No. The tech industry luv-luv-luuuuves H1-B visa immigrants. A lot of foreign countries churn out plenty of educated workers with just as good a grasp of programming or IT as American schools. Or in many cases better. Outsourcing has always been a really popular way to tap into that cheap talent pool, but that has a ton of drawbacks. Teams on different continents can be hard to manage. Getting the tech workers to come the U.S. and work cheaper than U.S. native techies is a huge win. It’s a best-of-both worlds scenario.
Yeah, but bigger worker pool = lower wages. With wage fixing on top of that, we can see what Zuckerberg and others like him stand to gain from making immigration easier. It was what motivated his stand on immigration from the beginning:
We need a new approach, including:
●Comprehensive immigration reform that begins with effective border security, allows a path to citizenship and lets us attract the most talented and hardest-working people, no matter where they were born.
●Higher standards and accountability in schools, support for good teachers and a much greater focus on learning about science, technology, engineering and math.
●Investment in breakthrough discoveries in scientific research and assurance that the benefits of the inventions belong to the public and not just to the few.
He never cared about uneducated Mexicans, or the poor shlubs whose pathway to citizenship involves a stint as a grunt in khakis (whom he now purports to defend because nobody would object to a strong America). He’s strictly in the import-a-tech-elite business.
Edit: In a response, Congressman King called out Zuckerberg’s bluff, while playing to his base about law breakers.
“I am under attack by billionaire Mark Zuckerberg because I am one of the few who will stand up and tell the truth about amnesty,” said King. “He wants amnesty because it would benefit his multi-billion dollar corporation, but I’m fighting to preserve the Rule of Law. Why would we reward people for breaking our laws? Rewarding law breakers produces more law breakers. Our Nation’s military is full of dedicated men and women and to disrespect them by rewarding illegal aliens with citizenship is an insult. I ask that everyone who agrees that illegal immigrants should not be rewarded for having broken the law stand with me.”
And I guess that in Flyover Country, the fact that Zuckerberg is actively campaigning against you can only be a net benefit to your campaign.
Tortilla - Only cheaper if the VISA limits their ability to, say, change company…
There’s a variety of methods companies use, all of them questionable, to make it hard for employees to just change jobs once a company has sponsored them through the visa process.
Plus foreign workers on a temporary visa will always accept a lower wage. There’s plenty in the worker pool who want that stepping stone to longer-term/permanent U.S. residency.
Protip: every thread is “the thread about” whatever its topic is. You can just title it what you want it to be about. I’m reminded of the Far Side collection that had an index, where all letters were blank except for T, which contained every cartoon in the book indexed as “the one about”.
Oh yes, artificial VISA shortage as a way of driving down wages too, I forgot that one.
(New UK non-EU skilled workers salaries have dropped something like 20% since Cameron introduced number caps…excepting banking, naturally)
Why am I not surprised that Vet finds common cause with a racist and misogynist?
Why am I not surprised that you should once again distort my views?
I’m sure an immigrant to the US must feel real proud to be let in mainly because Zuckie needs cheap labour for his cubicle farm ville.
I don’t see him as distorting your views at all.
And are you for lower wages still, or a 100% block on people crossing borders to work?
We’ve been over this one before. You loudly protest being labeled as a racist despite deeply opposed to immigration or any foreign cultures attempting to influence your own. While I’m sure you’ve jumped through some amusingly elaborate mental hoops to satisfy yourself that your motives are pure and not at all racial, you’ll need to accept that everyone else is going to call you a racist. Because that’s the kind of shit racists get upset about. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck . . .
Well, it’s accurate that my criticism of technology has a great deal to do with the homogenization of culture it leads to. I also don’t like corporate-driven social-policy making with his immigration lobby group “Fwd.us”, which is what Zuckerberg is doing and also at the heart of what is to be despised about Silicon Valley.
Also, when Starlight writes:
"Do you know where games companies are going, Vetanarias? That’s right, Canada. Why? Because they can tap the global talent pool.
Well, I also have a problem with video gaming, not only because of its business model (at least among large studios that are only here because the government is bending over backwards to get them here while doing absolutely nothing about working conditions), but also in how it has given us gamification, which is another dangerous trend which comes within the scope of this thread.
I looked for a piece of writing that exudes techno-utopianism, and I found this, from a place called Bitcoin Magazine: “Everyone Should Fetishize Innovation” (the title alone sounds like satire, but it’s serious), which is in part a response to the techno-skeptic Evgeny Morozov (he’s not perfect, but nobody else is doing what he does, which is a very necessary thing indeed). We already have a thread for Bitcoin, so I won’t discuss that here, but there is in this article the very problem with techno-utopianism: it’s perenially confused about what kind of libertarianism it wants to be (the left-libertarians desire it as much as the right-libertarians - where the author of this article belongs - do), it thinks it’s omniscient and omnipotent (and wants to be), it despises government regulation but is equally paternalistic, it enables woes which it then blames others for, and operates on a level where belief in technological progress is akin to a new religion. From the article:
Morozov is concerned that the left’s infatuation with innovation mars its ability to regulate tech well. Unfortunately, “well” here is undefined. Morozov dislikes the assumption that innovation—and, by extension, economic growth—should be the default yardstick by which we measure the success of technology policy. He wants a “robust technology policy” which is “independent of Silicon Valley and serves social goods greater than flying cars and longevity pills.” Social goods like what?
He gives a clue when discussing email, which he posits might better be provided through taxes and fees than advertising, for the purpose of (and I am not making this up), privacy. The drawbacks of allowing government to do to email what it did to snail mail are pretty clear. “Such solutions might be bad for innovation.” Well, yes. “But the privacy they afford to citizens might be good for democratic life.”
At this moment, the federal government is warrantlessly mining our private emails and providing the data to agencies such as the DEA which are using the illegally obtained evidence to arrest people but not revealing where the evidence came from so it can’t be challenged in court, all while lying to us and Congress about it. But yes, definitely an email service provided by the federal government would be more private.
This is a games forum. You might want to notice that. Gamification is also very very little to do with most games companies.
Moreover, no, it’s not “necessary” to post screeds about how tech is bad on the internet. Then you conflate every forward-thinking view with libertarianism, and insist they must have your absolute views.
No surprise that your beloved Morozov wants to limit communication for the poor, and enshrine a single monopoly provider to provide his beloved state guaranteed snooping. No need for the agencies to even ask in his model, right. MORE PRIVATE. (Remembering, again, he wants to charge people for this…and that every other internet provider in the world would be blocked in America)
Is there anything other than cultural stagnation that you don’t have a problem with?
I don’t object to video games per se, but to video games as propaganda, or video games as teaching tools, or video games as the new opium of the masses. I just want people to be more cautious about the video games they play, and about what those video games are trying to say.
As for Morozov, that’s why I said he wasn’t perfect, but I think the charge that he wants the state snooping around is a bit far-fetched, if you remember that he precisely turned against technology for pretending to be liberating people while it was actually allowing dictators (like in his native Belarus) to better monitor their population. This being said, at least the state - or at least a properly regulated one, where the NSA doesn’t go around doing what it wants because who’s going to stop it? - has a legitimate claim to monitoring some people’s online activities. The private sector has none.
Ah. So game-assisted learning, which has great potential. Why, people might learn to think for themselves. Or they might enjoy themselves rather than be doing longer shifts, etc.
And Morozov’s from Belarus, and wants more state control and power?
…
Yea, 100% he’s for making it easier for the government to control communications.
And of course you have to deny basics like spam blocking, etc.
There is no sin in wanting to preserve your culture and your way of life.
The rural county I grew up in was paved over and developed. The farmland giving way to McMansions and stripmalls - each much like the one next to it. I would hardly call that progress. They have little charm, and less character. What I find sadder still was the destruction of the rural communities in the county - the residents could no longer afford to live there and with their departure went a way of life. Little places like swampoodle, a place that exists on no map, were destroyed. With it went the black families who had lived there since 1865.
I realize we’re all rushing pell mell into a future where all of our coffee comes from Starbucks, and where everyone eats at the Hard Rock Cafe. I for one would prefer to live in world with a little more vitality.
We all want to live like Thoreau at times…but we also want to blog about it. What to do, what to do.
Much of which is both idealised and heavily dependent by subsidies.
And no, the future is where the poor are eating very little and the rich eat at the hard Rock Cafe.
There absolutely is if the method of preservation you promote requires everyone who doesn’t fit your criteria staying away from the territory you claim.
The South was just trying to preserve its culture and way of life. Only, that culture involved owning other human beings.
The present-day villages of Pakistan feel pretty strongly about preserving their culture and way of life. To the point where they are pretty draconian about punishing anyone who has a relationship outside the village without the permission of the council. Sometimes those punishments involve gang rape.
So, yeah, there’s often plenty of sin in wanting to preserve that.