thatfrenchguy

I mean, the issue is that a large number H1B folks have vital skills for the US economy and that even just 20% of those leaving would mean every single big tech company would be in immense trouble

I mean, both GDP and average salaries in Czechia is higher so arguably at some point you might want playgrounds for your children

Compared to cost of living though?

You essentially have no data to back this up though, especially given the filed H1B/L-1 labor data for big tech is first year of employement with only base salary, which bears no ressemblance to what their wages will be even just 3 years in.

> There's a 5 hour limit and a weekly limit. Those are hard token limits

I mean, humans sleep and do other things than work, so they likely don’t hit their weekly limits or their 5 hour limits every single 5 hour chunk :)

That’s because you use the button to make them whole screen?

I had to go look at my Costco and Amazon orders to check because my intuition was that I spent so much more money in diapers in the first year and indeed, that was like ~75% of the cost of the first two years. Toddlers get changed so much less often than babies, and you can plan your purchases way more easily, so I’m not even sure they make that much money off those.

Yeah, but you can hunt for discounts to reduce that bill quite a bit

Eh, you have to wash poop off them in a washer at high temps, so it’s a bit harder to compute. IIRC if you use the dryer it’s a wash: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7c4096ed915...

Hard to say how much money you’ve saved because running the washer and dryer is not free though :)

Sales tax in the US is nowhere near 25% :)

$499 with carrier subsidy too

And your line is thinking is how we end up with what is going on at the Pentagon, and less innovation in our industry :)

Half of the best engineers I know come from a random state school, from a random country, and we should work way harder than we do on finding those people.

But also… the other half come from prestigious colleges, and the way you solve the first half is not by not hiring the second half.

> 1) Eliminate the H-1B visa entirely. If a company wants to hire an immigrant, they can just sponsor the Green Card up front, knowing the worker can fuck off once they have it. The net result would be decreased immigration and increased offshoring, which brings me to…

Do you know how long those take? Consular processing for green cards is painful as hell and somehow even longer than adjustment of status if you're in a non-backlogged country. The real solution here is obviously to allow self-sponsorship for employment based green cards.

> Companies that do 90% of their business in America but whose workforce (contractors, consultants, and FTEs) aren’t 90% American?

I mean, do you want to tax a company that hires foreigners, sponsor their green cards, just because some of their employees decide to not naturalize (say, like Apple or Google or Meta?) ? That makes zero sense.

> For-profit business models predicated on shunting workers onto every possible social welfare program

H1B folks aren't eligible for any social welfare program, even though they, e.g. contribure to Medicare / Social Security.

> The question is - what % of this labor could be sourced domestically and what actually needs to be imported?

I mean, the other question is: how many US jobs exist because of folks who came to the country on H1B? Clearly none of the big tech companies would exist in the scale they are without us.

You still have to be way more strategic so the inputs of your new factories don’t get tariffed as well, otherwise your higher labor costs will kill any desire to actually do onshoring.

If you have a recommandation algorithm you are not a dumb pipe

I mean, yes, the benefits (and sometimes harms) of those companies to humanity reach multiple orders of magnitude more people than the microcosm of the Bay Area housing crisis.

Yup, so that we can loose our innovation edge and loose the next Apple, Google or Nvidia. Amazing plan.

That stuff is so bad for you though that raising the price probably decreases the country's total healthcare costs by quite a bit.

I think you mean, spend $0 instead, given how many folks are donating toys on local facebook groups

I mean, 75% of americans are overweight or obese right? It's wild that the richest / least obese counties in the US still have 15% of people who are obese ( https://datacommons.techsoup.org/ranking/Percent_Person_Obes... )

> I could get a home near a major airport like 10 mins from SFO

You need a lot less than 40m$ to get a house 10 minutes from SFO, Daly City or outer neighborhoods in SF have homes for less than a million for sale right now

Our kids are not going to be happy we spun up more CO2 generation for this.

I mean, medical professionals would live closer without it most likely

Yup, but when you’re sleep deprived the months feel like years, and if unlucky and you got a bad sleeper the years can feel like decades

> The least the US could do would be to show a little more gratitude by guaranteeing them permanent US residency after they graduate, but they don't even get that—many people are kicked out of the US, where they've spent most of their adult life, when they wash out of the academic pipeline.

And they often have no choice but to work in academia too, because Academic H1B are lottery exempt but not Industry H1B and they aren't transferable. Pretty messed up.

> United maintains a relatively consistent experience between domestic and international, minus the free alcohol.

A consistent extremely mediocre experience I guess. I've flown Lufthansa, Air France, Air Canada and United with a toddler and I'd get out of my way to avoid United in the future, never seen staff everywhere in that airline that was more unpleasant and unhelpful, especially with young children, as much as when flying United.

Destroys your clothes and is mega inefficient in exchange. You can buy better washers than LG washers that are modern.