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Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez contains an explanation of the H-1B visa system:

Skilled immigrant tech workers in the United States have effectively one method of entry: the famous H-1B visa. Capped at a small yearly number, it’s the ticket to the American Dream for a few tens of thousands of foreigners per year. Lasting anywhere from three to six years, the H-1B allows foreigners to prove themselves and eventually apply for permanent residency, the colloquial “green card.” Like the masters of old buying servants off the ship, tech companies are required to spend nontrivial sums for foreign hires. Many companies, particularly smaller startups, don’t want the hassle, and hire only American citizens, an imposed nativism nobody talks about, and which is possibly illegal. Big companies, which know they’ll be around for the years it will take to recoup their investment, are the real beneficiaries of this peonage system. Large but unexciting tech outfits like Oracle, Intel, Qualcomm, and IBM that have trouble recruiting the best American talent hire foreign engineers by the boatload. Consultancy firms that bill inflated project costs by the man-hour, such as Accenture and Deloitte, shanghai their foreign laborers, who can’t quit without being eventually deported. By paying them relatively slim H-1B-stipulated salaries while eating the fat consultancy fees, such companies get rich off the artificial employment monopoly created by the visa barrier. It’s a shit deal for the immigrant visa holders, but they put up with the five or so years of stultifying, exploitive labor as an admissions ticket to the tech First World. After that, they’re free. Everyone abandons his or her place at the oar inside the Intel war galley immediately, but there’s always someone waiting to take over.

Strictly speaking, H-1B visas are nonimmigrant and temporary, and so this hazing ritual of immigrant initiation is unlawful. Yet everyone’s on the take, including the government, which charges thousands in filing fees. The entire system is so riven with institutionalized lies, political intrigue, and illegal but overlooked manipulation, it’s a wonder the American tech industry exists at all. So into this bustling slave market, echoing with the clink of leg irons and the auctioneer’s cry, did we ignorantly wade. If Argyris was to join our as-yet-unnamed company, he’d need a work visa. In fact, forget working: he couldn’t even legally stay in the United States once Adchemy terminated him. Immigration law stipulates a former H-1 holder must leave the country within days. Thanks for building our tech industry, you dirty foreigner, now beat it. Was there a way out? Argyris, a proud Greek with an admirable display of Southern European enterprise and skill at sniffing out legal loopholes, found a solution. His longtime Turkish girlfriend, Simla, was studying for a PhD at Stanford under an F-1 student visa. Were they to marry, Argyris would qualify for an F-2 student spouse visa. This wouldn’t let him officially work in the States, but it would let him remain there.

More: read Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley

Related:

• Shift of power from publishers to advertisers

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How much would you pay me to take you on a tour of most of the countries hit hardest by the Zika virus? Unless your job is public health or biomedical research, I’m guessing the answer is “not much.” Yet isn’t this precisely the offer made by Caribbean cruise lines? The cruises are planned out a couple of years in advance so at this point I guess they are locked into the route. But wouldn’t it make sense for everyone who is currently going to the Caribbean to instead cruise around the Indian Ocean or South Pacific?

Related:

• “Baltic Sea on Royal Caribbean’s Serenade of the Seas”

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Aside from the fact that my vote doesn’t count, I refuse to get excited about the Hillary v. Trump contest because it seems to me that the laws with the biggest effect on Americans’ lives are local and/or state. I’m wondering if the Internet, the Death of Print, and the Death of Local is responsible for Americans over-focusing on national elections. My friends on Facebook treat the Hillary v. Trump choice as a life-or-death decision. Yet if asked “What bad thing might happen to you if Trump were elected?” the best that they can come up with is that Trump would start a nuclear war (why would someone with extensive real estate interests in the U.S. want a nuclear war?).

Absent that forecast nuclear war, I cling to my belief that local/state laws are more relevant to citizens. Let’s work through a few Massachusetts examples.

State legislative level: our Legislature recently considered a bill to suggest (but not require) that family court judges assign children to shared parenting in the event that biological parents are divorced and/or were never married. I wrote about this in “Men in Massachusetts should simply not show up to defend restraining orders, divorces, and other family law matters?” Note that “shared parenting” might be simply every-other-weekend plus a few extra days here and there as opposed to every-other-weekend. State Senator Will Brownsberger, however, managed to kill the bill in committee (story) by expressing concerns about what happens when there is “high conflict” between the parties. As explained in our Massachusetts chapter, this means that any plaintiff wishing to win sole custody of a child can simply manufacture conflict by starting fights with the defendant (women have a 97-percent statistical chance of winning custody in Massachusetts, according to Census data from 2014; one lawyer noted that “This is a good state in which to work your mind and education, but it is a great state in which to work your body and child.”).

What were the stakes? Suppose that judges interpreted the new law to encourage actual 50/50 shared parenting like they have in some other states (e.g., Arizona). Assume two parents who each earn $125,000 per year and have a single joint child. Neither has been previously sued for alimony or child support. Assume that the mother sues the father (a 75-percent probability, according to our statistical study of a Massachusetts courthouse) and wins the current standard 70/30 schedule with the child. Under the Massachusetts guidelines, as the winner parent she gets $20,072/year tax-free plus perhaps the child’s actual expenses paid by the loser parent. Had the new law passed and had a judge been influenced by the new statute’s language, she would take care of the child 50 percent of the time and get… nothing. Over 23 years, she is approximately $461,656 poorer in after-tax dollars (her real estate costs will be the same whether the child lives with her 70 percent or 50 percent of the time; any reduction in food expenses will be minimal). All of this plays out regardless of who is in the White House. [Imagine the dislocation if Massachusetts adopted a German-style system! A plaintiff could have sex with the richest person in the state and collect only $6,000 per year in child support. There would be no alimony for the able-bodied. Legal fees would be a percentage of the amount in dispute. This would shut down one of the state’s largest industries and it wouldn’t matter what anyone in Washington, D.C. said.]

Thus, from a successful plaintiff’s point of view, the reelection of Will Brownsberger to the state legislature is much more important than who wins the White House.

Local laws and decisions in Massachusetts can also be more significant than the typical federal law. Do you care about your child’s education? The quality of that education is mostly determined at the town level here. Want your child to go to a charter school? There is apparently a state law that caps the number of charter schools and a current ballot question that seeks to work around the cap (the union for public school teachers opposes the ballot initiative). This fight goes on independent of who is giving speeches from the White House.

Would you prefer to go through life being totally stoned 24/7? Question 4 on our ballot will make that legal (Barney Frank supports this). Stoned versus straight makes a bigger difference to most people than most Supreme Court decisions, as does “imprisoned for smoking weed” versus “not being arrested in the first place.” (Note: If you are passionate about marijuana, vote for Libertarian Gary Johnson. New Yorker says that he was formerly CEO of ” Cannabis Sativa, Inc., a marijuana-branding company that hopes to benefit as legalization spreads.”)

Consider simpler pleasures. What if an American city were to build Copenhagen-style bicycle infrastructure? That would change the day-to-day experience for hundreds of thousands of people, possibly have a huge impact on public health, improve the environment, etc., and it could be done regardless of whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump was President.

There are, of course, federal programs that matter even if federal individuals may not. If you’re one of the 10+ million Americans collecting SSDI, for example, you would care about what happens in D.C. But the program dates back to 1956 (history) and it doesn’t seem likely that a new President will persuade Congress to drop it.

Readers: What do you think? Are your friends overinvolved with national elections that have little relevance to their personal situations?

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From Peter the Great: His Life and World, about which I will write more later, …

Since the earliest times, Russians had calculated the year not from the birth of Christ but from the moment when they believed the world had been created. Accordingly, by their reckoning, Peter returned from the West not in the year 1698 but in the year 7206. Similarly, Russians began the New Year not on January 1, but on September 1. This stemmed from their belief that the world was created in autumn when the grain and other fruits of the earth had ripened to perfection and were ready to pluck, rather than in the middle of winter when the earth was covered with snow. Traditionally, New Year’s Day, September 1, was celebrated with great ceremony, with the tsar and the patriarch seated on two thrones in a courtyard of the Kremlin surrounded by crowds of boyars and people. Peter had suspended these rites as obsolete, but September 1 still remained the beginning of the New Year.

But to blunt the argument of those who said that God could not have made the earth in the depth of winter, Peter invited them “to view the map of the globe, and, in a pleasant temper, gave them to understand that Russia was not all the world and that what was winter with them was, at the same time, always summer in those places beyond the equator.” To celebrate the change and impress the new day on the Muscovites, Peter ordered special New Year’s services held in all the churches on January 1. Further, he instructed that festive evergreen branches be used to decorate the doorposts in interiors of houses, and he commanded that all citizens of Moscow should “display their happiness by loudly congratulating” one another on the New Year. All houses were to be illuminated and open for feasting for seven days.

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I applied for Global Entry in the spring of 2016 and, absent a willingness to travel hundreds of miles from home, the first interview that I was able to get was in August. At that point no interviews were available at Logan Airport until April 2017.

I arrived at Logan Airport and found a Customs agent behind an inch-thick bulletproof glass screen. She directed me to a different office within Terminal E, next to the Dunkin’ Donuts. There is no reception area for this office, just a door with a lot of signs saying not to knock but instead to wait in the hallway until one’s time is called. My appointment was for 10:45 and at about 11:15 our group was called in. After looking at my passport and driver’s license, the agent looked at some records on a computer, offered the names of some countries that I had visited, and then asked if I had visited Canada or Mexico within the past five years. I told her that I had just recently returned from Canada (pilot convention in Quebec City!) and dredged up a distant memory of a Mexico trip. She also asked if I’d ever been arrested (no). Then she took my fingerprints, which is about the 10th time the government has done this (the previous 9 were associated with applications for various airport security badges; see USA Today for some information on this program, which is per-airport).

At all times the agent talking to me wore a thick bulletproof vest. Added to the bulletproof glass at the beginning of the process, I began to wonder if there had ever been attack on a Customs or Immigration agent at a U.S. airport. If they don’t have any cash, why would someone bother to go this deep into the airport? If the answer is the all-purpose “because, terrorism” then why would a terrorist want to go to an office containing just one person instead of the check-in area where hundreds of people congregate?

A few minutes after walking out the door I received an email notification from DHS (“via usdhs.onmicrosoft.com” indicating that these folks are proud customers of the Microsoft cloud?) saying that my application had been approved.

Given that what they need to do is mostly the same as what they do when people enter the U.S. (aren’t foreigners fingerprinted?), i.e., ask some questions and verify documents, I wonder if the backlog couldn’t be cleared by having Global Entry “interviews” done on-the-spot when Americans return to the U.S. and there isn’t a huge line. There is already a DHS agent talking to the American. There is already a fingerprint machine. The traveler already has his or her driver’s license and passport in nearly all cases.

Related:

• Clearing immigration and customs at Logan Airport

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The headline of the dpreview article is more encouraging than the full text… “Canon 5D Mark IV brings dramatic dynamic range improvements to the 5D line” ends up saying that the Nikon D810 and the Sony a7R II, both of which use Sony sensors, handle dynamic range much better than the new Canon.

For folks with a chest full of EOS lenses and a strong back to carry them all, perhaps this camera is worth the trip to Amazon. Meanwhile Sony is not resting. They’ve released a 50/2.8 Macro lens that can take a picture down to 1:1 magnification (i.e., a 24x36mm object will fill the frame of an a7). Press release on dpreview.com.

Perhaps it is worth a trip to Cologne this year for Photokina!

Related:

• What do folks think of the Canon EOS 5D Mark IV?

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“When the Pilot Is a Mom: Accommodating New Motherhood at 30,000 Feet” (nytimes) is about women who want paid maternity leaves:

At Delta, a group of women pilots have banded together through a private Facebook page and have approached their union with formal proposals for paid maternity leave — unheard-of at the major airlines — because they say they would like to stay home to breast-feed their babies.

Airlines have always compensated crew members per flight hour, which includes time spent on the ground after the door is closed. This is why pilots and flight attendants are so happy when the door is closed and the plane is pushed back from the gate. Now they are getting paid. If the result is sitting on a taxiway for three hours while thunderstorms clear that works out a lot better from the crew’s perspective than sitting in the comfortably air-conditioned terminal.

As few men will be able to quality for “maternity leave” (but perhaps some will in our age of flexible gender?), the result of this change would be that women would be paid more than men for doing the same amount of flying. (A friend points out that women are already paid more in most jobs because, in addition to being paid for more time off work (maternity leave, sick days), they also receive the expected value from filing a gender discrimination lawsuit.) For a given level of experience, airlines already do pay women more. A woman can be hired if she meets the FAA minimums for hours of flight time; a man will have to compete with other men and may require an additional 1,000 hours of flying experience (2-3 years) in order to be hired.

My favorite part of the article:

Consider what it took for First Officer Brandy Beck, a 41-year-old Frontier Airlines pilot, to pump breast milk. Once the plane was at cruising altitude and in autopilot mode, she would seek the agreement of her captain to take a break. In keeping with Frontier policy, the remaining pilot was required to put on an oxygen mask.

Next a flight attendant — to prevent passengers from approaching the lavatory — would barricade the aisle with a beverage cart. Then the attendant would join the captain in the cockpit, in keeping with rules that require at least two people in an airline cockpit at all times.

Only then could Ms. Beck slip into the lavatory for a 20-minute pumping session.

“It’s by far not my favorite place to make my child’s next meal,” Ms. Beck said. “But it’s a sacrifice I knew I would have to accept because I came back to work.”

In other words, it is not the fellow pilot who sacrifices by being forced to wear an oxygen mask for 20 minutes. Nor is it the passengers who sacrifice because they can’t use the bathroom, because they have to wait longer for assistance from flight attendants, or because if there is an emergency they won’t have as good a chance of getting out of the plane alive.

[Currently there is at least one way for a woman to get an airline paycheck in exchange for maternity. If she has sex with a senior captain, for example, she’ll be entitled to $40,000 per year in tax-free child support for 23 years under the Massachusetts guidelines (see the chapter on Massachusetts for a woman who did just that… three times). This will comfortably exceed after-tax compensation for a junior airline pilot (see “Professional Pilot Salary Survey 2016” and also this sample of first-year airline pilot salaries) and does not require investing $100,000 in flight training, working 22 days/month, 16 hours/day, or sleeping in Hilton Garden Inns (except perhaps once).]

Separately, Facebook apparently values workers who identify as “white, male” more than workers who identify as non-white, non-male, or both. “Facebook’s Point System Fails to Close Diversity Gap” (WSJ) tells the story:

Two years ago, Facebook Inc. offered its in-house recruiters an incentive to help diversify its largely white, largely male workforce.

Previously, recruiters were awarded one point for every new hire. Under the new system, they could earn 1.5 points for a so-called “diversity hire”—a black, Hispanic or female engineer—according to people familiar with the matter. More points can lead to a stronger performance review for recruiters and, potentially, a larger bonus, the people said.

When the numbers didn’t move, Facebook sweetened the deal. Starting last year, recruiters earned two points for a minority hire, or twice as much as for white or Asian males, who already were well-represented within its technical ranks.

Even so, Facebook has shown little progress. Last month, the company said 4% of its U.S. employees were Hispanic and 2% were black, the same as the two prior years. Women made up 33% of its global workforce, up from 31% in 2014.

Intel Corp. has paid its employees double referral bonuses for women, minorities and veterans. Other companies take into account how many women top managers hire when calculating their bonuses.

Why wouldn’t the company simply pay the desired workers more? Would it be illegal for Facebook to offer higher pay to the workers that it wants to hire and who have a higher value to the company than white male workers?

Also, in our transgender age, why wouldn’t recruiters game the system by asking interviewees to identify as female? (See this Sacramento Bee article for how California National Guard recruiters responded to financial incentives by helping themselves to “an estimated $100 million in dubious or illegal payments.”)

Related:

• Paid Maternity Leave: Employers or Taxpayers should Pay?
• Tilting the job market in favor of those with children
• When and why did it become necessary to pay Americans to have children?
• “Unions and Airlines”

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About 18 months ago I posted “Why do laptops have so little RAM?” wondering why it was essentially impossible to find a laptop computer with more than 16 GB of RAM. Moore’s Law hasn’t been suspended as far as I know. Laptops are still roughly the same price as a 1.5 years ago. Why do they still have just 16 GB of RAM as a maximum configuration?

[Separately, “Why aren’t SSD or hybrid disk drives more popular in laptop computers?” is a question that I asked 5 years ago. I think the question remains live. Given the low cost of SSDs and vastly higher performance in practice, why is it possible to go to the physical or virtual store and find notebook computers with mechanical hard drives? Are there a huge number of consumers who can’t tell the difference and just look at the number of GB or TB?]

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I’m not sure why Anthony Weiner’s electronic persona remains front-page news, but apparently the New York Times thinks that he merits it, e.g., “Anthony Weiner’s Latest Sexting Scandal: Here’s What We Know”. This sparked a Facebook discussion about a Boston Globe Story: “Huma Abedin separating from Anthony Weiner after scandal”. Here’s what one Facebooker said about this: “I’m guessing the reason she has not left him before now is that she could end up paying alimony and child support since he has been a stay at home dad, and he could end up with most of the custody. Now with the child in one of his creepy pictures she has more leverage.”

Under New York family law, a judge would try to pick a winner parent and park the cash-yielding child with the winner for approximately 83 percent of the time. The loser parent would babysit every other weekend and pay all of the bills for both the child and the winner parent. Thus Huma Abedin would be at risk of losing one third of her after-tax income, in addition to her status as an actual parent, in the event that Weiner won the “I was a stay-at-home dad and want to continue the voluntary arrangement via court order” sweepstakes.

I’m not sure what to make of this. Even before the latest scandal broke it didn’t seem likely that Weiner could have prevailed in the winner-take-all battle that New York law sets up for separating parents. What’s more interesting to me is that these two are apparently about the best that American society can produce, one having been elected to Congress and the other being a top aide to the spouse of the former leader. Weiner can’t find discreet sexual partners in New York City. Huma Abedin apparently can’t be involved with Islam without also being involved with supporters of jihad against the West (source).

Readers: Reading the Facebook posting above from a friend of a friend, do you think that her argument has merit? Or is it just the “two strikes you’re out rule” being applied?

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I’m listening to Medical School for Everyone, Grand Rounds Cases. There are some interesting points regarding what happens when you have an illness that is hard to diagnose. If you go to Specialist X you will probably be diagnosed with a disease within that specialist’s area, regardless of the disease that you might actually have. If the specialists truly are stumped then they fall back on the all-purpose “It is all in your head” and send you to the psychiatrist who gives you pills that you’ll eventually stop taking because they aren’t helpful.

One lecture concerns an unvaccinated American child who contracts measles while on a trip to France. He comes into contact with about 110 other people while contagious. One of them (his unvaccinated brother) falls ill. The rest are hunted down by public health officials who check vaccine status, administer boosters and other prophylactics. The lecturer says that the cost to the local public health agency was over $300,000 and that didn’t count a couple of weeks of hospitalization in a room with negative air pressure for the two children who actually became ill.

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