The ones who major in Psychology are typically the ones who need it.

I miss the old WIndows days when you could customize installation from scratch like with v3.x. At least Linux still lets me custom install like Debian.

Many nerds and geeks have poor social skills. I am one/1 of them, and having disabilities doesn't help. :(

Do you have the URL to that PEW study? I am curious about over 30, 40, 50, 60, etc.

Sweet. Let me get my viruses. ;)

Yay, robotic ants! :D

Multiple vendors does what exactly? Increased internal support costs. Spread it around to more of your "friends" perhaps?

Just make the H1B slot an expiring license (say 5 years). Auction it off at the beginning and allow it to be resold on the open market until it expires. Then you can stop bothering with questions about pay gaps and other nonsense. If there's a $10K per year arbitrage opportunity, the market will quickly sort it out.

We could use the spot price of visas at different maturities as a "yield curve" to see what the predictions are for future technical labor demand and as an indicator for how tight labor demand is right now. Best of all, the visas will be used on rock stars who are actually worth importing rather than being doled out more or less at random.

H1B fees and legal expenses are not cheap, nor is paying international relocation expenses for a candidate and his/her family, so we're certainly not saving money by hiring H1B's.

You just described the alternative of paying enough to make your total package competitive as being too expensive. It sounds like you're saving money by that any reasonable definition, even after the government and lawyers take their share. If it wasn't cheaper than raising your pay rates, you wouldn't be doing it.

That being said, I'm willing to grant that a company that hires PhD level people is much more likely to run into a real hard limit when it comes to finding subject matter experts, and they're the types of operations that the H1B system is supposed to work for on paper. If we did the sensible thing and auctioned off H1B slots and allowed them to be resold on an open market, those are probably the types of companies that would buy them.

I don't have a problem with offshoring. They just need to pay taxes like others do. Instead of thinking that congress will give them a tax free holiday someday so they can scoot their hoard back over here for free.

So capitalism involves cheating and gaming the H1b system to the point of criminality so corporate profits can be maximized at the expense of everything and everyone else? Sign me up for a different system.

Here's the thing:

I am afraid. Afraid of being right.

I want the climate change deniers to be right, because then the world will continue to be hospitable to our way of life in the future.

That always gets me. At 17, you're old enough to enlist in the military, be issued deadly weapons and get shipped over seas to enforce U.S. foreign policy, which may involve killing lots and lots of people.

"What's that you say? You want to be an Uber driver and have a beer when you get home? Sorry, son, you're just not mature enough for that."