Well, more funding for sure.

I’m sure if the people that started Conservapedia largely because they were incensed about the academic versions of dates [1] that didn’t center their little book club - CE/BCE - had much more funding they’d have the same level of conspiracy theories and racism.

[1] In their own words:

Conservapedia, launched on November 21, 2006, is a conservative, family-friendly Wiki encyclopedia. It was founded by teacher and attorney Andrew Schlafly with the help of several students from his fall 2006 World History class. In May 2008, Schlafly and some of his homeschooled students appeared on the CBC news program The Hour (see: Videos on Conservapedia).

When a student handed in her paper using the date-markers “BCE” and "CE” from Wikipedia, Schlafly realized that Wikipedia, despite its claim of neutrality, contained bias against the achievements of Christianity and conservatism. Other occasions of liberal bias, including the reversion of factual edits about the 2005 Kansas Evolution Hearings, led to the creation and launch of Conservapedia.

Emphasis is mine to highlight just what fucking snowflakes we are dealing with here. I’m sure fElon’s motivations have a very similar snowflake quality.

I’m thinking they will have some brogrammer just as arrogant and as fucking stupid and Dunning-Kruger as “Big Balls”, but who claims they “do computer gud” does something stupid like trying to do a search/replace on certain words, but ends up missing key information and also leaves obvious traces of the ratfuckery that others point out in like 3.8 seconds.

Makes sense that Pedonald, who has always had accusations all his life of being mobbed up, is doing things like this.

I just never really understood anyone that could sit there and listen to what the cons and Republicans say and do and what their aims are and then think any of that lines up with red letter stuff from “the” bible.

But I’m thinking a lot of conservative xtians are not really readers, despite all their talk of “the” bible.

Maybe the visas should be tailored to only that, then. Or come up with a specialist visa meant entirely for that.

As is, they are also used by IT bros…

She might want to heed Michelle Obama’s warning…

The original (presented) heart of the visas were to pull in some of the best and brightest of other countries to fast track them to become Americans, thus bolstering the output of America.

I think if you’d ask most (non-racist) Americans about this, you’d probably get a willingness to find some way to get exactly that kind of result. Seems like a win-win all around, except for corporatists only looking at next quarter’s profits.

The underlying rationale seems well-founded - there are smart people everywhere, how can we get entice some of them to come here and work for us? Hell, whether it was true or not, that used to be very much America’s brand, too.

Unfortunately, the charade and exploitation that is where the H-1B very quickly ended up is very much our brand, now, too, and that just sucks. I’d love to find a way back to that original idea and find a way to live up to it…

It’s more about mashing up “Pedo” with “Donald”.

He’s not wrong.

Pedonald is threatening Colorado with unspecified “harsh measures”; it might be that someone in Colorado caves to this asshat even if I’m sure most of Colorado’s citizens want her to serve all of her term under Colorado’s watch.

This is the least shocking thing about their squabble.

Gee, I wonder why they cancelled the jobs data, too.

I’ve been working decades in IT and for decades I’ve heard fraudulent claims from companies saying that they cannot find local talent. That’s nonsense.

And knowing that companies have been shedding workers for some time now after over-hiring during Covid and hearing how long it is taking for people (in some cases, people I know) to land new jobs is an indication that there should be plenty of people to hire within America without resorting to H-1Bs.

I think there are lots of options that could be explored. One is if these are for truly research types of things, maybe keep a smaller amount of the visas, but only for that. And make it easy for them to become full citizens if they wish. Make it easy for them to float between entities (corps, universities) so that they are truly free agents in the marketplace, etc., even if they don’t opt for citizenship.

Another would be to find ways to fast-track truly rare talent right to a path to citizenship that is not tied to an entity at all. Or maybe it is, but for maybe three months as a trial run, then they are full citizens free to work for anyone (or not at all, or go to school again), and vote, etc…

But as for stacking the deck for corporations with lots of compliant cheap labor to be used in IT and engineering, keep American workers in line, and drive down wages…nah.

The supposed aims and the rationales given for the H-1B are easily punctured the minute you ask - wait a minute, if these are such precious commodities that cannot be found here, why the fuck would we send them packing in 3 to 6 years? Why wouldn’t we do everything possible to entice them to stay and become full citizens? Surely they’ll end up starting up businesses of their own, etc…it’s truly the American dream. Why are we subbing a 3 - 6 year gig for the American dream, FFS?

Companies will always look for the cheaper option. If you ban H1B1 visas then they will just outsource the whole thing if it’s cheaper than hiring local talent.

I think serious consideration should be about closing up that loophole, too. If companies want to enjoy access to American infrastructure and the American market, they should be willing to pay Americans a competitive wage for that. If companies start using offshored talent, there is nothing stopping that from being taxed so high as to make it cost-prohibitive.

Because without those visas, the non-American talent can’t be employed, and the US simply doesn’t have the local talent to fill those spots.

LOL. America has tons and tons of local talent. The job market is actually very tough right now since there is so much of that talent.

Companies just want to drive down wages to much lower levels, and claim they cannot source local talent here, which is a blatant lie in every case I’ve seen - which is in IT.

There is no law of nature that could not be taxed accordingly, too, but the country needs to have this option presented as part of the conversation.

That threat is always thrown out there to keep people from questioning H-1B as if we need to answer to wayward corporations, instead of the other way around…

It was a good thought, but it’s being heavily abused now.

I’m not sure when it was a good idea and I also don’t know a time when it was not being abused, if I’m being honest. At least in IT (and in general, engineering, or so I’ve heard) going back to the 90s…

Now, the other threat they hold over our heads is that companies will just outsource if we don’t allow this, but that’s not a law of nature or anything, either. There is no reason we should not tax such services like that, too.

America kept telling their youth (and probably keep telling them) to “learn to code” because those were the jobs they were told Americans should aspire to, etc. Since I’ve been in IT since the 90s, I have more than my share of doubts about this promise, since I’ve seen how we are treated and the strong desire in the corporate world to suppress wages, benefits, any sense of autonomy, etc…if America is serious about this message, maybe they ought to look out for the workers.

It was getting abused since at least the 90s, at least as far as I could see. Sure, it was anecdotal as far as what I saw, but you’d hear others saying similar things.

The sad thing is that even after the dot-com bubble, we still had H-1Bs, when something like that should have been an obvious trigger point to shut them down to zero, at least within IT jobs, and only raise them above zero once some other trigger point is reached, and even then, only very cautiously.

If companies really need to find such rare talent, maybe they find some kind of way to have Congress build them a path to bring someone in as a full citizen and work. We’ll see how many “shortages” of local talent they have once all that rare talent are also free agents entirely capable of finding another job, LOL. I think the real “shortage” they are talking about is a lack of workers beholden to them, and willing to work for less than the prevailing wages…