That response is pretty combative and runs the risk of earning a black mark against oneself, easily done in the small-ish community that is IT. Not necessarily the best strategy when starting out. May not necessarily be the best strategy even when established.

When contracting, both the end user and the placement company are one's customers. I know nothing of matters legal in the States but my general sense of caution suggests taking a deep breath and maybe a short walk before giving serious thought to taking one's customers into litigation.

Judging from the context of your post I'd gently advise you to be careful with those linguistic gymnastics, you might injure yourself. :-p

I'm sorry you've copped a bit of flak over your past role. I can only guess at how many people are hurting because of this practice and I feel for them. Personally I'm grateful for you having shared your experience.

I'm not in the US but like many western nations, NZ is only a decade or so behind North America on a lot of matters social, commercial and otherwise. It seems wise to keep an eye on the US mood, naturally for myself but also because of my general nerdly concern for geeks in need. Nobody who appreciates skills can easily witness good knowledge workers lose much or all of what they've achieved financially for no good reason. I feel quite sad when I think of those forced to sit on their hands while third parties do a poor job of the work they used to take pride in performing themselves.

The first way to combat this 'corporate capture' of the H1B programme is a general understanding of its premise and mechanisms amongst the IT community. We're more than capable of understanding the legislation, although it is admittedly rather tedious reading. Anecdotes such as yours help us appreciate a little of the legal process, the administrative dodge and the half-truths that keep this race-to-the-bottom operation running.

Of course, but unless I'm mistaken I don't think we yet have a working example of a gigawatt-class solar power plant with battery storage yet. Even for home use it's not just a simple matter of slapping up some panels, it's a significant investment that needs to be costed carefully.

TL;DR: solar isn't baseload and it's silly to oversimplify the situation as nuke vs solar. We need 'em both and more besides.

..jobs that are themselves increasingly under threat from automation. :)

Great post though and I don't disagree with you. We certainly are living in interesting times.

Good post. I'm not sure I understand the engineering challenges sufficiently to critique your proposal but we do need to be thinking along these lines.

Personally, I love nuclear power. I'm very, very fond of hydro, pleased as punch with wind generation and have a special place in my heart for geothermal power production.

Where we are right now we haven't the luxury of time to overlook any sustainable power generation technology. Each has its place and we need them all if we're going to successfully transition from fossil fuels.

Life is what we make it of course, your snark notwithstanding.

It is however made no easier when fools like the AC above insist that complex situations be childishly boiled down to simple black-and-white 'Mr. Nuke vs Mrs. Family Solar' false dichotomies.

The only 'insurmountable problem' I feel we have is the continuing riches we're taking from the bottomless mine of our own collective stupidity.

I think a little phenomenon called the 24-hour day/night cycle of our little planet is all the argument he might need to counter your kindergarten-level rebuttal. Perhaps instead there's something magical about your 'Family Solar' that I've missed that you might like to share with the rest of us?

Thanks for that segue. Now, back in the real world, one doesn't usually have the luxury of choosing one's customers. Furthermore, one very seldom has the opportunity to choose the customer's home PC environment for them either.

People in the real world make decisions based upon their personal and business needs; the black-and-white views of basement-dwelling trolls tend to factor less into their calculations than you might expect. No, really.

Yup, all he came up with was those stupid faggot computers that never worked anyway!

Looking at the comment following yours it appears you have some sort of anonymous fool throwing mud at your proposition. Unsurprisingly they offer nothing by way of improvement on your position. I guess it's more fun for a shallow mind to follow mud with mud than attempt a reasoned argument.

I'm sure you're hardly bothered by such idiocy but I wanted to take a moment to point out that in my humble opinion your post provides a beautifully elegant and balanced summary of the scientific method at work. Perhaps it's original; perhaps instead it's ancient and I'm showing myself to be embarrassingly poorly read by failing to recognise its origin. Either way I find it inspirational, thank you.

I chose to reply rather than mod you up because I found your post remarkable and.. well, I guess I needed to remark upon it. Apologies if the points would have been of greater value to you!

Obvious troll is obvious. Go play somewhere else, kiddo.

Wow, I found myself so annoyed by your post I wanted to reply with "Fuck you!" However that's hardly constructive, even if it is in character. (Yeah, I'm trying to evolve.)

Anyway: some of us are productive, helpful, compassionate and useful members of society, but only when we take our medication on a regular basis. Typically we're not proud of that fact but it beats the alternative.

If it helps you feel better: when some of us identified by this generalisation fail to take our medication - for whatever reason - we suffer a special kind of agony that cannot be described or explained adequately to someone who does not need medication to function normally. Consider it a significant punishment, if that eases your conscience. In my own experience I've found it can take weeks to fully return to normal.

Would you feel as coldly towards a person suffering diabetes? A person who needs daily finger-prick blood testing and may even require insulin injections?

We didn't get to choose our brains or our bodies, just like you didn't get to choose yours.

Besides, if I had a choice I'd naturally rather be a unicorn, just like every other sane person out there.

Golden handcuffs are still chains of bondage, that is true enough.

At least they'll have an opportunity to make some intelligent decisions about their extra income, perhaps some might start that nest-egg towards retirement they've been wanting to kick off but haven't had the funds to do so until now.

As a general comment, life can be pretty tight financially when earning less than $40k. For example here in Auckland I'm paying $35kp/a just in rent for a nasty cold 3brm house with no heating/aircon, no carpeting, peeling paint and a bushy garden/yard that costs me another $1.5kp/a to keep tidy.

Those golden handcuffs on offer sound .. surprisingly attractive, now that I think about it. :)

Precisely and well said. This is (another) great reason why people who like to clamour "there should be a tax on that" to every perceived injustice should be ignored (or preferably, loudly refuted) for their short-sightedness.

Increasing minimum wage, 'taxing the rich' and slapping tariffs and fees around will certainly have consequences, however they may not necessarily be the intended consequences.

Maybe raising minimum wage to $15/hr in this case is actually the right thing to do, but such a decision isn't the simple matter a lot of people make it out to be.