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).
P.S. I like this article: http://paulgraham.com/95.html
Why? Because the salaries of US-based programmers would rise? Because companies would be more motivated to train locals instead of importing foreigners?
Or it just speeds up outsourcing.
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.
You can save money by outsourcing, but if you try to minimize expenses at all costs it shows in quality.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Honestly companies have tried, and keep trying, but the work keeps coming back to the US.
Hint: Its because software engineering is a lot more than cutting code.
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.
> 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.
https://www.uscis.gov/eir/visa-guide/h-1b-specialty-occupati...
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.
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.
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.
Read this article as an example: http://www.infoworld.com/article/3004501/h1b/proof-that-h-1b...
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.
The real issue is that h1b establishes a time period of essentially indentured servitude to the employee.
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.
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.
What would probably work is - increasing the visa application fees quite significantly if a company is applying for more than X applications a year.
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.
The only way he'll help anyone else is if their interests happened to be aligned with his.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of the guy (barring recent endorsements) but you have to understand where his philosophical basis is.
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 !
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.
If you meant the 'Wolfian World', I came up with that 2 days ago, so no.
I did clean up the essay, added some material, made it a bit more accessible to non-HN readers and put it here:
https://medium.com/@internaut_48577/peter-and-the-wolfe-b8de...
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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tw-rxtwhzcY
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 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. ;-)
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.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12941619
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.
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.
Plus, it appears that Peter Thiel is going to be in some sort of advisory role. That's valuable insight
That's not even slightly true here in the UK.
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.
People love Obama and they see Hillary as an extension of his presidency.
People are afraid of Trump. He reminds them of the corrupt, self interested, dictator types, which are rampant in this region.
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.
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.
In the EU. Lots of people in the middle east did not after he started a war there.
As a European, I'm quite scared of what wars Trump will start / cause.
Time will tell if I am right or wrong.
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.
While individual publications might be exceptions to the rule generally the media are to the right of centre in Europe.
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).
They most definitely are.
Consider the media closely working with the White House now, Obama's "entourage". Not one of them is Republican.
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 ...
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.
Wasn't it Trump who has the been the biggest opponent of the political correctness? That cuts both ways, you know.
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.
Fox News doesn't broadcast outside USA, you know.
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.
And I have Australian friends in the bay area now who are reconsidering which country they want their tax dollars to go to.
How have you found London? And where would you recommend a Perthian turned Melbourian dev head to if we have to go overseas to find ourselves?
Remember that the number of people that have voted for Trump only represent about 1/5th of the population.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_federal_election,_2...
- 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'll end on a good note though - this map is a lot more full than I make it sound like. http://www.nbnco.com.au/learn-about-the-nbn/rollout-map.html
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-high-bit-rate_digital_sub...
I'm wondering if it's something nonfinancial, but I (honestly) can't figure out what it could be.
Same reason why all types of infrastructure are crumbling in all of the Western world.
Aims pointopoint microwave link at NZ (if only... they don't work that far away :P)
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.
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?
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).
So is Turnbull, but it doesn't excuse you.
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:
https://governmentsandmarkets.com/trump-the-morning-after-th...
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.
From what I hear, people expect the US to be:
- A lot less friendly place for women, people of color and other minorities.
- Preferring hateful rhetoric.
- Dismissing scientific facts.
- Bankrupting the less fortunate that need healthcare.
- Enlarging the divide between rich and poor, via tax cuts for the rich.
- Less friendly to fellow NATO members, trade partners, neighbors.
I don't know how anyone can read this and see this as a progression.
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?
Whether he follows through and has congressional support is to be seen.
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).
His bombastic statements were populist, I don't see anything on the policy agenda that seems it will hit the Valley in any meaningful way.
Even if there are some trade-barbs with China ... the Valley doesn't export much there ...
+ 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.
Except they are quite significant, third largest after Canada and Mexico.
But you're right I probably over stated a little bit.
Nevertheless, the trade imbalance is massively lopsided.
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.
It's already doing that, which is why US companies are tripping over themselves as they scramble to get in on the Chinese market