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.

iirc, paintball marker is slightly translucent, right? So maybe like…a sticker?

So you’re saying that despite them excluding them now, they’ll include them later, but it doesn’t matter because it’s open source…?

I mean, I don’t disagree that it doesn’t matter, but why would they go to all the effort of excluding them now just to include them later?

Sure, but the more you pack into a small probe that’s explicitly supposed to get wet and hot, the more likely something inside is going to dramatically fail and leach some sort of terrible something into your food and cost you hundreds of dollars to replace every time it died. A bimetallic strip wrapped in teflon, completing a simple circuit, and plugged in by a heat-resistant cable to your range/hob/cooktop would be easier, cheaper, and less likely to kill you.

Rice cookers do this, in a very simple way! They operate under four basic facts:

1. Assuming you’ve added the correct amount of water, rice is cooked when all the water has boiled away.

2. Water’s temperature can’t go over 100°C. After that, any additional energy goes toward boiling it away.

3. The temperature of cooked rice and air, without water, can go over 100°C.

4. Metals of different elements expand at different rates under different temperature conditions.

So the water gets up to temperature and begins to boil. As it boils away, it cooks the rice. Once it’s all gone, the temperature of the cooked rice (and thus the cooker) begins to rise above 100°; when it does, one half of a strip of two metals touching the cooker expands further than the other, bending the strip, breaking a contact, and opening the switch, which turns off the heating element.

Expanding beyond this very simple mechanism is absolutely possible! But the more configurable you want the temperature to be, the more expensive it gets. I bet the simplest way to do this would be to have a few different little probes you can clip to the inside of the pan, one for each temperature you might want to keep a pan at. Inside each would be a bimetallic strip calibrated to that temperature.

Cute. Obviously he can fool his base, but I’m up for anything that makes them turn on him.

Honestly I wonder if this is why the amendment is being suggested. AI products in particular are likely to be interacting with a lot of websites that will be required to verify ages, and I’m sure California in particular is loath to make waves that might throw that revenue stream into doubt.

I think you’re missing the fact that open source OSes are explicitly excluded in the version of the law that’s currently being discussed.

The thing is, you don’t have to be smart to become a part of the ruling class. You just have to be somewhere in the triangle of smart, lucky, and immoral. To be a billionaire, you just have to be lucky and immoral.

For people who have been there for a while, remember that there’s almost certainly an internal propaganda campaign trying to refute any negative stories that come out about Meta. I’ve heard enough from people who have interacted with Meta employees to know that it’s almost a cult; and when you’re getting paid twice a month, it probably doesn’t feel as toxic and more transactional. That probably makes it more of a frog-boiling than it would seem from the outside; even smart people can get taken in by a cult.

People who have started more recently, though, have less of an excuse.

Unless you physically go to the state department office in DC, you’re fine. All online renewals and all other branches use the old design.

Yeeesss. Eat each other. Dooooo it.