A law firm has posted a video with some of the steps that companies can take to hire workers from overseas. There’s something poetic about seeing Americans screwing other Americans, don’t you think? :(
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62. I fully recognize the difference and I have commented on a few posts here and there in the past where choices made by our congress people have not been in the best interests of our country. There are those who frequent this forum would rather support partisan politics than to push for what is right.
However, I would not agree that this employment dilemma is causal. There is a correlation, but to insist that MikeT is perpetuating / causing the problem may be laying blame to the wrong person(s).
My “straw man” comment is from my own personal observations when traveling overseas. A lot of motivation for these people to push towards these higher paying career fields has been motivation of getting out of life and death poverty situations I have seen overseas. We don’t have that problem here and due to our intial success as an economic mecca, we have gotten fat off the hog.
We are now graduating more fitness experts than engineers or scientists and then we whine about our situation like Mr. Smith says. I think the fact that we as a country score near last place on math, science, and computer programming while people in these other countries seem to excel in it needs to be looked at more. This is not due to our inability, but I would argue a lack of desire / laziness.
There are those who would argue that how you start in life limits what you can do for the rest of your life. There is some element of truth to this, but I have seen far too many poor people come from overseas come to this country and become wealthy in spite of where they started in life.
I’ve also met a lot of Chinese from overseas. Culturally, they tend to be much more frugal than we Americans. We are a society of instant gratification. They do not tend to be that way. Suffice it to say, many of our parents who suffered through the Great Depression probably had a similar frugal economic mindset of Chinese or other countries…. probably because it was motivated by survial because back then poverty could kill.
Instead we are a society that hands credit cards out to 18 year old kids who have absolutely no financial discipline and completely buy into the marketing of instant gratification, run their credit limit up, have revolving credit, live paycheck to paycheck, and then whine that we are not being paid enough when a little financial discipline would have helped to prevent much of this. Our education system needs a massive overhaul in the math, science, programming, and finance areas if we want to maintain our place in the world.
63—Of course we can. This is America!!
64–No 1==So a burglar comes into your house to rape your ass. He is an ex-WWF Champ so you can only submit. Now, you do have a gun in your condom drawer, but there is a law against killing. Clear and simple. THATS WHAT YOU WANT?????? or a more complicated law?
No 2==There is a depression and you have lost your job. You and family are hungry. You start walking to California to get a job. On the way, you spy a field of rotting turnips–rotting because the farmer can’t afford to ship them to market. You want to take a few turnips that will otherwise go to waste but there is a law against stealing. THATS WHAT YOU WANT?????? or a more complicated law?
No 3==I’m totally with you. Hot ass is worth severe punishment anytime. ((and usually unavoidable one way or the other in my experience.))
Maybe not perfect, but we both gave good efforts. 10 Commandments are the easiest. Laws beyond a tribal existence harder to write/understand/enforce.
65—We have both traveled and seen alot and have many of the same conclusions. Americas decline may be impossible to stop, but only difficult to slow down. There are multiple reasons why that is.
We don’t have to champion those reasons, nor confuse our own best interests with the natural empathy we have towards those born in less advantageous circumstances.
#66 – bobbo – I concede that a self-defense or defense of others provision was overlooked for law #1. Nothing says it has to be anywhere near as convuluted as the existing statutes on the matter.
As for law #2, it’s interesting you should specify turnips, as that is just about the only vegetable I can’t abide (rather eat bugs).
As for #3 , I can take care of those urges competently myself without any assistance my neighbor, as much as I might enjoy her participation.
It’s been fun, though.
#66 – bobbo – I concede that a self-defense or defense of others provision was overlooked for law #1. Nothing says it has to be anywhere near as convoluted as the existing statutes on the matter.
As for law #2, it’s interesting you should specify turnips, as that is just about the only vegetable I can’t abide (rather eat bugs).
As for #3 , I can take care of those urges competently myself without any assistance my neighbor, as much as I might enjoy her participation.
It’s been fun, though.
68. Don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly not championing this employment practice… just saying let’s get to the root cause rather than use this situation as the whipping boy.
74—Hi jz. Just to be polite. Have it your own way.
75. The only thing I would not agree with is businesses needing to create incentives to bribe people into becoming engineers. Sure it would be nice, but if higher pay and benefits are not good enough, then the fault lies with the individual(s).
Initially we did not have a shortage of engineers, we have a shrinking population of engineers due in large part to most Americans not wanting to take personal sacrifices (studying frequently) to become one. People want things too easy. We as a society are suffering from this problem… maybe more so that our parents wanted our lives to be “easier” and nicer. Likewise we did the same for our kids and now their kids too.
I think the education system and parents are mostly at fault. Parents are too busy to be involved with their child’s progress and the education system makes things too easy and pass people who should otherwise stay behind due to monetary rewards schools get based on their “passing rate”.
Long term goal, reform public education, have absolute minimum standards, and have higher standards & frequent testing for teacher competency. Stress competency in the technical skills.
Short term goal to fix as much as possible now, bribe people who are in the work force with incentives like you say to get a better education / training to be more competitive… but not make this a permanent offer. Meaning, once the result of better education start entering in the work force, then kill the bribing.
I don’t fault business for what they are doing, this is what we as a society have offered them. I do agree that it has now gotten to a point where business would rather perpetuate things as they are now because it’s oh so easy. Doing the right thing can mean personal and financial sacrifices. If we as a culture won’t do it, why should you expect a business to do any differently?
Hmmm, odd. Last two posts are off by one number… I meant 76, not 75.
78—Ok, what in your mind is the distinction between capitalism, fair market arms-length negotiation about employment terms VERSES bribe?
I mean this humorously, do you see how you push the straw man argument to the extreme AGAIN? Not that you can’t think/argue any way you want to.
But in any case, that is what free market capitalism is all about==yes, bribing people to get the work done. Now, as a corporate welfare advocate ((I’ll argue as you do for equal standing)), all you have to do is lobby Congress to pass laws encouraging kiddies to go to engineer school===a call to greatness, Ask not what your country can do for you……….
You can blame the parents for kiddies not wanting to be coal miners under your theory. Pay what it takes, and you get what you need.
#61 – The number of domestic engineers we are graduating has slowly been shrinking.
I didn’t realize “housewife” was offered in a Bachelor’s program.
#65 – Instead we are a society that hands credit cards out to 18 year old kids who have absolutely no financial discipline and completely buy into the marketing of instant gratification, run their credit limit up, have revolving credit, live paycheck to paycheck, and then whine that we are not being paid enough when a little financial discipline would have helped to prevent much of this.
We also have a society that fails to provide any training of any kind.
How does a credit card actually work?
How does a mortgage work?
How do taxes work?
What is revolving credit?
What’s a fixed rate vs. a variable rate and what should I choose?
How do credit ratings work?
What are 401Ks?
These questions and more should be required course material in every high school in America, and you should not graduate until you pass this.
We praise the free market and blame consumers for every tragedy that befalls them, but we send our children into this chaos like lambs to a slaughter.
We give them bullshit advice like “work hard and follow the rules and you’ll be successful” (which is rarely true) but we never tell them the how and why of the machine’s inner working.
Arm the kids with knowledge and maybe that will stem the tide for some of them.
80. I can see why you’re misunderstanding that I’m somehow using a strawman argument, but I”m not refuting what you’re saying. Yes, I’m exaggerating your use of the word “incentives” by calling them bribes, but that’s hardly going to the extreme when all I am saying is I personally do not feel it is businesses’ responsibility to offer more incentives outside of great pay and benefits over other job fields. I’m not interested in lobbying Congress to push an engineering curriculum, but I am saying our education system should be re-evaluated and have many of its weaknesses fixed. We are losing our competitive edge and the “balance of power” is tiliting away from us.
81. 🙂 Funny
83. Agreed on graduation requirements. That being said, you don’t need to have financial displine taught at a school to know what it is and how it works. Don’t spend more than what you make. Treat a credit card as a loan that you pay back with interest if you don’t pay it off on the 1st bill.
I agree that this H1B visa matter is a mess, but we got there because of a shortage we as a society allowed to happen IMHO. It needs to be fixed as the individual from #3 eloquently illustrated.
There are plenty of jobs around if you’re willing to relocate. Some people refuse to do that. If you’re that hard up, work at a corporation that does business with the military. At least then your chances are pretty good since the DOD doesn’t like non-citizens working on military projects for obvious reasons. If you have political reasons for not working at such a place, well I guess you have to pick your battles.
I would be HIGHLY in favor of the things you suggest to be graduation requirements, but to those who didn’t get that and are in the work force now, suck it up and deal with it. Learn to adapt so you can improve yourself and don’t dwell on the fact that someone wants to hire a non-citizen over you. Government isn’t the answer to making life more fair. There are jobs out there, but if a person is struggling to get one, I have to wonder if that person is being too picky over the job, or too insistant on location.
I don’t know about the rest of you but, I have traveled a bit and watched TV plenty; America is still the richest country in the world. Is it unethical to find ways around a law, yes. But, it is also unethical to only allow Americans to play ball in world economics, and that is just what we have done for so many years.
Most people I have met are political hypochondriacs, they constantly think the economy is falling apart and it just hasn’t happened over the last 50 years. We have become more and more powerful.
I was in Peru two years ago and the infrastructure is a joke compared to ours. I am not talking about leather couches and sports cars, I am talking about the lack of paved roads, telephone/internet, electricity, and hospitals. The United States has so much money, that we don’t know what to do with it, so we sit around and argue like this on a board for fun.
I am a tech guy just like many of the people on this forum and I like doing it, but I don’t have the right to do it, just because I want to. If that were the case, we could all be professional artists and musicians. Wage labor is about supply and demand and if the demand is lowered for Americans, because we want to much money, either do it better than a foreigner or change what you do based on demand. I am sorry, we don’t have the right to do what we want and expect somebody to pay us for it, there are plenty of other smart people in the world that will do it for less.
I am sorry, but we can’t make laws against every little thing we don’t like. Capitalism is part of the philosophy of this country and I have the right to keep what I make, but if others don’t want to buy it, than I have to make something else to survive.