so on?
Are American universities really turning out engineers with high GPAs and relevant coursework that are unqualified? Or even create a disadvantage for their employer?
I mean realistically you don’t know how good an engineer is until they get on projects and you see their work. But that’s true for Harvard too,
Yes. Ever do hiring, or run a significant interview system? I have. Us engineers thought the same way you did, but after a significant number of interviews, we went back over resumes versus interview performance to find ways to save costs/interview more per resource used, and surprisingly to us at that point quality of college was the biggest predictor. Lower quality schools simply had a less talented or trained pool, and it was significant.
Ever run a company or do a lot of hiring? It’s not a line of thinking. If can cost effectively find equivalent candidates from a weaker pool, you’ll be rich selling that service.
> 1) Eliminate the H-1B visa entirely. If a company wants to hire an immigrant, they can just sponsor the Green Card up front, knowing the worker can fuck off once they have it. The net result would be decreased immigration and increased offshoring, which brings me to…
Do you know how long those take? Consular processing for green cards is painful as hell and somehow even longer than adjustment of status if you're in a non-backlogged country. The real solution here is obviously to allow self-sponsorship for employment based green cards.
> Companies that do 90% of their business in America but whose workforce (contractors, consultants, and FTEs) aren’t 90% American?
I mean, do you want to tax a company that hires foreigners, sponsor their green cards, just because some of their employees decide to not naturalize (say, like Apple or Google or Meta?) ? That makes zero sense.
> For-profit business models predicated on shunting workers onto every possible social welfare program
H1B folks aren't eligible for any social welfare program, even though they, e.g. contribure to Medicare / Social Security.
You're deliberately conflating different arguments to suit your preconceived opinions rather than read them as the individual arguments they are. Even so, I'll respond in earnest to each counter-point you're attempting to make:
> Do you know how long those take? Consular processing for green cards is painful as hell and somehow even longer than adjustment of status if you're in a non-backlogged country. The real solution here is obviously to allow self-sponsorship for employment based green cards.
I do, actually. I've navigated the immigration system as a sponsor, and it's hell. It's deliberately engineered to make it as difficult and expensive as possible to navigate successfully, and it's needed an overhaul for half a century. Using that as a wedge issue to deny reform, however, also hasn't worked for half a century, and has only resulted in a fatigued populace embracing fringe populism and naked fascism in an effort to see any movement at all on the issue.
Seriously, this was a big topic leading up to the 2008 election. Congress has dropped the ball dozens of times.
As for self-sponsoring, I'm not ready to open that can of worms given the immense exploitation it allows (essentially indentured servitude - which, to be fair, so is H1B, so let's not shift that exploitation further down the ladder either).
> I mean, do you want to tax a company that hires foreigners, sponsor their green cards, just because some of their employees decide to not naturalize (say, like Apple or Google or Meta?) ? That makes zero sense.
Yes, I do. If an employee decides not to Naturalize, then they're free to seek other employment on the job market with employers not phased by such penalties. Employers will naturally shift to only hiring Citizens or permanent residents pending Naturalization, not Green Card workers. This shifts the exploitation further down the chain rather than up front via temporary visas with no direct pathways to Citizenship, but to be clear, it does not eliminate exploitation of immigrant labor.
Immigration to another country is a serious decision to make. It comes with tradeoffs. We should want people willing to integrate - not assimilate, necessarily - into the country's fabric, put down roots, raise kids, contribute back to communities, and be good citizens. We don't want or need more rich tourists stopping by for a decade or two as permanent residents before fucking off back to their home country where the cost of living is cheaper, not when so many of our problems require long-term thinking and strategizing to solve - something citizens are best equipped to see through.
> H1B folks aren't eligible for any social welfare program, even though they, e.g. contribure to Medicare / Social Security.
I'm aware. You're conflating every single proposal after the H1B point in bullet 1 with all of them targeting H1B specifically. In this case I'm referring to the fast food industry, the retail industry, the service sector, the multitude of American enterprises who refuse to pay livable wages by design, so that taxpayers have to spend more on SNAP, Medicaid, Section 8, and other welfare programs for the working poor just so Walmart, or Amazon, or McDonalds can pay their shareholders and leadership panels even more money. This isn't even an "open secret" anymore, it's literally the business playbook for some of America's largest employers.
You're making decent enough arguments, but you're not doing the barest minimum research before making them. C'mon, you can be better than this, I know it.
> The question is - what % of this labor could be sourced domestically and what actually needs to be imported?
I mean, the other question is: how many US jobs exist because of folks who came to the country on H1B? Clearly none of the big tech companies would exist in the scale they are without us.
I would challenge that by saying SO MANY "software engineers" are net-negative producers, be it offshore teams in Asia or Eastern Europe or U.S. citizens. Partially a result of coding bootcamps. The recent tech layoffs in ~2022 that we are still reeling from is further evidence that maybe we don't need H-1B for software engineering roles. Medical? Absolutely.
You are being downvoted but you are totally correct. The tech industry existed before the H1B and was growing rapidly. There’s no evidence at all that the industry would have stopped growing without the H1B or that any company started by an H1B wouldn’t have been started by an American.
44% of unicorns founders between 1997 and 2019 were foreign born. 20% of those were specifically from India.
It seems like if Americans were just so much more dominant, they’d form a much higher percentage of unicorn founders given that the percentage of foreign born people in the US was about 15% at the highest.
Looks like foreign born immigrants are punching about 3 times their weight as startup founders.
reply