He’s six months in and like ⅔ of the way through his campaign promises. And that’s with standing against ICE and dealing with both an extreme winter and and extreme summer. He defeated multiple establishment-backed candidates. And he’s managed to do this all without any major scandal.

Plus, if this is a psyop by the right, it’s absolutely backfiring. Mamdani is showing the electorate how a government can work for its people. That’s good for people, but terrible for the establishment.

I realize where the cynicism comes from, but “just don’t change” is always true right up until it isn’t.

And then the other half, too, of course.

I tend to agree, but the internet amplifies polarization. Not a great thing for discourse.

That’s…literally what I’m saying with this comment.

They keep saying we’re going to get left behind, but then they never actually leave.

I’m kinda thinking that by the time we get done with the other 11,000 (a thousand more happened between your comment and mine), Anthropic won’t be much of a going concern anymore.

Sure. But this is one of those stories that hits right down the middle in places like Lemmy: it’s a fascist government causing harm to a company with a long history of anti-human operation. It’s a total sweating-guy-two-buttons meme situation: “Trump is a fascist” vs “And Nothing Of Value Was Lost.” Seems like most people are picking a side. I think we shouldn’t.

If there were any sane Republicans, DeWine comes the closest, I think. The Overton Window has moved so far that a lot of MAGAts in Indiana call him a socialist.

It’s possible to not like AI and what it’s doing to society and the planet but also to be concerned about executive overreach and corrupt abuse of power.

I still remember people telling me the country needed Trump because it needed to be run like one of his businesses. “You mean used as a half-assed vehicle for his own vanity that gets stripped for parts and then driven into bankruptcy the moment he loses interest?”

Seriously, the man failed to sell alcohol, meat, and gambling. Those have been three of the four easiest things to turn a profit on for most of human history (and he doesn’t have the body for the fourth). If you gave me a distillery, a beef farm, and a casino, I would be a millionaire inside a couple of years—and I’m the worst salesman I know. And somehow he also became a millionaire after starting all three of those businesses, which is decidedly less of a flex for someone who started out as a billionaire.

“Their turd sandwich has vegetables in it” doesn’t excuse the fact that they took the ham sandwich off the menu entirely.

I just realized I didn’t address the three year limit. Sure, they’re only saving $50k over the term of the visa now. But they’re gambling that the visa situation will be more favorable in three years, or that the job market will be in such shambles that they can afford to cut pay across the board, or replace people with AI, or whatever. It doesn’t just save them $50k, it lets them defer that cost for three years, which is three years that money can be earning interest for them. Plus, if they write it down as compliance or governmental fees or whatever, I believe there are beneficial tax implications.

Exactly. The root of the problem isn’t cheap overseas labor, it’s that companies and billionaires have the money to do whatever they want regardless of the cost.

Is it, though? If the big companies causing this problem are just ignoring the cost, and the small companies that might actually need to bring people in from overseas for legitimate reasons can’t afford to pay it, is it doing more good than harm?

There’s an Ethiopian restaurant in my old neighborhood that was very clearly run by a couple who used it as a way to get their cousins and friends out of Ethiopia in the '80s and '90s. They wouldn’t be able to do that with a $100,000 visa fee; that’s more than the restaurant makes in a year, after expenses.

And I’ve known a couple of people who have some very specific, very niche skill sets that aren’t taught at trade schools in the US; skills like scientific glassblowing, which small companies disproportionately need more than big companies. When the previous guy retires from the job, the company has to decide whether to outsource the production, hire someone to move from overseas, or exit a product line entirely (maybe going out of business in the process). When a $100,000 visa fee is introduced, their options are decreased by one. When there are also insane tariffs, their options decrease even further.

So no, I’d argue that charging them $100,000 is objectively worse than charging them nothing. It doesn’t harm the companies that are abusing the system, and it harms or even kills the companies for whom the H1B was originally created.

That’s another great point. There are a lot of knock-on effects from this, just like there are from tariffs. (Honestly it is a tariff, just levied on people immigrating rather than goods importing)

Sure, in theory. But they’re not pulling people over here for a year or two. They’re getting them over here for several years, and every year they keep them on is another $50k saved.

But on the other end, you have small businesses who need specialized labor that’s not available in the US. Or family businesses who want to bring other family members from out of the country and hire them to work for their little mom-and-pop shop, to further help bring their family out of poverty. Neither were likely to hire anyone local to do the job, and the $100k might be everything the business earns in a year after expenses.

So the $100k fee does nothing to curb the onshoring of cheap labor by big companies who are causing the problem you want to solve, but it completely kills the ability of people in developing nations or people here who are trying to do right by their community to hire anyone who doesn’t already have the right to work in the US.

I just said, in the very comment you’re replying to, that an additional fee doesn’t do that. Even if the goal is a good one, this isn’t an effective way to do it. $100,000 is a pittance to any company big enough to be importing overseas labor in the first place. Even if it wasn’t, it’s absolutely worth it for them to pay $100k now in exchange for getting a $50k per year discount on labor for that role.

Except $100,000 is a pittance to any company big enough to be importing cheap labor in the first place. These are companies that shrug off billion-dollar fines, they have $100k in the executive boardroom couch cushions, so it’s absolutely worth it for them to pay $100k to the government in exchange for getting a $50k per year discount on labor for that role.

I assume you think this was a good idea because it encouraged businesses to hire locally rather than hiring internationally. But really all it did was ensure that large companies (rather than immigration officials) were in charge of deciding who was and wasn’t allowed to work in the United States. Rather than improving overall employment, it just reinforced oligarchy.

I feel like if you’re writing the sentence “an optional, paid version of our browser that offers Brave […] without its extra features,” you need to sit back and take a long, hard look at yourself.