H1B Visa

[Steve Litt]

On Fri, 09 Dec 2016 09:15:22 -0700
Keith Smith <techlists at phpcoderusa.com> wrote:

> What I am hearing Steve, is every job should pay a living wage.  Am I 
> correct?

Yes.

> 
> I'm old and grey.  I worked a few part-time, minimum wage jobs, when
> I was in high school and while attending college at a point in my
> youth when I was trying to find my myself.  I never thought of those
> jobs as a job I would work at long term or after getting a little
> older.

I don't know how old or gray you are, but I graduated high school in
1967. Back then, you could spend 1 or 2 days knocking on doors and come
up with a minimum wage job. If you knocked on doors in Factory Row (my
local one was Howard Street in Skokie), you'd come up with about 33%
above minimum wage. And in those days, 40 hours of minimum wage could
finance a cheap apartment and cheap food if you didn't have a car, and
minimum wage jobs back then didn't assume you had a car. Career
navigation was easy back then.

> 
> I've always thought, with rare exception that minimum wage jobs are 
> starter jobs.  

That's how it *was* when I was lucky enough to grow up. College grad or
not, you had multiple ways to build a career sufficient to frugally
raise a family. That situation is gone, gone gone. Today, minimum wage
jobs are the only alternative for many people.

> AND I have always thought that one needs to feel the
> pain to better themselves.

That's absolutely true. But above a certain threshold, that pain
changes from a stimulant to a retardant. When you have to take four
busses to buy one bag of groceries (can't carry more on the bus),
you're just not going to be as good an employee. I use the grocery
shopping by bus as one example: There are many. When you become too
poor, making it to the next day burns up all the time and mindshare you
could have used to improve yourself.

> I know this might seem a little harsh, however I think if someone
> finds them self in a minimum wage job at 30 or older, without a plan
> to progress, then they have no one to blame but them self.  

That's just Boomer Bullshit. This ain't the summer of love. In the
modern economy, a young person is lucky to make any money at all. If
the young person has no family safety net, he/she's lucky to have a
roof over his/her head. The career navigability we had at their age is
gone. For all too many people today, survival is a challenge. If you
could put them in a time machine and send them back to 1965-1972,
they'd prosper. Probably outcompete us.


> Again, I
> know there is exceptions.  So lets say my prior statements apply to 
> non-students, retirees, and about 80% of what is left. That leaves
> some room for the exceptions.

It's much, much more universal than that. When I started working, if
you showed up sober, had half a brain, and did it like they trained you
to do it, you got ahead. Today, you need to be good just to tread
water: You must be great to move ahead.

> 
> I'm thinking I read that Seattle Washington min wage caused
> restaurants to go out of business and minimum wage workers were laid
> off.

Yes. I'm sure that if the minimum wage were lowered to a nickel an
hour, employment would increase. Like in India, the well off would hire
people for a nickel an hour to manually fan them, instead of buying an
electric fan. We'd go back to having full-service gas stations.

But what becomes of all those people who can't afford food or shelter
on a buck an hour (obviously supply and demand would stop it before it
got down to a nickel)? I'll cover that in my answer to your next
question.

The point I was making is a job that won't feed or clothe a person
should not be offered. If the job's that worthless, it should be
automated out of existance: At least the automation will create a few
decent paying jobs.

> 
> It is not clear what your point is about hiring your own private
> army. 

When a large swath of the nation doesn't have enough money to feed and
shelter themselves and their family, they turn to one of three things:

1) Welfare
2) Crime
3) Revolution

If #2 gets extremely bad, or #3 happens at all, you'll need to surround
yourself with some pretty adept bodyguards, knights, whatever you want
to call them, in order to keep your house, your food, your computers,
and perhaps your life.


> Is it that minimum wage will cause increase in crime? Or the
> the purple squirrels want to reduce government to the point you have
> to pack an AR-15.

In general, the same voices urging the dropping of minimum wage also
want to drop welfare, so crime and revolution are the order of the day.
I mean really rampant crime: Not just that your car gets broken into
once a month and stolen once a year. If there's any kind of
insurrection or revolution, you'll need to be well armed; really well
armed, every time you leave your house.

> I think I read some place that the incarcerated tend to be have above 
> average intelligence.  We will always have car thieves and burglars
> no matter how good the economy and the number of opportunities.

Yeah, but the more deep and widespread poverty gets, the less it looks
like the modern US and the more it looks like Somalia. Also, what *I*
read about prisoners is a significantly greater percentage of prisoners
than non-offenders have actual brain damage. And I've never read that
they were above average intelligence.

> 
> Those construction guys were channelling their energy in the wrong
> way. I would venture to say that all of us have been down on our luck
> at some point in our lives and we did not resort to stealing.  We
> worked hard to get out of hard luck ville.

As far as working hard to escape hard luck, if you are anywhere near my
age, then compared to people coming of age today, we got success handed
to us. Surely you can see that.
> 
> When I was a kid we shopped our neighbor's store and some worked for
> our neighbor.  The money stayed local.  Walmart replace main street -
> low paid workers who are subsidized by tax payers.

That's a different subject. I'm no fan of Walmart, and almost
completely boycott them because of how they treat their workers and the
effect they have on local small businesses. But look at what you said
in your last paragraph: YOU had neighborhood businesses to hire you,
today's people don't.

> 
> This is all crony capitalism.  If we were to remove all the unnatural 
> influences on the market and allow the market to find it's true 
> equilibrium then all of this would take care of itself.

:-)

My factory was a pretty safe one, thanks to things like OSHA. But all
the older workers were missing fingers, sliced off in a time before
OSHA, when it was Patriotic American to run a dangerous sweat shop. If
you consider safety regulations unnatural, we're going to have to
disagree. I like my workforce to have ten fingers apiece.

What about antitrust laws? Are those "unnatural?" The invisible hand of
Adam Smith completely falls apart in the presence of monopolism.

What about campaign finance laws? Are those "unnatural?" I can think of
no better example of "crony capitalism" than buying elections with
unlimited, anonymous contributions.

There are different kinds and degrees of capitalism, and laissez-faire
capitalism is no friend to democracy or any kind of representative
government.

> When I was down on my luck, I did not blame anyone but myself.  

Darn right. Back in the day, we could go out and get a job after one or
two days of trying, assuming we were White and not disabled. This job
would keep us fed and sheltered. As far as the economy, ours was
probably the most pampered generation that ever existed. Try graduating
high school today, especially if you can't count on your family to feed
and shelter you.

> I
> don't buy that we owe anyone a living wage 

Then you and I have very different ethics. I don't want to see people
suffer. And I *really* don't want to see blameless children suffer.

> nor is that an excuse for
> the the break down of society.

It may not be an excuse, but push poverty far enough and that's what
you're going to get. Read history. American exceptionalism only goes so
far.

> 
> Ponder this for a minute.  Around a hundred and fifty years ago (my
> time might be off) people where loading all they had in a wagon and 
> travelling West to settle a plot of land given them by the gov.  I
> would imagine that was quite a hardship.  I'm sure some lost all and
> some even lost their lives.  This is the spirit this land was built
> on.  I can go on and on with examples.

Listen to what you just said. They were *giving away* land in Oklahoma.
Except the north and south pole, there's no more land to give away. Our
population is probably five times greater than the period you mention.
If there were a place giving away land today, I guarantee you a huge
proportion of Milleneals would migrate there, even if they had to walk.
But that option doesn't exist.


> 
> In the end Gov cannot create jobs, 

Yes it can. It always has. Haven't you had friends who worked in the
defense industry? Have you read about the WPA in the 1930's?

> all they can do is destroy the 
> economy by getting too involved. 

Oh come on, that's a talking point. Listen, if you really want no
government involvement, move to Somalia. The government will never
bother you again.

> If we do not let nature take it's 
> course then we will always have a less than optimal economy.

Nature take its way? Is that like survival of the fittest? So rich
children who get pnemonia get the best hospital care, and poor children
with the same disease die on the streets?

And when the word "optimal" is used, the question always must be asked
"optimal with respect to what?" With respect to the benefit of rich
people? In that case you're probably right. With respect to
absolute number of dollars? You may or may not be right. But with
respect to the strength and stability of America, "let nature take its
course" will lead to a very bad result.

You should go out and talk to lots of people in their 20's. The world
that formed your beliefs bears no resemblance to the world they're
starting their careers in.

SteveT