What's sad is that unionizing will accelerate whatever the decline of the company is causing the dissatisfaction. Wiser for employees to just jump ship or found a new game studio when this kind of decline happens.
The chances of a company turning around are super low, adding a union makes it harder. Just run.
It does seem that long term Europe should be segregated from the www.
For small entities Euro compliance is impossible. Say for Michigan's largest Mustang parts website. Euro's often respond this they would never bother and their targets are big tech, but illegal and not prosecuted is not the same as legal. And it is telling that the law doesn't say "this only applies to corps with more the 100 million in Euro revenue". It applies to all companies and individuals. It should be possible for such a site to "opt out of Europe" and have safe harbor.
And there is no way it makes sense for the whole world's web to be regulated by a Euro court. There is no reason for a user in the US to see GDPR banners.
Maybe a great firewall to id Europe users, and if you use a vpn to escape it US law doesn't recognize it as valid.
Propane is a good alternative, especially for the home cook. With good ventilation, charcoal is an option too. Both can actually be hotter that the standard or pro gas stove.
Anyone actually done this with normal stock options (NSO if it matters) and have advice? My understanding is that it might be achievable with Pensco as the IRA custodian but I'd be interested in hearing how it worked in practice
Nope, you've linked to a media piece and a law journal article.
The economists did all the math, they actually thought of your 1) and 2) and other things besides. (Both the middle and high wage H1-B immigrants helped.)
They usually (not every single time) find that immigrants benefit native workers, that's low, medium, and high skill immigrants. They both increase the number of jobs AND the average wage.
The "abuse" of the H1-B program you mention is also helping even though you are correct that it is against the intent of the program. You almost certainly owe several of your gigs to H1-B immigrants, time when you would have otherwise been on the beach or working at a lower wage.
I know this goes against almost everything you've ever heard. It's counterintuitive. Like treating cancer with radiation, using a back fire to stop a wildfire, or that adding more software devs to a late project will make it later.
You want to look for something like "this poll of economists says that more immigration is bad for the US". "This poll of economics nobel prize winners say that while high skill immigration is good, medium skill immigration is bad". "This survey article of economics immigration articles finds that 70% of papers agree: middle skill immigration lowers wages". You will not find much.
For example these polls of economists say that high skill immigration is super good, but low skill immigration is only pretty good.
As patriotic American who cares for their fellow citizens and also out of self interest you should say "we should really crank up the H1-B program and let a lot more skilled immigrants in".
This is perfect, this is exactly what I'm arguing against!
Does this statement also seem true?
"It is hard to believe so many * economists * don't "get it". You cannot inflate the supply of labor, regardless of the means, and get a good result for the average working stiff."
What do we think economists are doing with all their data sets and papers and conferences and stuff?
From 1974 (they don't have data before that) to 2000, real mean personal income goes from 32K to 43K. [1], that's for individuals. The graph is useful to look at.
This is complex, for example there are also more single parent / single person households which tends to lower household incomes.
The startups I've worked for, co created with coworkers who had H1-B visas (and green cards) created a lot of IT consulting gigs. We might even have hired you. This is as we went from 40 to 400 employees. Those H1-B visa holders created gigs for you to work. Even the consulting gigs you are competing for and losing are creating more consulting gigs later on. You are counting those right?
It's not simple, your intuition gained from media stories is not correct. You should instead read what economists say, they usually find that native wages and jobs are increased by immigrants.
Just think about how many dumb stories the media writes about stuff you actually do understand. Like - is your usual biggest project risk really hacking? Nope, it's the 50% chance a software project won't succeed at all.
Part of the problem is that the media loves writing outrage stories. Training your own replacements is a perfect story for that. A journalist will write that story. Every. Single. Time.
Take the story "this 40 person team with 3 H1-B employees, is now a 400 person team". Each of those H1-B employees created 10 jobs + some extra jobs at other companies. This (roughly) has happened to me twice, there will never be a news article about that.
The original bit was just a plea to not use the intuition we get from news stories, and look to economists instead.
This kind of thread attracts people who are very easily influenced by outrageous media stories like that. They are very confused. It seems so obvious to them that we could just stop immigration and stop bad things from happening. They are super angry that no one is doing anything to solve this obvious problem. What they don't understand is that really no one is fixing it because when you look closely it's not a problem at all.
HN can be a place were people think about real hard problems and talk about how to solve them, I hope it can be more like that. (This is a fake problem.) The world needs people who face up to reality and try to improve it.
Your coworkers, company, customers, friends, and family are all greatly improved by your work and presence. Long term I hope that wins out.
At every level, high skilled, medium skilled, and low skilled, immigrants tend to increase jobs and wages for natives. This is the rough consensus of economists.
There is lots of work to make this even more true, of the flavor "ok if we are only bringing in 1 million immigrants, who does this best". H1-B and student visas a consequence of that thinking.
I did find personal income growth from 1974 on. That gets rid of the 2 income household problem. I think maybe they only surveyed households til 1974.
From 1974 to 2000, real mean personal income goes from 32K to 43K. [1]. The graph is useful to look at.
I do think some of the story is that most compensation gains went to benefits, especially our crazy expensive health care (again 5% to 18.2% of gdp). So the hourly wages stayed the same, but benefits went up. I think the original point, that more workers did not lower income, still holds.
Really I can't do an Econ Phd to respond to this thread. So I'll outsource to economists, who say more workers do not lower income.
The workforce grew, look at the link and table 5. Basically woman and minorities joined the workforce. Worker to population ratio went up and the total number of workers went up faster than the growth in population.
GDP per capita is $59,531. So .1-.3% of that is $60-179. For every man, woman, and child in the United States. $19-58 billion per year. This is value created, money from thin air, you don't have to tax anyone to give $120 to everyone in the United States every single year.
If you know something else that good, you should let us all know. Economists and policy makers scrounge around for stuff that's not a tenth as good as that. 333-1000 things this size make up every single dollar anyone in the United States has ever had. That's all the light bulbs, car makers, services and food you've ever seen.
GDP is the perfect thing to look at, it's our national income.
My claim is "economics is complicated", so we should listen to economists. Then I put in a link to what some economists say to give the flavor.
You can go adventuring for yourself. Look for papers from the federal reserve, university economics blogs, and academic journals. You can just read the abstracts. You will find a very clear consensus.
I am also explicitly saying that the media and even high quality media like the Nytimes will leave you with very bad intuition about the effects of immigration.
That's super interesting, I didn't know that about hourly wages. I tend to think of income gaining from 1950 to 1990 and flattening from the mid 1990s to now.
Though it does look like total compensation (adding in benefits) did actually increase recently, they don't have anything for back to 1960. So maybe the story is that wages stayed flat, but benefits accounted for most of the income increase. Not an economist so I don't know how to tease this out.
Heath care does go up from 5% of gdp in 1960 to 18.2% today, maybe most compensation gain is going there? Plus retirement benefits.
But... from 1960 to 2000 the civilian labor force increased from 70 million to 141 million [1]. With all those new workers, by your link, compensation didn't actually shrink. That's weird huh? Also real median family income grew from $41K to $72K [2].
And sure 10 million software engineers added to SV tomorrow would lower wages. But maybe not long term? If it was 10 million countrywide? What would an economist or a careful wage survey say? Anyway we're talking about 85,000 jobs all over the country.
The main point of my comment is that when economists spend 10 years looking at data and arguing out every detail, they conclude that immigration is increasing jobs and increasing wages. They usually conclude that for specific wage markets too.
Maybe we can't rely on some anecdotes in the media to refute their conclusions?
That's the section where they acknowledge that, yes, people lose jobs to immigrants. They go on to say that actually more people gain jobs at higher wages because of immigrants.
There's a section on high tech jobs to read too, take a look.
Most people believe that immigrants generally lower wages and take jobs. They almost never do. Economists who have done hundreds of studies on different wage markets have found that immigrants create more jobs and raise wages in most cases.
Also in the paper? "... how does immigration affect the average American?...annual economic gains to the native-born population to be between 0.1 and 0.3 percent of gross domestic product". This is an astonishingly large benefit. Some estimate that switching completely to self driving cars would add .2% to gdp a year. It's that big a gain. Almost no other policy we can think of has this great an effect. Our current gdp growth is at 2%.
It's not unusual to be wrong about this, there aren't more than 5 people at any major newspaper who understand that immigrants create jobs. 95% of news stories you have ever read get this wrong.
Add to that the media always going for max outrage, and you get stories about workers being replaced. Never stories about the workers that immigrants added.
Btw, H1-B workers are not magic, an American worker is creating complementary jobs too. This is why cities have such high wages, the high density of complementary labor.
And hey, when have you ever known software to not create the need for more software :0)
Yep, totally where I was going with that. One H1-B guy I worked with did in fact become a founder of a small successful firm, but that was after he got a green card.
I think we've lost out on a few billion dollar startups and awesome inventions by locking people to the H1-B job they got hired for.
Because San Francisco sales tax is 8.63 and something the costs 1 dollar is really 1.083. And I would like 91.7 bach cents when I give 2 dollars.