Then I repeat my statement that current law already allows Google to bring in the exceptionally gifted, just as Corning was able to bring in my friend, so what's the problem? If there is a person who is genuinely in the top 0.1% of a given field, you can get them into this country, under existing law, and if they're truly that good at what they do you aren't going to be able to abuse them as H-1Bs are commonly abused.

I'm sorry, I just zero faith in the tech industry as a whole and Google in particular. They're crying wolf about AI. Wake me up if there's a Sputnik moment in AI, which there won't be, because we already lead the damn world in it. They can already bring in that 0.1% top tier talent. Again, what's the problem?

If I'm reading between the lines of your posts, you're a nepo baby, "I prefer not to pay in cash, for instance, because I expect the investments I would have otherwise liquidated will maintain their historic rates of return over the next 30 years, essentially making that education free." How many people do you suppose enter undergrad age with enough assets to pay for an Ivy League education, up front, confronted with that oh-so-horrible dilemma of whether to liquidate assets or assume debt? For the vast majority of people, it's a false choice, "assume debt" is the only option in the multiple choice list.

Not sure where you're getting the idea from that an Ivy League education equals money being shoveled at you. All of the people I know with jobs that get money "shoveled" their way are working 60, 70, 80+ hours for the privilege, which may appeal to some, but a lot of people would rather not do that. An Ivy League degree may get you a better first job than a peer with a degree from a State University, but that first job won't be one with any sort of work life balance, not if your objective is to have money "shoveled" at you.

FWIW, I have no "axe" to grind here, at least not agains the Ivys. I'm a happy high school graduate making six figures. To the extent I have an "axe" to grind, it's that my circumstances were largely a fluke of timing, and someone entering my vocation today without a college degree has virtually no chance of replicating my success. We've built a society that largely throws to the wolves the vast majority of the populace (60+%) who do not have any sort of degree. That's a far bigger societal problem than whether the Ivy Leagues represent a good bargain over significantly cheaper State University systems.

Sure it is. And before that it was about cybersecurity talent. Before that it was about development talent. Before that it was about networking talent.

The only consistent theme here is there's never enough on-shore talent, so we need to bring in more off-shore talent, and surely their willingness to work for lower wages AND have their permission to be in the country dependent on the whims of their employer has nothing to do with it?

I've known exactly ONE person that qualified as exceptionally gifted in my career who came into this country. She worked for Corning and helped develop Gorilla Glass. She came here from Finland, not India, and if Corning had abused her the way the tech industry abuses H-1Bs she'd simply have gone back home to her highly developed country with a better social safety net than ours. The law already allows corporations to bring in such exceptionally gifted people to fill roles like that, roles you can't fill with an off-the-shelf job posting and education. So what's Google bitching about?

Oh, that's right, they're laying off thousands of people despite being massively profitable while simultaneously whining that the labor market isn't meeting their needs.

This is all about screwing over labor. Nothing more, nothing less. I'll support making it easier for Google to do this if the law loosening the restrictions they believe are problematic also creates a new class of visa that isn't tied to employment, with the original sponsoring employer compelled to pay 100% of all public services consumed by the immigrant for 10 years after arrival, and the finalization/upholding of the recent rule prohibiting the enforcement of non-compete clauses. So sure, sponsor that immigrant, but you don't get to hold them hostage, they can move about the labor force as any American could, and if they end up on public services YOU get to pay the cost.

Mandate a system like that and watch how fast Google and ilk discover the vast majority of talent they need is available on-shore.

Nobody claimed it was $0. Many have claimed it's a bad deal compared to the cost of a significantly cheaper public university education. A car analogy would be between a Honda Civic and a Mercedes S-Class. Either one will get you to work and back, efficiently and safely, but one of them costs 1/6 to 1/5 what the other does.

What you're proposing has failed in every country that has tried it. The US has more runway than most, because of the USDs status as the global reserve currency, but eventually that runway will run out.

It's not about shitting on smart people. How many exceptionally smart (the US Government's term is "exceptionally gifted") people do you think got into this country via H-1Bs? Very few. The vast majority are brought over here after a company posts a job at a massively below market salary, which goes unfilled, because duh, then they whine to Uncle Sam about a labor shortage and bring an Indian over to take the aforementioned job at the below market wage.

It's a shitty deal for everyone, the immigrant included, because now they're held hostage to a potentially shitty job that a native born citizen could walk away from. Do you think it's for nothing that the vast majority of people who remained at Twitter after the Musk takeover were immigrants on work visas? Do you think the average American would sign up to work 80+ hour weeks for that asshole, knowing their reward for giving up their entire personal/familial life would probably be to get laid off anyway at a later date? No, they quit in droves, but the H-1Bs didn't have that option because quitting meant being promptly deported.

It's modern day indentured servitude and the only people who want it are MBA assholes looking to squeeze more blood from the labor stone, err, I mean, extract more efficiencies from a dynamic global market.

I think his point is they have to pay interest on the debt. You may have seen the headline where we just passed the depressing milestone of spending more on debt service than the Department of Defense. Debt, whether personal or government, has the net effect of reducing your flexibility to respond to unforeseen circumstances.

What they ought to do, IMHO, is delete the bankruptcy exemption from student loans. If your financial circumstances are so bad you never have a realistic prospect of paying off the loans, that's what the bankruptcy code is for, except student loans are neigh impossible to discharge in bankruptcy. It's actually easier to stiff the IRS and include your tax debt in a bankruptcy than it is to get rid of student loans.

The bankruptcy code has provisions to prevent abuse, you aren't going to be able to discharge all of your debts if you're a Doctor pulling six figures, but a single Mom saddled with loans she'll never realistically repay even if she makes payments her entire life? If it was literally any other debt, she could wipe it out with a bankruptcy filing.

You're not wrong about the Ivy League but you're also kind of glossing over the fact that public college costs have likewise soared at many times inflation for decades. There are a lot of reasons why this happened, it's not exclusively because the Government decided to throw nearly unlimited amounts of money at the system via student loans, but that definitely played a significant role in it.

If you really want to go down this rabbit hole, you should also ask why American society has spent the last several decades pushing a "college for all" mantra, building a society where you can't be financially successful without a degree, when more than half of the population does not have a degree. You can point to more socialized countries where university is essentially free, from the student's perspective, and their graduation rates are not appreciably better than ours. A key difference is most of them have vocational programs so the 50-60% of society that doesn't go onto university retain a viable economic path.

Have you actually worked with the Microsoft and Google cloud ecosystems? I have. In terms of security, compliance, monitoring, Microsoft is way ahead of Google, and that's before you consider Google's proclivity for axing services on short notice that you've come to rely on. There's a reason why very few serious businesses entertain the Google Cloud. Outside of academia and small/niche businesses, it's nearly non-existent.

You don't have to like Microsoft, they certainly do a lot that pisses me off, but you should ground your criticisms in reality instead of going for first post karma whoring.

My supposition is the younger generations have different expectations of what healthcare should offer than the Greatest Generation that lived through the Great Depression and a whole-of-society war mobilization. I don't know any one from the WW2 generation that is unhappy with the VA. Conversely, I don't know anyone from Vietnam onwards that is wholly happy with the VA. The "better than nothing" faint praise I hear seems to be typical, at least amongst the vets I know. The mental healthcare (more accurately, near complete lack of it) is a huge problem and if I were to speculate some more, not something as keenly felt by the WW2-era vets, because they weren't encouraged to seek treatment for mental trauma as later generations were.

She's my partner because neither one of us wants to get married and 'girl/boyfriend' seems like an insignificant descriptor for someone you share a household with.

Under this novel theory, all state alcohol regulations are invalid.

The US system needs day fines.

Is a systemd developer seriously throwing shade at another piece of software for having a large attack surface?!

I had a friend of that generation too, he just passed away this year at the ripe old age of 99, and he had nothing but good things to say about the VA.

Conversely, my partner, and her brother, both US Navy vets in their 40s, they have mixed things to say about it. They both would agree that it's "better than nothing", they both say it has provided a great safety net for them and allowed them forgo caring about health insurance when looking for jobs, yet neither is fully satisfied with it. When it comes to primary care, preventative medicine, things like that, the VA is great, more or less the equal of what I get with my platinum plated private insurance. When it comes to speciality medicine, it's hit or miss. The wait lists are the worst part, it takes her weeks to months to get an appointment with her regular care team, diagnostic tests, etc.

My beefs with the VA, as someone who has loved ones in the system: It's absolute garbage at dealing with mental health, which you'd think would be a major focus for a health organization that is supposed to be treating veterans. I have never gone to the VA ER and not seen multiple patients with major and apparently untreated mental illnesses in the waiting room. My partner had to resort to self-paying private practitioners to come to terms with her mental health damage from combat deployments, because the VA was useless in this regard. If you aren't suicidal and/or easily treatable with meds, they got nothing to offer you but wait lists and bureaucracy that would make the worst HMO look like concierge medicine.

That brings me to my second beef with the VA, it has no equivalent of Urgent Care, at least in the major metros we've called home, as well as those we've been unlucky enough to be traveling through when my partner had a health scare. You either get an appointment with your regular care team -- which will probably take weeks to months -- or you go to the ER. None of the scares my partner has had in the four years we've been together have been "ER worthy", when the equivalents happen to me I go to Urgent Care, but she has to go to the ER. Not only is this stupidly expensive (shouldn't the VA want to save money where it can?) but it invariably leads to insane wait times. Something I could get knocked out in an hour or two at any Urgent Care Center is probably going to entail six plus hours at the VA ER.

I should also add "They have too many Dr. Feelgoods" working for them. My partner was on an opioid cocktail from the VA to manage service related injuries. It took her years to wean off those drugs, against the advice of her VA care team. Now she manages with weed and the occasional NSAID, so did she really need to be on opioids? They gave her zero help weaning off them, in fact, they tried to discourage her from doing so. They still throw major controlled substances (ambien is my favorite) at her like they're candy. If there's a Schedule II or III drug you'd like to get, just sign up for the VA, you'll find a provider willing to write you a script in short order.