As someone who used to work in contract recruiting, hiring requirements that made absolutely no sense and were fishing for H1-B eligibility were common. I'm still adamant about the idea that an H1 should be paid at least 120% of the average salary for the position at the hiring company. If it's THAT hard to hire an American, then clearly you should need to pay more for such rare expertise.

Trump is at least taking a step in the right direction by changing the H1-B lottery system to favor more highly paid and skilled candidates, but as you say to remove the current rampant abuse it should be made mandatory to pay more than the market rate for the position.

Personally I'd just scrap the H1-B program altogether, and let the free market sort it out. H1-B is almost as bad as simply exporting jobs via outsourcing. Laws should be made to benefit US citizens, not US companies and shareholders.

H1B is worse than exporting jobs via outsourcing. With outsourcing we are only competing with other countries for jobs, but with H1B we get to compete with other countries for housing (in our own towns) too.

With outsourcing it's basically impossible to compete since the country being outsourced to has lower salaries for a reason - because they have a lower cost of living and people can afford to accept lower salaries. If you are a US citizen facing US cost of living (housing, real estate taxes, college costs, healthcare, etc, etc), then how can you compete with someone who can afford to do the job for way less ?!

At least with the H1-B they are paying US taxes and spending at least something in the US economy, but outsourcing is also taking US corporate profits, mostly coming from US consumers, and sending it overseas to benefit a different country!

Trump has said that US companies should be more patriotic in their hiring, but nothing will happen without changes to the law or tax code.

>nothing will happen without changes to the law or tax code

Agreed. We need to incentivize the corporate behavior we want and disincentivize or ban the corporate behavior we don't want.

This has been an attack on democracy over 40 years in the making. Conservatives have been openly saying what they've wanted to do all the time, but most people thought there'd never be a moment where they'd actually have enough power to pull it off. Meanwhile, liberal politicians have and still are operating under the delusion that they don't have to pass laws when they gain power, they can merely cast feelings and hope that the courts will back that up.

There are still hundreds of thousands of journalists around the country who don't have ivy league educations and are getting paid a pittance to work in their fields. I once worked for a publisher which hired reporters making $12 an hour who easily worked over 60 hours a week. Big city reporters might push out a few stories a week. The small town people are cranking them out by the dozen, with about 3/4ths of their bylines being "<newpaper>" Staff so that people remain unaware of how understaffed these papers are.

Netflix wasn't launched in 2007. The streaming service was launched in 2007. Netflix as a company was founded in 97 and was ubiquitous by 2002. Why go to the movies and pay $100+ for a family when you could wait 4-6 months for the home release and get the movie mailed to your home? You could go out and buy a box of microwavable popcorn and a few bags of candy and still save 80 bucks.

And I'm fine with it. We've got trillions of dollars worth of companies that do very little but leech off of the rest of us and utilize the vast wealth they've accumulated to degrade our society in order to perpetuate their own existence.

I'm not going to argue against the veracity of what you're saying, but I would caution against cutting off our nose to spite our face.

I think what we're seeing is that there is obviously a need to rein in some of those corporate excesses you're alluding to, and try to protect the research core that we need to move the nation, and humanity in general, forward.

Given that they track you every inch of your route, it'd be a pain in the butt to attempt to fake it.

I've gotten a refund on food before because my driver picked up my food and then went spend a half hour in a gas station before returning to their route even though my home was 2 minutes away.

>Given that they track you every inch of your route, it'd be a pain in the butt to attempt to fake it.

Pain for a single app developer when no such app exists, but a spoofing app will dutifully draw anyone any number and length of travel.

I've had three doctors in the past year tell me that either I wasn't a candidate for cancer treatment because I was gonna die in the next 3 years anyway, or that my best bet was a liver and heart transplant.

All of them read the first page of my medical records upon being admitted to a hospital in January. Not a single one of them read anything after that and it shows. One of them was stricken and amazed that I was walking into his office without aid or an oxygen mask.

Gives me great confidence in their ability to pay attention to detail.

Just look at Louisiana for a second.

There are hispanic creoles, native american creoles, german creoles, italian creoles, so forth and so on. Because to be a Louisiana creole isn't to rely on any racial marker at all. It just signifies that your ancestors lived here at a particular time.

So if someone says that they're Cajun, not creole, they're lying to you. ALL cajuns, without exception, are creole.

And most people who claim to be Cajun are either not Cajun at all or they've mistaken their surname for being Cajun. Like a guy who told me I was wrong about a food item and he knew better because he's a Cajun, being a Champagne from Golden Meadow.

Only problem is that Champagne isn't a cajun surname. The Champagne family came over directly from France.

You might have seen Isaac Toups on TV hawking a cookbook. The Toups surname is actually German (originally spelled Dubs but the French authorities did their thing), and they landed in the US in 1718-19 in Biloxi, MS.

And so on, and so on...

I think that some "cajuns" would be more willing to call themselves creole if they knew that in addition to the native americans, the other group that saved their asses when they came to the territory were the German creoles. Those people had it far, far harsher than the Acadian disapora ever did. When they got to the territory, they were not allowed to use beasts of burden for a full decade. This means that when they were dropped off and told to go farm rice (which none of them had ever done before), they had to till their fields and deliver their product to New Orleans from the River Parishes, up to 60 miles away without horses. By the time the Cajuns got here, there were plenty of horses for working the land and other livestock that you were legally allowed to eat.

Anyway, that's just one little speck of a much larger ethnic pie.

You beat me to it. I definitely know Cajuns from Breaux Bridge with the last name Rees for example.

The registrar of births in Orleans Parish used to essentially blackmail several prominent families about how far back the black was in their birth certificates and lineage.

Where do coon-asses fit in this scheme?

Coonass is a pejorative that Cajuns from Louisiana received during WWII when they were asked to be translators for the French resistance. The language in Louisiana diverged into cajun French and Kouri Vini (creole French) over the 200 years since Louisiana was first colonized, so modern French didn't line up and there was still a bit of a language barrier. The French called these people connasse, which basically means stupid because of this, but the cajuns took it as a kind-hearted nickname and brought it back home with them. Many cajuns were and still are upset that the term is ever still used to refer to them because it's a coarse word they feel belittles their culture, so if you're in the company of them and you don't know how they'll react, you might want to wait until they bring it up.

I love this site, this is the second thing about louisiana culture i've learned in the past month by asking a question like this. The other one was that Cajun is derived from Acadian.

And i got to share that "creole" has many meanings, including the stuff that forms on the inside of a BBQ itself.