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confuseddesi

298 karma · joined July 7, 2014

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confuseddesi··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
This is what is broken. The current system is archaic and circuitous. It also performs a legal fiction around non-immigrant visas functionally being a path to permanent immigration.

We should increase the number of immigrant visas and make it straightforward what the process is to get a green card like what one would see in other countries like Canada and Australia.

Meanwhile, non immigrant visas should remain non immigrant and very restricted criteria for changing status (eg. marriage) without reapplying abroad.

confuseddesi··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
That’s a strawman. There’s wide gulfs between “I want very permissive immigration à la Canada” to “I want the US immigration system as it was under previous administrations” to “I want no immigrants”. For example, I personally want the standards for H1-Bs to be a lot higher, but would willingly grant substantially more immigrant visas to top academics and workers under EB1, EB2 and EB3 visas.
confuseddesi··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
These are all non-immigrant visa classes. The understanding is that you are temporarily immigrating to the United States. Why should it be surprising then that it is hard to become a permanent resident/immigrant if you explicitly came on a non-immigrant visa?
confuseddesi··on Green card seekers must leave U.S. to apply, Trump administration says
As a US citizen I am confused. H1-B and similar are supposed to be non-immigrant visas for temporary workers. Why was it allowed to permanently immigrate under those visas to begin with? We have immigrant visas like the E-1 for routes to permanent immigration.
confuseddesi··on Pope Leo XIV's PhD Dissertation
I would actually like to read the dissertation but this link doesn’t have it. How do I get a PDF or web version to read?
confuseddesi··on Chandrayaan-3 Soft-landing [video]
It’s landed! Congratulations to India on this great achievement!
confuseddesi··on The moral bankruptcy of Ivy League America
Freedom of association is extremely limited once you factor in public accommodations. For example, even if I own a hotel, I can’t choose who can stay in the hotel if they are willing to pay in a lot of cases.
confuseddesi··on Tech bosses are letting dictators censor what Americans see
So is the only universal truth that there is no universal truth, and if so, why?
confuseddesi··on Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought
I wonder if there is any correlation with the use of hormonal birth control prior to attempting to conceive.
confuseddesi··on Even parental leave in Europe could be better
I do see the benefit of parents having time to raise their kids in society. But I have also seen explicit comments on HN that people don’t have kids because we don’t have enough benefits. If the goal is simply “give people a year off so they can have their one kid and then be done with it”, so be it. But then we shouldn’t be advocating for these policies as a solution to anything besides giving parents a long paid vacation.
confuseddesi··on Even parental leave in Europe could be better
Have we been able to find any correlation between better parental leave and people being more likely to have kids/more kids? What is the goal of this improved parental leave?
confuseddesi··on Cloudflare announces fourth quarter and fiscal year 2021 financial results
Why are you leaving Cloudflare?
confuseddesi··on Ask HN: How do you think about promotion?
This is very insightful - especially the part about it being normal to chase promotion yourself.

In your opinion, what is the right time horizon to switch roles and/or companies to maintain your edge?

confuseddesi··on The new chief chaplain at Harvard is an atheist
This is basically a fluff piece about a piece of non-news. Some alumni who actually know what’s going on wrote a newsletter explaining what the real deal is here: https://harvardchristianalumni.org/activities/
confuseddesi··on Far more adults don’t want children than previously thought
This seems almost akin to the tragedy of the commons. Society needs for various reasons (e.g., to maintain and promulgate culture, to power welfare and labor needs, to generally exist in the next century) for people to have children at least at some level above replacement rates. However, each individual couple has a lot of disincentive to have children. I am not convinced this disincentive is due to a lack of benefits from the state - I don’t see benefit-rich Western Europe doing much better than the austere United States. I think we as a society and as individuals simply don’t value creating and raising children as one of the most rewarding and important activities to be performed enough to outweigh the financial, social, and personal implications.
confuseddesi··on Say goodbye to hold music
Are there features or apps with features like this on the iPhone? I would like to activate them if so.
confuseddesi··on Show HN: Benefits comparison across tech companies
Looking at this dataset, the balance of benefits here seems more tailored to deferring children (eg. egg freezing) vs. embracing children and providing benefits to make it easier to have them (eg. in-office daycare, part time work schedules). I wish these employers would focus more on the latter and build upon benefits they already offer like parental leave instead of incentivizing the delaying of children to further one’s career.

Edit: upon reflection, even free meals outside of lunch are not really a meaningful benefit to parents who want to have those meals with their families.

confuseddesi··on Santa Cruz decriminalizes psychedelic mushrooms
Couldn't this be handled instead by allowing doctors to prescribe these substances like they do other medication? Why decriminalize non-prescription possession instead?
confuseddesi··on Tell HN: Merry Christmas
Merry Christmas!
confuseddesi··on Map: US States Renamed as Countries with Similar GDPs
You mean Long Beach, right?
confuseddesi··on US Births Dip to 30-yr Low; Fertility Rate Sinks Further Below Replacement Level
The causal connection works the opposite way. When you are rich, you have fewer kids.
confuseddesi··on US Births Dip to 30-yr Low; Fertility Rate Sinks Further Below Replacement Level
In general, the richer someone is, the less likely they are to have as many children. See https://www.economist.com/node/21561112.
confuseddesi··on California's Housing Laws Should Be Under State Control
What part of rigorous zoning laws and artificially constrained housing supplies by city councils sounds like the free market to you?
confuseddesi··on How Neglecting Minorities in Medical Research Has Led to Deadly Outcomes
I did find the line at the top "With more than 50 percent of the population estimated to be a minority by 2044..." funny - doesn't that make them a majority?
confuseddesi··on Elite colleges are making it easy for conservatives to dislike them
Here's another snippet from President Clinton:

"I have long opposed governmental recognition of same-gender marriages and this legislation is consistent with that position."

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/usr/scotts/ftp/wpaf2mc/clinton....

confuseddesi··on Elite colleges are making it easy for conservatives to dislike them
Perhaps it is the American right-wing moving further right, but I am more inclined to believe the American left is moving farther left: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/01/why-ame...

Take for example this speech by Bill Clinton in 1995: https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4654597/bill-clinton-illegal-...: "That's why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens."

To think that this was a speech by a Democrat president about 20 years ago is unfathomable to the left today.

confuseddesi··on US committee votes $30,000 increase in minimum salary of H1B visa workers
That is the case even today; American engineers compete with foreign engineers housed across the world. The difference here is that there is some benefit in having workers come domestically - communication and collaboration among other things improve. American employers will hopefully be driven to pay better wages to Americans already here instead of importing cheaper labor.