I think one of the fundamental problem with h1b is that it is labeled as "non-immigrant" whereas for all practical purposes it is really an immigrant visa. Why would a person who is supposedly having rare skills come to a country and spend their best years here without reasonable guarantee of permanency? People buy homes because it is a reasonable belief that they are going to be living here permanently and it has historically been true.
In any case I don't see the point you are making. Should America be treating immigrants poorly because whichever country you're in makes you slightly uncomfortable to buy a home there? It's not an excuse for all this pain and cruelty. America should hold itself to higher standards.
There is a very common pattern of people who go to work to some other, richer country for a set period of time with the sole purpose of making enough money to achieve an objective back home (provide for family, buy a house, retire, etc). I don't know how common this is between H-1B applicants, but it's extremely common in the EU for example.
in the EU there is no need for any visa (within member states) and essentially it's a desired feature of the EU.
Another point is that speaking the local language in a richer country of the EU is less likely than speaking English (with English being official only in Ireland and Malta), so it's harder to settle - esp. with kids and school.
It used to be common in the US too. My great-grandfather, for instance, planned to go to the US and work for five years to afford a farm back home. He had earned enough in three (and also contracted tuberculosis, and also the elderly couple whose farm he had agreed to buy weren't ready to sell yet, so he invested the money in bank shares, but the bank was fraudulent and went under...)
> Why would a person who is supposedly having rare skills come to a country and spend their best years here without reasonable guarantee of permanency?
I agree with your overall point but the answer here is money. The earning potential in the US vs. e.g. India is drastic.
I think that in general, expecting a 'career for life' with one company, as was common in the 1950s, is a bit naive today. Companies change, needs change, people change, just because you like the job now doesn't mean you will in ten years. To give a tech industry example, right now you could be working for a cool startup, in a few years the startup gets acquired by a large tech company, they change the management style, it's not fun anymore. Like imagine you got hired at Github around 2010, would you definitely still be there today? Or even in 2020?
Also, you have plenty of people who will have career plans like "work in finance in NYC for 5-10 years, amass a fat pile of cash, and retire to a small farm in the middle of nowhere". If I were living in China or India, I might see "spending 5-10 years in the US earning large piles of money and returning to my homeland to retire and live a life of leisure" as a valid career path.
It's not really money. Frankly, no 20 year old thinks that much about money. They do things that they like, whether that is going to school, working at a job, or starting up. And you don't know about the broken immigration system from the outside. The reason this problem is unique to India is due to country caps/DEI which prevents people from India on H-1B from getting a green card.
I disagree that no 20 year old thinks that much about money.
If you're lucky enough to have had rich enough parents to not have to worry about money too much, yes, you'll probably optimize for doing things you enjoy, but people who spend a lot of their younger years with money issues will sometimes obsess about it and really focus their lives around 'getting rich'.
I've noticed have similar phenomena with people who are deprived of certain important needs in their youth - people who are starved of a certain type of parental affection overcompensating by orienting their lives around getting more of it (eg women with daddy issues who are very promiscuous), people who feel disrespected and downtrodden who become obsessed with social status, people who get bullied and get into martial arts...
If you've ever read Gone With The Wind, there's a line where Scarlett O'Hara says "with God as my witness, I'll never go hungry again". I suspect that many people who have similar experiences will react by orienting their lives in a similar manner. "I was deprived of something important, so I will react by over-indexing on that important thing I was deprived of, to avoid the future pain of being again deprived of it".
* If you're lucky enough to have had rich enough parents to not have to worry about money too much, yes, you'll probably optimize for doing things you enjoy, but people who spend a lot of their younger years with money issues will sometimes obsess about it and really focus their lives around 'getting rich'.*
I think you’re in the right ballpark, and I have seen it play out exactly that. However, I think it is even more common for rich kids to obsess about getting richer.
In my experience, as long as their needs are being met, most people get used to whatever lifestyle they are raised in, and stick with it. if they grew up in a family that chases wealth, and equates income with self worth, then they tend to keep doing that.
> Why would a person who is supposedly having rare skills come to a country and spend their best years here without reasonable guarantee of permanency?
For the same reason I temporarily resided elsewhere: An opportunity to expand my horizons, experience another culture, and oh yeah... the money. In fact, through much of history it was common for skilled workers to go abroad and bring skills home, this was how industry got kickstarted in many places and there were even various formal programs for this. This is even the case for skilled labor that doesn't qualify for an H1-B visa. It's commonplace for aspiring chefs to work in kitchens around the world under the tutelage of well-regarded chefs to learn from them and then apply the same techniques and operating models to their own restaurant at home.
You are mentally applying reasoning that assumes permanency to a situation that explicitly says it doesn't include permanency.
> I think one of the fundamental problem with h1b is that it is labeled as "non-immigrant"
I'm curious as a non-American - labelled by who? People who want to talk tough on immigration but benefit from H1Bs in their companies? Or the system itself in some way?
i think people are missing here that it is non immigrant because it’s temporary. but it is dual intent so you can intend to become an immigrant (permanent resident) on this visa. there are other nonimmigrant visas that are not dual intent such as B-1/B-2 or F-1. To get those visas you cannot have intent to immigrate.
It's a non-immigrant visa, because the law uses "immigrant" as a technical term that does not match the common usage. For international comparisons, it makes more sense to say that H-1B is an initial immigrant visa that grants you a temporary residence and work permit. Most countries expect you to immigrate and live several years as a temporary resident before you can apply for permanent residency.
My personal rule of thumb is that any non-citizen who becomes a tax resident due to hitting the six-month rule is an immigrant.
> I think one of the fundamental problem with h1b is that it is labeled as "non-immigrant" whereas for all practical purposes it is really an immigrant visa.
The fundamental problem is people spreading this lie. It has a path to permanent immigration, but it is a non immigrant visa, it is very clearly define and describe as such.
It is idiotic to build a life in a country where you only have a temporary visa. I've lived in 4 countries and I never assumed I would forever be allowed to stay in any of them.
The US do not owe a path to permanent residency to anyone.
Grew up in one for ~25 years, lived in 2 for roughly 1.5 years each, then moved to the fourth for the past ~15 years. Married with 2 children. What's your point?
I never even thought of buying a house or "build a permanent life" in a country before I was given permanent residency with no condition. And even then, I worked as fast as possible to get citizenship. When you are a guest in a country you don't assume they'll keep you around forever.
So you're claim of 4 countries isn't applicable to most people buying homes while on visa. Nobody on visa is buying a house in 1.5 years. People buy homes when they've been here for several years and have a permanent residency application in progress. So that's more like the last country where you've been.
Whole point of this thread is that it isn't unreasonable to have kids and family and a house and social life when you've lived somewhere for 10+ years. So any action on part of the government should at least give the space to get things in order or find alternatives. This is a fair and humane expectation.
Duration has nothing to do with it. One should not buy a house while on a temporary visa, period. You should not feel entitled to stay in a country just because you've been there X years on a temporary visa.
If someone gets permanent residency in a country I see no problem if they want to buy a house after 6 months, more power to them.
The abnormality is this idiotic 10+ years time that people are allowed to stay on a temporary visa. This is what needs to end. This is what makes people entitled - understandably I would even say. People are foolish, but I still blame the game, not the players.
The question isn't about entitlement at all. It's about decency. I agree, better to not allow people to stay too long on temporary status. But it was and is allowed today. So there are people who have been on temporary status for 15, even 20 years. Fully legally. If your policies require them to just leave one fine day without any recourse, it is not decent.
An example might be someone who is renting your house. If you allowed them to live in your house for 10 years, would you ask them to leave without notice or with just the minimum 1 month notice? Yes they are not entitled to anything more than what was in the contract but would you do that? I wouldn't. Most people I know would work with the tenant and give them more time to figure things out. And if all of this was done with that decency, I am fine with it.
"Decency" is subjective so I don't really see the point of debating it. The rules were 1) clear from the beginning when it comes to a status being temporary and 2) always potentially subject to change since countries change their policies all the time. To be honest, that's the only objective thing to look at.
Sad. I still use Dropbox personally and really like their use experience, but I just don't find enough use for it to pay for a service like that. The technology proved to be far too easy to replicate and they failed to build anything that would make users stick around, I guess. Maybe moving to workspace collaboration solution like Google docs was the play?
As much as I hate it, capturing users and building a walled garden seems to be the only way to make it really big.
I am not impressed with that steering of the AI. In the case of Terry Tao, he clearly held a solid understanding of the problem domain and could also understand the outputs of the LLM at an expert level. He asked astute, topical questions that specifically probed areas of the problem that were either unclear or insufficiently specified, and ultimately ended up at a place where (presumably) he both understood the Jacobian Conjecture Counterexample exhaustively, and how it was derived. My impression is that through his learnings during the chat, he became sufficiently well-educated in this subdomain to apply some of these lessons to other mathematical pursuits.
In your counterexample, the human just repeatedly asked the model to "try harder". Not remotely the same.
I know but the point is that it worked too. You could argue one problem is harder than the other, I am not and expert so I wouldn't know. But at least it's clear the second result is also impressive, and didn't require much expertise. So it's wrong to say that you need expertise to get hard and impressive things done with AI.
I agree with the author that engineers need to recalibrate and say yes more often but the zirp connection is a stretch and unnecessary.
Good engineers will say yes and no thoughtfully and will adjust to the new reality anyway. So it feels kind of pointless since no one is really a just say yes or just say no person, though it is well written.
Does anyone have insight into how waymo is actually doing as a business? It seems to be unaffordable in the bay area. 2-3x the cost of Uber/lyft whenever I've checked. It is very cool, but I can't imagine they're doing well at that price point
The waymos are so consistently badly overpriced I've stopped even bothering to look. Nobody I know rides them! But they have riders more than half the time I walk by them, so clearly they're making money off somebody...
Supply is very limited right now. They're not making more of their v5 Jaguar vehicles. They expected to have lots of their v6 Zeekr vehicles at this point, but choosing a Chinese manufacturer just before Biden and Trump clamped down on them didn't work out so well in hindsight. The v6+ Hyundai models should start showing up in volume soon though.
It's marketing plus perception of how expensive it is. Most of diamond purchases are for engagement rings. Nobody wants to appear cheap. The expense and rarity is the point.
> Most of diamond purchases are for engagement rings. Nobody wants to appear cheap. The expense and rarity is the point.
I relate to this. I wasn’t born rich and grew up poor. My parents started a business when I was in my teens, so I worked two jobs, and technically still do because I help them out. My parents instilled a work ethic in me that’s helped me get to where I am in life.
When it came time for me to buy an engagement ring, I went into the process knowing I wanted a natural diamond. My best friend said he could tell the difference between “real” and “fake” and that I shouldn’t be cheap. I didn’t want to be “cheap,” either. I was ready to spend $30,000+ on a diamond.
Instead, I bought a lab grown diamond. I spent $1,600 on a 1.72ct. My buddy thinks it’s real and nobody has even asked whether it’s lab grown or natural. I realized I was spending too much time asking, “why should I get a natural diamond?” The reasons never justified the cost. Spending 18x to 20x more on something that looks exactly the same and serves the same purpose just wasn’t logical to me.
That can be the right call (and is the one I would make) but for situations like this, it may be as much about how you think about something yourself rather than how others view it. If spending more makes it mean something different to you, then that can be a primary function. That being said, blood diamonds are a huge problem, DeBeers is a cartel, and we’d be better off investing our money in other ways that serve a relationship, family, etc.
Yes I agree. My point was more generally that the discussion around whether other people can tell ignores how one feels themself. I don’t often hear that point made, that you can’t lie to yourself IF it’s important to you that it’s natural or whatever. It’s way easier to actually not care or prefer lab grown and then move forward feeling great.
>>>Spending 18x to 20x more on something that looks exactly the same and serves the same purpose just wasn’t logical to me.
That's up there with people who brag about only smoking when they drink and vegetarians for moral reasons who eat fish.
You framed a feelings based, adherence to tradition, no basis of actual functionality as a rational, logical decision, just because there was a worse decision to be made.
Google isn't doing this out of kindness. Sure charging for mail would give some bad press but Google can handle it in many different ways and they have in the past. They provide the service because it's valuable to the business. They know that the void will be filled by another service. And that's bad for Google.
In any case I don't see the point you are making. Should America be treating immigrants poorly because whichever country you're in makes you slightly uncomfortable to buy a home there? It's not an excuse for all this pain and cruelty. America should hold itself to higher standards.