The proper way to do this is not a big fee, that is just a government money grab. The proper way is to force a minimum pay rate for H1B employees such that they are paid inline with local rate. This means they are employed because their skills are needed and not available locally, not to save money over employing a local person with the needed skills. The big catch is ensuring creative accounting is not used to under pay the H1B working while pretending to pay them similar rates to local employees.

it seems like a solution in search of a problem.

From TFS: There is no single, standard definition of middle class, or upper middle class, and what counts as a hefty income in one city can feel paltry in another.

For the comprehension impaired, that's why stated range of $133,000 to $400,000 is so wide. In one city, $133,000/year would be "upper middle class", while in another, $400,000 would be the threshold.

There are even some mathematical proofs for that by now. For example, "creativity" of gen-AI seems to be limited to below the level of a professional by the very approach used: https://www.psypost.org/a-math... This is a pretty devastating result, because in a larger context, it means that AI-slop is not a temporary problem, but the only thing the tech can really produce.

Cropley modeled creativity as the product of effectiveness and novelty ...This finding indicates that large language models are structurally incapable of maximizing both variables simultaneously, preventing them from achieving the high scores possible for human creators who can combine extreme novelty with extreme effectiveness.

The only way the vaccination helps the elderly is if the vaccinated do not catch the disease and therefore do not expose them to it.

If different vaccination rates by age are driving changes in COVID-19 mortality by age, another way to see this should be to compare elderly to nonelderly COVID-19 mortality rates, over the course of the pandemic. We would expect the ratio of elderly/nonelderly mortality rates to be high in 2020, when no vaccines were available, but to fall in the first half of 2021, both because vaccines were available earlier on to the elderly, and because elderly vaccination rates were higher. The ratio might rise again in the second half of 2021, because non-elderly vaccination rates rose more rapidly than elderly rates during this period. In Figure 7, we confirm these expectations. The figure report three ratios of PFRs in the three Midwest areas by month during the pandemic: for age 85+, ages 65–84, and all elderly, each relative to middle-aged adults aged 45–64. Consider first the PFR ratio for elderly aged 85+ to adults aged 45–64. This ratio is generally above 20 during 2020 and is over 40 in December 2020. It then plunges in early 2021, a period in which the eldest were offered vaccines, generally ahead of everyone else other than health care workers and continues to fall to about 5 by June 2021. For persons aged 65–84, there is a modest fall during the first quarter of 2021, a period in which many people in this age group could not obtain vaccines, and a sharper fall in the second quarter of 2021, as the vaccines became widely available. The ratios then rise somewhat in the second half of 2021, as vaccination rates for the non-elderly rise faster than rates for the elderly. This is association, not causation, but strongly supports the protective effect of vaccination.

These projects span a broad range of difficulty, with costs reaching over $10,000 and completion times exceeding 100 hours. All project costs and completion times come directly from human professionals who completed the work.

In the Mexican Repatriation during the early part of the Great Depression, between 300,000 and 2 million people of Mexican heritage were forcibly removed from America, even though a large percentage of them were born here.

However, voluntary repatriation was far more common than formal deportation and federal officials were minimally involved.[5] Some of the repatriates hoped that they could escape the economic crisis of the Great Depression.[10] The government formally deported at least 82,000 people,[11] with the vast majority occurring between 1930 and 1933.[5][12] The Mexican government also encouraged repatriation with the promise of free land

According to the consulting firm’s report, people are currently living a “32-hour, 17-minute day” by multitasking throughout their daily routine online, and consumers spend over 13 hours on media daily by utilizing various social media platforms like Instagram, X, and TikTok.