The Government is (pretending to) do something about this - we've had a huge increase in "apprenticeships", but a lot of those are just shops counting their shelf-stackers as apprentices because it means they don't have to pay the minimum wage.
While somewhat unrelated considering that for new grads google forces them to submit a transcript. I woudln't be surprised if they cared about degrees over experience.
Except when you are using a library like boost or pandas you know the people behind it know what they are doing. When you are importing from a thousand different package authors any one of those people could be incompetent and/or malicious and screw up your entire code base.
I don't know why you wouldn't think he was serious. I think you are ignoring that the vast majority of people that use pot smoke it. In that sense, it's probably worse because most people that smoke weed tend to hold the smoke in their lungs for protracted periods of time which increases the amount of tar that gets in their lungs.
I know this is completely anecdotal, but I think casual pot smokers do about two or three bong hits a night versus sneaking out for an entire cigarette twenty times a day.
The heaviest pot smokers I know (and I know a lot, though I don't generally use, myself), will consume it as much as four or five times a day. As you note, one "usage" looks like a few hits off of a pipe, bong, or vape. It seems to be self-limiting, even in people with a history of addiction.
I'm not gonna suggest pot doesn't have negative consequences; the heaviest users I know also have motivation problems (but so do I, sometimes, and I don't do any drugs) which maybe contributes to them often having shitty jobs and a difficult hand-to-mouth existence. (But, that is correlation and not causation. Maybe the economy is shit, and young folks today have a hard time finding good work. Maybe smoking pot just makes it bearable.)
What's interesting to me is what happens when a pot smoker can't get pot. Among my friends, cigarette smoking goes way up, drinking goes up measurably, and use of other drugs goes up. I'd be willing to believe pot is a good tool for helping people quit more dangerous habits. People who need something help them get through stress/anxiety/pain (emotional or physical) will find something.
My classmates, which are started to smoke marijuana in school, now are dead (I am 40 years old). They die not because of tar or something like that, but because they switched to heavy drugs.
It is fact from my life. 4 my classmates started to smoke in school, when they were 14 years old. Then somebody told them how to make cheap drug from papaver, which is called «shirka» there. Now they are dead.
An argument I would attempt to counter - the market is the gateway. The dealer you buy your illegal cannabis from often also sells 'harder' drugs, such as cocaine and heroin.
While both are horrendous, I think we can say that having intimate photos of you taken without your knowledge being spread is worth than having photos you took being spread. The reason being that in the first case your rights to privacy were actually violated twice.
Thanks for the interesting discussion. Anyway after further thought I came to agree with you because the person in the second situation also had their privacy violated twice when they had the video/images stolen from their device and when it was spread without their consent.
But I think it's pretty self-evident that doing multiple wrong things to do one final wrong thing is worse than just doing the final wrong thing.
This is not true. Unchecked immigration is always a negative for native workers. It can be accurately described as wealth redistribution from workers to the companies that employee them.
They cause $515 billion in losses for native workers and $565 billion gains for native businesses. Look at the chart on page 9
This is misrepresenting the data. The majority of economists and the relevant literature agree that allowing more freedom of immigration improves the welfare of American worker. This is ignoring the huge benefits to the immigrants themselves. To appeal to what I imagine HN's ideology is, the arguments are similar to those around making the market more free--when you prevent buyers and sellers from making transactions they otherwise would, you inhibit growth.
Only 9% of economists disagree with the statement: "The average US citizen would be better off if a larger number of low-skilled foreign workers were legally allowed to enter the US each year."
0% of economists disagree with the statement: "The average US citizen would be better off if a larger number of highly educated foreign workers were legally allowed to immigrate to the US each year."
EDIT, since we're at the reply limit: Borjas is kind of heterodox, and without the chance now to do a better review of his literature I'm inclined to sided with the fairly overwhelming consensus. Picking two graphs that look similar isn't really a convincing argument, and 'redistribution' implies that this is a zero-sum change.
My position generally is that H-1B's (and whatever *-1B you suggest) would generally be good for the economy, though suffer from implementation issues and unnecessary restrictions.
You tell me the data is misrepresented, please tell me how? The data in the charts are accurate and this is from an esteemed economist.
Actually read the article I linked and he discusses how the standard economics literature has completely misrepresented the impact of immigration on native workers.
>Finally, Peri and Yasenov look at workers aged 16-61, and this is a particularly
weird data manipulation. Among adult workers, a high school dropout is someone who
lacks a high school diploma. But that definition, when applied to teenagers, means that 16,
17, and 18-year-olds who are sophomores, juniors, or seniors in high school are classified
as high school dropouts because they do not yet have that diploma. Let me emphasize: All
teenagers, whose earnings consist mainly of what they get in part-time and summer jobs,
are part of the low-skill group. There are so many high school students who are being
lumped with the real high school dropouts that they fatally contaminate the analysis.
Also when people talk about the wealth inequality in the US and how wages have been stagnant for 30 years
Notice that in 1979 wealth inequality skyrockets, which is logically consistent with the idea that immigration is wealth redistribution from displaced workers to their employers.
edit: look at the graph and compare the gap in wealth inequality. In 1995 when immigration is slown down wealth inequality stays constant. When immigration is ramped up, inequality grows like crazy.
edit: for whatever it's worth I made the connection between wealth inequality and immigration. so try not to use that to say my source is bad
Very few serious economists pin growing wealth inequality on immigration and only immigration. It's not just happening in the US but elsewhere as well. There are a variety of factors in play, and I think a lot of good economists will even admit that we do not know all the answers. Here are some of the other major ones:
* Technology, which will happen with or without immigration.
* Globalization, which will happen with or without immigration. Make it hard for people to immigrate, and companies will eventually open branches elsewhere.
The only self-interest you seem to be pursuing is the self-interest of business owners. Targeted immigration at a specific field is wealth redistribution from people that compete with immigrants to people that do not (ie, the person that hires you).
So when you talk about that I should be selfless for the workers around the world that want my job, I pretty much know what side of the table you stand on. You are either A. A foreign worker B. an employer or C. have some broader social agenda
So stop criticizing workers for wanting to protect their self interest because everyone has their own agenda they want to forward
First, do not accuse HN commenters of shilling for their own economic agenda. There are 18 zillion different forms of message board incivility, and accusations of bad faith commenting are one of the minuscule few than the site bans overtly.
Second, if you oppose immigration on the grounds that it increases supply, lowers prices, and thus reduces wages for tech workers, do you oppose everything else that does that? Should we educate fewer tech workers? Should we do fewer things to spot underutilized tech talent? Should we have fewer remote-friendly offices, so that we can constrict the market down to only those people who are willing to live in tech hubs? Where do you draw the line?
>First, do not accuse HN commenters of shilling for their own economic agenda. There are 18 zillion different forms of message board incivility, and accusations of bad faith commenting are one of the minuscule few than the site bans overtly.
Did you read the parent comment? It generalized that every engineer that opposes immigration is doing it because they are selfish and are only interested in money.
Also you call it that I am claiming they are shilling when I was in reality pointing out that everyone has bias and you should understand your own before criticizing others.
>Second, if you oppose immigration on the grounds that it increases supply, lowers prices, and thus reduces wages for tech workers, do you oppose everything else that does that? Should we educate fewer tech workers? Should we do fewer things to spot underutilized tech talent? Should we have fewer remote-friendly offices, so that we can constrict the market down to only those people who are willing to live in tech hubs? Where do you draw the line?
The line will clearly be arbitrary. We as a country need to decide how much certain jobs are worth and design our immigration policy around it. Unchecked immigration of unskilled labor is killing the lower and middle class and driving wages into the ground. If Americans can't find jobs it's time to ease up on immigration. Likewise if companies like Disney are laying off entire divisions to hire cheaper foreign workers then maybe H-1B visas should be reduced.
I personally think the USG should always prioritize the welfare of Americans (including recent immigrants) over foreign workers.
That's fair, but you can't respond to someone's offensive overgeneralization with a direct accusation that they are hypocritically talking their own book. Don't respond to bad comments with even more badness.
As for the rest of it:
The reality is that the market's pressure to increase supply in response to extreme demand will swamp any protectionist policies we come up with. There may be no job in the world more portable than software development. We can import labor to fill the gap and enjoy the tax revenue, or we can watch more and more of world's development work be performed overseas.
I don't love our immigration policy today (this is one of the very few places where I'm a libertarian; I think we should just auction visas off), but I don't think excluding immigrants is going to help us in the long term.
That's a false dichotomy if I ever saw one, and I dislike using that phrase.
The other option is if there is in fact a skills shortage, we encourage our businesses to train people already in the country first. Our education system is excellent contrary to popular belief and we have plenty of unemployed and underemployed people that have demonstrated their ability to learn new skills so why not go to them first?
Instead the path right now is some very unknown foreign college -> non competitive masters program (USC, UTDallas, UFla are common) for an F1 visa -> employee hires on OPT for 3 years of "training" -> apply for H-1B for the ones that show any promise.
So we are optimizing a system that takes students from education systems that consistently rank at the bottom globally, put them in mediocre masters programs for 2 years, train them for 3 years and we finally have something usable? Please.
So here is what I don't understand about the supply demand argument in the context of workers. When Disney hired their IT division it was clearly because their was a need and benefit from having them. If paying the wages of that division was prohibitively expensive wouldn't they have gone out of business before they had the opportunity to outsource? So clearly on that front I think we can assume that a company similar to disney would outsource simply for profit.
Now another argument in favor of immigration is that it brings down the costs of good for everybody. Chicken will be cheaper of course when you have people working for 5 dollars an hour to produce it. Well the reality is that only 5 to 6% of the cost of producing chicken comes from wages. I'm sure if we looked at the software industry we would have the same finding.
Now what is the cost of targeting a specific field for immigration? For native workers the loss in wages is half a trillion dollars. The immigrants create a 50 billion dollar surplus. Almost all of the increase in GDP from immigrants comes from their wages at 2,053.8 billion out of the 2,104.0 billion total increase in GDP from immigrants.
So American citizens see a 50 billion dollar net increase in GDP (that is relevant to them) from increased immigration. (page 9 in the link below)
So we are taking half a trillion dollars from targeted workers for a 50 billion dollar increase to the overall population.
The 50 billion dollar surplus seems like a lot thinking as a normal person but 50 billion is nothing when talking about GDP. So from what I see, the only purpose targeted immigration at a specific field serves is to divert money from workers to employers
In the same chart on page 9 it shows that the surplus is received by the native businesses that benefit from the cheaper workers.
also consider this, do we want to create an america where we have a clear divide between workers and owners because we constantly artificially inflate the supply of workers using immigration?
also I think it's a little hypocritical that we aren't bringing in other white collar workers, we should have A-1B for attorneys and B-1Bs for bankers, I'm sure people in other countries will clamor to learn american law and finance for a chance to come here
My bias is my personal relationship with engineers abroad who are paid fractions of what we are. I am completely aware of my own bias and do not consider my position to be the "universally correct" position. I don't think such a thing exists.
Having a bias is the same thing as having an opinion. We are each free to have our own opinions and preferences. Disagreeing is part of this, and even if we disagree about our own preferences, I hope that we can empathize with where the other party is coming from and what the basis of their opinion is. To have an opinion is not to be a hypocrite, to borrow your words.
What I do find to be self-contradictory, is when many Bay Area tech workers support protectionism for their own interests (immigration) but oppose protectionism that oppose their own interests (housing development). There is a glaring lack of empathy for why someone could reasonably and justifiably hold an anti development position (anyone who opposes development is automatically a NIMBY, just as you pointed out that I have generalized all tech workers who oppose immigration to be doing so out of their personal self interest -- which is a gross simplification that I apologize for making). Similarly, when they demand empathy for their housing plight, they do not share the same empathy for their fellow engineers who similarly want to have access to greener pastures. But despite the lack of consistency, I can understand why they would take each of their positions.
>My bias is my personal relationship with engineers abroad who are paid fractions of what we are. I am completely aware of my own bias and do not consider my position to be the "universally correct" position. I don't think such a thing exists.
My suggestion may go against your preference since it wont always help your engineer friends but I think dynamic targeted immigration at jobs that are suffering from worker shortage is the solution. What we have now is a disaster though, a long lasting law targeting fields that may not even need the increased supply in workers anymore.
I personally have nothing against immigrants, the people I have met are in general amazing. But I have my own interests to take care of before I can consider others.
Also H-1Bs target IT in general but is the sort of IT that disney laid off really facing a labor shortage?
>What I do find to be self-contradictory, is when many Bay Area tech workers support protectionism for their own interests (immigration) but oppose protectionism that oppose their own interests (housing development).
I'm not from the bay area so I don't know the fine details of the housing market but are you talking about engineers supporting building more apartments? Also if they are acting in a hypocritical way you would be right to call them out on it.
