> Connect the dots. They fired American workers, brought in H1B’s from India while also increasing their offices in India. AI didn’t break Windows, cheaper labor and the effort to increase bottom line did.
It’s a little amusing that you bring up the current admin, without saying anything about the Biden admin in which the article timeframe occurs or the Obama admin that created a lot of the havoc we have now in personal health care.
Unfortunately, the U.S. has never had the best doctors in the world (outside of cancer treatment). Japan and Russia for example have much better healthcare. However, it has certainly gotten worse now that hospitals are taking advantage of the visa system and bringing over doctors/nurses from other countries to increase their own bottom line.
The regular cost increases are due to immigration (no insurance), medical coding system, and govt subsidies.
You would have to blow up the system and restart to make it affordable, but then that also means millions of jobs gone overnight, a historic market crash, and then no one would want to work in that field as pay would have to be substantially lower.
You also can’t go down the free healthcare route based on the above, along with govt being horrible with everything it touches that we would have a $50 trillion debt in a few years time.
Political games like this guy is playing drive me crazy, and then people believe him and don’t do any research.
This guy has a U.S. green card.
The letter from USCIS (immigration) is because he previously had a travel visa in his passport that is now invalid since he has a green card. He was claiming that he would protest the U.S. by entering on the visa rather than his green card - at the same time USCIS informed him that the visa was (correctly) being revoked (due to green card status)
If companies were looking for talent, 80% of H1B’s wouldn’t be from India, but from a much more diverse set of countries.
The fact is that India culture is much more so subservient, willing to work more for less pay, won’t unionize, don’t follow major US/Euro holidays, don’t care about work/life balance..etc. Like it or not, it’s nothing more than exploitation as cattle to increase bottom line and sold as increased output.
India is also very nepotistic and it might well be Indian managers already present in the US pushing for entry of their relatives, schoolmates and friends.
No no, your observation is that a large amount of (per your assessment) low-quality people are already being brought in.
This is completely unrelated to the question of whether the highest quality people are being brought in.
By analogy: "New York City doesn't have a lot of the greatest restaurants in the country because 90% of the restaurants in New York City are not that great."
It's just logically invalid.
And divorced from reality. There's a reason the top students in the world overwhelmingly come to study in the US (at least up until recently). The US's dominance on this and its downstream effects is absolutely unambiguous and it's frankly silly to suggest otherwise.
"We also have a lot of underqualified Indian H1Bs" is completely irrelevant.
So..a 401k
At least the 401k is pre-tax. This on the other hand is taxed on both ends. Maybe I am missing something, but I really don’t see the upside.
We wanted to keep the focus on (1) foundation VLMs and (2) open source OCR models.
We had Mistral previously but had to remove it because their hosted API for OCR was super unstable and returned a lot of garbage results unfortunately.
Paddle, Nanonets, and Chandra being added shortly!
MistralOCR works stably for me when first uploading the file to their server and then running the OCR. I also had some issues before when giving a URL directly to the OCR API, not sure if you're doing that?
How is this different than owning a house or a condo? A house you still pay property tax on the land. A condo you still pay an association fee. Both of which generally go up continually every year.
This is also not a surprise that they don’t own the land. At any time they can move their mobile home, unlike a house or condo. They fully know what they signed up for.
I pay about $2000 a year for property tax (It's in the boondocks). That's it. A land rent may be a big chunk of that every month. It varies a lot, so run the numbers.
A Condo owner owns the land and pays property tax and HOA fees, which can be steep, so there's land appreciation.
Why pay so much every month to get zero land equity and zero home maintenance?
Run some numbers. I did sometime back. And don't forget, these are microscopic lots. Barely room for a couple of storage shelves under a car awning.
The references say that the mobile homes depreciate, so they're not even worth moving, and landlords charge anyway. I linked to very short ones that bring up key issues.
The major difference is condominium associations are cooperatives, and mobile home parks are owned by a landlord while you are the tenant. The point that is being made is there's a trend for these landlords to become predatory.
In a condominium you are a member in the association that owns the common areas and have a voice. The board is other people who own condominiums there, and will at least try to do things in the best interest of the condominium owners.
Many people don’t understand that insurance companies only make an 8-12% margin. Since each state requires all insurance companies to gain pricing approval to sell in their state (Filings), if healthcare costs go up within a given year the insurance company loses money. We don’t have an insurance issue, we have a healthcare and inflation cost issue. Same goes with home insurance.
What many don’t know: if you don’t like your insurance cost, it’s because of state legislation and cost in YOUR state - not federal govt.
"We don’t have an insurance issue, we have a healthcare and inflation cost issue. Same goes with home insurance."
I think this is the primary driver. However, we can't ignore how insurance company behavior also influences the pricing. The feds play a bigger role in this than you might think with things like Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement rates and residency funding leading to provider scarcity.
Bonus is a very significant component (often the majority) of comp that gets cut when you're under a noncompete in these kinds of jobs. Yes I understand that's a "world's smallest violin" problem at these scales.
Seriously? HN and the tech news sector have exhaustively covered the abuse and exploitation of noncompetes inside and outside of tech for the past decade. They protect employers at the expense of employees, consistently fail to provide reasonable compensation for lengthy agreements, and are regularly exploited by bad actors to harm current and former employees by making them accept lower wages and worse working conditions.
Even fifteen minutes of casual reading through old threads here should answer this question for you. The only supporters of non-competes tend to be those who do not view employees as people, but as proprietary property.
If your company information is so sensitive that losing a worker would leave you vulnerable, then the solution is to compensate that employee well enough that they don’t see the need to leave and take on that additional risk.
> If your company information is so sensitive that losing a worker would leave you vulnerable, then the solution is to compensate that employee well enough that they don’t see the need to leave and take on that additional risk.
Yes, this is what I think people are missing: non-competes harm the free labor market.
Labor is a resource like any other, and as such there's a market. If the labor is highly valuable that means we should value it as such, in dollars. If we're not doing that then that means something is distorting or otherwise breaking the free market.
I would never expect to buy a car for 5,000 dollars. But, for some reason, with labor, everyone's expectations of how a market works suddenly need not apply. Why is that?
The problem is if we forcibly lower wages via non-competes then that harms the labor market as a whole. Yes, companies get to save a few bucks, but in exchange the expectations are broken. This is actually self-destructive. Why? Because companies, as much as labor, relies on those expectations. Now, you can't hire better workers for more money because we've detached monetary value from the actual value of labor. Oops! You want the best of the best? You can't do that do anymore.
On the surface, non-competes appear to benefit companies, but they don't. It's an illusion, and a seductive one.
The freedom not to sign is not the same as the liberty to pass up an opportunity for survival. Your snippy quip just makes you sound like an ignorant fool who can’t defend their position, let alone coherently argue against others.
If I walk across the desert and find a house on an oasis and the owner offers me water on the condition that I first put a chain on my ankle that is tethered to the property, do I really have the option to say no?
What if all the houses are following the “standard industry practice” of chaining anyone who asks for water? What if refusing to follow this practice means that you can’t obtain funding to build a house?
> This is limited to industry category and employee’s keep their current pay. How is this bad?
I don't know... former communist countries had restrictions precisely like this one, it was an integral part of their regulations.
Former feudal countries too, maybe a bit harsher.
The land of the serfs and category 5 hurricanes - sounds sweet.
> and employee’s keep their current pay
Oh yeah, inflation is just starting - to pay for the big bubblegum bill, in real terms that pay is going down 10%/yr, and the serfs cannot renegotiate.
Financial industry comp for top earners is mostly bonuses so 4 years of not being able to earn a competitive rate isn't a high cost for the company to prevent you from helping competitors or keeping your skills up to date.
The downside for employees is that they're not able to keep current and will likely have a harder time finding jobs in the future. The downside for society is that it will cause skilled people to not be producing anything.
Adding friction to changing jobs stifles competition (hey, it's right there in the name), and thus suppresses wages. Employers already have a massive advantage in employment negotiations, so a just society has zero reason to give them more.
Yeah I mean it's "scummy" as in you don't control your destiny, but if your guaranteed the pay and benefits for 4 years, and you know that up front when you sign the contract it's sort of like knowing you will get a sabbatical
