I was on an Aircraft Carrier. Big Ship. And I can tell you that even on that ship, things could get very rough. Can’t imagine how it was on those early, very, very small ships. Mayflower, Columbus’s ships, the early explorer, all small.
About a week ago, I posted a link to More Perfect, a slide essay on how technology shaped–and will reshape–the American Union, from Christian Keil, who is a new partner at Andreessen-Horowitz.
Comes now a response from Michael Bruno, who describes himself as a ‘former Marine infantry officer, former policy wonk, and now I work for a family office, investing in different asset classes. With a particular affection for civilizational technology and industry.’ His response is titled Less Perfect. I haven’t read it in detail yet, but it looks very interesting.
I’m not sure if you read them, but I replied with a few comments to your More Perfect link at neo’s place (last week?). In his Less Perfect response Mr. Bruno reflects most of my sentiments. As I’ve matured into old-ish age, raised kids, navigated a career (or three), traveled the world… My thoughts on what matters have changed (hopefully evolved, and not devolved). When I was younger I was more in Keil’s camp. Now? Team Bruno.
My parents graduated High School in 1955. If Mr. Bruno or Mr. Keil crunched the data back then, many of the data points would have been less favorable; life expectancy, cancer survival rates, infant mortality, home ownership. Many of the economic indicators would have also been worse. But I guarantee you a much higher percentage of Americans living in 1955 felt positive about the nation, their future, the nation’s future and their children’s future. And, equally important, a much higher percentage of Americans would have said they felt their lives had meaning and purpose; that they felt they were a part of something important and vital.
America, the West (the world?) has been failing at that for more than a few decades. Look at Mr. Bruno’s slide 101, 100, 99. Slides 91 and 36. … Is there anything more important to human thriving? My guess is you can ignore all the data in both slide decks and simply look at birth rates. Is there a better measure of how humans feel about their lives and the future?
What does it say when a species voluntarily stops breeding?
if you dial past all the fluff, you see the connections are not incidental,
some of them, may play into certain tropes, but he chose to be part of certain institutions on each end of the Atlantic and beyond
the greatest generation certain had their priorities in order, the depression and the war, certainly had a way of focusing them on that score
they unlike yeats, were convicted and rooted, in what matters, it was the subsequent generations that losr their way,
Rufus T. Firefly and David – If I may join in – I was having a conversation the other day about the mortgage interest rates in the early 1980’s as a rejoinder to young people today who complain about how they can never own a house. It got me thinking about my own ancestors and the multiple world wars, depressions, de-industrializations, oil crises, and the like that they had to make their way through. And those are just the ancestors that I have known in life.
I have two theories. The first is that most of living memory in the US has been pretty darn good. No one under the age of 50 or so has adult memories of being in constant fear of nuclear war with the Soviets. No one below retirement age has adult memories of the oil crises or of steel mills closing in the 1970’s and 80’s. Very few living Americans remember a world war or a depression. Now that we seem to be reverting to the mean just a bit, it seems like a catastrophe because most living adults don’t remember that the last eight decades or so, and especially the last three, really have been an aberration.
I also think that a lot of the problem has to do with the lack of religious faith among the young, and especially the lack of meaning and community that faith can provide.
Re: More Perfect & Michael Bruno
Just what I love to read — a big essay in PowerPoint and a long Twitter thread.
Not.
Interesting reflections here.
I was a depression baby. Six years old when Pearl Harbor. Eight years old when Dad left for the Navy. Missed the Korean draft by a year. Nineteen when Mother died in 1954; leaving Dad with two youngsters at home (I was gone). Entered flight training in 1955.
During all of those years, I do not recall ever hearing an elder complain. About anything.
Life was so good for a kid growing up. We had a degree of autonomy that kids today cannot comprehend. I refer to us as ‘free range kids’. We knew that we lived in the greatest country in the whole world; probably in all of history.
By the way, despite all of the talk about the fear of nuclear war; I never heard the term ‘duck and cover’ in school. We felt secure. The nuclear cloud simply did not affect us. At least not until I became a ‘nuclear delivery qualified Naval Aviator’ (how is that for a job description?)
The world may have been up side down during my youth, but it was still a great time to grow up as an American ‘free range’ kid.
Re: Generations
Your mileage may vary. Of one’s generation it’s easy to take for granted the advantages and to highlight the disadvantages.
Still I’ve got to quote Oldflyer:
The world may have been up side down during my youth, but it was still a great time to grow up as an American ‘free range’ kid.
I think it’s almost all related to your final paragraph. Humans need community, to feel they are working with others near them towards shared goals.
This is what I think folks like Keil and Professor Pinker miss. It’s not material datapoints; do you own a TV? Do you have air-conditioning? Are you living 10 years longer?
People need purpose. That can’t be outsourced.
Niketas,
“… having to compete with a … worldwide pool of labor for a job.”
The effects of this are huge.
Niketas, RTF…”having to compete with a national or worldwide pool of labor for a job”
A very, very major thing. And it is *not* due to ‘corporate greed’, as often asserted, it is due to the fact that improvements in transportation & communications technology have allowed manufacturing and services to be done in places where labor is much, much cheaper…and if American corporations didn’t take advantage of this, non-American corporations would, and most American consumers would buy their cheaper products.
Just think how much higher the Dow would be if Trump hadn’t “destroyed trillions of dollars of value” per bauxy lol
Aren’t corporations *supposed* to be greedy? Unlike nonprofits who always have impeccably pure motives …
Pacific Northwest National Laboratories (PNNL)is the largest single employer in the Tri-Cities of eastern Washington. They take their “not for profits” very, very seriously.
Chases Eagles on February 6, 2026 at 11:54 am said:
“This picture from wiki is of a carrack drawn by Hans Holbein in 1533. Look how crowded it is.”
Scaling this picture as holding up to 19 or 20 people along its length, and using 2 ft. per person, gives this vessel length as approx. 40 ft, well short of the 106ft mentioned for the Mayflower in the video. But as a representation of a ship or vessel type, I presume it could be scaled and built to longer versions if this graphic is actually to scale for a real (probably earlier?) example.
My house is 62 ft long and approx. 39 ft. wide, so still well short of the 106 ft long Mayflower but wider. But it now houses only two people.
It turns out a modern aircraft carrier is about 900 to 1100 ft. long, and 1100 ft happens to be the distance of my driveway from my garage to the road. That provides a sobering scale when I consider such measurements and lengths. If my wife asks “how long is X?” I can say 1/3 or 1/2 of the distance up to the road and she (and I) gets a sense of it.
Oldflyer,
I am probably 12 years younger than you (an early Boomer), and I also agree that in my upbringing adults did not complain and things were pretty good overall. And while the nuclear possibly was mentioned, it was generally treated as “nothing we can do about it if it happens”. The adults were responsible for worrying about that.
But interesting that your job title was “nuclear delivery qualified Naval Aviator”. That would make a great title for a Substack writer!! Perhaps you should take up writing one ?? You undoubtedly also have many stories worthy of telling others.
Interesting to contrast RTF and Bauxite:
“Humans need community, to feel they are working with others near them towards shared goals. … People need purpose. That can’t be outsourced.”
Vs. Niketas: ” … having to compete with a national or worldwide pool of labor for a job.”
Yet the value of the competition in the marketplace includes the productivity enhancements and sometime its related creative destruction. Clearly the greed of supplying foreign markets in return for their labor in supporting ours was also a factor.
I am not sure why “someone” did not seem to recognize that such unbalanced competition (without the added costs of US safety and labor and environmental regulations) would be bad or at least unsettling for our social and economic well being as well. I suppose Perot’s “giant sucking sound” and a few other voices were heard, but they were not impactful enough until Trump came down the elevator?
Maybe a partial answer is greater transparency in the lobbying and donor data: who is supporting which politician and what agenda are they pursuing, exactly? But this would also required a news media oriented to tracking and reporting such “mundane” stuff and establishing correlations and connections that are more than mere titillation. And a population with sufficient interest in the answers to impact their voting patterns and behavior.
@R2L:Yet the value of the competition in the marketplace
Different people will say different things, I can only tell you what I would say.
1) When it comes to competition with foreign countries, foreign labor imported into this country is a completely different matter from importing goods and services. People are not widgets.
2) A lot of “competition” in these days is fake, and bigger the player the faker it is. If greedy megacorps ruthlessly pursued efficiency and undercut each other to make an additional nickel, consumers would benefit. Instead they get in bed with government to change the rules to benefit themselves and also to get a giant customer not spending its own money. The megacorp benefits financially and the government gets a nice compliant sheep to herd and shear as it likes. Look how and why DEI has been implemented for a good example.
Niketas…’posting fake jobs and hiring H1Bs instead of Americans”…strikes me that this could be a securities law violation: the company in question is reporting on its financials a labor cost that will not be sustainable if laws & regulations start being enforced properly.
David Foster,
Spend a few hours on LinkedIn looking for posts and comments from job seekers opining on the vast amount of odd, fake, ghosted jobs. I can attest to three instances I was personally exposed to where Indian leaders in U.S. companies posted job openings to satisfy requirements to ultimately employ Indians in India with absolutely no goal nor intent to consider qualified U.S. candidates, if available.
I also suspect that there are kickbacks going on.
… if laws & regulations start being enforced properly.
That’s amusing. You should make that a post on LinkedIn or a reddit thread with tech/engineering job seekers and see what kind of ratio you get in the comments.
David Foster,
Look at the simple math. There are 1.47 billion people in India. 330 million in the U.S. For any job that can be outsourced would a U.S. candidate ever be chosen, based on that ratio? I have interviewed a lot of Indian tech candidates (and many were qualified). They all had PhDs. When I asked them about this they explained the Universities there are very different and a PhD from an Indian University is typically not close to one from a U.S. University, but they have it on their resume. Ipso facto, they are “more qualified” than a U.S. candidate interviewing for the same position with no PhD.
David Foster,
R2L wrote it better than I likely would have, but greed or no, a nation needs to protect its interests. Japan has few raw materials. It’s the last place one would choose to locate a massive auto industry on planet Earth, looking at the globe as a borderless planet. But the Japanese looked at the market post WWII and decided that would be a good industry for their people, for their economy, for their nation.
Too many economists look purely at capital*. Based on that, any labor that can reasonably be done in a 3rd world country should. With 8+ billion people in the world, most of whom are willing to work for far below the wages Americans require, why would one ever employ anyone in the U.S.? There are skilled radiologists in Africa who will read your X Ray for 1/10th of what a U.S. radiologist charges. There are native English speakers in India who can master the law or tax code in your state and will handle your legal or accounting needs for 1/3 the cost of a U.S. attorney or CPA. Why employ an American?
And Germany is correct to get their oil and gas from Mother Russia. It’s cheaper than using their own natural resources.
And the U.S. is smart to get its vaccines from China.
Yet, Economists keep wondering why there are all these run-down neighborhoods in the U.S. with high drug use, suicide rates and crime.
Weird.
*We made a similar mistake during the Covid19 pandemic. Our politicians put epidemiologists in charge. Epidemiologists can tell you how to reduce exposure and death, but that’s only one factor when governing a state, or country.
@David Foster:…strikes me that this could be a securities law violation: the company in question is reporting on its financials a labor cost that will not be sustainable if laws & regulations start being enforced properly.
If laws and regulations aren’t, as you acknowledge, being enforced properly, I don’t see why such companies should be concerned about a potential securities law violation. A bit like harrumphing at a bank robber for jaywalking I should say.
If H1B were being done properly there’d hardly be any H1Bs at all. You know this for a fact. It is supposed to be a non-immigrant visa and for a temporary hire in those rare cases where no American has a very specific skill set. The US graduates thousands of Americans every year with IT degrees and not one of them should be unemployed before a single H1B is granted for an IT worker.
The laying off of American workers to replace them with H1Bs makes it very clear what the nature of the H1B program has become. As it was originally intended, that should have been impossible.
Niketas @10:20am,
Yes. And, there is a compounding effect due to wage deflation. They hire an Indian electrical engineer or coder for less than the prevailing wage in America. Once there are a significant percentage of such workers employed in a field the overall wage for that profession in America decreases. So, a bright young High School Senior with a good mastery of STEM looks at wages of newly minted College grads across professions and sees that he or she can make more in Finance than coding, so gets a degree in Finance. Four years later, when an employer places an add for an Electrical Engineer or programmer there are even fewer U.S. grads to choose from due to the wage deflation for the skill set so even more employers go the H1B route. Rinse, repeat.
On December 6, 1941 the U.S. didn’t have a lot of hirable talent in the field of aircraft production*. Four years later we led the world. Did Americans suddenly get smarter in avionics and aircraft design? Or did huge, internal demand drive a lot of Americans to focus on that profession?
*A wise economist would have advised we ship aircraft from Japan, or Germany as they were ahead of the U.S. at the time.
Niketas, you’re right about how Reps mostly try to be meritocratic, while Dems consistently push for Dems in personnel policy.
In news, and for 70 years in academia, & somewhat in entertainment.
I was on an Aircraft Carrier. Big Ship. And I can tell you that even on that ship, things could get very rough. Can’t imagine how it was on those early, very, very small ships. Mayflower, Columbus’s ships, the early explorer, all small.
About a week ago, I posted a link to More Perfect, a slide essay on how technology shaped–and will reshape–the American Union, from Christian Keil, who is a new partner at Andreessen-Horowitz.
Comes now a response from Michael Bruno, who describes himself as a ‘former Marine infantry officer, former policy wonk, and now I work for a family office, investing in different asset classes. With a particular affection for civilizational technology and industry.’ His response is titled Less Perfect. I haven’t read it in detail yet, but it looks very interesting.
Links here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/76078.html
This picture from wiki is of a carrack drawn by Hans Holbein in 1533. Look how crowded it is. Also note the guy puking over the side and behind him ???
What is that couple doing!
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/Holbein_-_Ausfahrendes_Schiff.png
David,
I’m not sure if you read them, but I replied with a few comments to your More Perfect link at neo’s place (last week?). In his Less Perfect response Mr. Bruno reflects most of my sentiments. As I’ve matured into old-ish age, raised kids, navigated a career (or three), traveled the world… My thoughts on what matters have changed (hopefully evolved, and not devolved). When I was younger I was more in Keil’s camp. Now? Team Bruno.
My parents graduated High School in 1955. If Mr. Bruno or Mr. Keil crunched the data back then, many of the data points would have been less favorable; life expectancy, cancer survival rates, infant mortality, home ownership. Many of the economic indicators would have also been worse. But I guarantee you a much higher percentage of Americans living in 1955 felt positive about the nation, their future, the nation’s future and their children’s future. And, equally important, a much higher percentage of Americans would have said they felt their lives had meaning and purpose; that they felt they were a part of something important and vital.
America, the West (the world?) has been failing at that for more than a few decades. Look at Mr. Bruno’s slide 101, 100, 99. Slides 91 and 36. … Is there anything more important to human thriving? My guess is you can ignore all the data in both slide decks and simply look at birth rates. Is there a better measure of how humans feel about their lives and the future?
What does it say when a species voluntarily stops breeding?
an interesting perspective,
https://substack.com/@escapekey/note/p-186964254
if you dial past all the fluff, you see the connections are not incidental,
some of them, may play into certain tropes, but he chose to be part of certain institutions on each end of the Atlantic and beyond
the greatest generation certain had their priorities in order, the depression and the war, certainly had a way of focusing them on that score
they unlike yeats, were convicted and rooted, in what matters, it was the subsequent generations that losr their way,
Rufus T. Firefly and David – If I may join in – I was having a conversation the other day about the mortgage interest rates in the early 1980’s as a rejoinder to young people today who complain about how they can never own a house. It got me thinking about my own ancestors and the multiple world wars, depressions, de-industrializations, oil crises, and the like that they had to make their way through. And those are just the ancestors that I have known in life.
I have two theories. The first is that most of living memory in the US has been pretty darn good. No one under the age of 50 or so has adult memories of being in constant fear of nuclear war with the Soviets. No one below retirement age has adult memories of the oil crises or of steel mills closing in the 1970’s and 80’s. Very few living Americans remember a world war or a depression. Now that we seem to be reverting to the mean just a bit, it seems like a catastrophe because most living adults don’t remember that the last eight decades or so, and especially the last three, really have been an aberration.
I also think that a lot of the problem has to do with the lack of religious faith among the young, and especially the lack of meaning and community that faith can provide.
Re: More Perfect & Michael Bruno
Just what I love to read — a big essay in PowerPoint and a long Twitter thread.
Not.
Interesting reflections here.
I was a depression baby. Six years old when Pearl Harbor. Eight years old when Dad left for the Navy. Missed the Korean draft by a year. Nineteen when Mother died in 1954; leaving Dad with two youngsters at home (I was gone). Entered flight training in 1955.
During all of those years, I do not recall ever hearing an elder complain. About anything.
Life was so good for a kid growing up. We had a degree of autonomy that kids today cannot comprehend. I refer to us as ‘free range kids’. We knew that we lived in the greatest country in the whole world; probably in all of history.
By the way, despite all of the talk about the fear of nuclear war; I never heard the term ‘duck and cover’ in school. We felt secure. The nuclear cloud simply did not affect us. At least not until I became a ‘nuclear delivery qualified Naval Aviator’ (how is that for a job description?)
The world may have been up side down during my youth, but it was still a great time to grow up as an American ‘free range’ kid.
Re: Generations
Your mileage may vary. Of one’s generation it’s easy to take for granted the advantages and to highlight the disadvantages.
Still I’ve got to quote Oldflyer:
The world may have been up side down during my youth, but it was still a great time to grow up as an American ‘free range’ kid.
Amen.
Housing, health insurance and health care, higher education,* and having to compete with a national or worldwide pool of labor for a job. Those are real headwinds for younger people. Ever-increasing Federal regulations don’t help. Any young people feeling as if earlier generations have pulled up the ladder after them can easily substantiate that feeling with data.
*Note the zero of this chart is 1997.
Bauxite,
I think it’s almost all related to your final paragraph. Humans need community, to feel they are working with others near them towards shared goals.
This is what I think folks like Keil and Professor Pinker miss. It’s not material datapoints; do you own a TV? Do you have air-conditioning? Are you living 10 years longer?
People need purpose. That can’t be outsourced.
Niketas,
“… having to compete with a … worldwide pool of labor for a job.”
The effects of this are huge.
Niketas, RTF…”having to compete with a national or worldwide pool of labor for a job”
A very, very major thing. And it is *not* due to ‘corporate greed’, as often asserted, it is due to the fact that improvements in transportation & communications technology have allowed manufacturing and services to be done in places where labor is much, much cheaper…and if American corporations didn’t take advantage of this, non-American corporations would, and most American consumers would buy their cheaper products.
See my post Labor Day Thoughts, 2025:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/74890.html
BOOM!!! RECORD: Dow hits 50,000 for the first time ever – Video *Updated*
https://commoncts.blogspot.com/2026/02/boom-record-dow-hits-50000-for-first.html
@David Foster: And it is *not* due to ‘corporate greed’
I would say that posting fake jobs to check PERM boxes and hiring H1Bs instead of Americans is definitely due to corporate greed.
Just think how much higher the Dow would be if Trump hadn’t “destroyed trillions of dollars of value” per bauxy lol
Aren’t corporations *supposed* to be greedy? Unlike nonprofits who always have impeccably pure motives …
Pacific Northwest National Laboratories (PNNL)is the largest single employer in the Tri-Cities of eastern Washington. They take their “not for profits” very, very seriously.
Chases Eagles on February 6, 2026 at 11:54 am said:
“This picture from wiki is of a carrack drawn by Hans Holbein in 1533. Look how crowded it is.”
Scaling this picture as holding up to 19 or 20 people along its length, and using 2 ft. per person, gives this vessel length as approx. 40 ft, well short of the 106ft mentioned for the Mayflower in the video. But as a representation of a ship or vessel type, I presume it could be scaled and built to longer versions if this graphic is actually to scale for a real (probably earlier?) example.
My house is 62 ft long and approx. 39 ft. wide, so still well short of the 106 ft long Mayflower but wider. But it now houses only two people.
It turns out a modern aircraft carrier is about 900 to 1100 ft. long, and 1100 ft happens to be the distance of my driveway from my garage to the road. That provides a sobering scale when I consider such measurements and lengths. If my wife asks “how long is X?” I can say 1/3 or 1/2 of the distance up to the road and she (and I) gets a sense of it.
Oldflyer,
I am probably 12 years younger than you (an early Boomer), and I also agree that in my upbringing adults did not complain and things were pretty good overall. And while the nuclear possibly was mentioned, it was generally treated as “nothing we can do about it if it happens”. The adults were responsible for worrying about that.
But interesting that your job title was “nuclear delivery qualified Naval Aviator”. That would make a great title for a Substack writer!! Perhaps you should take up writing one ?? You undoubtedly also have many stories worthy of telling others.
Interesting to contrast RTF and Bauxite:
“Humans need community, to feel they are working with others near them towards shared goals. … People need purpose. That can’t be outsourced.”
Vs. Niketas: ” … having to compete with a national or worldwide pool of labor for a job.”
Yet the value of the competition in the marketplace includes the productivity enhancements and sometime its related creative destruction. Clearly the greed of supplying foreign markets in return for their labor in supporting ours was also a factor.
I am not sure why “someone” did not seem to recognize that such unbalanced competition (without the added costs of US safety and labor and environmental regulations) would be bad or at least unsettling for our social and economic well being as well. I suppose Perot’s “giant sucking sound” and a few other voices were heard, but they were not impactful enough until Trump came down the elevator?
Maybe a partial answer is greater transparency in the lobbying and donor data: who is supporting which politician and what agenda are they pursuing, exactly? But this would also required a news media oriented to tracking and reporting such “mundane” stuff and establishing correlations and connections that are more than mere titillation. And a population with sufficient interest in the answers to impact their voting patterns and behavior.
@R2L:Yet the value of the competition in the marketplace
Different people will say different things, I can only tell you what I would say.
1) When it comes to competition with foreign countries, foreign labor imported into this country is a completely different matter from importing goods and services. People are not widgets.
2) A lot of “competition” in these days is fake, and bigger the player the faker it is. If greedy megacorps ruthlessly pursued efficiency and undercut each other to make an additional nickel, consumers would benefit. Instead they get in bed with government to change the rules to benefit themselves and also to get a giant customer not spending its own money. The megacorp benefits financially and the government gets a nice compliant sheep to herd and shear as it likes. Look how and why DEI has been implemented for a good example.
Niketas…’posting fake jobs and hiring H1Bs instead of Americans”…strikes me that this could be a securities law violation: the company in question is reporting on its financials a labor cost that will not be sustainable if laws & regulations start being enforced properly.
David Foster,
Spend a few hours on LinkedIn looking for posts and comments from job seekers opining on the vast amount of odd, fake, ghosted jobs. I can attest to three instances I was personally exposed to where Indian leaders in U.S. companies posted job openings to satisfy requirements to ultimately employ Indians in India with absolutely no goal nor intent to consider qualified U.S. candidates, if available.
I also suspect that there are kickbacks going on.
… if laws & regulations start being enforced properly.
That’s amusing. You should make that a post on LinkedIn or a reddit thread with tech/engineering job seekers and see what kind of ratio you get in the comments.
David Foster,
Look at the simple math. There are 1.47 billion people in India. 330 million in the U.S. For any job that can be outsourced would a U.S. candidate ever be chosen, based on that ratio? I have interviewed a lot of Indian tech candidates (and many were qualified). They all had PhDs. When I asked them about this they explained the Universities there are very different and a PhD from an Indian University is typically not close to one from a U.S. University, but they have it on their resume. Ipso facto, they are “more qualified” than a U.S. candidate interviewing for the same position with no PhD.
David Foster,
R2L wrote it better than I likely would have, but greed or no, a nation needs to protect its interests. Japan has few raw materials. It’s the last place one would choose to locate a massive auto industry on planet Earth, looking at the globe as a borderless planet. But the Japanese looked at the market post WWII and decided that would be a good industry for their people, for their economy, for their nation.
Too many economists look purely at capital*. Based on that, any labor that can reasonably be done in a 3rd world country should. With 8+ billion people in the world, most of whom are willing to work for far below the wages Americans require, why would one ever employ anyone in the U.S.? There are skilled radiologists in Africa who will read your X Ray for 1/10th of what a U.S. radiologist charges. There are native English speakers in India who can master the law or tax code in your state and will handle your legal or accounting needs for 1/3 the cost of a U.S. attorney or CPA. Why employ an American?
And Germany is correct to get their oil and gas from Mother Russia. It’s cheaper than using their own natural resources.
And the U.S. is smart to get its vaccines from China.
Yet, Economists keep wondering why there are all these run-down neighborhoods in the U.S. with high drug use, suicide rates and crime.
Weird.
*We made a similar mistake during the Covid19 pandemic. Our politicians put epidemiologists in charge. Epidemiologists can tell you how to reduce exposure and death, but that’s only one factor when governing a state, or country.
@David Foster:…strikes me that this could be a securities law violation: the company in question is reporting on its financials a labor cost that will not be sustainable if laws & regulations start being enforced properly.
If laws and regulations aren’t, as you acknowledge, being enforced properly, I don’t see why such companies should be concerned about a potential securities law violation. A bit like harrumphing at a bank robber for jaywalking I should say.
If H1B were being done properly there’d hardly be any H1Bs at all. You know this for a fact. It is supposed to be a non-immigrant visa and for a temporary hire in those rare cases where no American has a very specific skill set. The US graduates thousands of Americans every year with IT degrees and not one of them should be unemployed before a single H1B is granted for an IT worker.
The laying off of American workers to replace them with H1Bs makes it very clear what the nature of the H1B program has become. As it was originally intended, that should have been impossible.
Niketas @10:20am,
Yes. And, there is a compounding effect due to wage deflation. They hire an Indian electrical engineer or coder for less than the prevailing wage in America. Once there are a significant percentage of such workers employed in a field the overall wage for that profession in America decreases. So, a bright young High School Senior with a good mastery of STEM looks at wages of newly minted College grads across professions and sees that he or she can make more in Finance than coding, so gets a degree in Finance. Four years later, when an employer places an add for an Electrical Engineer or programmer there are even fewer U.S. grads to choose from due to the wage deflation for the skill set so even more employers go the H1B route. Rinse, repeat.
On December 6, 1941 the U.S. didn’t have a lot of hirable talent in the field of aircraft production*. Four years later we led the world. Did Americans suddenly get smarter in avionics and aircraft design? Or did huge, internal demand drive a lot of Americans to focus on that profession?
*A wise economist would have advised we ship aircraft from Japan, or Germany as they were ahead of the U.S. at the time.
Niketas, you’re right about how Reps mostly try to be meritocratic, while Dems consistently push for Dems in personnel policy.
In news, and for 70 years in academia, & somewhat in entertainment.
How the tale gets corrupted in the telling.*
* See https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/how-chinese-whispers-reveals-the-true-workings-of-the-human-mind/