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Submission + - Rising Temperatures and Heat Shocks Prompt Job Relocations, Study Finds (techtarget.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: A recent study in the National Bureau of Economic Research has found that companies are quietly adapting to rising temperatures by shifting operations from hotter to cooler locations.

The researchers analyzed data from 50,000 companies between 2009 and 2020. To illustrate the economic impact, the researchers found that when a company with equal employment across two counties experiences a heat shock in one county, there is a subsequent 0.7% increase in employment growth in the unaffected county over a three-year horizon. The finding is significant, given that the mean employment growth for the sample of businesses in the study is 2.4%.

Heat shocks are characterized by their severe impact on health, energy grids, and increased fire risks, are influencing companies with multiple locations to reconsider their geographical distribution of operations.

Despite this trend, states like Arizona and Nevada, which have some of the highest heat-related death tolls, continue to experience rapid business expansion. Experts believe that factors such as labor pool, taxes, and regulations still outweigh environmental climate risks when it comes to business site selection. But heat associated deaths are on the rise. In the Phoenix area alone, it experienced 425 heat related deaths in 2022 and a similar number in 2023, record highs for this region.

The study suggests that the implications of climate change on business operations are becoming more apparent. Companies are beginning to evaluate climate risks as part of their regular risk assessment process.

Submission + - Study sees financial misconduct risk linked to H-1B Visa worker vulnerability (techtarget.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: A recent academic paper titled "Does U.S. Immigration Policy Facilitate Financial Misconduct?" sheds light on the precarious position of H-1B visa holders in the U.S., particularly those employed in accounting roles. The study, conducted by researchers from Drexel University's LeBow College of Business, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, MIT Sloan School of Management, and City University of Hong Kong, explores how the dependency of H-1B workers on their employers for legal residency can lead to a higher risk of financial misconduct within companies.

The paper's findings suggest that the reduction of the H-1B cap from 195,000 to 65,000 visas in 2004 led to a noticeable decrease in financial irregularities among companies that heavily relied on H-1B workers for accounting positions. This correlation is attributed not to the wrongdoing of the visa holders themselves but to their reluctance to report financial misconduct due to fears of job loss and deportation. The study argues that the leverage employers have over H-1B workers can pressure them into unethical tasks, including the facilitation of financial misconduct, due to a lower threat of whistleblowing.

Despite the study's insights, it has faced criticism, particularly from Ron Hira, an associate professor of political science at Howard University, who questions the paper's methodology and data sources. Hira argues that the study's reliance on Labor Condition Application (LCA) filings as a proxy for the number of H-1B workers in specific firms weakens its conclusions. He suggests that a more accurate measure would require data from Form I-129, the visa petition form.

The authors of the study acknowledge the limitations of their data but defend their methodology, arguing that their findings highlight a significant issue with the H-1B visa program's impact on financial reporting and misconduct. They propose policy changes, such as extending the grace period for visa holders, to mitigate the risks associated with employer leverage over H-1B workers.

Submission + - Supreme Court rejects IT worker challenge of OPT program (techtarget.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: The U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday declined to hear a challenge against the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program, which allows STEM graduates to work in the U.S. for up to three years on a student F-1 visa. John Miano, the attorney representing WashTech, the labor group that brought the appeal, called the decision "staggering." He said it “strips Congress of the ability to control nonimmigrant programs,” such as OPT, the H-1B program, and other programs designed to provide temporary guest workers.

In the most extreme example of what the decision may allow, Miano said it theoretically enables the White House to let people on tourist visas work. The decision "gives more authority to the federal government to do what it wants," he said.

The OPT program permits STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) graduates to work for up to three years under a student F-1 visa. Critics of the program said it brought unfair competition to the U.S. labor market. Ron Hira, an associate professor of Public Policy at Howard University, said the U.S. administration of the OPT program is so poor that "the program has effectively no controls, accountability, or worker protections."

A group of Senate Republicans, including U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, argued in briefs filed with the court that the federal government was using the OPT program to sidestep the annual H-1B visa cap. More than 30 Republican House members also filed a brief in support.

Submission + - Google antitrust case may look at unknown threats (techtarget.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: The Google antitrust trial begins Tuesday in Washington. It may be the most significant tech case since the 1989 Microsoft antitrust trial. Like Microsoft, Google will fight the perception that it dominates its markets and crushes competitors in search and advertising. It will push back against the U.S. Dept. of Justice's characterization that it is "the gatekeeper of the Internet." Microsoft tried to fight the government's antitrust attack by arguing that the tech market is too dynamic to be dominated. It said it faced unknown but real threats. An MIT economist, Richard Schmalensee, testified that Microsoft lacked monopoly power. Its Windows pricing was "severely constrained by largely unknown long-term threats to its position." Trial Judge Penfield Jackson scoffed at the argument. But Microsoft was right about unknown threats. In one of the ironies of history, just months before the start of the Microsoft trial, Google was incorporated.

Like Microsoft, Google will try to chip away at the argument that it is the Internet's gatekeeper. It will be able to cite Microsoft's investment in OpenAI. Generative AI has the potential to reduce the importance of Google's search. It may tell the court that the prospect of yet unknown competitors tempers its behavior. It's a familiar argument for Google. In its 2004 IPO, Google believed it faced competitive risk from "companies that are yet known to us."

Comment off the rails (Score 0) 79

ICANN went off the rails a few years after it was created. After accomplishing its primary mission of opening up domain registrations, it lost its way. Despite the use of the word "Internet" in their name, they meet globally three times a year. recent places include Hamburg, DC, Cancun, Kuala Lumpur, The Hague, San Juan, Seattle, Montreal, Kobe, Barcelona, and Panama City. It has a "funded traveler" policy, paying hotel and $85 per diem for meals and travel, which cost it millions annually. It's a good deal if you're part of the community. ICANN uses its ability to create TLDs for any word in the dictionary, giving it a new revenue source. I don't know what this current dispute is about, but seriously doubt it upset the Internet or ICANN's operations to generate new sources of revenue to fund its travel.

Submission + - Abortion travel benefits help recruiting, but stir 'woke' comments on Glassdoor (techtarget.com) 1

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: A new paper from the Institute of Labor Economics in Germany, using data from job site Indeed, found that job postings by firms with reproductive care policies increased by 8% compared to those that didn't announce a policy. These are policies that pay travel benefits out of states that ban abortions. The results point to "increasing a firm's ability to recruit gender and politically-aligned workers," the researchers found. But the study also looked at Glassdoor reviews of employers that implemented the benefit and saw a decline in ratings for senior management and an 325% increase in the use of the word "woke" in reviews.

Submission + - Republicans urge Supreme Court to take up a case to end OPT program (techtarget.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: Republican lawmakers in the Senate and House are rallying behind a lawsuit to end a program that allows a student to work on an F-1 visa after graduation for up to three years. They are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the appeal of a group of tech workers challenging the program's legitimacy. The lawsuit from the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers (WashTech) argues that the Optional Practical Training (OPT) is "entirely the creation of regulation" and "is now the largest alien guestworker program in the immigration system." If the Supreme Court, agrees to consider the case, it could end the OPT program.

Controversy over the OPT program erupted in tandem with the increasing demand for H-1B visas and its use in offshore outsourcing. As H-1B visa demand increased, the OPT program's timeline was extended to allow STEM graduates to work in the U.S. for longer periods of time. In 2008, President George W. Bush added 17 months to the OPT program for students with STEM degrees. In 2016, President Barack Obama extended the timeline to three years. The reason for both extensions was to give international students a better chance at winning the H-1B lottery. With the maximum OPT extension, participants have three chances to enter the visa lottery.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Republican colleagues Senators Mike Lee of Utah, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Mike Braun of Indiana and Katie Britt of Alabama are urging the Supreme Court to take up the case. They contend that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is exploiting the OPT program to circumvent the annual H-1B visa cap of 85,000. Eleven states, all led by Republicans, have also filed a brief urging the Supreme Court in support of the case, as did 31 U.S. House Republicans. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled last fall, 2-1, against WashTech. But a dissenting view, in part by Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson, wrote the F-1 statute "plainly does not delegate the asserted authority" to the DHS for the OPT program.

Submission + - Federal HQ buildings only used at 25% of capacity (techtarget.com) 1

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: According to federal officials at a U.S. House hearing Thursday, the monumental federal buildings in Washington are largely empty, with some agencies using 25% or less of their headquarters' building capacity on average. The government owns some 511 million of square feet of office space, and capacity problems open the door to the possibility of conversions to housing or commercial uses. Commercial resuse has happened before. In 2013, the General Services Administration leased the Old Post Office Building at 1100 Pennsylvania Ave., to the Trump organization for a hotel. "The taxpayer is quite literally paying to keep the lights on even when no one is home,Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), who chair the infrastructure subcommittee meeting. The blame for the low utilization has several causes: A shift to hybrid work, out-of-date buildings that waste space, and designs before technology reduced the need for certain types of workers. The Republicans want federal workers to return to offices and reduce telecommuting to at least pre-pandemic levels. In February, the House passed H.R. 139, the Stopping Home Office Work's Unproductive Problems Act of 2023 — or the Show Up Act — requiring agencies to revert to 2019 pre-pandemic telework policies. A companion bill, S. 1565, is pending in the Senate. It has six Republican sponsors but no Democrats.

Submission + - Tech industry often denies job interviews to women, study (techtarget.com) 1

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: Many women and people of color who apply for tech jobs aren't offered interviews, according to a new study by Hired, a tech job matching service in New York. It reported that interview invitations were sent exclusively to men in 38% of job opportunities last year. This number, though alarming, does reflect an improvement from 2018, when the figure stood at 45%. Non-white job applicants faced a similar problem. In 2022, 12% of positions only sent interview requests to white job seekers.

Hired's findings also suggest that much of the tech industry's workforce gender and racial disparities are self-inflicted, resulting from biased hiring. The tech industry's low percentages of women and Black Americans is well documented and slow to improve. Women make up less than a third of the tech industry, and Black Americans represent about 5% of the tech workforce, despite a U.S. population that is 13% Black. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, said last year that there are "no good excuses" for the lack of women in the sector.

The New York-based Hired said it used an independent research firm to survey 229 technology hiring leaders, nearly 80% of whom worked in HR. Participants were vetted and compensated for their participation and kept anonymous. They also used survey response data from a random sample of 1,075 tech employees who use Hired's career marketplace.

Submission + - White House wants to know how employers spy on employees (techtarget.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: The White House wants to know how businesses use employee monitoring systems and is appealing to workers to supply information about their employers' technology and practices. The White House request for information (RFI) noted that employers "are increasingly using automated systems to monitor, manage, and evaluate their workers." It is also seeking input from employers and vendors, and the information gathered will be used for planning and strategy development.The government's request for proposals said employee monitoring systems can track workers' location, pace or quality of work, communications, interactions with other workers or customers, and computer activity. They use various techniques to do this, "ranging from software on workers' computers to dedicated electronic devices that workers wear or carry on their person." Employers have access to technology to monitor every aspect of an employee's behavior and activity at work: keystrokes, chats, emails, website visits, physical movements and, theoretically, vital signs. Adoption of employee monitoring systems has increased in the last few years as more employees began working remotely due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will accept comments through June 15 on Regulations.gov, although the docket for comments is not yet available.

Submission + - Generative AI systems boost productivity, retention, says study (techtarget.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: A National Bureau of Economic Research study found that generative AI boosts productivity by 14%, reduces stress, and increases employee retention in customer support roles. The workers who gained the most from this automation were newer and less experienced. Customer support is a stressful job. "A key part of agents' jobs is to absorb customer frustrations while restraining one's own emotional reaction," the paper noted. But generative AI can act as an aide, using the customer's chats as input and providing suggestions for empathetic responses and problem-solving in real-time. The study found that generative AI reduced the likelihood of customers wanting to escalate issues to a supervisor. But it's just one study, caution analyst. David Creelman, CEO of Creelman Research in Toronto, cautioned against putting too much weight on one study. "It's too soon to start making conclusions about where this will have an impact and how big that impact will be," he said.

Submission + - U.S. sets code rewrite on job ads seeking H-1B, OPT workers (techtarget.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: The tech job site Dice reached an agreement with the U.S. to use scrape use technology to scrape or remove "potentially discriminatory keywords such as 'OPT,' 'H-1B' or 'visa' that appears near the words 'only' or 'must' in its customer's new job postings." Discriminatory job ads against U.S. workers has been a longstanding complaint at the job site. In 2012, Bright Future Jobs, an advocacy group, alleged that many job ads posted by employers were "peppered with an alphabet soup of visa terms to attract foreign citizens" and designed to discourage U.S. workers. Ron Hira, an associate professor of political science at Howard University, who has testified before Congress on problems with the H-1B visa program, said "This penalty can only be interpreted as a slap on the wrist that accomplishes nothing for the workers who are being harmed by such practices."

Comment This arms race eventually ends in human extinction (Score 2) 56

by Jimmy_B (#63370661) Attached to: OpenAI Announces GPT-4

On one hand, this is impressive, and probably useful. If someone made a tool like this in almost any other domain, I'd have nothing but praise. But unfortunately, I think this release, and OpenAI's overall trajectory, is net bad for the world.

Right now there are two concurrent arms races happening. The first is between AI labs, trying to build the smartest systems they can as fast as they can. The second is the race between advancing AI capability and AI alignment, that is, our ability to understand and control these systems. Right now, OpenAI is the main force driving the arms race in capabilities–not so much because they're far ahead in the capabilities themselves, but because they're slightly ahead and are pushing the hardest for productization.

Unfortunately at the current pace of advancement in AI capability, I think a future system will reach the level of being a recursively self-improving superintelligence before we're ready for it. GPT-4 is not that system, but I don't think there's all that much time left. And OpenAI has put us in a situation where humanity is not, collectively, able to stop at the brink; there are too many companies racing too closely, and they have every incentive to deny the dangers until it's too late.

Five years ago, AI alignment research was going very slowly, and people were saying that a major reason for this was that we needed some AI systems to experiment with. Starting around GPT-3, we've had those systems, and alignment research has been undergoing a renaissance. If we could _stop there_ for a few years, scale no further, invent no more tricks for squeezing more performance out of the same amount of compute, I think we'd be on track to create AIs that create a good future for everyone. As it is, I think humanity probably isn't going to make it.

In https://openai.com/blog/planni... Sam Altman wrote:

> At some point, the balance between the upsides and downsides of deployments (such as empowering malicious actors, creating social and economic disruptions, and accelerating an unsafe race) could shift, in which case we would significantly change our plans around continuous deployment.

I think we've passed that point already, but if GPT-4 is the slowdown point, it'll at least be a lot better than if they continue at this rate going forward. I'd like to see this be more than lip service.

Survey data on what ML researchers expect: https://aiimpacts.org/how-bad-...
An example concrete scenario of how a chatbot turns into a misaligned superintelligence:
https://www.lesswrong.com/post...
Extra-pessimistic predictions by Eliezer Yudkowsky: https://www.lesswrong.com/post...

Submission + - Nearly 40% of software engineers will only work remotely (techtarget.com)

Submitted by dcblogs
dcblogs writes: Despite the demand of employers like Apple
  Amazon, Microsoft
, AT&T
and others, nearly 40% of software engineers preferred only remote roles, and if their employers mandated a return to the office, 21% indicated they would quit immediately, while another 49% said they would start looking for another job, according to Hired's 2023 State of Software Engineers. This report gathered its data from 68,500 software engineering candidates and a survey of more than 1,300 software engineers and 120 talent professionals. Employers open to remote workers "are able to get better-quality talent that's a better fit for the organization," said Josh Brenner, CEO of Hired, a job-matching platform for technology jobs.

Comment Capabilities are outpace alignment (Score 1, Interesting) 61

This is undeniably cool and impressive, but, I think proceeding down this research path, at this pace, is quite irresponsible.

The primary effect of OpenAI's work has been to set off an arms race, and the effect of *that* is that humanity no longer has the ability to make decisions about how fast and how far to go with AGI development.

Obviously this isn't a system that's going to recursively self-improve and wipe out humanity. But if you extrapolate the current crazy-fast rate of advancement a bit into the future, it's clearly heading towards a point where this gets extremely dangerous.

It's good that they're paying lip service to safety/aligment, what actually matters, from a safety perspective, is the relative rates of progress in how well we can understand and control these language models, and how capable we make them. There *is* good research happening in language-model understanding/control, but it's happening slowly, compared to the rate of capability advances, and that's a problem.

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