Post-Jobs Apple seems paralyzed and unable to commit to any big moves.
It is impossible to overstate the success of the iPhone, but there are so many recent examples where they dipped their toes in only to fail or be left behind (autos, VR, AI, etc).
What will the next 20 years of Apple look like? Just more iPhones?
I'm not surprised, but I think it's fair to find it upsetting. It's a twofold loss: A loss of competition in all markets that Apple monopolizes, and a loss of everybody working towards protecting that golden goose instead of actually improving the product.
Costco's genius is in building and maintaining trust with their members.
In the age of private equity takeovers and the MBA-enshitification of pretty much every product and service, Costco appears to be the only retailer that will stand on the side of their members against those forces.
They are playing the long game--which will pay off incredibly well for them as fewer and fewer companies care about customer satisfaction and quality.
I’m completely against factory farming, confinement barns, etc and always avoid meat produced this way.
But I do wonder what you mean when you say “cruelty” in the context of cattle.
Having lived in/around rural livestock production most of my life, I can tell you that most cattle operations I am familiar with take excellent care of the their animals. Minimizing stress is absolutely a top goal for them.
Pork, on the other hand, is almost always produced in a horrifying, cruel way. Confinement barns are terrible in every sense of the word. Pigs are treated without respect from cradle to grave.
It depends on the laws of your country, but here in Canada, you can't slaughter cows on your farm. They have to be transported, often long distances, to a slaughterhouse. Slaughterhouses, and the metal box that brings them there, aren't very nice places for a cow.
As far as I understand the $100k fee applies only to consulate issued H1Bs. L1 -> H1B path (via AOS) is possible without fee. (Recent) US university graduates can also use similar path from what I understand.
We will see how much the $100k fee affects things during this H1B lottery round in few weeks.
> Only about 70 employers have paid a $100,000 Trump fee on H-1B workers from outside the US since it was imposed through a September White House proclamation, a government attorney said Thursday.
I think a lot of people have just moved to L1/O1/etc visas to get around it as OP pointed out, although a lot of people are still hiring H1B's. Amazon has applied for over 2000 H1B's so far this year, which puts them on track for ~7000 for the year https://www.uscis.gov/tools/reports-and-studies/h-1b-employe...
We have hit the cap for H1B's every year and we will always do so until we get rid of the program. Cheap labor will always be in demand.
A 100k one-time fee is nothing for big employers. That's 25k/year for 4 years, and if you realize that H1B's can't easily leave their job it's obviously worth it.
Compare hiring an H1B that is stuck at their job, to an American who can leave at any time. You can pay the H1B a lower wage to compensate for the fee you paid to get them into the role. 25k/year for 4 years is worth it for not only the reduced churn that comes with training a new person, but also you don't have to pay any of the incentives that come with getting a new employee into the role like sign-on bonuses, wage bumps, benefits etc.
There's an X account which just posts universities hiring H1B's for ~half of what it would normally cost to hire people. An 80k/yr senior software developer will always be in demand, especially if the team is already predominantly non-american
Universities typically are in the public sector side of the equation... and the public sector doesn't pay any non-administrative role the Big Tech rate.
$80k/y isn't "we're paying H1-B half of what the going rate is" but rather "the state legislature has set this pay scale and we're paying everyone that amount" ... And many times, H-1B visas aren't eligible to work in those roles.
> Universities typically are in the public sector side of the equation... and the public sector doesn't pay any non-administrative role the Big Tech rate.
There's absolutely no reason government couldn't pay competitive rates for software engineers. They do it for doctors and administrators of state-owned medical centers. Not to mention football coaches
Football coaches are revenue generating for universities... software developers at universities not so much. Doctors are licensed professionals that have a decade of schooling... software developers frequently reject licensure and celebrate their lack of a formal education.
But there's no reason they couldn't just pay them more. The way to make them pay more is to force them to hire applicants at market rate, and when that's impossible, they'll go to the state legislature. Allowing for the H1B loophole is the problem universities are too eager to abuse
Exactly. The fact that H1B's get paid less than Americans across the board is all you really need to know about the issue. There IS no reasonable counter argument.
It's supposedly a program for importing the best and brightest talent that doesn't exist in the US but somehow those best and brightest people get paid LESS than their American counterparts? It was never about the best and brightest it was always about bringing in cheap labor that can't leave.
Sadly I don't think we'll ever fix it either, right leaning industrialists support it because they benefit from cheap labor, and the left leaning politicians get to continue importing people who overwhelmingly vote for them. As usual the loser in the equation is the middle class American worker.
How many H1B visa holders become citizens eligible to vote for those "left leaning politicians?"
I don't think having an H1B helps you accelerate your citizenship application in anyway, and for many countries the wait for legal citizenship is decades long.
You didn't answer the question at all. Getting an H1B visa is merely the first step in a very long process towards citizenship. Decades long. For example, if you're from India and you get an H1B, it'll be roughly a decade before you can get a green card. From then you have a mandatory 5 year waiting period before naturalization. And this assumes a normal, functioning immigration process; something we definitely don't have in the US.
This can be sped up if they marry a US citizen, speeding up the process quite a bit, but it will still be several years. Now their children would be citizens, but that's another 18 years before they can vote. Politicians aren't known for playing the long game...
>Politicians aren't known for playing the long game
There are plenty of politicians who have played the long game, also political parties take actions on longer time scales than individual politicians. Stances that politicians take on issues often come down from the party anyway. Many politicians don't care about many issues, but they vote based on their party's stance. The blue party is staffed with all types of people, many of whom will live to reap the benefits of changed demographics.
Heck many politicians are still in office 18 years later! Look at Nancy Pelosi, she was in office for 38 years. That's multiple batches of anchor babies.
It's not that long of an investment. We have seen this entire country go from 99% white in most places to below 50% in most places, in ONE generation and that change is clearly visible in national elections.
I mean just look at the data, it's a story that tells itself. One party does indeed benefit from increasing diversity and they are also the party that coincidentally spends a lot of time working on initiatives to increase diversity.
It seems that you are using the term "Great Replacement" as a tactic to dismiss the argument and all the data by which it is supported because you have no real counter argument.
I also did say that the other side benefits from importing cheap labor. Which is why both parties seem to do very little to slow immigration no matter which is in power, despite overwhelming demand from their constituents to slow immigration.
> The fact that H1B's get paid less than Americans across the board is all you really need to know about the issue.
Except this is literally false. Every single study I’ve seen that claims this has no real evidence - just speculation without knowing the details of the jobs or the people being hired, based on their own self-serving false comparisons to make dubious claims that similar jobs are paid differently.
Since you said “across the board”, do you think Google or Amazon pay a software engineer at the starting level differently based on immigration status? No, they don’t. Literally every manager at big tech could tell you this confidently.
I have worked at Apple for a decade, H1B's absolutely do get paid less. We have many H1B's that literally just sit around and push buttons and file bug reports, and barely know how to code. Some of them can't code at all. Ofc some of them are good engineers, but they are not even in the majority.
There is plenty of data to back this up.
>A total of 60% of all H-1B jobs are assigned wage levels that are well below the local median wage.
The EPI report is one of the commonly cited baseless reports. Dig in a level beyond their press claims and you’ll find no real method behind it that justifies their claims, because they have no actual way to compare one worker to another to know they’re equivalent and comparable for the purpose of compensation.
As for your claims about Apple - I am guessing you aren’t a manager and don’t know about how their pay scale works. I’m not doubting your claims about the quality of some workers - although I bet you’ll find plenty of non immigrant people not doing work as well. But I know the claim on pay is wrong, once you adjust for performance ratings and levels.
We have moved far-away from the notion of a factory work who's labour can easily be traced to the output.
I think in general we have to question what work one does - not in a negative way - I think its healthy to do so. Standard economic models and thinking are pretty dated and don't really reflect reality as the world of work evolves.
H1Bs are not cheap labor. They’re almost always pricier than the alternative to the company. This is a myth that is ultimately rooted in racism more than facts. Most of the top H1B filers - big tech companies in particular - pay literally identically for the same job. They have fixed pay structures internally, in part because if you don’t, you could face discrimination lawsuits - but mostly to just not lose the competition for talent.
But the cost to the company isn’t the cost of the pay anyways. It’s also the cost in lost time of the H1B process, the fees you pay as part of the process, the costs of law firms you have to hire, the cost of time delays, the risk of the immigration process not working out. Those work out to a lot more value than 25K/year.
An H1B is also not stuck in their job - you can transfer H1Bs.
I do not see how the facts you present call into question the basic logic that as you increase the availability of a commodity, say labour, you anticipate its price to diminish. All of the immigrant workers could be better-compensated and more productive than all of the American workers, and still their presence could drive the price of labour for native workers in that sector down. E.g., if there is a shortage of repairmen certified to fix some medical equipment, introducing a glut of new repairmen who are even more productive will fail to reduce the compensation of the incumbents only in exceptional circumstances.
People applying for H1B visas are getting partially compensated in the right to legally reside in the US rather than in money. The right to legally reside in the US is something that a lot of foreigners want badly, and are willing to accept otherwise-poor compensation for; and by definition it is not something you can pay an American citizen with.
Why is the company getting to pay their employee with that legal-residence-value and therefore get a discount on compensation?
The cleaner approach is the immigrant has to pay that value in visa expenses, taxes, or something else; while the company should have to pay market rate for the position.
I'm not trying to downplay their accomplishments, but how much of their scientific advances from the 40s-60s were due to capturing ex-Nazi tech (and scientists) or stealing from the US via their incredible intelligence efforts?
They definitely supported a lot of their rocket science from found documentation in Peenemünde et. al. (The personnel OTOH did its best not to fall into Soviet hands, and most of them ended in America, even though some didn't make it and were captured by the Soviets.)
They had genuine excellency in mathematics and theoretical physics. First, those specializations didn't require much expensive or advanced equipment back then. Second, by their very nature, they were freer from ideological bullshit than other specializations, and that alone attracted many of the best and brightest there.
(I can confirm that even in late-stage Communist Czechoslovakia, very hard sciences were considered an intellectual haven for non-conformists. The ideologues didn't understand them and did not consider them subversive per se.)
On the other hand, biology was under full tyranny of Lysenko et. al. and "bourgeoise geneticists" would get imprisoned in concentration camps and even executed or starved to death. As a result, Soviet biology never recovered to a respectable science again, not even after Lysenko lost his power.
Until today, you will find ex-Soviet textbooks of maths and physics all over the net, and people actually download them and use them to study. That does not apply in most other domains.
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On the other hand, biology was under full tyranny of Lysenko et. al. and "bourgeoise geneticists" would get imprisoned in concentration camps and even executed or starved to death. As a result, Soviet biology never recovered to a respectable science again, not even after Lysenko lost his power.
This holds for "pure" biology. On the other hand, for medicine, in the East Block phage therapy was intensively developed (which in the West was barely done; instead in the Western countries there was an intense development of antibiotics).
"In the Soviet Union, extensive research and development soon began in this field. [...]
Isolated from Western advances in antibiotic production in the 1940s, Soviet scientists continued to develop already successful phage therapy to treat the wounds of soldiers in field hospitals. During World War II, the Soviet Union used bacteriophages to treat soldiers infected with various bacterial diseases, such as dysentery and gangrene. Soviet researchers continued to develop and to refine their treatments and to publish their research and results. However, due to the scientific barriers of the Cold War, this knowledge was not translated and did not proliferate across the world."
I don't know why you are getting downvoted. As a simple example of practical biology in USSR, the Eastern Bloc basically invented modern doping programs.
I'd rather call this research medical science, and with some exceptions (the Doctor's Plot during the last year of Stalin's paranoid rule), medical science tended to be less policed than biology, because even the top dogs of the Party knew that they could fall ill and require top treatment.
Unlike with Lysenko, where shortages of food for the regular population never demonstrated themselves on the nomenklatura's own dinner tables, there was some feedback mechanism that could not be ignored.
But I agree that the exact border between biology and medical science is murky.
You might be interested to check out the Viennese model - Approximately 220,000 municipal flats and 200,000 subsidized dwellings form the backbone of Vienna's housing system, housing about 50% of the population.
Prices in Vienna are so much more affordable than in comparable European cities - Munich, Hamburg, Berlin to speak of Germany, not to say Madrid, Paris, Barcelone, Milano.
UBI is perfect tool to make citizens obey to state. You'll always vote for your breadwinners.
Why, instead of centralised planned economy that failed ans killed millions people many times in history, not just lowering taxes and let people to decide how spend their capital individually? Game theory applied on UBI sounds really like an ugly idea.
UBI is the opposite of centralized planning. Instead of the state deciding what resources people need, and who “deserves” help, it leaves it up to individuals to decide how best to divvy up resources, and everybody gets it.
As for tools that make citizens obey, the government already has the best one: a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Everything else is child’s play compared to that.
Because lower income levels in the USA are so low that a substantial number of people do not even pay federal income tax at all. Consequently, "lowering taxes" does not deliver any money to those people. A tax credit would, but this is more or less semantically equivalent to an actual payment such as UBI.
At the federal level, in terms of general purpose taxation? Not really. Capital gains? Even less people pay that. Fuel taxes, aviation taxes etc. are not general purpose taxes.
About 20% of the world's oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz, which is effectively closed right now. So far, the economy is coping by drawing down inventories elsewhere and praying that the strait reopens soon, but even then, crude oil futures are skyrocketing (up 50% in a week). If this lasts for a few months--and if a few oil tankers get blown up in the crossfire--this is going to be a repeat of the 1970's oil embargo. There is also the worry that the war is going to end up targeting and destroying a significant chunk of oil production facilities in the region, which will persist the energy crisis well beyond the end of active hostilities.
Combine that with the fact that the war is being led by a senile idiot who is unable to articulate a strategic purpose for the war in the first place and being prosecuted by someone who thinks that war crimes are aspirational, and you begin to understand that there is actually little prospect of this being resolved anytime soon.
One potential knock-on impact of the strait being effectively closed, is that at some point the gulf states will be forced to shut-in production as local storage fills up and production can’t be exported. That combined with war damage to critical transport/export infrastructure will cause a lag where production can’t meet global demand even when the strait re-opens. Turning oil wells back on is not like flipping on a light switch.
Ignoring concerns about the wisdom of the war; there's about three directions this can go:
Fizzle out: Strait reopens cause Iran needs ocean shipping.
Continue as now: oil trade disrupted, but using lots of missiles and drones and things; increased munitions demand leads to increased manufacturing jobs.
Boots on the ground: oil trade reopened, long term quagmire, probably more munitions production.
The other Gulf States will now have to greatly increase military spending in order to protect their sea lines of communication against Iranian aggression. A lot of that spending will flow to US defense contractors. (I'm not claiming this is a good thing, just that it's inevitable.)
Not just oil but a lot of fertilizers goes through the strait as well, fertilizers that have to be applied at certain moments of the year. Missing a shipment by a few months will decimate crop yields across the world.
If you think food is expensive now, wait until fall!
Unrelated, Grapes of Wraith is a good read if you're looking for something to distract yourself with.
Iran's principle strategy is to impose severe economic consequences on the US and its allies, to tip the balance of resolve in their favour. This is easy for them to do, because closing vital shipping lanes and attacking energy infrastructure in the region is done at only the cost of a few drones -- whilst defending this is incredibly expensive. This asymmetry is the only one which is profoundly in Iran's favour, and their best strategy for forcing a diplomatic resolution. This is why they are attacking multiple US allies in the region.
The Iran war is symptomatic of what's to come. If the US/other major powers feel unconstrained to wage semi-limited disruptive conflicts at will - then the world will be much less stable.
Iran can close the straight of hormuz as retaliation, and there really isn't anything that can be done about it except for invasion. Other countries have similar capabilities or can acquire them readily. If Cuba wanted to close the gulf in retaliation for a US attack - they could, Denmark could lock the north sea to US shipping and naval traffic etc. etc.
Cuba has effectively zero capability to project military power beyond their territorial waters. They can't close the Gulf of Mexico or even credibly threaten to do so. They are in no way comparable to Iran. As an island nation with limited natural mineral resources they're also very vulnerable to blockade.
Shahed style drones are quite inexpensive, the straight between key west and cuba is only 90 miles. To my knowledge, it is practically impossible to destroy distributed shahed launchers from an air campaign alone.
To my knowledge it is practically possible to carpet bomb Cuba and just kill everyone on the island. And they have almost zero domestic manufacturing capacity to build long-range drones (or anything else).
turn it around. how is it possible that we interfere with a population, already inflamed with hatred because of past interference, and expect them to become moderate apolitical consumers. we kill more fathers, there will be more angry sons. that's been going on for more than 50 years. so no, it doesn't seem like there is any good outcome to be had by invading yet another country in the area and setting up another weak puppet government. what is the end game supposed to be here?
There's no end game. In foreign policy circles they refer to this as "mowing the grass". Whenever an adversary starts to become a credible threat then bomb them enough to knock them down a few notches and delay the problem. From a purely amoral geopolitical perspective this can be effective, although at tremendous human cost.
personally I think this is 'fair'. wave your stick around and threaten people and the community takes away your stick. But I don't really trust this administration to follow the wisdom of the elder Bush. it seems a situation primed to follow the course of the mideast wars of the last couple decades, where the US stayed purely for the reason of not wanting to own up to the obvious and attempt to force some kind of submission. I guess we can check in a couple weeks to see which way the wind the blowing.
The actual screenshot isn’t sent, some hash is generated from the screenshot and compared against a library of known screenshots of ads/shows/etc for similarity.
Not super tough to pull off. I was experimenting with FAISS a while back and indexed screenshots of the entire Seinfeld series. I was able take an input screenshot (or Seinfeld meme, etc) and pinpoint the specific episode and approx timestamp it was from.
> The actual screenshot isn’t sent, some hash is generated from the screenshot and compared against a library of known screenshots of ads/shows/etc for similarity.
this is most likely the case, although there's nothing stopping them from uploading the original 4K screengrab in cases where there's no match to something in their database which would allow them to manually ID the content and add a hash or just scrape it for whatever info they can add to your dossier.
I thought that similar inputs do not give similar hashes..but apparently that is cryptographic hashing. Locality-Sensitive Hashing methods (e.g. Perceptual hashing[1]) makes similar inputs have similar hashes.
I immediately did a little exploration for potential utility in neuroimaging analyses...not that anything was immediately obvious to me, but I love learning about things like this.
This is not a law to protect people, this is a law to protect entrenched special interests (Reservation and State-owned casinos).