> I still got complaints from my financial advisor that she could get us a better return than that, but I didn't care. I wanted more certainty than that.
Seems to me that she is the one hurting more because your choice undermined her commission lol
Not really, she does fine. She really does think I am over conservative in my risk tolerance. Sadly you don't get to re-run the experiment if you don't like the outcome (that being my risk intolerance speaking).
Yeah, but rent doesn’t seem to go down that much though. Opportunity cost of moving is real, security deposits are sizable. I wanted to rent for as long as possible but there’s no rent cap and the apartments keep jacking up the rent.
At least now they have some sense to cap the rental raise percent but I’ve had to deal with 15-20% increases before, and not to mention the cost of parking in an apartment.
I probably made a mistake buying but I couldn’t take the bullshit from landlords and all the headaches that come with people wanting more money.
I think I disagree on this front, but that’s probably because I ended up buying a home due to a mix of FOMO, bad landlords and rent not being too far from mortgage.
Plus from a psychological perspective it’s hard to say don’t do it for financial reasons when anyone who bought a home in the last 10 years (forget 20+) has seen insane appreciation. I’m jealous of everyone who got practically free money (2-3% mortgages) on an asset that has increased at least 50%. Life probably doesn’t get better than that and makes me wish for such nice things.
At least my “rent” is “set” for the next 29 years (I just bought last year) so hopefully at some point my mortgage would be something to be envious of.
> A more important point is why is it that Americans objectively are richer yet feel poorer?
I thought about this a lot. Some of it is expectation wrapped up in the American Dream. You work hard, and get those rewards. But that isn’t true because life isn’t fair and capitalism isn’t particularly humane or ethical.
Some of it is perceived. The people who strike gold without hard work expect to keep striking more gold, and when the yield shrinks you’re appalled because that’s not how things should be.
US is a deeply individualistic society, now more so than ever. We don’t always sacrifice for the common good, because they’re supposed to work hard just like me.
For a relatively short period it was true. Now majority works hard, lives from paycheck to paycheck and can not even own a house. Most results of what they produce goes to feed ever growing appetites of Musks
Genuinely curious, what does taxes have to do with it? Everyone pays taxes, legal or illegal in some form.
I don’t think paying your dues should make you more likely to get through the pipeline. After all, you paid those taxes because you made good money, which is what people come here for.
> A plurality of Americans don’t pay federal income taxes
What does a plurality even mean here? This is a binary question, so plurality and majority are the same thing. And I don't think it is factually correct that the majority of Americans do not pay income taxes.
I didn't look hard but that's the first thing I found. Famously, Mitt Romney complained that 47% of Americans don't contribute to federal income tax revenue, which is what I was thinking of.
Side note...I hate this stat because it makes it sound like the rich are paying their share of taxes. The reality is that people who make large w2 income pay a large part of federal taxes, and while they would be considered rich they are not the ultra-rich we see in the news every day.
> .I hate this stat because it makes it sound like the rich are paying their share of taxes
Yes! I agree, I don't mean to sound like I support the status quo. In this particular case, I wanted to clarify that green card-holding immigrants carry a disproportionate amount of tax burden (but that is not to support the current state of things).
I didn't mean to imply you did support the status quo. And you're right about GC holders as they tend to make good money and fall into the worst spot tax wise - having a large w2 income.
Yes, technically payroll taxes are not income taxes.
And people who that x number of people do not pay income tax are implying they are paying no federal taxes when that is not true. It is a disingenuous argument.
But then they gave up a tax paying job and thus the net effect is zero.
Looking holistically the person leaving the US (or lets say 100 people to make it easier to see the point) means 1 to 30 less startups and so maybe an entire company or more not being started. That is less revenue for US.
What most people from the "they steal our jobs" mentality (not saying that is you, but this a seperate point) don't get is productive people create jobs by being a customer of many businesses.
>The facts show that just like the amount of labor is not fixed, neither is the size of the economy (fixed pie fallacy) and as more work is done, the economy grows
Your reply is a glib thought-terminating cliche strawman that doesn't address their point at all. Interesting!
Those theories are based mainly on the effect of Cuban immigration in Miami, however they lack a control so you can't really conclude anything.
Besides, yeah, if you hire people who will work for any salary, the amount of jobs will increase, but salaries will decrease, for locals as well. After some time, locals will flee sectors where the migrant workers are brought in, creating further self-inflicted "labor shortages"...requiring more migrants!
The main winners are capital owners, who, thanks to the migrant workers, can now acquire a larger part of the added value generated by workers.
But a jobs worth of GDP was lost due to the lost consumption. Harder to measure for 1 person but imagine 100k people suddenly left a city. That would be felt somewhere. Dry cleaners, cafe, supermarkets etc.
This might be less true if there is resource starvation but we have transport and imports and exports. You can accomodate more people and feed them.
There are not enough qualified people in any particular country for all the possible new technologies that could be deployed. You're not likely to hire your plumber to program a webapp.
That doesn't mean your plumber isn't qualified—just that people looking for webapps want to hire workers who know how to make them.
So many computer science grads can't find work many have left the field. I don't think we will run out of workers.
There is the other side plenty of workers successful at programming language could be trained to fill any gap. That's what happened in the 50s and 60s..
Companies struggle to hire at a rate they want to pay. They don't struggle to hire at a market rate pay or more. Funny how that works.
PS The number of roles that there aren't qualified Americans for could be counted on one hand. This has always been about reducing salaries, not shortages.
I highly doubt a company can find 20k senior Photolithography experts in rural Nebraska if a company wanted. No matter what money they are paying. They'll have to bring them in.
Of course I am exaggerating, but this is not a 1 dimensional problem.
The issue is that if you import all of skilled workers you need, salaries won't rise in the branch, and students or workers in adjacent fields don't have any incentives to learn the skill. If you can hire Syldavian photonics engineers for 50k$/y, no one is incentivized to learn photonics.
This is why in the modern world some sectors are always crying about "worker shortages" while asking always more migrant workers to come in - salaries are compressed as a result, and locals have no incentives to enter the branch.
Hence importing workers may be useful for needs that are limited in time and space (say, install a specialized foreign machinery in a power plant), but systematic importation leads to dequalification of the local workers, who flee the branch that has now low salaries.
it's a companies not wanting to spend any amount of time and money training an employee and wanting 100% utilization the second the employment starts issue.
Those seem like bold assumptions about % of startups created by green card holders?
I feel like the better argument is that the greencard holder was the best candidate and thus will be more productive in the role. It is just efficient resource allocation. That, even without new companies, will drive profit/expansion/more jobs
At a certain point, there aren't enough Americans for these jobs. So the choice is to let other nations absorb these skilled laborers, or simply hire the best people.
It's funny how we forget about meritocracy as soon as the median American is threatened.
> At a certain point, there aren't enough Americans for these jobs
Is that really true? I’m sure in some fields where you need rare experts I believe it. For the average engineer who is just another cog in the wheel of big corp, I highly doubt it.
> Is that really true? I’m sure in some fields where you need rare experts I believe it. For the average engineer who is just another cog in the wheel of big corp, I highly doubt it.
Have you ever hired someone before? Did you decide to take the best person you found or did you pick an American?
> Have you ever hired someone before? Did you decide to take the best person you found or did you pick an American?
Many times. Sometimes we don’t offer sponsorships so we hired who didn’t need one. Other times not. During the interview process where they’re from isn’t the matter at hand. Either way, there’s no shortage of good candidates - solely American / GC or not.
Though let’s be honest - there is a question behind the question, isn’t there? Why don’t you just ask that instead?
That doesn’t directly prove that there aren’t enough Americans who can do the job. Sometimes yeah, the non American is better like in photolithography.
Generally though, the foreign candidate is not so much better that hiring an American would have lowered the bar.
Sometimes it also comes down to leveling - I’ve had to down level people due to budget concerns. Americans can hold out for that better job, but the other cannot so companies take advantage of that.
My point is that it’s not a skill issue, it’s a wage + location issue. Foreigners will find that their wage is better than what they can earn at home, so they can undercut that citizens who’s held out for a better opportunity.
> so they can undercut that citizens who’s held out for a better opportunity.
Just to better understand, genuinely, do you mean that the company would increase their budget in the event that a foreign worker had not been available, and that an American would have taken the job at that time, given the higher wage?
Why wouldn’t they? It’s a supply and demand thing, supply is lower so pay is higher to meet demand.
Other ways to solve is to settle for less if the job isn’t that crucial, or look for someone who lives in a lower cost of living area who can take the wage. But that also depends on the whole RTO fiasco.
To be clear, if you are doing leading edge R&D or some super special project like SpaceX, etc then yeah you need to seek the brightest minds across the globe. But to maintain your CMS or work in some ERP softwares, you can definitely find an American to do it.
The basic point I’m making is a large majority of H1B work can be done just as well (within an acceptable error rate) by someone here. There are reasons why you need some special talent but those aren’t as common.
With AI taking a percentage of jobs there will be enough people to fill those positions and more. Why bring in workers when productivity is taking away positions.
> With AI taking a percentage of jobs there will be enough people to fill those positions and more. Why bring in workers when productivity is taking away positions.
>It's funny how we forget about meritocracy as soon as the median American is threatened.
What meritocracy? This is a myth pushed to justify a kind of "just world" interpretation of our social ills. Nepotism is increasing, social mobility decreasing. To believe in meritocracy in the face of this is to deny reality.
I can already on the ground see the effect of the Trump policies. So many tech jobs that would have been in the US are being lost. And companies are learning how to be effective with overseas teams.
"Immigrants doing a very large portion of tech work can't be just because they get paid less"
It is solely about that. Remember, immigrants didn't really play a role in the US tech industry for half of its existence and didn't play a major role until a decade ago. This is despite the fact that US colleges openly and actively discriminate against US citizens for grad school spots for 2 or 3 decades now.
> This is despite the fact that US colleges openly and actively discriminate against US citizens for grad school spots for 2 or 3 decades now.
Can you provide a citation for this specific claim? I used to do admissions to a grad program in the US, and we ended up admitting mostly foreign students soley because very few US citizens actually applied (probably only 10% of apps). Whether that's because they were not qualified or couldn't afford it I do not know. But it's not because they were openly and actively discriminated against.
Not just that, universities (especially smaller research universities) love having grad students whose research is paid for. China, Saudi Arabia, Brazil (less so now than in the past), Qatar, and others have all had programs for years where they paid the tuition and research costs of students at universities. Why would the university not pick that over a local kid who the university has to pay for out of their own coffers?
> Not just that, universities (especially smaller research universities) love having grad students whose research is paid for.
> Why would the university not pick that over a local kid who the university has to pay for out of their own coffers?
Universities don't pay for research - and departments usually don't pay for research either.
At the margin, a professor will prefer someone who has her own funding, but that person also needs to be competent, so I doubt the national schemes you are citing have made an impact on who gets into graduate school.
I've been involved in .. applied CS for 40 years, and the industry has been filled with people of a wide variety of backgrounds for that entire time. Even during the time I worked for the US DOD many of the people I worked were international.
> So we’re essentially turning away someone who is building up our country.
They're not being turned away. There's a requirement to be in the country for 5 years with a green card before citizenship. It seems to me that they are just upset that they have to follow the rules which aren't hurting them at all.
They are actually in fact being told to return to their country before completing a process that previously - legally! - could be done in the US. That = being turned away
> There's a requirement to be in the country for 5 years with a green card before citizenship.
That is absolutely irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
Until next week, or whenever the current system is again upended haphazardly.
> It seems to me that they are just upset that they have to follow the rules which aren't hurting them at all.
It seems to me that they were all following the rules. The rules are now being capriciously changed with sly marketing words to confuse everyone.
They are effectively being ruled by a system that they have no say in. That's incompatible with America's democratic values. Of course it's reasonable that we don't allow non-citizens the vote; the problem as I see it is that if someone has worked here for 25 years for all intents and purposes they are a citizen, the government just doesn't formally recognize the reality of their situation.
This is so confusing. What does GC -> citizenship have to do with this? The rules work fine now because they apply for the change of status and keep on working until its accepted and leave if not. This new rule means they have to leave the country they are living and working in for anywhere from 1 month to 2 years, probably losing their job and majorly disrupting their lives for seemingly no reason at all. People who have lived in the US for a decade with a job, mortgage, family and children randomly need to leave to years, and what does that accomplish for anyone? If the govt. wanted to deport them, they could do it at any moment. The govt. can process their change of status paperwork exactly the same whether they're in or out of the country. So what is the point of any of this?
Taxes are supposed to pay for public services. An efficient visa system is a public service. If you pay tons of taxes but don’t get a public service that’s personally very important to you, it’s natural to feel let down
You have to do a lot when you get a green card to prove you won't be a burden on the US tax payer. It's a big part of the system and a big part of the anti-immigrant rhetoric
> Genuinely curious, what does taxes have to do with it?
It's popular trope from the GOP that immigrants are an economic drain on the US. They get free <insert whatever you want>, so the US must throw them out to save money.
Just because someone pays some taxes (it's hard to avoid paying sales tax if you buy a thing in a store, regardless of your citizenship), doesn't mean they're a net economic benefit to the country they live in, depending on exactly what taxes they pay and what taxpayer-funded services they get.
Immigrants come to the US with a variety of financial situations. Some immigrants are blatantly scamming welfare systems designed for poor Americans or are outright committing fraud (this is much of what is going on with the federal investigation and charges of Somalis in Minnesota). Other immigrants are paying taxes comparable to what American citizens would pay (this is probably the case for most people on H1B visas in the tech industry).
> Taxation without Representation was literally the driving force for the creation of America itself
The issue of taxation without representation had far more to do with the founders’ status as Englishmen and British subjects than their status as taxpayers. Paying taxes by itself was not a sufficient qualification for political representation. Felons, minors, and women were also required to pay taxes in the 1770s, despite not being able to vote. Immigrants who believe that the taxes they pay entitle them to this representation have bought into a falsified version of American history that was popularized during the Civil Rights Era.
United States Congress, “An act to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” March 26, 1790:
> Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, That any Alien being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen thereof on application to any common law Court of record in any one of the States wherein he shall have resided for the term of one year at least, and making proof to the satisfaction of such Court that he is a person of good character, and taking the oath or affirmation prescribed by law to support the Constitution of the United States, which Oath or Affirmation such Court shall administer, and the Clerk of such Court shall record such Application, and the proceedings thereon; and thereupon such person shall be considered as a Citizen of the United States.
> I don’t think paying your dues should make you more likely to get through the pipeline. After all, you paid those taxes because you made good money, which is what people come here for.
To show that they're not freeloaders. A lot of right-wingers have a belief that immigrants are implicitly freeloaders, and therefore getting rid of them will make the economy better.
Of course it's just not true. Like most current Republican talking points, it's plainly fabricated; it's an outright lie. But, since a lot of people believe it, it's useful to reminder everyone that its not the case.
A very common xenophobic narrative is that foreigners do two things at the same time (1) steal your jobs and (2) drain your social systems. Another even more vile one one would be anything to do with coming for your daughters and women, but for this you will have to favtor in race. Because a rich white Frenchman coming your daughter doesn't have the same ring to it for bigots.
If the US, a country with a too low birthrate, throws out even the best kind of migrant (namely the kind that generates a lot of value for the country), you're going to be in deeper shit than ever before for decades to come.
Now I agree that paying taxes or not should have nothing to do with it.
It's not just a narrative and has been proven true, at least for (2).[0]
For (1), I think that a good discussion with any business owner in a migrant-dominated field will tell you that hiring foreigners is done to keep costs low and avoid Baumol's law. As a result, locals don't want to work in such fields, reinforcing the need for migrants.
So what you're saying is that people arriving in a country don't earn as much as people with established ties there? Cool. I wonder how that could be? /s
> people arriving in a country don't earn as much as people with established ties there
Not true as Europeans are not concerned.
> how that could be
It doesn't have to be like this; for instance, you could require that migrant workers earn at least 2x the median salary to get a visa. It would avoid the whole exploitation of third-world workers paid a subsistence salary to save on costs.
> Where else would people get opportunities that could match the United States? I can't think of any country that would even come close.
Isn’t that comparative?
If you are in the EU then the US seems like a holy grail because pay is higher. If you have dual citizenship you can probably avail of the EU safety nets if you had to go back.
If you’re in South East Asia, any EU choice is a huge improvement. Lately there has been strong immigration to Germany for example instead of coming to the US.
After naturalization and giving up my original citizenship, I am a little envious of people with dual citizenship of US + any EU country. It really doesn’t get better than that.
> If you are in the EU then the US seems like a holy grail because pay is higher. If you have dual citizenship you can probably avail of the EU safety nets if you had to go back.
One of the reasons pay in the US is higher is because the EU taxes ordinary people fairly heavily to pay for those social services. But also because of systematic cultural differences between the US and EU that lead to the US having a more dynamic economy that generally pays people more.
> If you’re in South East Asia, any EU choice is a huge improvement. Lately there has been strong immigration to Germany for example instead of coming to the US.
Lately Alternative für Deutschland has been getting a lot of votes in Germany; what kinds of rules (on top of the existing ones) do they think should be in place for people in southeast asia trying to immigrate to Germany?
> Lately Alternative für Deutschland has been getting a lot of votes in Germany; what kinds of rules (on top of the existing ones) do they think should be in place for people in southeast asia trying to immigrate to Germany?
The AfD is in no position to put legislation regarding immigration in place, that is federal law. Nevertheless, southeast asian immigrants are not particularly in the eyes of the public.
> After naturalization and giving up my original citizenship, I am a little envious of people with dual citizenship of US + any EU country. It really doesn’t get better than that.
Depends on whether you actually want to enter the US. If you don't, its citizenship is a burden like no other citizenship: Banks want nothing to do with you and you pay extra taxes that no other nation requires from you. Oh, and should you decide on giving it up - that's cumbersome and costs a bunch of dollars, from what I've heard.
So from someone that at a max would want to visit the US only as a tourist: Having only european citizenship is better than dual european/US citizenship to me.
I find it amusing how your reply can itself be used as an example of hyperbole (due to the second part). Is there a name for that? Autological¹ figure of speech?
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