Infosys cuts the chase. When I forwarded the resume of a friend of mine to them, they kicked it back saying they *required* the high school graduation year. Not proof of graduation (tho why high school graduation should matter to someone with a degree plus experience anyway...).

You see, college degrees might be obtained at any age. But highschool degrees are mostly earned at 18. So they are asking for the applicants age.

And yet, many corporations have just such laws in place for consumers.

You can't legally buy products sold cheaper in other countries and resell them here for a slight markup.

Which means they want to use cheap labor- but force consumers here to pay top dollar.

When I can buy movies for $2.49 instead of $15 and when I can legally buy meds for 10 cents instead of $4.35 (blood pressure meds), etc. etc. etc. then I'll be a bit more open to this crap.

Armed police *still* patrol the ground three years later.

Oh, so you don't want your $18,000 severance? I mean we know you have no real savings outside of your 401k so this would be nice to help keep you afloat while you look for a new job.

By the way, you also have to sign this non-disclosure agreement if you want your severance too.

It's been a pleasure.

They are supposed to be highly skilled and possess talents which can't be located in the local market after a reasonable search.

Now, you can write lots of words but lawyers just sharpen their teeth on that kind of thing.

Simply set a dollar amount equal to the current top 10% income in the country. Right now, that's about $100,000.

So you can't bring an H1B in for less than $100,000. Minimum salary in their pocket- not the contracting house.

Right now almost 40,000 of the 65,000 slots are taken up by large indian contracting houses which have been directly replacing existing american workers (which is illegal per the text of the law which is why some companies are walking this back when caught). This means that companies like Microsoft and Google that need genuinely rare talent have less than a 50/50 chance of getting some brilliant mathematician or cutting edge software engineer.

Tellingly, Cognizant (over 9000 H1B's) has no offices in Silicon valley but have offices in most major american cities. Their target is not rare and special but people who simply have a 4 year degree and a few years experience.

Our infosys contractors rotated every 6 to 9 months. It was a *selling* point to management. They actually believed that all knowledge was seamlessly transferring via documents to the new people and that the new people didn't suffer 3 to 9 months of reduced productivity because they had no clue about the big picture.

Combine that with the fact that the quality of Infosys candidates has dropped enormously since 2005 and it's a recipe for disasters.

Excellent point why automated driving will be better for long drives where people tend to zone out.

I had a dodge durango (huge SUV) from 1998 to 2005 and it was rear ended while stopped at a red light ("I thought the light had changed") AND front ended when the person in front of me at a red light put their truck into reverse and peeled into me (apparently decided they wanted to make a left turn).
I was also rear ended in a brilliant blue element (smaller SUV) when cars behind me had an accident and the air bag stunned the driver.
I was also rear ended in a white toyota after sitting at a red light for at least 10 to 15 seconds by 3 drunken young idiots in a truck.

It's not that your car is black. It's that they are idiots.

Three of the times I was rear ended were by trucks. I often observe passenger truck drivers being complete idiots on the road. Especially the larger trucks.

Watched the linked video. It makes it very clear.

The google car comes to a normal stop at a safe distance. The car behind it doesn't even slow down at all and has at least 4 car lengths to do so.

Something was going on with the other driver. They spilled their coffee, were doing their makeup, or most likely- were on their cell phone- perhaps even texting or reading a text for bonus points.

It's still not their fault. The person behind was too close and failed to control speed.

In this case tho- the video clearly shows the other car doesn't even slow down. I'm guessing they were on a cell phone.

In this case also, the google car has been at a complete stop for a couple seconds before it is hit by the other car and it's behind another car at a proper distance and it's at a red light.

Absolutely. And likely less than half the population is capable of that high skill work even IF you paid for training.

And many of those who can and do train- find a new system eliminates their position before they cover their training costs.

We need inexpensive focused training.

But even so- half the population has below average intelligence.

To be more precise tho...about 12% are capable of doing the high skilled labor- 3% are grossly overqualified for most "high" skilled labor. On the flip side of lower intelligence/impulse control/etc. 15% are barely functional and at least 17% are not functional enough to do high skilled labor even with a lot of help.

32% of the not so smart population could do a lot of damage if they are left to starve.

What you say is correct. And beside the point.

Robots (despite the recent DARPA challenge which made them look incapable) are rapidly replacing a certain class of human workers.

Automation is replacing another class.

Both are happening faster than people can earn enough to retrain.

And that was the key challenge of the luddites. They didn't want to stop the machines- they wanted training on the new machines and the owners (capital) refused. So many of the luddites died homeless of exposure and starvation- pretty much as they correctly assessed. And the next generation forgot about them and closed ranks.

Robots are rapidly replacing jobs which simply require that you have eyes and hands and can perform a manual tax.

Automation is replacing jobs where you follow any kind of predictable procedure.

Will all jobs go away? Never. But we already see decreasing workforce engagement by working age citizens from 16 to 67. It's masked by the way they do the numbers for unemployment, but the reality is that the number of working age citizens who can't find work has risen for the last 15 years.

If we shared the wealth via some kind of basic income- we'd probably fine. But instead, all that extra productivity benefit is filtered to 10% (and really 2%) of the population who then says "get a job" to the people they won't hire. Hungry people get violent. There is a direct correlation between low employment and lack of benefits in 2nd world countries. We need to address the issues in the 1st world before we have mass riots.

It's much cheaper to provide assistance ($19k) vs imprison people ($31k) annually.

Quality of life has been dropping for 30 years. Food quality is down- we are burning up the soil to raise food at this rate. it can't replace the minerals and vitamins that we used to get in our food.

You can still get food like they used to sell in supermarkets. It just costs $5 for a tomato and $12 for hamburger.

Perhaps humans will adapt to poor quality food.

Travel time from home to work has increased as have working hours. We essentially passed a sweet spot back in the 1970s and it's been getting frog in the stewpot worse since then.

Robots COULD be great. But so far the trend is for a tiny percentage of the population to get good paying jobs in exchange for 60 to 80 hour weeks.

Until india and china catch up to the west and wages normalize, we probably won't share the benefits of higher robot productivity. Which will eventually mean civil unrest and poor quality of life for over half the population who can't find work. Not everyone is trainable or above average intelligence.

Manufacturing jobs have dropped every year since robots were introduced while productivity has risen.
http://cdn.theatlanticcities.c...
http://www.technologyreview.co...

They've been replaced with terrible low paying service jobs.
Wages have been stagnant for 80% of those who have jobs since shortly after robots were introduced. Robots are not the only cause- but they sure didn't help.

While the unemployment rate is finally tightening up some- that's because so many have completely left the work force. Participation of working age citizens age 16 to 67 has dropped continuously for the last 14 years.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/...

Who paid for this article? The robot manufacturing companies?

It is in everyone's best interest to allow the person who thought to request that particular period a short grace period before making the information public.

30 to 90 days maximum then make it public. It's not in the public's best interest to have access the same day as the person who put up ten grand to request the information. The end result will be that the public gets less information and the government will grow more corrupt given a cloak of secrecy.

They are already playing games with FOIA request to try to crush them.

Two of the other games are to charge a rate as if their highest paid staff was doing the work when it was really being down by lowgrade employees and providing 10x to 1000x the information request to raise the cost and to bury requester.

I can see we just disagree. I think you have some points but you are missing the big picture of the end result.