H1B Visa

[Keith Smith]

I had dinner with a couple guys from a programming agency last night.  
The senior owner is about 55 and the junior owner is about 35.  I'm 
guessing they make exceptionally good money.  What was the mix that made 
them successful?  Skills, personality, an hard work.  They both attended 
college, developed some in demand skills, with a little luck and hard 
work they are doing very well.

So what your telling me there is no opportunity in America.  It's over.  
The good times are gone.  Our only options are

1) Welfare
2) Crime
3) Revolution

Who pays for the welfare?  There must be some opportunity. Some one is 
paying taxes.  Someone is buying those $275,000 houses in the East 
Valley.  Someone is buying new cars.  I see multiple new car dealerships 
in the East Valley.

And I would submit we are in a revolution.  It is a war of ideology.  
The one we are talking about.  You are saying there is nothing for the 
young.  I am saying it takes hard work, sacrifice, and thinking outside 
the box.

You sound to be 8 years older than me.

Life has not been a bed of roses for me.

I've earned my opinion.

I recall the 70's and 80's as very harsh.  High unemployment, extremely 
high inflation, and extremely high interest rates. There were few 
opportunities like you express, at least not where I lived.  Middle 
managers were being laid off by the thousands.

I dropped out of school and upon the urging of my adoptive father I 
joined the Marine Corps.  My recruiter insisted that I complete my GED, 
which I did before entering active duty. Within weeks I realize going to 
school would have been a better choice.  While in the USMC I attended 
high school and got a real high school diploma.

When I got out I attended college while working mid-night shift as a 
civilian employee of my home town police force.  Both led me to becoming 
a police officer 2 years later.  I still attended college while 
alternating between mid-night shift and evening shift.

While attending college and working as a police officer I joined the 
Army National Guard so I could qualify to purchase an 830 sqft 2br/1ba 
house.

I assumed a 12.5% mortgage.  At the time new mortgages were going for 
18%.

I completed an associates degree in programming and was promoted to 
sergeant. The next year I decided to attend college full time and left 
the police force.  2 and a half years later I completed a BS degree and 
had $16k in school loans.  By then it was 1990.

The economy was no better and I could not find a job local that would 
utilize my degree.

So I ended up at the police department as a step 1 patrol officer after 
leaving as a step 2 sergeant.

The economy sucked, by this time I had child support, school loans I 
could not pay, and ended up going bankrupt.  I was very disillusioned 
because I had just spent 10 and a half years working my butt off to 
build a resume that I thought would open doors.  I never thought someone 
else owed it to me to pay off my school debt.

After teaching myself dBaseII, dBaseIII, dBaseIII+, FoxBase+, Clipper 
87, FoxPro Dos, FoxPro Win, and doing some contract work I finally 
landed that programming job and was able to pay off my school loans 
while living like a refugee.

By that time I was over 40.

Sounds like you had a better go of things.

After all it took for me to get to that point - I'm of the opinion that 
one must work hard and create your own luck. We have to think outside 
the box.

Somalia?  Drop a few dozen American entrepreneurs in Somalia and 10 
years from now it will be a vacation destination.

Your talking government I'm talking people.  All I want or need from the 
government is to create a equal starting place and to get out of my way. 
  The outcome is between me and my God.

I do not buy that today is any different that it was 40 years ago.  The 
difference is the people.  We grew up knowing we had to pull ourselves 
up by our boot straps.

Today these kids need safe places, demand the day off to cry because 
trump won, and want free school.  Oh and I'm reading at one college they 
do not want to take finals.  No wonder they cannot find a job.

When I was in the USMC we had safe places - it was called a parameter.  
We would create a ring around our location with men who had automatic 
weapons who stood on that wall ready to do whatever it took to keep the 
enemy out.

As a police officer we create safe places as well with women and men who 
were ready to do what it took to protect the citizen population.

I think there are some millennials that are making the ultimate 
sacrifice for our country and for the world while serving in the U.S. 
military. Some are becoming police officers. Others are creating 
businesses.  These are the ones who get it.

The ones you describe need a couple years in the USMC to learn a harsh 
reality that it takes hard work and sacrifice. Don't come looking to tax 
me because I've earned what I make.

When I was going to college, a friend of mine told me one morning his 
father woke him up and told him he had to go get his own.  The father 
said he has gotten his own and now it was time for his son to get his 
own.  The father worked for IBM and they were very well off.  That was 
good fathering.

We are not in the great depression.  Don't like your position then at 
least try to do something about it.








On 2016-12-09 14:48, Steve Litt wrote:
> 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.
> Millennials
>> 
>> 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 Millennials 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
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-- 
Keith Smith