I am someone who went through (fully legal) immigration hell while building a company that in the end, employed 100s of US workers and had global competition (meaning, if we didn't do it in the US the jobs would probably go to some other country).
Here's my conclusion from this experience: if you are in a business that depends on Intellectual Property competes globally (i.e. not a nail salon hiring local workers), then in the area that gives you your competitve advantage YOU NEED TO HIRE THE BEST GLOBAL TALENT. Period.
If the immigration system doesn't allow that, then either you'll hire remote, or you'll be beaten by an international competitor with more liberal skilled immigration rules. Neither is a great outcome.
There are simple ways to ensure H1-B is used to hire this type of talent. The recent rules that prioritize H1-B applicants based on their salary are positive IMO and address a lot of the Tata/Infosys abuse (which is real). If you are truly going after the best global talent, that won't be cheap!
H1-B is super old school. The notion is that you only hire someone in H1-B if there's nobody that can do the job. However, the challenge today is not if you can do the job, but can you do it better than the global competitors? That concept is super foreign to immigration legislation (no pun intended :).
Short of a whole new immigration framework, increasing the number of H1-Bs and prioritizing based on salary would be a good short term fix - no lawsuits needed.
> Government usually pays well-below-market salaries
That may be true for base salaries, but if you take into account overtime and pension/health benefits that is not the case. If what you say is true, gov't emplpyees would quit en masse; however that's not happening. I know from personal experience people that get government jobs and act like they won the lottery.
> Public sector unions have almost nothing to do with that, though, since the labor is almost entirely contracted-out (so, private sector unions, to the extent unionized), and anyway the main cost drivers aren't labor costs but MTAs horrible contracting process and NY State contracting rules.
In NYC at least, public projects like subway construction use by law or by convention only union labor. That's a huge cost driver. You are right that that's private unions when it comes to construction, however when one considers the enormous operating costs of the MTA (the other side of the same coin) that's all public unions driving costs up and resisting any modernization that would make the system more efficient.
You are also right that contractor oversight sucks and that's also a cost driver; both are valid issues.
In my opinion, the well being of taxpayers should take precedence over a relatively small number of gov't workers.
Government needs to be paying market salaries to its employees, period. If gov't employees don't like it, they should quit and find another job like everyone else.
In NYC it has gotten to the point, thanks to unions and regulations, that digging new subway tunnels is too expensive to consider. There was an article here at HNews a few weeks ago about a study that pointed out people making $75/hr in the tunnels to do more or less nothing.
Why do we care about the well being of few thousand workers over millions of taxpayers, many of whom make less than the gov't / union employees? makes no sense.
The subtitle starts like this: "Even the worst-run startup can beat competitors if investors prop it up."
This is clearly written by someone that has little to no startup experience. As someone that has spent 15 years as a founder I can tell you that the opposite is true: I have seen startups racking in seemingly endless funding only to be beaten by much smaller / less well funded competitors that happened to have better strategy or execution. The examples are endless, more recently we heard about Quibi ($2B funding!) failing, Yik Yak, WeWork etc
There are markets that are capital intensive, and others that are really commodity spaces where winner takes all (Uber comes to mind) but for the most part, the smartest VCs in the industry will tell you that you should worry about strategy and execution, not raising a ton of cash which creates a bunch of problems on its own.
The reason why extreme cases are showcased, is because it fits a certain narrative. We all know what that narrative is - that Covid prevention should take precedence over everything else.
The fact that the prevention is worse than the disease, in terms of economic hardship, depression, deprivation of education, etc; the fact that prevention measures hit poor people and minorities much more than rich people (who can move around and educate their kids in private schools that largerly do not shut down) - these are all inconvenient facts.
At least be honest - say you know lockdowns are horrible for many people that even if they got the disease would be fine (save for the extreme anecdotes!) but we still decide to impose them.
Really hard to have an honest conversation based on facts these days.
The problem is, we don't have a definition nor a test for consciousness. So these discussions usually go in circles.
i am aware of three definitions of consciousness, used often without clarity:
a/ consciousness = intelligence. By this definition, a lot of AI has some level of consciousness
b/ conciouness = being awake and alert. A lot of studies for instance that compare MRI of alert vs unconscious humans focus on this aspect.
c/ consciousness the way we humans experience the sense of self awareness ("watching a movie from inside", etc). This must be more than an illusion because for instance right now I am writing about it so that "sense" is affecting my actions. But how do you even define or test for it?
It's likely you have a lot of (a) without (c), and you could have a lot of (c) with little (a). We can test for (a) but not for (c), so for now it's all philosophical speculation.
Until we can define and test for (c), I don't see much progress being made here.
There are network and anti-trust concerns that make this problematic.
In the old days, if you thought newspapers were biased you could publish your own and it would sit on the newstand next to the other ones. That's how we got NY Post and the Daily News in NYC, etc.
But imagine if one newspaper had 100x the readership of the second one. And if it'd be impossible to start a new one because of network effects. The editor of that newspaper would have outsized power to affect elections and it would be considered threat to democracy. That's the case with Twitter.
Either Twitter stays 100% neutral, or we'll need to anti-trust the heck out of it to make sure there are a few Twitters to compete with each other (and represent different views).