Many if not most of the responses here posit that the degree requirement, even if not directly related to the job, is a cheap, if crude, way to filter out a deluge of job applicants.

If there is such a shortage of STEM workers that it is necessary to import so many that Silicon Valley has become majority Asian in less than a generation, it is rather difficult to justify such crude measures.

In reality, what is going on is that capturing positive network externalities has increasingly been the VC business model -- not invention. This creates monopoly profits that insulates management from bad hiring decisions. Rather than letting those bad decisions go to waste, Asian cultures, which can smell economic rent 10,000 miles away, ramped up their diploma mills (a diploma being the equivalent of a taxi cab medallion in terms of rent seeking), targeted the network effect monopolies, targeted the hiring authority of those companies, imported their "degreed" coethnics in huge numbers under the H-1b program, and focused more and more of the VC world on the rent-seeking network effect business model. The "guest workers" are then on a green card track which, when obtained, raises their value in the dowry market by tens of thousands of dollars. Everyone wins, except Western civilization and the folks that built it.

“Sandra Wachter, a researcher in data ethics and algorithms at the University of Oxford, said: “The world is biased, the historical data is biased, hence it is not surprising that we receive biased results.””

The single most subversive thing that can be done in the present environment is to financially back lossless compression prizes. One such prize is the Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge — although it needs to be expanded to include all of Wikipedia. Perhaps a more immediate prize would be based on compressing a wide variety of social science data. Sandy can then show everyone how smart she is by modeling the “bias in the data” so as to better predict it — which is exactly why compression is _the_ unbiased universal algorithmic IQ test.

See: https://vimeo.com/17553536

...that if only the US hadn't stolen all those geniuses from the developing world, it would have developed so much faster?

Or, alternatively, that if only the US hadn't imported all those fake "geniuses" that the US would have already colonized the solar system?

It's over for Western civilization.

If you have a domain name under which you have a lot of content -- an example is kuro5hin.org -- and, after a decade or so you find yourself impoverished and stressed to the point that you can't renew the domain registration (as did Rusty Foster), a domain squatter jumps on it and holds it hostage for thousands of dollars. When that happens, frequently even "The Wayback Machine" is told to deep-six the archived content by the simple expedient of placing a robots.txt file in the home directory of the hijacked domain. "The Wayback Machine" then dutifully removes public access to the content. OH but the fun doesn't stop there! So now let's say you fork over the ransom money to the domain squatter, get the domain name back and remove the robots.txt. Of course "The Wayback Machine" then restores public access to all those articles... right?

WRONG!

archive.org does keep it stored and it is accessible to those with insider status, but no more public access EVER.

There really is value in hoarding history and if you can get away with it by doing it "on accident" all the better!

Obama, being interviewed on mitunetwork.com was asked if illegal immigrants had to fear being deported because they voted in the US election tomorrow. His response: "When you vote, you are a citizen yourself.

Quick! Someone do a TED talk!

It doesn't matter what you want to teach an old programmer if you don't offer them dog biscuits.

Archive.org plays it dumb when archived content becomes unavailable due to a domain drop catcher placing a robots.txt archiving exclusion on the domain.

This would not be quite so suspicious if it were not for the fact that when the original author of the material "memory holed" by archive.org pays the extortion to the domain drop catcher, archive.org and requests that archive.org restore the content for the public, archive.org will frequently (always?) fail to do sodo so.

Archive.org's motive?

What is Google's motive for making its Usenet archives virtually unusable?

He who controls the past...

It would have happened over a decade earlier if the DotCon bubble burst hadn't replaced most of the old guard in Silicon Valley with H-1b's from India trained in Java.

Those who claim the US benefits by draining the best and the brightest from around the world are doing two things wrong:

1) They bad liars. Everyone knows they just want cheap labor. Just cut the noise already and accept the fact that they may have to send some mangers overseas.
2) Even if they happen to get someone particularly gifted to leave their native land and work cheap in the US, they're ignoring the negative impact this has on those -- usually developing -- economies which need their best and brightest in order to grow their economies to become importers of US goods and services.

So it was Jimmy Carter that delayed the privatization of commercial launch services by decades?

What a legacy!