Being Lazy has the advantages of laziness which is that if you do not clean your room, you became a hoarder and your room overflows.

The point I am making is that either of these tools are not holy grail. I do not think a solution for all is going to exist, just use them when it best suits the application - I think ( Like its just my dumb opinion )

also @spion I think we are going to take this argument to our death beds :D

Group 1: One economy consists of the some of the largest most richest multinational entities the world has ever seen.

Group 2: The other consists of small business like every other country.

Every company in Group 1 was once in Group 2, they move from Group 2 to Group 1 once they have achieved some benefit from "regulatory capture" to entrench themselves.

Economic prosperity and innovation comes from Group 2 increasing in size. Group 2 normally plays by the rules of market ( they are part of the economical food chain )

Group 1 is OUT of the food chain.

Why did I bring this up ?

Because this is critical in understanding the role of immigrants and capital.

If a set price bar is created for H-1B then group 2 business will be unable to compete on price, most group 2 business operate using thin margins. Size of Group 2 will increase in foreign countries, as Group 2 business are easier to start outside.

Group 1 on the other hand are responsible for the abuse of the H-1B in the first place ! but setting a lower bar will completely not effect them. In fact now their entrenched position is more entrenched ! since small business will be unable to hire foreign workers that they need. Group 1 market share increases allowing them to better control price.

All the extra money that group 1 receives, they are not stupid to start business in low growth high cost developed economy. Due to their global reach, all that money gets invested in building offices outside - their main enemy is govt. - it is in their best interest to figure out how to play one govt against another.

Group 2 on the other hand, any cost saving that they get through cheaper labour, normally gets reinvested in the local economy. They are normally not the ones who are interested or have the managerial skills to co-ordinate business at an international level.

Anything that congress does, that does not take into account this dynamic between group 1 and 2 is doomed to fail.

Just like people working at helpdesk say they are working in "IT".

Higher finance is filled with crazy maths, if you are interested in statistics and probability then finance is the best way to make a lot of money.

Its also not "gambling,etc" - its educated decision making. People in higher management need to make a lot of very important decisions all the time. 90% of the time they just use their "gut feeling". This is where people with strong technical knowledge in finance comes in.

Where to allocate money is a very hard question to answer, you can throw a random dart at your options or bring in complex ML models. The sky is the limit.

In fact unless a court decision is made I think it technically unfair to the company and their employee the way the mob has brought out their pichfork.

We have only heard the story from one person - and it makes the company and its CEO look like Satan's spawns - which in my experience never is 100% true.

Having said that, I am always a little unnerved browsing LinkedIn - you have CEOs, CFOs, Management always complaining about their employees, and employees doing cringy asskissing :( It makes me deeply sad what LinkedIn has turned into, LinkedIn just gives employers more power.

On the other hand I have noticed that HN, reddit are places where Labour ( employees ) come to complain.

Its just an interesting trend where two social networks exists - one for the capitalists and one for labor.

I use both LinkedIn and HN quite a lot and don't really see what you mean about the capital/ labor split between the sites, for what it's worth.

Also, I find your characterization of HN as a labor forum as opposed to capitalist rather curious, since its origin lies with one of the purest forms of capitalism possible, startups.

Ultimately, social responsibility plays a big role in outcomes. Companies that intend to blow up everything in their path, lie, cheat and steal their way into cashflow, and then have some key people escape before it all falls apart, are just destructive - they aren't even creatively destructive. Those companies are why startups have a common outsider's view of being shady ventures.

But in terms of the systemic effect on power between capital and labour, I'd said people being entrepreneurial shifts power (in the political sense) towards labour, partly through increasing the independence of labour in aggregate, and partly through enabling labour to capture significantly more of the rewards of their work [1].

[1] For example, compare the typical amount of equity held by "last and least important founder" vs "first employee" to see that being a founder radically shifts power your way.

It's not just one person. We have now had the story largely confirmed by WrkRiot's CTO (maybe I should say "former CTO", or maybe the entire company is effectively "former") and one of its former advisors.

Or "investigative journalism", as it used to be known. This is what the press is for. If they're wrong, I don't doubt it will end in litigation.

I found Penny's story very believable and felt really bad for many of the individuals involved (the H1-B workers most of all). There was probably a lot of professional pressure on Penny not to be seen as a troublemaker and not to name the company's name. There is a definite information asymmetry between management and workers and I feel like wrkriot was using that to exploit their employee's trust.

It seems fair to out them for that so they can't just change their name and do it again (which was clearly a pattern). Had they not been mostly a fraud, they might have been able to provide a reasonable defense against the story. Had the fraud continued, in order to protect innocent employees, it most likely would have just hurt more people.

It's definitely not black and white but I don't think we harassed them out of business either. It was definitely all about to fall apart regardless.

The difference lies in how to grow your business. LinkedIn and Glassdoor cannot ask employees to pay them for being fair but can ask employers to pay them for deleting/managing the image of the company.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Anyone who think this isn't doxxing go have a look at Twitter, Reddit and even some of HN on how some employees who had nothing to do with the fraud have been treated.

On what was basically a junior employee not being compatible with their boss.

Which adults know is definitely two sided when one person tells the story (and normal).

The salary in my own country for a mid level software engineer is 600 dollars a month !

Think about that for a moment . . . .

Now imagine if you are a company, you can hire a developer with 10-20 years of experience at the cost below your junior developer.

Why won't you do it ?

The other part of the equation is the fact that if you do not do it you are a strong competitive disadvantage compared to companies.

Now many people on HN might want to crack down on this Donald Trump Style.

But actually cracking down on it will make matters worse.

Software, IP is really global these days.

So as soon as wages are pushed up in america, the flow of FDI ( which is growing at 5x every year in India ! ) will shoot even higher.

Someone made this argument that I find the best explanation for what is going on.

Countries like India have more untapped computational power compared to the US, just due to having 4x the population and not even 1:1 the wealth.

There is nothing immoral about what is going on.

Its capitalism working as intended - I also do not think americans are losers in this game, it just means they will not see any investment or improve in their standard of living while private money is busy improving the lives of everyone else.

Standard of living in the US is growing - but very slowly.

While standard of living is increasing rapidly in developing countries.

You can see the same issue in China, where standard of living has actually grown rapidly.

I am not arguing to make American standard of living regress at the expense of improving the standard of living for other developing nations.

Standard of Living would have risen regardless of FDI money moving into India and China - the only difference is that western capital is allowed to make money off that development.

The issue is that the amount of money that is required to bring any massive improvement in living standard in western countries is really large. Things like self driving cars are much harder to create - then just copying current technology and distributing it.

This is why it should have been upto western govt to channel a lot of public money and tax multinationals aggressively so that western countries can have accelerated rate of growth.

The worst part about the thing is how dehumanizing it feels.

"Here you have paid taxes for years ! please leave now, we just valued you for your economical output"

It made me a stronger individual as a result, I know I am not owned anything. But you still develop an emotional link to your environment after being there for a while.

> Ms. Metzger is a member of an activist group demanding the existence of cash be guaranteed in Germany’s constitution.

Its not technically impossible to create a electronic version of anon cash.

In fact its always possible to create tracked versions of fake cash. Its what the FBI uses for catching drug dealers. With crpyto-currencies that would be impossible.

Also cash has your DNA on it.

Hopefully you are also not broke.

The biggest indicator I have seen when it comes to H1B1 is if the company is run by recent foreign immigrants.

I have seen 5 man team able to get hold of H1B1 - since they were that dedicated.

The process is not actually that hard if there is a will from the top for it.

China has made it a national priority to provide better standard of living to their people then the West.

..With rising salaries, labor unrest, environmental devastation and intellectual property theft, China is no longer an attractive place..

How are these things bad ? China has their own class of capitalists now - they no longer need wall street to finance their projects.

China may have bumpy roadblocks - but at the scale they operate - financially, manpower and political will. It sort of doesn't matter. Its like a elephant worrying about what an ant thinks.

Any issue that china faces - they seem to figure out how to overcome it. In the EU we cannot even figure out how to get our currency right - even though modern finance started here. China made all the right decisions when it comes to Keynesian economics.

And sure they have a lot of debt - but the losers are the banks who are lending them money. Who is going to knock on China's door to ask for their money back ?

China can afford to waste 1 million of their own engineers to just beat Airbus. That is the scale at which they operate. Just like how Stalin was able to screw up so many times.

I have meet a lot of Chinese students - and if they were good at English and didn't grew up with the great firewall. Silicon Valley wouldn't prolly exist. Software is the only industry where I have seen American and Indian be better than the Chinese - but its a very anecdotal observation.

You do not have to do a lot of analysis - just listen to a few episodes of Dan Carlin's hardcore history.

For most of history China dominated economically and technologically. Just because Europeans had better war technology ( due to the fact that europeans were do divided ) were we able to dominate for a few hundred years.

We are going back to what normal looks like.

Edit:

I am not some chinese shill, my personal opinion is china should be punished for crushing other countries through unfair trade practices.

The free market doesn't work if there are companies that have the backing of a state with 1.3 billion people !

China would probably dominate even without the massive financial backing of their state banks. But the aggressive nature of their expansion is worrying.

American's are still protected - you should ask the peripheral countries about the effect of the rise of China to their economies ( Vietnam, etc ) why do you think Obama is trying to push the TPP ?

China also worries me because they are showing that democracy doesn't matter, when it comes to wealth creation.

this is patently false. the official Chinese government line is that the current western standard of living is not scalable. their reasons include that it is ecologically unsustainable to generate the kind of consumption and waste that the west does. this is not due to their strong sense of ecological stewardship but because they know it will be difficult for them to reach the US' GDP per capita, and they are trying to manage the expectations of their citizens.

In Europe and US - if living standard decrease from one generation to the next - the worst thing that can happen is we vote in Donald Trump for 4 years.

In china the situation is much more scary as there are no system in place to channel that anger and frustration in a controlled way. The only direction to move is up.

the CCP of-course realizes that they need to invest heavily in renewable, and that is exactly what they are doing. The expectation will be there - and their govt is dedicated to meeting them - with renewable energy is preferable.

Apart from running a democratic and open society.

Chinese government has a pretty tight grip on the nation's information sources, and has a very significant political and military power. Democracy has no chance to be exported there, as it was exported e.g. to Iraq and Afghanistan (rather unsuccessfully).

Chinese government makes a lot of efforts to keep the political system of China under control, without Western-style democracy (and probably any other). It also makes a lot of efforts to keep China producing and selling a lot of stuff, and becoming better and better at it. It's rather successful on both accounts.

There are a few examples of countries becoming wild economic successes under quite undemocratic regimes: South Korea and Singapore spring to mind. But both are not Communist (or former Communist, since the Chinese seem to have abolished much of their previous communism). Maybe this is why the didn't look so suspicious to the Western public.

I somehow feel like they are overly optimistic but could not find any proof to refute their point (talking about the current US election clearly did not help...). They are mostly upper middle class who worth more than me. So I guess they may be biased? However the taxi drivers seem to have the same view.

An anecdote: none of them want to immigrate (at least to US) and their only major concern seems to be the air quality. Since they can buy everything else from overseas anyway.

I think your sample is skewed. Chinese people from all social classes are immigrating to the US at record rates. The US gets about 25% of all Chinese emigrants each year, a number that's been growing not decreasing. China recently overtook Mexico as the top source for new immigrants in the US.

Look at the number of Chinese students, the number of H-1Bs, and the number of Chinese green card applications for evidence of middle class highly educated immigration.

For less educated immigration, visit any Chinese restaurant in any backwater town in the country. You'll find that the front of house is staffed by an endless supply of new immigrants.

It is possible that Chinese immigrants are on the rise, but it is not like a Chinese person can easily immigrate to US, legally or not. Comparing the number of Chinese and Mexican is a bit silly, because of the "undocumented".

The number of Chinese students is meaningless as not every student wants or can stay. The number of H-1b may mean something but my feeling is that Chinese are getting less in recent years. Do you have actual data? The green card applications is more direct evidence, but some real data showing the trend would be useful.

Anyway, I think if there is no pacific in the middle and there is no wall at the border. At least 100 million Chinese people would love to move to US...

Countries compete in many ways and form of government is just one and might not even be the deciding factor.

This might become a problem for China in the long term but I don't think it's certain.

Democracy makes sense because governments make mistakes and those need to be dealt with. Democracy is able to deal with that very nicely.

At the moment the Chinese government does a very good job and have the benefit of pretty much everyone else in the world who matters being highly interested in seeing China succeed. As longs that doesn't change - and I find it very hard to imagine a scenario where it does - China won't become democratic.

Western world believes in democracy (at least some people do), but it's not generally accepted truth. I think that democracy is stupid, though I don't have anything better to offer.

Democracy also self-contains the tools to undo itself, as long as someone can convince the majority that it's not only a good idea, but prudent to do so. That is why the transition from democracy to fascism and outright dictatorship can happen quickly.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streitbare_Demokratie

It was Winston Churchill who said that democracy is the worst system of government, apart from every other system that has ever been tried.

Not to mention that it can devolve into something that's more of a democracy in name only.

Take the upcoming US elections where the choices are, on one hand, a blowhard who wants to build a massive wall to keep out Mexican immigrants, and on the other a corrupt-to-the-core corporate puppet.

This isn't much of a real democracy when parties become so big that more competent people have no chance of running for office without the support of said parties.

First they gotta deal with the gender imbalance problem - literally 10s of millions of young men for whom there is no possibility of finding a partner, because the one child policy led to many female babies being discarded. Take a bunch of angry young men who see no future for themselves and you get what's happening now in Afghanistan...

easy, that's a propaganda problem. tell them the enemy stole our women or something like that :P