Sounds like what I did to the "your car's warranty is about to expire" people about 3 months after I got my jeep. I figured they got a dump of people who had recently purchased a used vehicle. I was mostly polite but would string them along. With that Jeep there was no way they would ever offer a warranty (at the time it was 15 years old and only had 368,XXX miles on it) but would act interested. Eventually they would want vehicle information and telling them it is a '96 with that mileage they would inform me that it didn't qualify for a warranty. At this point I knew the conversation was over but once I did get it "escalated" to a "supervisor", the guy one phone over, and got to do it again.

I also like giving the phone to one of my children. It is down right hilarious to hear a 3 year old get fed up with these scammers, mine really likes to tell stories and eventually tell the scammer to "Stop talking now! I'm trying to tell you something!". My 6 year old is a much better communicator but is very inquisitive and will ask them all sorts of questions.

All the more reason to get rid of these rats with wings.

True and I wasn't trying to imply there was. I just hadn't thought about yours a possible solution. I think the next time I write my elected officials on the subject I will offer both, especially since one of my Senators was responsible for the introduction of legislation that would have automatically bumped up the number of H1Bs if the cap was met up to some ridiculous amount.

I doubt that your field is so specialized that there exists no American who could do any of the three jobs, but maybe you have other things working against you like:
A shit work environment
A shit location that no one wants to live in
Shit compensation
Made up shit job requirements (looking at you 10+ years Java experience in 2000, or 5+ years experience with Win2k3 in '04)

So maybe the answer is to improve one or more of the above until someone actually wants to work for your company. Then again you are AC so for all I know you are Sergey Brin shilling for you next quarterly report to increase shareholder value.

Sounds similar to a call from a recruiter I got about a year ago. The requirement was the laundry list of technical skills but in a highly specialized area with a requirement to move from my low cost area to a high cost area where I doubt I would have been able to ever afford what I currently have for less than a quarter million a year. When the recruiter gave we the wage a they were offering I stuttered and stammered at which point I was asked if that was good. I replied with a no as I was currently making about 2.5 times as much and was in a better (lower crime, better schools, less crowding, less polution) and cheaper (food, property, energy) area.

I like your idea as it is an interesting difference to my opinion in that if the H1Bs are so critical to a company that all H1B holders should be the individuals in the company with the highest total compensation (including benefits, retirement packages, relocation packages, company provided vehicles/drivers, etc). This holds true given the premise (probably false) that this is a particularly rare skill set that they couldn't find anyone in the US to do the job and couldn't train someone into the position in time since it is so critical. For cases where this is truly a critical unique skill set that is needed to complete a project or task this shouldn't be much of a problem, yes I do realize that such cases will exist, since huge companies that import vast quantities of H1Bs can eat the cost since we hear that CEO compensation isn't a problem, and tiny companies there more than likely isn't a huge spread in compensation.

Either way making your change or mine would do wonders for showing how critical these people actually are to the company instead of being a method to save some money. It needs to be clear that H1Bs are a more expensive route. Also why don't we see any H1Bs in management since it seems finding highly qualified competent management is truly a rare thing?

That are then ignored without consequence.

For example a decade ago some company wanted to put fiber (I think it was Verizon) in the new developments across the street from my mom's house where there expensive $750,000+ houses were going in. It was stipulated that they also had to roll out fiber to the rest of the city if they wanted to install in the new developments. 10 years on there still isn't fiber outside of the new developments, and there aren't any plans to install it either.

I didn't know you rectum and throat were the same thing?

I beg to disagree. Under the 2 party system things change, just not for the better. One party can erode one set of rights and then in a few years they lose power and the other party gets to erode some other rights. They both then get to campaign on the rights that the other side took away, yet never manage to get around to reinstating them when they are in power.

This may have some to do with the topology in you area. I live in a low area in my neighborhood and while the main 2 antennas, they are on the north side of the cities about 1/4 mile apart, are close, there isn't a clear line of sight to them from my house, even with a 16' mast and large antenna point correctly. I gave up on TV with the switch to digital and I find that I really haven't missed much.

I just keep hearing about how California needs all of this migrant farm labor to bring in the harvest from the news so I figured that migrant labor (probably illegal) was still widely used instead of mechanization.

Living in an upper Midwestern state California, comparatively, is a slacker when it comes to food production and with good preservation techniques having good food is easy year round even when it isn't in season. Case in point I have found that by being a cheap guy I have also become mostly a localivore (still hate that stupid term) since it is cheaper to go and buy in bulk from the farmer, and then can, dry, prepare and freeze, pickle, or otherwise preserve the food than to buy as needed at the grocery store. Basically I do the following:
get a few 50 lbs sack of potatoes for $5 each and just keep them in the cool dark basement
Can up 10s of gallons of stews, chiles, sauces, and soups made from meat from farmers I know and stuff out of my garden
make jams, fruit sauces, dried fruit, and preservers from trees on my own property or from local orchards
Make a bunch of meals and just freeze them (lots of home made pasta dishes)
Freeze a bunch of raw food
Buy large sacks of dried beans
If you dedicate a few weekends in the late summer and fall to cooking it is amazing how much food you can make and preserve and then not have to worry about cooking for most of the year.

Just because in the southwest US (looking at you California that should be a desert) they still use lots of manual labor doesn't mean that that there aren't machine that can harvest these crops. There are machines that shake fruit trees and catches it, picks grapes off the vines, harvest tomatoes (the machine takes in the whole plant), and I wouldn't be surprised if picking things like broccoli, cabbage, and lettuce couldn't be done in a similar fashion, especially given what I have seen in the grocery store over the last few years.

Easy I can name 2:

1. Iran
2. North Korea

People just need to make it clearer that you will be unreachable. My managers stopped when they insisted that they needed a way to get a hold of me in case of emergency since I would be well out of cellphone range. My response was a trained tracker and a team of search dogs. I told him about where I was going to be leaving my car and said to start searching there as I would be somewhere up in the north woods of Minnesota.

I like my method of turning carp into something delicious better:
1. Catch the carp
2. load up ~100lbs of carp in the back of the jeep in a big plastic tub
3. dig a big hold in the garden
4. bury carp in the garden
They make a wonderful fertilizer. I also do the same thing with the little crappy bullheads from the pond that is full of sheep field run off near my house.