Ayn Rand explicitly disavowed libertarianism, both big "L" and small "l". Her political/moral philosophy was Objectivism [0].
The primary focus of libertarianism is the promotion of individual liberty and non-aggression, leaving the individual to become as big (or small) of a philanthropist as she/he wishes, and never being viewed as a lesser libertarian because of their altruism, or lack thereof (in fact, many libertarians I know are very generous people).
Objectivism, on the other hand, specifically condemns altruism and philanthropy, and deems those who engage in altruism to be "bad" people. This is consistent with how Ayn Rand lived her life.
I don't know whether your phrase describing Thiel, "do good for myself and the world will be better", is accurate or not as a description of his personal philosophy (it does make some sense he would follow Rand instead of libertarian philosophy, given his recent activities both political and entreprenerial). But I am quite sure that the phrase is characteristic of Objectivism and not libertarianism (l | L).
Please don't confuse Ayn Rand with libertarianism. Many libertarians despise her writings, back then as in now (and she despised libertarians/Libertarians).
There was a recent interview of Jeff Bezos where he was asked to comment about Peter Thiel. He said Peter Thiel is a Contrarian. He then said that Conventional Wisdom is generally right and Contrarians are generally wrong, but when Contrarians are right they are right in a massive massive way !
This reminds me of Nassim Taleb's barbell risk management strategy: Avoid the middle in favor of the extremes. For investments, it means a combination of very conservative plus some high risk investments to win big. He applies it to many other areas, though, including health and politics.
Having watched and listened to Thiel for several years now, I came up with a pet hypothesis I call 'The Wolfian World' that I feel describes what's going on more accurately than the newspapers.
Your comment was a very interesting read. A shame that it didn't get any further discussion. I'll give The Book of the New Sun a go. Thanks for your insights.
Thanks. You won't regret it. It is a most extraordinary masterwork.
That book changed my thinking in ways I find difficult to describe. It was as if the world suddenly developed richer textures. I don't know if he would agree, but I felt it was a very 'Thielian' book. A lot of his ideas and statements came into focus for me when I read it. Together with the recordings I mention it became quite an experience.
It's also linear extrapolation beyond everyone's individual abilities to react to the immmediate past. That at least is one thing our system enforces: the political cycle forces people to think about the presidency at least once every four years and the senate every two. A long term dip below progress is still possible insofar as the majority of the worlds population live nothing like the lucky minority.
You're saying that our intrinsic chronocentric thinking prevents us from seeing the danger of the have-nots abruptly encountering a Western lifestyle? That futureshock in large numbers could wind up causing disruption on a scale that would pull us all down?
In fact about 1/4 of my comments on HN relate to the 'Technological Stagnation Hypothesis'. The TSN is rather hard to appreciate (for most people in our society it seems unbelievable, they just can't shift their mental model of a world with progress because their benchmarks for that are mostly faith based) but Peter Thiel has made many videos available explaining what it means, I think this is one of the best ones:
The 'Wolfian World' is merely a way to look at our world sideways through a (brilliant) work of fiction with very similar themes to Peter Thiel's Technological Stagnation Hypothesis.
I am an immense fan of BOTNS, it is perhaps the most cherished novel in my collection, several years after reading it I still haven't read another novel that has impacted me in a similar fashion (recommendations are welcome), however, while I don't object to your analysis of some of the book's themes, I think your connecting it to current political events is a pretty huge stretch and really only accurate in a somewhat superficial sense. Still, I can't say enough good things about that book so have an upvote.
My email is in my profile if you or anybody else wanted to talk about BOTNS and why there's a deep connection between Peter Thiel's ideas and those of Gene Wolfe.
I don't think it is a coincidence that Wolfe was an engineer during the same period that Thiel has been scrutinizing. There are many intriguing connections. The energy crisis in oil, the rejection of nuclear energy (the New Sun). I fancy I see allegory. Maybe I'm mad but I am fascinated by both sets of ideas and cannot help seeing a wonderful marriage. ;-)
Interesting. You sold me on picking up a copy of BOTNS just now. Looking forward to reading it. Sounds like a fascinating story, regardless of any connection to contemporary political events one way or the other.
I found myself I couldn't finish it in one sitting. It was just too deep. I did it in a series of short sprints, accompanied by my weird music suggestion :)
Keep a notepad and pen handy, I found that useful to jot down various hypotheses that came to mind while I was reading it. Was useful for figuring out what certain words meant. Stay away from Google at all costs, the risk of spoilers is too great, don't even read the blurbs.
Sometimes I would think: is this thing I think I'm seeing really there, or is this the linguistic version of the Voynich manuscript? Then I'd read on and it was like being in a dark room and having a door open from a well lit hallway.
Will do. I'm still working on finishing the "Wheel of Time" series (halfway through book 13 now), so it'll just just a little while before I start BOTNS.
On a related note, do you read / have you read, any other works that fall into the "Dying Earth" sub-genre? A friend of mine recommended the Jack Vance works, and I'm think I'm going to add those to my list as well.
Jack Vance is a good choice. This 'dying earth sub-genre', its fantastical or science fiction attributes are a thin veneer on something real.
One major change to my thinking by Wolfe was that I used to assume history and progress were linear. I don't believe that anymore. There are too many glaring inconsistencies. More important than a chronological clock is the tick of the 'cultural clock'.
There are works that give me a, let's call it a dying earth vibe, but they are works of non-fiction such as Joseph Tainter's Collapse of Complex Societies, 1177 by Eric Cline (both are interesting but the first of which I strongly recommend to you), or texts originally written in dead languages like Aramaic or Latin of which I have a few in English. It is a very strange feeling to read a text thousands of years old and realize the author is more, not less comprehensible than a similar text from several centuries ago written in your mother tongue. It is stranger still when you find more examples of this happening. It is as if the newer authors had their thoughts clouded or confused, the way they form their thoughts on the page is less joined up. I have come to believe that society undergoes change in such as way that it is perfectly possible for one to have much more in common with the thoughts of an ancient group of people than a much newer one.
To my eyes, it is clearly the case that different periods in history are recorded at different rates of lucidity or joined-up thinking. That is a hamfisted description but it'll have to do. My suspicion is that when we become altogether non-lucid the writing disappears also. At other times it appears to me that the thinking of some authors is more sophisticated than our own. I cannot account for this, only to suggest that culture controls people's range of reasoning powers and that there are deep cycles we are utterly oblivious to.
On a related note I feel strongly that many books and film media created before the 1980s were more sophisticated than today's interpretations. I wrote something about this recently.
Peter Thiel thinks about this in a technological sense but it may also be true culturally with music, art etc.
People will state this is subjective, but I don't think it is. Just because you can point to works of excellence in any age doesn't mean there is no moving average. Perhaps we're hamstrung by access to easy answers that slot into place in our heads in place of difficult, but more original thinking that is our own.
Or easier. Hillary is a face of western corruption to much of the world. So long as Trump delegates the tech stuff properly and doesn't do anything too unusual the moral choice of the US should be easier.
Then that's a pretty bad argument that Trump's election will make software developers from "Europe, Australia, NZ, etc." more willing to come to the US.
I'm not actually. It was a reference towards the belief of many but not most that most of the west is dominated by a special political class that strikes underhand and immoral deals which they justify through the claim that they were democratically elected despite not having been elected for anything resembling those actions (often completely ignoring things they were elected for) and despite the process through which they were elected not actually being 'completely' democratic.
For these people Hillary and her ilk represent a local minima, and votes for her a stagnation or move away from actual democracy. The harm Trump will cause is indefinite and the claims that have been made are hard to substantiate, whilst he is obviously not an ideal POTUS it is not obvious that Hillary would be better.
Not obvious that Clinton would be better? It is certainly obvious to economists that taxing the increased economic welfare from trade and using it to help workers whose industries move is better than restricting trade. It is obvious to scientists that speeding up the movement from fossil fuels is better for managing Earth's climate than trying to bring back coal. It is obvious to criminologists that community policing is better for managing crime than stop and frisk and adversarial policing. It is obvious to sociologists that allowing gays to marry as they please increases their well-being and allowing women to control their pregnancies decreases poverty and crime. I can't find a single reason why Clinton would be worse.
A lot of people are making categorical statements about whole countries, on what I can only assume are their own experience. I'm surprised that after Brexit, you can still be this categorical about "the will of the people".
I don't know where you get your facts from, but the way the world sees the Clintons (whether corrupt or not) is as "expedient, better work with them, good things might come out of it." The way the world sees Trump is "what the fuck? This guy used to be a reality TV star in a program that didn't really make it outside of the US? What? He also says all this bizarre things?"
If you thought American image around the world was at its lowest it could reach during GWB's presidency, oh boy you are in for a surprise.
Not true here in France or most of Europe, for that matter.
The only people happy about Trump is ultra-right wing/neo nazi panopticon of odd figures - Wilders, Le Pen, Farage, Orban ... Really the "crème de la crème" of Europe. And, of course, Putin.
The rest is worried now - people are seriously questioning what happens, for example with NATO, after Trump's remarks on not unconditionally supporting the allies. Is Trump going to divide Europe between himself and Putin, e.g. in exchange for Syria? Is Putin going to have a free hand to invade Baltics now? What about Ukraine, Moldavia? Are we going to go back to the Iron Curtain era where Soviet "borders" were the ones with West Germany? These are serious issues which you don't feel on the other side of the Atlantic, but for us living there it is a big deal.
What about business? Trump made some remarks about erecting trade barriers to protect American markets. So, of course, this concerns us too.
On the other hand, the misogynist, racist, xenophobic BS he was producing during the last few months is mostly seen as disgusting, but finally mostly your internal problem. I am sure someone like Merkel is not going to be personally happy to have to sit next to him at some official function, but people do respect the result of the election and are professionals. GWB was not seen as the sharpest tool in the shed in Europe neither but everyone survived it.
Clinton was seen as a continuation of the US policies, so naturally people would have preferred her - nobody likes to rock the boat too much when it comes to foreign policy or business. Trump is seen as unpredictable, unreadable and incompetent in this regard, unfortunately.
Tread carefully; while I suspect most of Europe doesn't care too much about Trump, the media and rest of the left wing in the UK labelled anyone pro-Brexit as ultra-right wing / neo Nazi types - they're still being called uneducated and racist by presenters on TV as I'm typing this.
Then the vote for Brexit won a majority. They're not all scum at the extreme end of a political spectrum.
If France goes down the same naive, name-calling route Le Pen will surely be next to capitalise on it.
That's what you get when you generalize over all media and, especially, not knowing any of them.
European media are on both sides of the aisle, you will find both left and right leaning ones, including crazy tabloids.
However, what you likely won't find is something like Fox News, with conspiracy theory pushing nutcases being regulars there.
BTW, this theory about a "media conspiracy" is not new, nor something that Trump or Putin invented. Lügenpresse ("lying press") is a term widely popularized by (not invented) and mostly associated with National Socialists in Germany - in Hitler's Mein Kampf, for example.
Most people parroting this unfortunately don't care - anyone having a different view has to be a part of some complot or aiding the "enemy" (whoever that happens to be).
Read carefully what I wrote. I didn't write that supporters were "scum" or "nazis". However, do check who was the first to congratulate and cheer Trump's victory:
Nigel Farage - former head of UKIP in UK, a party with extreme right wing history and some of the most vile and xenophobic rhetorics during the recent Brexit campaign.
Marine Le Pen - head of the French Front National, another extreme right party, with documented history of antisemitism, racism, xenophobia and outright neo-nazi tendencies. Their former leader (Le Pen the elder) famously said that holocaust was only "a detail of history", even going as far as joking about not enough Jews going up in smoke ...
Geert Wilders - the Dutch extreme right politician, well known for his anti-Europe and anti foreigner views
Victor Orban - the authoritarian prime minister of Hungary, known for his xenophobic policies, coalition government with the neo-nazi Jobbik party and negative views on liberal democracy - which he is successfully dismantling in Hungary.
With Le Pen I am afraid you could be right - here in France she has consistently around 30-40% of support already and a lot of people see her as a saviour against the "Arabs" (mostly people of North African descent - Moroccans and Algerians, both legaly and illegaly here and, by extension, all muslims), which are despised by many. The recent terrorist attacks and incompetent governments didn't help neither, but the animosity goes deeper and longer back than that.
However, the French system of presidential elections works differently than in the US, with two rounds where the 2 strongest candidates qualifying into the second round. She will likely lose there, because the racist, antisemitic past of her party is unpalatable to many. On the other hand, if the major parties don't put forward a sensible and popular candidate, anything could happen ...
True story, when in Europe the cheerers are the ultras we all get it as a sign that something is not going in the "right" (ironically right) direction.
Anyway, too many actors, too many variables too many things to come. Just wait and see!
Silencing people you don't agree with by calling them misogynist, racist, sexist, etc. and expecting them to convert to your side does not work.
Marginalizing them does not work.
Not in Europe. (Brexit)
Not in the US. (President)
This strategy is 0 for 2.
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."
Not only that, but you are also wrong on facts. There is no unconditional support of NATO allies by the US. See article 5:
"It commits each member state to consider an armed attack against one member state, in Europe or North America, to be an armed attack against them all."
Consideration of something is not unconditional support.
Hillary is a face of western corruption to much of the world.
No, to 99% of the rest of the world she's just a former Secretary of State and the wife of a former president whose era is often viewed through a nostalgic lens compared to current turmoil.
No ruler manages bureaucracy alone. Trump will have to bring in classical Washington. We'd like to think that Trump will perform a full-on house cleaning, sourcing principally from his business connections, but the reality is that everyone needs classical Washington because each person you bring on is a king of his little fiefdom in the NSA, CIA, FBI, armed forces, etc.
This is not the problem. You will get the top 1-5% anyway if they decide they want to move to the US.
USA needs to stop this "middle-class-men" brain drain from other countries. It is for your own and the rest of the world good. You guys need to start training the newbies otherwise you will end up just creating more isolated groups of people.
I'm also a dev from NZ, and I worked in the US a few years ago. Honestly it's not all it's cracked up to be, and I wouldn't choose to go back there. Trump didn't factor into that decision, but now it's even less enticing.
I was in San Francisco. Admittedly, that's a very unique situation. But I was shocked to see so many homeless people, and that the streets were so dirty. I was shocked to hear so many reports of gun violence coming from Oakland. There is just so much hopelessness in America.
I had a really bad experience with health care. In New Zealand, I never had to think twice about visiting the ER or hospital, where it's free, very high quality, and there's no long waits. In the US, a few trips to the ER including x-rays cost me something like ten thousand dollars, even after health insurance. My startup's plan might have not been great, but I understand why so many Americans go bankrupt from medical debt. I have a friend who went through cancer, which ended up costing millions of dollars. His family would have literally lost their home without the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits lifetime limits.
Having said that, I do like most things about San Francisco. There's some great food, great people, and so many things to do. It's a great place to live if you are wealthy. I wouldn't go back there as an employee or a startup founder, but maybe one day as an investor.
New Zealand is pretty awesome if you're wealthy, enjoy nature, can work remotely, go to bed early, and enjoy driving everywhere. I think it's also an ideal place to raise a family.
Yeah, the U.S. is a diverse place. Even the American people don't understand their own diversity, as you can see from the shock about the results of this election.
Aussie dev here with a similar story. I lived and worked in the bay area for a couple of years a few years ago. I wouldn't choose to go back there either, especially now.
And I have Australian friends in the bay area now who are reconsidering which country they want their tax dollars to go to.
Homelessness in Sydney/Melbourne is extremely tame compared to SF. Especially areas like The Mission. I was floored on a recent visit at how bad the problem was.
Eh... The Prime Minister of Australia is actively working against the technology industry here, and he actually states that preventing Australians from having better internet access is his biggest accomplishment.
- Behold, the Australian "IT tax" makes everything 60% more expensive here Just Because™.
- There's absolutely nothing like Silicon Valley here. If there is I've never heard of it, and I live in Sydney, the most population-dense area.
Situation: the two political parties here (Labor and Liberal) have opposing ideas about how to implement our new fiber network. I forget who wants what (which says a lot).
- One wants fiber to the node, where you get a fiber termination box inside your house.
- The other wants fiber to the <some other term I forget>, where the fiber link terminates under the street or on a telegraph pole, and you get VDSL service along existing copper lines.
The problem: both solutions actually work, but the second one is a few million less expensive because fiber cable is a bajillion dollars per meter and it really does add up. (And then there's the problem that installers are nailing the fiber boxes to the first thing that looks like a wall because they have so many installations to do and insufficient resources, and then people are all like "???" when they realize their box is mounted to the ceiling... or at least that's what I think I heard...)
The other problem that nobody talks about: 1Gbps briefly got a "oh hey yeah that sounds awesome, we should look at that sometime around 2187" very early in the discussion a couple years ago, but I haven't really heard much to suggest this sort of capacity is actually going to happen anytime soon. And VDSL maxes out at 100Mbps.
It's a very difficult situation: do you create a technically-1Gbps-capable network capped at 100Mbps, or create a 100Mbps network for a few million less? Remember, there's no established Silicon Valley or similar scene here. Sure, there are tech companies, but it's not the same, there's no startup thing. (Case in point: how many .au companies are on Hacker News? Problem.)
Anybody can go out right now and get 500Mbps fiber for something like $499+/mo (business only - expensive Just Because™ \o/ (see? :/) and also due to SLAs etc) if you have fiber in your area (and the month has a Z in it), but that doesn't put it in the hands of random individuals. To enable the entire country (or at least the urban areas), the 1Gbps connectivity would need to be utterly ubiquitous, unconditionally deployed to everyone.
And so, in amongst all of this, all new dwellings are required (I think by law, or something close to one) to have fiber runs installed, and terminated in the street. Apparently the two new apartment blocks down the road from me have functioning NBN service, and I can see the "NBN" trench cover in the middle of the footpath outside the one I checked, so... it is rolling out, sort of, but all the political wrangling is creating a level of uncertainty that's slowing everything down horribly.
Oh, and the NBN (national broadband network)'s plan for rural Australia? 6Mbps satellite. What's latency? (Not much else they can do though :/)
I can relate in a certain way. In Germany, the state-owned Telekom wants to avoid the cost for building fiber networks, and instead squeeze multi-hundred-megabit connections through the existing copper wires with VDSL2 Vectoring [1].
They're the only one advocating this. Literally everyone else, from watchdogs all the way up to the EU commission, wants them to do proper fiber networks.
That's really interesting. I'm guessing they're doing it to save money. The idea of premature optimization comes to mind, but this is one area where the investment really does need to be made, and will be worth it in the long run - once it's set up it's unlikely to be changed for decades (!!).
I'm wondering if it's something nonfinancial, but I (honestly) can't figure out what it could be.
I do some astronomy as a hobby, and it really drives home the point that the great circle path is not the shortest distance between two points. At midnight, if you want to point to the Sun, it's basically straight down (modulo latitude/season/DST).
Fibre To The Node is to the street, Fibre To The Home is into your house.
This is a decent summary of the situation in Australia. The NBN rollout map, however, makes things look better than they are. There are places that have been stuck at “in development” for about three years now, and none of the areas that I ever look at seem to change. NBN has been much hyped, but has fizzled much more than you’d expect. Or hope.
I want to move out of Melbourne to a place in the country with good Internet supply (Stawell vicinity, mostly), but it’s surprisingly difficult to find housing in NBN-connected areas. Take Stawell for example: at a broad level you look on that map and see it’s covered. But it’s not: everywhere around it is covered, but Stawell itself is not covered. I’m not certain why, but I’m guessing there are difficulties in the line-of-sight fixed wireless installations.
> Fibre To The Node is to the street, Fibre To The Home is into your house.
OH, that's why I couldn't remember the second one, I confused it with the first one. Thanks.
> There are places that have been stuck at “in development” for about three years now, and none of the areas that I ever look at seem to change. NBN has been much hyped, but has fizzled much more than you’d expect. Or hope.
I see. I've talked to Telstra people (instore tech support) while discussing other things, and my understanding of their consensus was that if a given area doesn't seem to be moving, you could probably use it's stuck-ness as structural support for something.
> I want to move out of Melbourne to a place in the country with good Internet supply (Stawell vicinity, mostly), but it’s surprisingly difficult to find housing in NBN-connected areas. Take Stawell for example: at a broad level you look on that map and see it’s covered. But it’s not: everywhere around it is covered, but Stawell itself is not covered.
I'm in the North Shore area of Sydney myself, smack bang right in the middle of the new Sydney Metro project (a ~20 minute bus ride away from the closest station), and to be honest I do wonder if the NBN service to those new buildings (which does light up green on the map...) is actually live and functioning. There's no cable in this area and my current ADSL2+ is... right now my modem says 13102kbps - 12.79Mbps. My situation is similar: little dots of NBN connectivity (I see where all the new developments are!) but... crickets chirping where I live. Which, to be fair, isn't a major town center, just a suburb like any other, but still. I'm glad I'm moving soon.
> I’m not certain why, but I’m guessing there are difficulties in the line-of-sight fixed wireless installations.
Wait, what? I thought the NBN was all fiber and satellite. How does this work?
There are three levels: fibre, fixed wireless and satellite. Satellite is only for those who don’t have anything better available. Start at http://www.nbnco.com.au/learn-about-the-nbn/network-technolo... for more details, but it can be a bit hard finding all the right details.
Wireless can do 25/5 and now, I believe, 50/20. So it’s pretty good, better than ADSL2+ in bandwidth anyway (no idea about latency).
I was very worried about a Clinton, but with Trump I hope for more legality and fairness in the processes. And the visa caps may get raised, so less cheap workers will flood the quotas, and more good devs will have a chance.
The Trump bashing in Europe was evil though. As they preferred to have another criminal presidency, with enough leverage on them to blackmail them on everything. As it happened with the previous ones. Media is very naive, and not even moralistic. Assholes are still better than criminals.
You mean the torch/pitchfork mob has "proof" of it, much like the witch burning sheriffs of yesteryear. Either way, neither of them are getting convicted of anything, but not because Clinton is especially colluding, and that Trump is clean, but because they're both rich white people.
But if you actually believe your second part, you've obviously only acted towards your own confirmation bias and are incapable of seeing truth.
I actually think there is a possibility that it could be easier to get into US as highly skilled migrant under Trump presidency because of his anti-immigrant polities.
If he raises a minimum income bar for H1B to 150K and keep the same cap, then it would be much less qualified applicants for H1B visas and therefore there would not be cap overflow with annoying lottery process.
Of course, I can't predict what Trump is going to do. He can also reduce cap significantly (which would be very stupid move).
Let's admit current H1B requirements are stupid. For example, requirement to have bachelor degree instead of high salary. There are lots and lots very mediocre developers and almost all of them have degree. On the other hand, there are pretty strong developers who do not have degree (i.e. smart drop-outs).
Why? Because the salaries of US-based programmers would rise? Because companies would be more motivated to train locals instead of importing foreigners?
Exactly. Salaries in western Europe are about half of US salaries, if you go to the East, while still within EU, a programmer could be paid as little as $15-20k/year.
If you go even more to the East - Ukraine, Russia, China, India, etc. you can get very highly qualified people for even less, happy to work on a project for you.
Software is one of the easiest things to outsource/offshore, unlike manufacturing or services. So protectionism is only going to end up harming US in this regard.
Of course, that doesn't mean that the H1B "indentured servitude" system for importing cheap foreign workers shouldn't be fixed. But imposing minimal salary is not the way to do it, IMO.
I have been part of many outsourcing projects over the last 15 years, and I can count on one hand the number of those that have been acceptable.
Outsourcing requires a completely different style of management than of a local team of developers. I have had better luck outsourcing art and animation tasks. But even there cultural barriers pop up all the time.
Sure it is, most of the problems I've seen described fall squarely in to "we went cost cutting all the way and got shit results - who could have guessed". If you hire cheap devs even by local standards then you get cheap devs, add to that the lack of proper management like you said because it would cost to do it properly and you get crap. Tech giants all have teams all over the world and it works OK, but they pay top rates for local standards and have proper management chain top down.
You can save money by outsourcing, but if you try to minimize expenses at all costs it shows in quality.
> Tech giants all have teams all over the world and it works OK, but they pay top rates for local standards and have proper management chain top down.
Having teams all over the world is a very different cost and business model from outsourcing.
With overseas teams they tend to either be salary matched to market and the quality not so great or good wage even by US (but maybe not SV) standards but getting the very best people.
Outsourcing is much more of a mess because markup is ~3x.
>good wage even by US (but maybe not SV) standards but getting the very best people.
60k$/year easily gets you top talent in places like eastern Europe and Asia - that's like entry level for the US, when you equate for skills I would guess it's almost always a 2x difference even in low cost US places.
The biggest thing about US was that it offers highest wages and it's a center for tech globally so it's really easy to attract skilled immigrants and so top people often emigrate - if you crack down on that well you suddenly made outsourcing better both because cost and the top talent availability.
I am not saying it is easy, only that it is the easiest when compared to e.g. manufacturing or services. You can't exactly outsource a dentist or barber to India and outsourcing manufacturing is a hugely expensive and complicated task, with a ton of logistics involved.
Compared to that moving software development to another country is much simpler. It is difficult to get it right, but it is simpler to move things like specifications and code than containers of raw materials and goods.
> I am not saying it is easy, only that it is the easiest when compared to e.g. manufacturing or services
It is actually the other way around regarding manufacturing and software development.
Software development is high-growth, quickly changing, highly skilled, high levels of communication, transferable, low capital, and doesn't scale well.
Manufacturing for the most part is steady demand, slow rates of change, low-moderate skill, low communication, not very transferable, high capital and scales really well.
This leads to software dev being very difficult to outsource without being out-competed.
E.g. I am making around 35k Euro/annually, before taxes. That is with 15 years of experience, with a university degree & a PHD in comp. science. And that is not at all rare if you are not in finances or machine learning (or whatever is the fad du jour at the moment) where the salaries are very high. But even there 50-70k+ are not that common. And, of course, my living costs are likely quite a bit higher than yours (well, perhaps except for large cities like Moscow).
UK is similar unless you are working for the London City bankers - I have been interviewing few years ago for a position with a big company there and they have actually offered me even less than what I am making now after taking into account higher costs of living in the UK.
Actually the French taxes aren't that high, the killer are the extra expenses that the employer has to pay for each employee - social & health insurance, various solidarity contributions, etc. I am costing my employer about 2x as much as what I am actually taking home. From that I still have to pay taxes, which are about one and a half of my monthly salary in total (the French pay taxes themselves for the previous year, unlike most of Europe where the tax is deducted from salary already and you only get a return if you paid too much).
There are two cases why companies would hire foreigners:
1. Hiring foreign workforce despite big supply of local workforce at certain skill level. It should be mediocre skill level with mediocre salaries because otherwise there would not be big supply of local workforce. The only reason why employer would do this is to reduce expenses for paying salaries. Wages for local workforce will decrease as a result of increased overall supply of workforce (locals + foreigners).
2. Hiring foreign workforce because of very small supply of local workforce at certain skill level. It should be pretty high skill level because demand exceeds supply and employers are willing to go through complicated visa process. Often such companies (like Google) are very hungry for talent and constantly hiring. It means that they would hire both, local and foreigners, anyone who is capable to pass their challenging job interview. Those companies are happy to pay decent salary for those rare talents.
So this is background. Now, I will answer to your questions:
If you cut the cap on highly skilled migrants, then temporarily salaries for highly skilled locals would spike, but in the long term such companies could not grow. As a result of this, some companies would go bankrupt (high tech is risky business, if you can't grow, often it means you will be dead) and some companies would go overseas. So in this case, either locals have less job opportunities in their homeland or they fly abroad to countries who are realized that high quality human capital is everything in global economy of 21th century.
H1B allows for work experience to substitute for formal college degrees. It's easier to demonstrate competency with the degree but it is not compulsory:
> The nature of the specific duties is so specialized and complex that the knowledge required to perform the duties is usually associated with the attainment of a bachelor's or higher degree.
> education, specialized training, and/or progressively responsible experience that is equivalent to the completion of a U.S. bachelor’s or higher degree in the specialty occupation, and having recognition of expertise in the specialty.
In practice, American companies who hire foreigners on H1B don’t bother.
I’m guessing, evaluating a university diploma is a well-known routine. Proofing that work experience counts as equivalent is less common, and hence unknown to the lawyers/accountants who do that paperwork.
If you don’t have an education but are exceptionally talented, O-1 “Extraordinary Ability” might be easier than H1B.
150K is a bit unrealistic. The US is not only Silicon Valley.
But 100K is realistic, and I would certainly appreciate that.
Regarding the quota of 65.000-110.000/year: With a 100K salary cap the numbers could stay the same. What's clear is that the H1-B visa departments are not able to process even 50.000 per season. The ones who take the risk or can afford it not to travel are staying and waiting for the processing after the first 3 years. The others, esp. the ones who need to do business traveling and their visa was not processed (even with Priority) have to leave the country and the program, like me.
Streamline the process, get more personal or raise the cap.
You confuse skill with high salary. If you're a part of HN community and work for a startup with some seed funding, good luck with (a) finding people (b) paying them $150k.
Not sure how you the want government to evaluate chemical, mechanical, aerospace etc. engineers. Right now it's formal education, since I think it's hard to do it objectively otherwise. For software engineers you expected USCIS will look at our ... GitHub accounts to evaluate it?
H1B as it is OK. Unfortunately big firms figured you can DDoS the application system and flood it with applications, get some people, underpay them and use them to replace more expensive and more qualified US people. This is a problem and it needs to be solved.
Skill is too difficult to define objectively and it's probably not what you should be discriminating on anyways (in a purely economic sense).
What you need to go for is "valuable" (scarce and in demand) engineers and salary is a decent proxy for that (more so than formal education). You also don't want the government to "evaluate" engineers because doing a good job at that would mean, pretty much by definition, selecting the very same engineers companies elect to hire.
But unfortunately salaries fluctuate across the country. The same engineer might make 100k in Cleveland and 150k+ in Silicon Valley. What might make sense is having the h1b attached to the immigrant, no strings attached for 5-10 years. Firms would make sure to pay them market rate, because they don't want them to walk, and additionally would only hire actually necessary workers, because they're making the same as anyone else in the country.
The real issue is that h1b establishes a time period of essentially indentured servitude to the employee.
I would advocate for using standardized test scores. If you're a smart dropout, even high school dropout, you could take the tests within just a few weeks.
Perhaps there does need to be some kind of flexibility for people who are not native English speakers. For example, a very high math score should be able to compensate for low verbal scores.
Using degrees seems like the worst possible option, since the standards are so low these days, and the trend is for the standards to go even lower.
Australian skilled worker visa sounds similar. Points come from low age, language exam, degree, training, years in the industry, etc. For technical skills, you pretty much submit your CV (packed with easily recognisable keywords...)
I think H1Bs should only be used for highly skilled specialist roles with a minimum pay grade like 150k (adjusted for local cost of living). In that scenario, a standardized test would either be no more useful than measuring by degree possession, or would not be able to aid the search to employ highly skilled niche specializations.
I am personally upset because my employer successfully hired an unskilled and unqualified H1B "masters degree" (who also is not fluent in English) to perform the duties equivalent to a 3rd year computer science student. Either this person should have never been hired, or if they should have been hired, they should have been hired by a better employer. Either we imported a bad candidate, or we imported a good candidate and squandered his talent for work we should have hired literally any fresh BS in CS candidate for. Of course, my employer is happy because he's paying less than fair market value for entry level work. This has undisputedly displaced a local citizen from work.
What upsets me the most about this is that there is a company willing to pay to import a 150k+ highly skilled, rare, and valuable candidate and my employer may have been responsible for blocking that.
I agree with most of your points. If the current application system is modified to prevent the 'DDoS' by the big firms, it would solve most of the H1B issues and automatically fix a lot of things.
What would probably work is - increasing the visa application fees quite significantly if a company is applying for more than X applications a year.
>On the other hand, there are pretty strong developers who do not have degree (i.e. smart drop-outs).
I think you might know better than I, but I don't think you have to drop out to be a great developer. Let's be honest, a degree by itself is almost meaningless outside the hard sciences, engineering, and perhaps whatever you would call the 'job-training' degrees (accounting, nursing, pharmacy, etc). There's degrees where you have to figure out how to get things done on your own, and there's degrees that are mostly about learning how to say what's politically correct.
+ We are outsourced there but we are the customers in that equation. The Chinese will not make things more difficult for American buyers - they are in a very pernicious situation as it is.
+ As for tariffs: the thing is - we are already in a trade war. China can sell in the US at will. China blocks tons of American companies from selling to China.
American exports to China are almost nothing.
The Chinese are already 'attacking' and have little to retaliate with.
Also - manufacturers are already moving many things out of China etc. and the gov knows it.
Tariffs may pinch a little bit, but if they do - they would be offset by a commensurate uptick in American manufacturing.
The only thing the Chinese could do would be to block 'Pizza Hut' and possibly Apple, which would suck.
Because of the trade imbalance, the Americans can do far, far more damage than the other way around.
China does hold massive US reserves, and could play some tricks, but it's not going to get to that, moreover, the Fed is ready to mop up any liquidity if the Chinese step out of bounds.
China has been playing a great hand of poker against the West - dividing and conquering - US and EU leaders all kow towing to China, and if they speak up getting slapped down for 'fear of losing access' to China. But we don't have access ... and we're never going to get it. Why would they give us access?
It will take some leadership to re-establish proper trade relations, and even though I don't like Trump at all - if he gets more aggressive with China it would be almost surely a 'good thing'.
The area I would worry about is military i.e. South China sea etc..
I see a lot of Obamacare being repealed, a tougher stance on illegal immigration coming for sure. I don't think that will hit the Valley very hard.
American tech manufacturing is outsourced to Asia, right? Will a trade war with China, for example, impact gadget production and raise costs and lower demand for the gadgets that the valley produces and profits from? If there are trade-barbs with China then I would expect that to hit the valley hard.
Low factory jobs may come back to US, hopefull with better pay than in China and selling gadgets at a higher price point, while China starts focussing on producing for their own population. I look at this quite optimistically, as it makes end-user price closer to the real cost of production, and it makes production local which brings the concerns for extremely-poor workers closer to the consumer.
In other words, no-one cared for Chinese slaving away, but reimporting those jobs and having Americans factory workers in the same indecent position may trigger more empathy, or at least more health/education budget is available to cater for them. Maybe we'll even charge 10x for IoT gadgets (or kid games, or Ikea lamps), so that workers get a decent situation. It will hit the Valley hard, but only startups who distribute moderately useful gadgets that rely on the poverty of the Chinese workforce.
Maybe it will go as far as paying the Macbook price for a PC, but that's ok if workers get proper working conditions.
We're potentially entering a period that's volatile in ways we haven't seen in the US in our lifetimes. People in SV need to be working to minimize Trump's power starting tomorrow.
I think he will be fine for the H1B and and other skilled immigrant programs.
Lower corporate taxes would be good, but I don't think it will be realistic. However, some kind of deal for tax repatriation for large multinationals might be possible. This could bring a lot of money back into the country by the likes of Apple and others.
Tariffs might have some impact as well depending on the type of company/labor and source countries affected (China/Mexico).
Data requests of Silicon Valley companies by the government may increase.
The list of people deemed "suspect" and spied on by the government using private data may grow and the people spied on may become, on average, browner and more Muslim.
Pence is the VP which constitutionally has next to no power (Lookup VP John Nance) President-elect Trump will be running the executive via his cabinet appointments. It'll be Governor Christie, who's running the transition and finding those cabinet appointments, that you should be pinning your hopes on.
Complete uninformed speculation: The stock market doesn't seem to like him. If that continues, the big markets may be less appealing as investments, interest rates may stay low, and so VC may be a (relatively) more appealing place to throw money. That would fuel money towards more startups, but it's a wildly uneducated guess.
How are these things in danger NOW? Did you sleep through the whole Snowden incident, and everything Assange published in the past decade? Trump can’t take away what you don’t already have.
I don't think there will be significant negative drag to Silicon Valley as anti-immigrant policies won't apply to skilled migrants.
Ultimately Trump is a chauvinist and economic with the truth sure, but that just makes him a New York businessman. He is no ideologue and as long as he doesn't kick off a trade war things should level out quite quickly as I note here:
We can also actually expect more support for startups as these are acknowledged job creators. Where the danger comes is in enforcement of anti-monopoly statutes for larger companies, although healthcare monopolies are likely first on the plate.
It probably means very little. A president does not really have the power to make significant change. It happens with collusion from congress and apathy from the public.
The Silicon Valley outcry about Trump was mostly a social signal intended to make people seem enlightened -- how enlightened does one really have to be to be disappointed a presidential candidate makes rude/racist remarks?
I seriously doubt the republicans and Trump will be on the same page much. Plus the democrats are slightly stronger in the senate, so the filibuster should slow many changes down a bit.
The only policy position he really made clear that would affect SV was that he said he would find a way to severely punish Apple for making their devices in China.
Whether he follows through and has congressional support is to be seen.
Peter Thiel has his ear, predict based on what you would think Thiel would suggest. My guesses, not that I have a great model of Thiel's mind, are less regulation but more data collection, probably not much change w.r.t H1B.
Srsly, if you want a highly skilled worker who is paid >$100k in the States, you got to have them start working here early when they are not that sophisticated and maybe is paid $70k or so. if I start my career in my home country I wouldn't give sh*t about working in the States after a few years when I'm already successful.
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