AP: “In its request for consultation, India alleges the U.S. had increased fees for temporary visas in December, officials said. It argues that as a result, some Indians receive unfair treatment compared with Americans in the United States in providing similar services in sectors like computer services.”
* Indians in India are nice, but there’s a reason progress is slow in India. It’s a low-trust, high-talk, all-time-politics, nepotistic, low-do culture.
* I’ve now worked in several places that go out of their way to hire H1Bs, usually Indian but not uncommonly Chinese. The main reason for hiring these people directly is that they are effectively indentured servants. To stay in this country and eventually get trhe coveted green card they must keep theit H1B employer happy. They will do anything to keep the visa including working uncompensated hours until late into the night and weekends.
Some are decent tech workers. Most are only semi-competent. Their employers rely on a small cadre of retained, native-born and educated workers to debug and correct all but the most obvious problems. higher level work beyond simple coding and support is almost invariably the purview of the native-born cadres. Employment contractors, like the notorious TaTa and various domestic exploiters like Covansys, Deloitte and Touche, etc., make a mint by over-rating their H1Bs, getting them high paying jobs that they cannot handle, and reaping enormous profits from fees and grossly overpriced G&A and Overhead charges. They don’t care whether the workers supply can do the work.
It’s a particular issue in state government work. US native-born tech workers are screwed over three times: (1) Their jobs are stolen from them by unqualified foreigners; (2) They wind up training and supporting these foreign workers; (3) Tax payers are stuck paying inflated wages for incompetent and destructive employees w ho have no investment in their work or the citizens they supposedly serve.
Meanwhile, the US pipeline of STEM workers is closing down as native-born students interested in these fields see that their is no future for them if they continue in STEM. If they do follow their interest, by the time they’re thirty they’ll have trained their incompetent H1B replacement and taken their place on the unemployment line behind their native-born predecessors.
Even if Trump wins and fulfills all his promises it will take more than a decade to correct the havoc wrought on native-born workers by these ill-advised immigration policies.
* Once people understand the loss of sovereignty in these trade deals, a move to repeal or renegotiate them will have a majority. If there’s a president who pursues it.
* I sometimes feel guilty about treating my own children different from other people’s. Aren’t they, like, all equal, man?
* Global trade rules need to be renegotiated on this point of governments needing to treat foreign workers as the equal of their own. Is that really what American citizens want from their society or does society exist to serve the interests of global capital? No other candidate, Democrat or Republican, will touch this. It’s his for the taking.
* Shouldn’t the Indians themselves be against this? Where’s are India’s nationalists on this one? I would have thought the Indians needed tech savvy workers for their own ambitious infrastructure targets.
No country has ever gotten rich through remittance money. The only way to go from poor to rich is by producing useful products and developing a strong domestic infrastructure. The remittance road to prosperity story is yet another lie being peddled by the ultra-liberals.
* Over 600,000,000 of them still poop and pee on the ground, even though they know that it spreads disease. They don’t have the collective mental capacity to build an advanced civilization. Their leaders know this and therefore encourage anyone with talent to leave and colonize other countries, as would you if you were in their shoes.
If you were an elite Brahmin would you stick around in your country building toilets (that the peasants likely won’t use) or would you abandon your country and go live with a more advanced race and civilization?
* Why doesn’t the USA just give Puerto Rico its independence? This article is just one more reason for it. I have never seen what the benefit is to keeping an impoverished, Spanish-speaking island hundreds of miles from America. The USA has also gotten stuck absorbing millions of P.R’s excess population. America didn’t even manage to switch it over to English. If it ever becomes a state it could be the Trojan horse for bilingualism in the USA. As a Canadian, I can tell you that is the last thing in the world you want to have.
* It’s totally absurd that Puerto Rico is allowed to play a role in the Republican (and Democratic) presidential nominating process since Puerto Ricans play no role in Presidential elections. PR gets 23 delegates. Since Trump is unlikely to get any delegates from PR, it is ironic that PR may play a role in denying Trump the nomination. If you were to subtract the 23 PR delegates from the total, Trump would only have to get 1225 delegates, rather than 1237, to secure the nomination. It will be interesting to see how many delegates Trump gets by the time of the Convention. BTW there are other territories which don’t vote in Presidential elections yet get delegates to choose the party nominees. They should also be denied participation in the nomination process.
* If you think like a capitalist, the absurd thing is that Americans demand better treatment than indians when the latter is willing to do the same work for less.
To a non-nationalist migrant, the idea that you should particularly care about people that you share absolutely nothing with except that you happened to be born kind of close to them is also not a given. If you need visible ethnic breakdown to visualize it fully, think of South African whites migrating out. Co-nationals just don’t mean that much.
The nationalists here love to say “that is what separate nations are for.” To the elite of many nations, a separate nation might be a improvement but that is not easy to do. (look at south asian chinese expats consider singapore heaven) Failing that, walled compounds or migration to places that shares more of their values is better.
From a economics point of view, network effects counts for quite a lot and productivity is raised if you just gather enough smart people at one point. It is better to be in disadvantaged in a productive spot than be the most talented person surrounded by envious retards. National IQ have stronger correlation with income than the personal one.
If you view your in-group as a class as opposed to a nation and care about their interests, you get different answer for the immigration question.
* The documentary “Cartel Land” is on Netflix. Amazing film, it’s as good as drama as it is as reportage. Anyway, anyone who wonders why we need a wall, a big one, right now, should watch that movie.
* There are two basic approaches to voting. One is that voting is a job, and we want informed and conscientious voters, which I think is the approach most people take naturally without thinking much about it. In that case some people aren’t qualified to vote and you should spend time determining what the qualifications are.
The other approach was taken by Aristotle, who argued that if the government could cause you harm, such as through taxation, conscription, or imprisonment, then you should have a say in what the government does. Incidentally, Aristotle was not considered to be as much of a small “d” democrat as most Greeks because he favored keeping the older aristocratic and monarchical elements in the government. But he wanted the democratic portion to be really democratic.
I agree with Aristotle’s approach, and its hard from that line of reasoning to deny the franchise even to prisoners currently serving their sentence, because they are under the control of government more than most. And actually polling places in prisons and even lunatic asylums is not unheard of outside the US.
With the “voting is a job” approach, then you can get from their to disenfrachising prisoners and even convicted felons not in prison, but there is a problem in that it doesn’t stop there. Do you take the vote away from a high IQ felon and give it to a low IQ non-felon? Or do you deny it to both? Which level of IQ/ income/ problems with the law exactly do you draw the line? Does the nature of the crime itself matter? What if the law that had been broken was pretty much bs?
So I don’t think a criminal conviction should result in removal from the voter rolls, but I disagree with polling places in prisons or giving prisoners absentee ballots. But on paper you should be able to vote as long as you keep your citizenship.
* Thank you Mr. Trump for breaking through the Great Wall of Smugness these mainstream people were comfortably living within. Now they have to entertain the possibility that they haven’t got us all figured out.
It looks like one of the positive side-effects of Trump tearing the cozy neocon-cuckservative love nest to shreds is that he’s also forcing Guardian types to wonder whether things are more complicated than they thought. The Grand Vermifuge really is a tonic for our sick political body.
* So I am sitting in our mess hall next to an Episcopal priest from Virginia and across from one of my liberal colleagues from Massachusetts, and they are talking about Trump. The priest says with a condescending tone, “I’ve never met anyone who is going to vote for the man.” I stick my hand near his face and say, “Pleased to meet you.” They stopped talking about Trump.
* I’ve slowly been working on a story about how a young man comes out to his liberal parents from the father’s point of view. You know, the signs had been there, vulgar web sights, changing outlook on life, even the way he spoke and his vocal intonations changed at bit.
The boy had totally new friends of the working class persuasion. The family had not had a manual laborer in it since 1850, etc.
The boy had never believed in Santa Claus and even as a young child has a Matrix poster on his bedroom wall featuring some shiny Red Pills.
And of course the boy is coming out of the Trump-closet to his parents. His father then declares that boy is no son of his and the mother screams hysterically that it was the most disgusting thing she could think of was what he and his new friends get up to when they all go to the polling booth to pull the lever for Trump.
And in the end the boy is kicked out of the house and written off forever by his parents!
* This seems like a pretty big deal to me. National Review has published an article by John Fund that urges Republican delegates to commit a misdemeanor in order to deny Donald Trump the Republican nomination:
“If Donald Trump won’t release his tax returns prior to the GOP convention, the delegates pledged to him on the first ballot should abstain from giving him their votes. Other than their vote not counting, there are no realistic consequences for any delegate doing so on the first ballot. A few states make breaking the first-ballot pledge rule a misdemeanor, but no one is ever prosecuted. In theory, state leaders could exact political retribution but such discipline is rarely exercised.”
National Review’s editor, Rich Lowry, presumably approved this for publication.
I realize things are getting crazy on the donor side, but I’m still trying to wrap my head around this: National Review just knowingly advocated the commission of a crime in order to subvert the democratic process. It couldn’t be real … but it is! It really happened. That’s a big deal, isn’t it? Over its history NR has fired writers and editors for much less.
Because it’s an iSteve world, Fund’s author bio at National Review is hilarious:
“In 2004, he wrote Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy. He has written two books with Hans von Spakovsky: Who’s Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk and Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department.”
http://www.nationalreview.com/author/john-fund
* America. Both LOL and sigh.
A land where Jews force all politicians to pledge to AIPAC but then complain of Trump’s authoritarian style.
A land where a clown like Beck accuses Trump of not being serious.
* You can do a lot of stuff in a Latin American prison that you can’t do in an American prison.
Mel Gibson’s movie “Get the Gringo” is pretty informative: the traditional rule was that the prisoners can’t leave but anybody else in town could bribe their way in — e.g., prostitutes, families, cable TV hook-up guys, carnival ride operators, or gangsters needing a place to hole up from the law. Latin American prisons tend to be vibrant!
* Israel seems to have a booming high-tech sector without importing so much as a single Indian. So why does America need them? The Ashkenazi-White IQ gap isn’t that big.
* Lots of Israeli tech workers in America too, though they are unlikely to be at the low end of IT jobs. America is the tech workshop of the world, so every ambitious tech person wants to be there. Anywhere else (India definitely, Israel too) is a backwater doing grunt work.
* The whole world has noticed that America is now a nation of beta pushovers who have bent so far over backward they can see the other side. Women get whatever they want by simply demanding it “It’s unfair, Unfair, UNFAIR!” There’s no demand too extreme. Why shouldn’t India make demands? It’s unfair! America is descended from Britain and shouldn’t they feel guilty for having ruled India for centuries? No reparations will ever be enough.
* Free trade agreements prohibit India from giving priority to its farmers and local farm products over those produced by foreign countries. The US keeps its farm produce artificially cheap (and extremely competitive) by subsidizing its farmers. That has the effect of killing off agriculture in poor countries (and in India, literally killing off the farmers, many of whom commit suicide because they are unable to pay off their debts.) The percentage of population that is rural is much higher in India (and other poor countries) than it is in your country. But you all don’t see, or care for, the effects of free trade on others, and just raise a hue and cry when it affects you.
Go ahead and elect Trump. Let him roll back all free trade agreements. It’ll be an interesting experiment.
* “The US has a visa waiver program with many countries (typically OECD) which allows you to travel without visas.”
US citizens are free to visit most European countries without a visa, but the US government requires visas for citizens of European countries to visit the US. A pretty glaring non-reciprocity that is often pointed out by Europeans when they visit here.
* One of the driving forces behind unionization was the “sharing of tribal knowledge”. As workers got older and more experienced, they knew more about the equipment and processes and had developed various efficiencies. They had no incentive to give this knowledge away with coworkers. When people were laid off, they needed to show their value above and beyond that of their peers. Only by having union seniority rules (LIFO) could they be cajoled to work as a team and share their knowledge with the new guys.
Now that we are returning to pre-union employment conditions (wholesale replacement of existing workers with cheap alien labor) it would behoove every worker to keep their work practices and procedures secret. As all non-union craft and industrial workers knew in 1890, you need every edge.
