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Submission + - Trump signs proclamation adding $100K annual fee for H-1B visa applications (apnews.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Looking to reshape the U.S. visa system for highly skilled foreign workers and investors, President Donald Trump on Friday signed a proclamation that will require a new annual $100,000 fee for H-1B visa applications.

The moves face near-certain legal challenges and widespread criticism that Trump is going beyond presidential authority by sidestepping Congress. The actions, if they survive legal muster, will deliver staggering price increases for high-skilled and investor visas created by Congress in 1990.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said the H-1B visa fee will be $100,000 per year and added that “all big companies” are on board.

H-1B visas are meant to bring the best and brightest foreigners for high-skilled jobs that tech companies find difficult to fill with qualified U.S. citizens and permanent residents. The program instead has turned into a pipeline for overseas workers who are often willing to work for as little as $60,000 annually. That is far less than $100,000-plus salaries typically paid to U.S. technology workers.

Submission + - In love with a Luigi Mangione chatbot (thespectator.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In this short clip, an unnamed woman proudly declares both her infatuation with – and ability to create an artificial construction of – Luigi Mangione outside of a Manhattan courthouse, where he has recently been absolved of various terrorism-related charges. Wearing an “I Italian Boys” T-shirt with an illustration of his face, the woman lists the many reasons why an AI chatbot, presumably trained on Luigi Mangione-related trivia, offers her the perfect romantic companionship. She gets to talk to him every day, she says, as a best friend and partner with whom she can plan a future and name their children. And, the woman adds, although she is aware that this might make her something of an imposter, the fact that Luigi studied AI at Stanford meant that this was an all-round reasonable thing to do.

It’s easy to write off this case as simply a harmless, albeit quite eccentric, example of the many ways in which young people are using AI today. But to do so would be to miss something much more provocative about how society has changed in the past decade. It’s the future of romance, she added in her clip. But it’s not. It’s the future of everything.

Something she notes in her monologue is that her Mangione AI-bot “fights her battles for her.” This seemingly innocuous statement is particularly interesting if you remember that a low locus of control – the term psychologists refer to when discussing whether people feel in control of their own lives or not – correlates quite strongly with support for political violence today.

I’m pretty sure that The Matrix and Her were intended to be viewed as warnings, not how-to guides for life in the 21st century.

Submission + - Fearmongering predictions about climate change keep falling apart (nypost.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Over the past half-century, environmentalists have predicted countless calamities. Their extreme predictions were typically wrong, their draconian countermeasures turned out to be mostly misguided, and we should be grateful we didn’t follow their harmful advice. We need to keep this history in mind as we are inundated with stories of climate Armageddon.

This summer, headlines about the Great Barrier Reef painted a dire picture of climate-driven devastation, with environmental journalists claiming the reef was on the brink of collapse.

In reality, data shows the reef has its fourth-highest coral cover since records began in 1986, revealing these alarmist narratives to be vastly misleading.

Sensible, life-improving environmental policies over recent decades were rarely sold with fearmongering. Rich countries have dramatically reduced air and water pollution through technological advances and then through regulation. Poorer countries are starting to do the same thing, as they emerge from poverty and can afford to be more environmentally concerned. Forests have expanded globally, with this growth clear in rich countries and increasingly across the world.

This isn’t the scary future we were promised by environmentalists.

Submission + - TCS, Infosys, and Cognizant turned H1B program into organized labor trafficking (x.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: I'm saying this as an immigrant living here — these parasites are destroying American workers and trapping immigrant workers in wage slavery.

They rig the lottery by filing up multiple sometimes even 80 applications for one fake candidate. They flood the system with fraudulent submissions to guarantee wins.

There were 15,500 fraudulent applications last year, over 52% were complete lies.

American workers get fired after training their own replacements. Immigrant workers get trapped at $65K for $120K jobs with no escape route.

Both groups get destroyed by the same scam while consultancies get rich.

The employer applies for the H1B visa, so they hold complete power over the worker. If you leave the job, you have 30 days to find another employer willing to sponsor you or go back to your home country.

This creates modern indentured servitude where workers can't negotiate or quit.

Submission + - If We Want Bigger Wind Turbines, We're Gonna Need Bigger Airplanes (ieee.org) 2

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The world’s largest airplane, when it’s built, will stretch more than a football field from tip to tail. Sixty percent longer than the biggest existing aircraft, with 12 times as much cargo space as a 747, the behemoth will look like an oil tanker that’s sprouted wings—aeronautical engineering at a preposterous scale.

Called WindRunner, and expected by 2030, it’ll haul just one thing: massive wind-turbine blades. In most parts of the world, onshore wind-turbine blades can be built to a length of 70 meters, max. This size constraint comes not from the limits of blade engineering or physics; it’s transportation. Any larger and the blades couldn’t be moved over land, since they wouldn’t fit through tunnels or overpasses, or be able to accommodate some of the sharper curves of roads and rails.

So the WindRunner’s developer, Radia of Boulder, Colo., has staked its business model on the idea that the only way to get extralarge blades to wind farms is to fly them there. “The companies in the industryknow how to make turbines that are the size of the Eiffel Tower with blades that are longer than a football field,” says Mark Lundstrom, Radia’s founder and CEO. “But they’re just frustrated that they can’t deploy those machines [on land].”

Radia’s plane will be able to hold two 95-meter blades or one 105-meter blade, and land on makeshift dirt runways adjacent to wind farms. This may sound audacious—an act of hubris undertaken for its own sake. But Radia’s supporters argue that WindRunner is simply the right tool for the job—the only way to make onshore wind turbines bigger.

Bigger turbines, after all, can generate more energy at a lower cost per megawatt. But the question is: Will supersizing airplanes be worth the trouble?

Comment Re:Improve the taste of municipal water (Score 4, Informative) 116

by outsider007 (#65652860) Attached to: As World Gets Hotter, Americans Are Turning To More Sugar, Study Finds

The problem is clean water is a partisan issue in the US. Environmental protection often gets framed as a threat to economic growth. That plus aging infrastructure, corrupt local politicians, fracking, etc.. amounts to undrinkable tap water for lots of people.

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