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Submission + - Bernie Sanders, H-1B skeptic

Submitted by Presto Vivace
Presto Vivace writes: Will the Vermont senator raise the visibility of the visa issue with his presidential run?

The H-1B visa issue rarely surfaces during presidential races, and that's what makes the entrance by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) into the 2016 presidential race so interesting. ... ...Sanders is very skeptical of the H-1B program, and has lambasted tech firms for hiring visa workers at the same time they're cutting staff. He's especially critical of the visa's use in offshore outsourcing.

Submission + - Microsoft's K-12 CS and H-1B Visa Agenda: From Think Tank to Law of the Land

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Led by Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, with corporate contributions from the likes of Microsoft and Google, a $30M campaign to promote K-12 computer science education was a smash success, winning over the President and lawmakers, who are poised to make CS a 'core academic subject' in a rewritten No Child Left Behind Act, which could result in hundreds of millions of dollars in new spending that the tech giants suggested could be funded using fees from additional H-1B visas they're coincidentally lobbying for to bring in foreign programming talent. Since the NY Times' Eric Lipton just won a 2015 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting that shed light on how foreign powers buy influence at think tanks, it probably bears mentioning that Microsoft's 'two-pronged' K-12 CS and H-1B visa agenda — which is on the verge of becoming the law of the land — was hatched at an influential Microsoft-backed think tank mentioned in Lipton's reporting, the Brookings Institution. On September 27, 2012, the Center for Technology Innovation at Brookings "hosted a forum on STEM education and immigration reforms and how these policy innovations can recharge American competitiveness and economic opportunity for current and future generations of workers." Keynote remarks were delivered by Brad Smith, executive VP and general counsel of Microsoft, who took the occasion to introduce Microsoft's National Talent Strategy. "So, Brad," asked the Brookings Institution's Darrell West, "you're the only [one] who mentioned this topic of making the problem bigger. So, we galvanize action by really producing a crisis ['like climate change', as Microsoft partner Code.org later put it], I take it?" Smith replied, "Yeah, I think we have the opportunity to do two things...the immigration and education issues are, to some degree, opposite sides of the same coin. The coin itself is about the need to have people with the right skills to do the work that the country needs to get done...And, you know, it will require additional people from outside the United States in the short term [20+ years, according to the WSJ] but let's use that to help address the broader and to some degree deeper and longer lasting problem that we face with respect to our educational system. It also gives us the opportunity to connect with people who may not have seen this connection or to connect with people who care more about one issue or the other, but bring them together" (video @ 49:24). Fittingly, in attendance two years later at the White House as President Obama tackled the national CS crisis as he 'learned to code' from a nonprofit headed by Smith's next-door-neighbor at the Brookings-trumpeted and nationally-covered Hour of Code event was Fred Humphries, a top Microsoft lobbyist and Brookings partner. According to visitor records, Humphries returned to the White House the next day with Smith and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to quietly meet with officials. While in D.C., Nadella also lobbied for high-skilled immigration. And that, kids, is How a Bill [Gates Agenda] Becomes a Law!

Comment Re:Buying cars based on fuel price... ugh (Score 1) 622

by Safety Cap (#49531517) Attached to: Cheap Gas Fuels Switch From Electric Cars To SUVs

The other fact is that pure gas cars are getting really good milage.
My Chevy Cruze is averaging over 33 mpg for me.

LOL. My 2002 Prius got 45 mpg (not to mention much, much lower emissions).

33 mpg is in the same class as "can't be bothered". If you want to crow, you need to get more than 50 mpg, son.

Comment Re:narcissistic spectrum personality disorder (Score 1, Insightful) 206

If one is that concerned about having a criminal record one should refrain from committing crimes. All he had to do was write a short post on his blog to call attention to whatever issue it was that was bothering him. Instead he broke into a server room, installed a computer, and illegally downloaded thousands of documents. I think 6 months and a criminal record is about right for that sort of thing.

Comment Re: Lifestyle (Score 4, Informative) 332

by Thomas Miconi (#49458093) Attached to: California Looks To the Sea For a Drink of Water

Citations? Here're mine:

USA uses about 1500 m3/capita/year, which is similar to New Zealand (1200 m3/capita/year) and Canada (1400 m3/capita/year). Compare with California alone, we're at 178 gallons/capita/day which is 245 m3/capita/year. That's lower than most countries.

Look, dude...

Your 1st link is total consumption. Agricultural + municipal + industrial.

In your 2nd link, the "178 gallons/day" figure is for municipal use only.

Pro-tip: when you get such massive discrepancies (1 to 6 !) between two similar populations, especially when one includes the other, it's worth checking it up a bit more carefully.

Comment Re:This is why they reinvent the wheel (Score 1) 626

Esperanto has the drawback of being a European language. Its grammar and vocabulary are overwhelmingly inspired by European languages, especially Romance languages. That's why your typical Frenchman or Spaniard can more or less decipher Esperanto, and so can highly literate English speakers (because the more complex English vocabulary is often Latin-based).

Sure, replacing English with Esperanto would be super-cool for French or Italian speakers. But why would a Chinese or Vietnamese speaker promote Esperanto rather than just learning English? To them, it's just a different form of Euro-speak, minus the enormous existing corpus (both technical and artistic) of English.

To have a snowball's chance in Hell of displacing English, a constructed language would need to be roughly neutral towards all people, or at least between Europe and, say, China. I know of no proposal that fits this criterion without being klunky, unnatural and just plain butt-ugly.

Submission + - How Comcast Bankrolls Organizations That Support TWC Merger (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: When Comcast announced it was pursuing a takeover of Time Warner Cable, many internet users and activists immediately submitted objections to the deal. Support came more slowly, but steadily, from organizations like the International Center for Law and Economics, and from politicians like Governor Phil Bryant (R-MS). Now, a NY Times report reveals that much of this support for the merger came in exchange for money from Comcast. From the article: "Letters detailing the benefits of the Comcast deal were submitted to the Federal Communications Commission by staff members from Americans for Tax Reform, the American Enterprise Institute, the Institute for Policy Innovation, Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Free State Foundation and the Center for Individual Freedom, as well as by a professor at a technology program at the University of Pennsylvania, all of which received support from Comcast or its trade association, tax documents and other disclosures reviewed by The New York Times show. A similar pattern is evident with charities like the Urban League and more than 80 other community groups that supported the media company and that also accepted collectively millions of dollars in donations from the Comcast Foundation over the last five years, documents reviewed by The Times show." Fortunately, even after spreading money around so liberally, Comcast is still struggling to find a coherent, believable message for regulators, and the deal is far from assured.

Submission + - Tech Billionaires Want Jesse Jackson to 'Get The Facts Straight' on H-1B Visas

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "Let's get the facts straight [on H-1B workers]," commands the Mythbusters-themed popup at FWD.us, which seems designed to refute Jesse Jackson's earlier claims that foreign high-tech workers are taking American jobs. What's really holding back Americans from jobs is the lack of foreign tech workers with H-1B visas, according to a new research brief entitled The H-1B Employment Effect , which is being promoted by Mark Zuckerberg's FWD.us PAC and Steve Ballmer's Partnership for a New American Economy Action Fund. One wonders what Jackson will make of the report, which uses a photo of what appears to be a young black male that occupies most of the first page of the research report to drive home its point. Curiously, a Google image search reveals that the photo of what one might assume is a U.S.-born worker who owes his job to an H-1B worker is identical to one gracing the website of a UK memory distributor, except it's been changed from color to black-and-white, giving it a civil rights movement-era vibe. Hey, one Photoshopped picture is worth a thousand words when you're trying to make a point, right?

Comment Re:Make it stop! (Score 1) 75

Can we please stop with the idiotic stories? One was funny. Two was meh. Three was dumb. At this point it's gone past annoying.

Nah, this one is actually OK. It might even introduce new readers to the original Asimov material. All of us old hats have read it, but the young'uns might not.

Actually, if they could use the joke posts to highlight some lesser known works, that would be ideal.

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