you forgot to add the snark tag

I'm voting R because *fingers crossed* Romney was blowing smoke throughout the primaries and will return to his roots: a pragmatic administer pursuing data-driven solutions. And take the party with him.

One must be careful about diluting the word "right." Leave it at 3, and protect them fiercely.

There's a lot to this.

1. I bought a house right out of school, which improved my quality of life to higher than my SW Engineer brother in SJ.
2. There is money here to be invested, and fewer groups are pursuing it, making the odds better for a sharp group with a good idea (big fish, small pond analogy)
3. Public support: Incubators at ASU are actively looking for people with ideas to connect with funders. There is a palpable inferiority complex in the state that can be played to the advantage of the startup.
4. Industry groups: AZBio, AZ Tech Council, etc are active and well attended
5. Local talent: not as bad as is being described here. Remember the aero/semiconductor history of the area.
6. Weather: remember, people, that CA has the best weather on the planet. When compared to half the country (e.g. places too snowy, too humid), Phoenix weather looks pretty good.
7. Political climate: the negatives mentioned here are not a significant factor to developing a business. Significant factors include a much lower tax rate (without the spectre of giant tax increases once it all catches up to you, CA) and less state limitations on business.

The demands of Carreon's initial letter--extortion, in my opinion--ought to be immediately identified as an abuse of power and information asymmetry (again, in my opinion). In a functional legal system, the state bar would review his actions, possibly leading to a revocation of his license.

As a resident of Arizona, I asked that this be looked into at http://www.azbar.org/contactus/contactusform.

I believe such action would go far toward preventing this kind of behavior in the future.

To the detriment of all of us

Yes. STEM jobs resemble those that can be commodit-ized to the untrained eye.

Actually, that may be true for some of them.

Please go tell this to all your manager friends and then punch them in the face for not believing you.

Those company accounts definitely work against us. In the "make a product for 1 dollar and sell it for 5" business model, we're paid out of the $1 and "they" out of the $4.

For an informative glimpse into the future of STEM in the US, look to the MD profession in the UK. Public policy removed financial incentives from the doctors and students wised up quickly. Today there are very few native-born physicians in the UK; they all come with modest financial expectations from countries with a lower standard of living.

Physicians can't perform their jobs from abroad. Scientists and engineers, however...

+1 Cathartic

Geez, go work for a small company. I have about 1 hr of meetings per week and work with my hands (not just typing keys) daily.

The problem with STEM jobs is that they involve actually doing things rather than directing them to be done: the lowest rung on the ladder. Nevermind that the skills required to perform these tasks are far more specialized and difficult to attain than those required by their managers. US students may have sensed that STEM careers are for suckers and are best outsourced; you need only compare the financial state of two equally intelligent 50-year-olds--a scientist and a businessman--to see why.

Most STEM careers are not worth the effort in the US. The ones that are combine technical skills with entrepreneurship or pure luck.

Either (1) workers take unpleasant jobs in sweatshops because it is the best employment option they have or (2) Asian sweatshop workers are persons of weak intellect who have many more attractive job offers but choose to work in sweatshops instead.

-Wheelan et al "Naked Economics"

When someone cross-references a 200GB torrent of amateur porn photos with the facebook database