Our Next President?

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: My immigration policy--not joking

Last week I went to a meet-and-great for investing in apartment buildings.
Most folks were house flippers looking to move up into the big leagues, I was looking for passive lending opportunities.

The presenter made a similar argument about raising rents. It's one key to making the numbers work for the apartment project flipper, raising rents 20% to 30%.
He talked about how people are stuck in their apartments to a large degree. Although in theory they can move, most folks want to live within a couple miles of where they live now, and moving is expensive.
If the flipper buys the cheapest project in an area, he can raise rents up to the units nearby and people are just stuck, they will somehow find another $100 a month.

[dcarrigg]

Re: My immigration policy--not joking

Of course I think markets are always about power

Saw this earlier, good example of nobody breaking the law, investors just seeking return, and folks getting hurt in the process. For anyone who grew up being told stories of absentee landlords in the great famine, this should be familiar stuff. For anyone else, if you ever wondered where my aversion to getting locked into "regular monthly payments" for something you can't quite own and control outright, there you go. Sensitivity to market power and aversion to getting into positions where it can be wielded like a weapon against you is a deep, cultural thing.

[Chris Coles]

Re: My immigration policy--not joking

Absolutely. Especially the combination Chairman of the Board / CEO positions. The same guy as Chairman hires himself as CEO and sets his own compensation package. There's no separation of powers. There's no national or international search for talent. It's not about who's best for the job. It's about power.

You want a great case-in-point? Mylan, the makers of EpiPen who got some bad press about jacking up the price by 500%. Who enabled that? Senator Joe Manchin. Who became CEO of Mylan? Heather Bresch, Joe Manchin's daughter. Did she have an MBA? No. But she lied about having one on her resumé. So why did Mylan select her, of all people, to be their CEO. Was it because she was the best qualified? Was it because she was the most honest? Or was it because her dad pushed through a bill to have all schools buy EpiPens at inflated prices?

Of course, I think markets are always about power. Even if you make it to the last table at a Hold 'Em tournament, if you're low on chips compared to the big fish, it's easy to get pushed all in. Even small business is full of this stuff. I learned that as a kid flipping pizzas. Owner was trying to open a new location. Competing pizza shop was owned by a guy who had several restaurants in the town. Several of his restaurants was rented from the same landlord who owned the new location, since that landlord was the local land baron and owned lots of commercial real estate in that town. Competing owner told landlord he'd shut everything down and walk if landlord rented to my boss. Landlord tore up the lease and rented it to the competitor who just kept it empty to avoid competition until he finally put something in there maybe a year later. My boss ended up finding a different spot to rent tucked back in a less visible location. It eventually went bust. This is how the real world works, not like a supply and demand graph the ivory tower egg heads teach kids in econ 101. It's not fair. It's cutthroat. And it's super easy for bigger players to leverage power to muscle out competition.

With doctors, the bottle neck isn't even the med schools, which also have very long waiting lists, but have been expanding enrollment somewhat. In the last 20 years they have opened a couple dozen MD granting institutions and about a dozen DO granting ones. The tightest part of the bottleneck is residencies. Residencies have been frozen at a constant level since 1996 thanks to "The Balanced Budget Act." But this is cutting off your nose to spite your face, and probably costs more money than it saves. I've not gone through the process myself, but from what I've heard it's bananas. Why?

Of course, The Market® will never fund residencies at any reasonable level. BUT, big corporate pharma and med companies will fund specialists' residencies that do things they like, with heavy strings attached. They have no incentive to fund what people actually need, only what's profitable for them. So Neutrogena will make more dermatologists happen to sell more Neutrogena stuff. Actual health outcomes are irrelevant. So this is how the supply of doctors happens--this is how the decisions about how many we'll have practicing in which areas of medicine happen. The number of slots government funds is capped. Corporate funds augment it and fund a number, dictating how many and in which given specialty. Then the National Resident Matching Program reviews things over matching weeks and tells students whether they match at all, and what they matched with. Of course, they had to "market up" the process with nonsense. So the decisions are made by the Roth-Peranson algorithm, which operates on the principle of the stable marriage problem and makes snap decisions in less than a minute. The system is designed such that there are always more applicants than slots, so many MDs and DOs are "not marriage material." What happens to all those MDs? They end up in hundreds of grand of debt doing paperwork or lab tests or some other thing someone with much less education could do and try again the next year. So now we have a pool of deeply indebted domestic MDs not allowed to practice doing menial labor deeply in debt. But we also don't have enough MDs practicing in certain areas that don't get corporate love for residency slots. So what's the solution? Import doctors who have gone through foreign residency programs and send them through a whole different tortured process. And if this sounds like the stupidest thing you've ever heard, then I think you're following along with me.

There's no shortage of people who want to do these jobs. MDs entering medical billing data all day on the sidelines because an algorithm didn't like them probably aren't living their best lives. Of course, the entire generation born after 1980 that has been essentially priced out of the housing market in good chunks of the country probably isn't either. And the solution to both issues is easy. Build thousands more small, unpretentious, two and three bedroom homes. Fund thousands more residencies. But The Market® will never do it. Because it's about power. And doing it would squeeze those with a bigger pile of chips, both wages of practicing physicians now, and home equity of people who bought in before the early 2000s when housing prices went through the roof. So we only build luxury housing, and we only add corporate-sponsored specialist residencies. 84% of all new construction lists in the top 20% of local housing markets now for the last decade and change. And most of that luxury housing gets scooped up by people and investors from abroad too. And when the eggheads say, "luxury houses trickle down," I'd invite them to come to New England, where lots of us live in housing that's very old, and the middle class housing from the 1700s and 1800s is still middle class today, and the luxury housing from the gilded age is still owned by the wealthy and powerful. It doesn't trickle down. It never will.

And I think the root of the problem is really the Good/Evil, God/Devil, Market/Government dichotomy people have in their heads. We've got to break out of it. We've got to get ourselves to a point where we realize that there's a stupid and a smart way to do things, not a good and an evil way. There's tremendous potential in America being wasted every day. If we could just break the stranglehold of power a little bit, we could unleash it. Millions of smart, educated, qualified people are doing pointless, menial jobs. Millions of couples that could be improving property and raising families are living in basements and one-room apartments letting the days tick by paying student loans, getting too old to have children or pay down a 30 year mortgage. We're better educated and trained than we've ever been. But we're locking a huge swath of people out of opportunity because it benefits a few people tremendously. It's the mis-match between skills and opportunity and capital and projects that need doing that are really the core of the slow growth and falling life expectancy and general malaise.

And the problem with the total hands-off free-market approach is that VC billionaires and big developers will never find a way to do small-town local construction projects in a way that sends all the profits to back to the valley. So capital they've accumulated will never be allocated to those ends, and therefore nor will the tax revenue. Just like there's no good way for big corporate players to make money off small private practice GPs, so they won't fund those residencies, and CVS will push for NPs and PAs or something like them to staff Minute Clinics instead. When you take democratic government totally out of the picture in a highly oligopolized world where capital is the most concentrated in the fewest hands it has been in history, power to make decisions how to allocate capital goes to the oligarchs de facto. And they have no incentive to do anything altruistic.

Of course, the government over everything approach doesn't necessarily work either. But I cannot think of an institution other than Government (inclusive of the military) that has the power to challenge the powerful and realign skills and opportunity; capital and work that needs doing. Problem, of course, is right in the Manchin example I used above. How much incentive to legislators really have to do these things when their funding all comes from the people benefiting from keeping the misalignment of capital and useful projects and skills and opportunity going? People are going to have to bootstrap candidates who will actually stand up to the oligarchy and wrest capital and opportunity free from those directing it toward their own ends. The problems America has are not terribly hard to fix. The healthcare issue can be solved by copying almost any other system from any other 1st world country instead of the one we have. The housing issue can be solved by building a lot more ~1,000sqft plain jain not-luxury homes. The infrastructure issues can be vastly improved by simply building them, swapping out lead pipes, building gas lines, The opportunity issue can be solved by funding more residencies and programs and licensures and all that and getting rid of the rube goldberg machine of private sector administrative jobs that gets bigger and bigger all the time and just crushes the souls of people who work them and bogs every sector down. And I'm even open to the idea that some of the regs and restrictions can be pared back in a way that's not dangerous.

I mean, imagine an America where instead of having a single algorithm decide whether and which residencies MDs get, we have an algorithm free millions of people from the drudgery of working in medical and insurance billing and administration. It's possible without proprietary pricing agreements and trade secrets between insurance companies and hospitals. It really is. Almost any other activity would be more useful. As a nation, we're expending a tremendous amount of effort on pointless activities just because we can't snap out of the good/evil paradigm, and it forces us to punt the authority to make decisions to a few private sector people with the power to make them, who always act in their own interests and have no incentive to care about the common weal.

I mean, the state where I was born was named after the common weal. It is a commonwealth. If the citizens of a republic hamstring themselves and actively punt decisions, who will act in their interests? Who will care about the commonwealth? Probably nobody. And if we're locked in a good/evil paradigm in which we've convinced ourselves that punting decisions is good and making them ourselves is evil, then I don't see how we have any hope. We'll keep getting bananas processes if we insist on having a banana republic where a handful of oligarchs run roughshod over the rule of law and make short-sighted decisions that benefit themselves at the expense of the commonwealth. So someone's going to have to reassert control, at least long enough to shake the ground and better, if not perfectly, align opportunity and skill and capital and useful work. We need less capital for apps and more for sewers. How many millions of kids are going to grow up with cognitive impairments from lead poisoning and lower IQs, and how much will that cost in lost opportunity? We know how to fix it, we have the technology, we simply don't allocate effort and capital to solving the problem. And we're never going to ever get it without really shaking things up. I doubt it will come just from one strong personality either, although someone will become a figurehead for it. It's going to come from people demanding it. People generally don't give power away. Usually you have to take it from them. And they tend to kick and scream in the process.

There are small signs of change, with perhaps the best, recently, has been the publication of this paper https://www.westonaprice.org/oiling-...a-in-new-york/ which sets out in great detail, (printed out some 30 pages of text), so a very long read. This will sound outrageous; if you want to live, you absolutely have to read it; all of it.

That leaves the obvious question; who among the candidates for your next President understands the challenges Oiling of America demands? And if there is even just one; where is their recognition of the need for change?

[dcarrigg]

Re: My immigration policy--not joking

only 50%

Maybe I was wrong about JD, but Physicians and CEO's are the most massively overpaid groups I can think of.
If DC is correct, that there are many qualified people, than why are CEO salary so high?
Obviously, supply and demand has nothing to do with physician and CEO salaries.

The systems operate more like cartels.

Absolutely. Especially the combination Chairman of the Board / CEO positions. The same guy as Chairman hires himself as CEO and sets his own compensation package. There's no separation of powers. There's no national or international search for talent. It's not about who's best for the job. It's about power.

You want a great case-in-point? Mylan, the makers of EpiPen who got some bad press about jacking up the price by 500%. Who enabled that? Senator Joe Manchin. Who became CEO of Mylan? Heather Bresch, Joe Manchin's daughter. Did she have an MBA? No. But she lied about having one on her resumé. So why did Mylan select her, of all people, to be their CEO. Was it because she was the best qualified? Was it because she was the most honest? Or was it because her dad pushed through a bill to have all schools buy EpiPens at inflated prices?

Of course, I think markets are always about power. Even if you make it to the last table at a Hold 'Em tournament, if you're low on chips compared to the big fish, it's easy to get pushed all in. Even small business is full of this stuff. I learned that as a kid flipping pizzas. Owner was trying to open a new location. Competing pizza shop was owned by a guy who had several restaurants in the town. Several of his restaurants was rented from the same landlord who owned the new location, since that landlord was the local land baron and owned lots of commercial real estate in that town. Competing owner told landlord he'd shut everything down and walk if landlord rented to my boss. Landlord tore up the lease and rented it to the competitor who just kept it empty to avoid competition until he finally put something in there maybe a year later. My boss ended up finding a different spot to rent tucked back in a less visible location. It eventually went bust. This is how the real world works, not like a supply and demand graph the ivory tower egg heads teach kids in econ 101. It's not fair. It's cutthroat. And it's super easy for bigger players to leverage power to muscle out competition.

With doctors, the bottle neck isn't even the med schools, which also have very long waiting lists, but have been expanding enrollment somewhat. In the last 20 years they have opened a couple dozen MD granting institutions and about a dozen DO granting ones. The tightest part of the bottleneck is residencies. Residencies have been frozen at a constant level since 1996 thanks to "The Balanced Budget Act." But this is cutting off your nose to spite your face, and probably costs more money than it saves. I've not gone through the process myself, but from what I've heard it's bananas. Why?

Of course, The Market® will never fund residencies at any reasonable level. BUT, big corporate pharma and med companies will fund specialists' residencies that do things they like, with heavy strings attached. They have no incentive to fund what people actually need, only what's profitable for them. So Neutrogena will make more dermatologists happen to sell more Neutrogena stuff. Actual health outcomes are irrelevant. So this is how the supply of doctors happens--this is how the decisions about how many we'll have practicing in which areas of medicine happen. The number of slots government funds is capped. Corporate funds augment it and fund a number, dictating how many and in which given specialty. Then the National Resident Matching Program reviews things over matching weeks and tells students whether they match at all, and what they matched with. Of course, they had to "market up" the process with nonsense. So the decisions are made by the Roth-Peranson algorithm, which operates on the principle of the stable marriage problem and makes snap decisions in less than a minute. The system is designed such that there are always more applicants than slots, so many MDs and DOs are "not marriage material." What happens to all those MDs? They end up in hundreds of grand of debt doing paperwork or lab tests or some other thing someone with much less education could do and try again the next year. So now we have a pool of deeply indebted domestic MDs not allowed to practice doing menial labor deeply in debt. But we also don't have enough MDs practicing in certain areas that don't get corporate love for residency slots. So what's the solution? Import doctors who have gone through foreign residency programs and send them through a whole different tortured process. And if this sounds like the stupidest thing you've ever heard, then I think you're following along with me.

There's no shortage of people who want to do these jobs. MDs entering medical billing data all day on the sidelines because an algorithm didn't like them probably aren't living their best lives. Of course, the entire generation born after 1980 that has been essentially priced out of the housing market in good chunks of the country probably isn't either. And the solution to both issues is easy. Build thousands more small, unpretentious, two and three bedroom homes. Fund thousands more residencies. But The Market® will never do it. Because it's about power. And doing it would squeeze those with a bigger pile of chips, both wages of practicing physicians now, and home equity of people who bought in before the early 2000s when housing prices went through the roof. So we only build luxury housing, and we only add corporate-sponsored specialist residencies. 84% of all new construction lists in the top 20% of local housing markets now for the last decade and change. And most of that luxury housing gets scooped up by people and investors from abroad too. And when the eggheads say, "luxury houses trickle down," I'd invite them to come to New England, where lots of us live in housing that's very old, and the middle class housing from the 1700s and 1800s is still middle class today, and the luxury housing from the gilded age is still owned by the wealthy and powerful. It doesn't trickle down. It never will.

And I think the root of the problem is really the Good/Evil, God/Devil, Market/Government dichotomy people have in their heads. We've got to break out of it. We've got to get ourselves to a point where we realize that there's a stupid and a smart way to do things, not a good and an evil way. There's tremendous potential in America being wasted every day. If we could just break the stranglehold of power a little bit, we could unleash it. Millions of smart, educated, qualified people are doing pointless, menial jobs. Millions of couples that could be improving property and raising families are living in basements and one-room apartments letting the days tick by paying student loans, getting too old to have children or pay down a 30 year mortgage. We're better educated and trained than we've ever been. But we're locking a huge swath of people out of opportunity because it benefits a few people tremendously. It's the mis-match between skills and opportunity and capital and projects that need doing that are really the core of the slow growth and falling life expectancy and general malaise.

And the problem with the total hands-off free-market approach is that VC billionaires and big developers will never find a way to do small-town local construction projects in a way that sends all the profits to back to the valley. So capital they've accumulated will never be allocated to those ends, and therefore nor will the tax revenue. Just like there's no good way for big corporate players to make money off small private practice GPs, so they won't fund those residencies, and CVS will push for NPs and PAs or something like them to staff Minute Clinics instead. When you take democratic government totally out of the picture in a highly oligopolized world where capital is the most concentrated in the fewest hands it has been in history, power to make decisions how to allocate capital goes to the oligarchs de facto. And they have no incentive to do anything altruistic.

Of course, the government over everything approach doesn't necessarily work either. But I cannot think of an institution other than Government (inclusive of the military) that has the power to challenge the powerful and realign skills and opportunity; capital and work that needs doing. Problem, of course, is right in the Manchin example I used above. How much incentive to legislators really have to do these things when their funding all comes from the people benefiting from keeping the misalignment of capital and useful projects and skills and opportunity going? People are going to have to bootstrap candidates who will actually stand up to the oligarchy and wrest capital and opportunity free from those directing it toward their own ends. The problems America has are not terribly hard to fix. The healthcare issue can be solved by copying almost any other system from any other 1st world country instead of the one we have. The housing issue can be solved by building a lot more ~1,000sqft plain jain not-luxury homes. The infrastructure issues can be vastly improved by simply building them, swapping out lead pipes, building gas lines, The opportunity issue can be solved by funding more residencies and programs and licensures and all that and getting rid of the rube goldberg machine of private sector administrative jobs that gets bigger and bigger all the time and just crushes the souls of people who work them and bogs every sector down. And I'm even open to the idea that some of the regs and restrictions can be pared back in a way that's not dangerous.

I mean, imagine an America where instead of having a single algorithm decide whether and which residencies MDs get, we have an algorithm free millions of people from the drudgery of working in medical and insurance billing and administration. It's possible without proprietary pricing agreements and trade secrets between insurance companies and hospitals. It really is. Almost any other activity would be more useful. As a nation, we're expending a tremendous amount of effort on pointless activities just because we can't snap out of the good/evil paradigm, and it forces us to punt the authority to make decisions to a few private sector people with the power to make them, who always act in their own interests and have no incentive to care about the common weal.

I mean, the state where I was born was named after the common weal. It is a commonwealth. If the citizens of a republic hamstring themselves and actively punt decisions, who will act in their interests? Who will care about the commonwealth? Probably nobody. And if we're locked in a good/evil paradigm in which we've convinced ourselves that punting decisions is good and making them ourselves is evil, then I don't see how we have any hope. We'll keep getting bananas processes if we insist on having a banana republic where a handful of oligarchs run roughshod over the rule of law and make short-sighted decisions that benefit themselves at the expense of the commonwealth. So someone's going to have to reassert control, at least long enough to shake the ground and better, if not perfectly, align opportunity and skill and capital and useful work. We need less capital for apps and more for sewers. How many millions of kids are going to grow up with cognitive impairments from lead poisoning and lower IQs, and how much will that cost in lost opportunity? We know how to fix it, we have the technology, we simply don't allocate effort and capital to solving the problem. And we're never going to ever get it without really shaking things up. I doubt it will come just from one strong personality either, although someone will become a figurehead for it. It's going to come from people demanding it. People generally don't give power away. Usually you have to take it from them. And they tend to kick and scream in the process.

[Polish_Silver]

Re: My immigration policy--not joking

I think Polish_Silver was being facetious.

only 50%

Maybe I was wrong about JD, but Physicians and CEO's are the most massively overpaid groups I can think of.
If DC is correct, that there are many qualified people, than why are CEO salary so high?
Obviously, supply and demand has nothing to do with physician and CEO salaries.

The systems operate more like cartels.

[Milton Kuo]

Re: My immigration policy

Honestly I'd say none of the above. I know kids who have been on wait lists for nursing programs or med school for years. There are 100,000 qualified MBAs for every CEO slot. JDs are unemployed all over the place. We have plenty of talent. There's no shortage of pretty girls who'd like to marry a rich guy that I've seen. We don't need more H1Bs.

I think Polish_Silver was being facetious. Imagine hiring an H-1B visa from India with a degree from IIT and IIM who's willing to work for 1/10 the wage of a typical CEO. To use the spiel from management when it comes to bringing in totally unqualified, unintelligent technologists on H-1B visas, "We can't find anyone with the qualifications for these CEO jobs. We should bring in Indian CEOs! They've graduated from world class institutions and the best thing is, THEY ALL SPEAK ENGLISH!"

[dcarrigg]

Re: My immigration policy

Maybe stop H2 completely and use H1 only for physicians, lawyers and CEO's?

Honestly I'd say none of the above. I know kids who have been on wait lists for nursing programs or med school for years. There are 100,000 qualified MBAs for every CEO slot. JDs are unemployed all over the place. We have plenty of talent. There's no shortage of pretty girls who'd like to marry a rich guy that I've seen. We don't need more H1Bs.

[Polish_Silver]

My immigration policy

IIRC, H1B includes fashion models too.t.

Maybe stop H2 completely and use H1 only for physicians, lawyers and CEO's?

[dcarrigg]

Re: med costs

Yup. That's the thing. Housing prices are so high on the islands in the summer when they need workers that nobody wants to move to the islands just for three months to work the low wage jobs just to give every penny they earn over to a landlord for a slot in a twin mattress bunk bed and a bathroom you share with 16 other people. It's literally all a matter of wage to rent ratios being out of whack.

[dcarrigg]

Re: track record of proportional representation

Yeah, I think it's totally possible too. I don't rule out anything you're saying here. History tells me that usually times like these lead to realignments. But history also tells me that the presidency was never quite this powerful in the past, so...

[dcarrigg]

Re: med costs

As I understand it, H2B visas are for unskilled labor like landscape and farm work, while H1B visas are for specialty work, and it seems IT jobs dominate. The large banks like Chase have loads of folks from India, Pakistan, Nepal...
Here's a list of the top companies sponsoring H1B visas from thos site https://visacoach.org/2009/02/26/the...ored-us-visas/
Corporations really love the foreign H1B engineers. They accept lower wages, helping push pay scales down for all workers.
The H1B workers are bound to the job - if they quit, they get deported. So they can be pushed to work longer hours for lower wages, which sets a certain tone for all professional staff.

COMPANY	No. of Visas
INFOSYS TECHNOLOGIES LIMITED	4,559
WIPRO LIMITED	2,678
SATYAM COMPUTER SERVICES LIMITED	1,917
TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES LIMITED	1,539
MICROSOFT CORP	1,037
ACCENTURE LLP	731
COGNIZANT TECH SOLUTIONS US CORP	467
CISCO SYSTEMS INC	422
LARSEN & TOUBRO INFOTECH LIMITED	403
IBM INDIA PRIVATE LIMITED	381
INTEL CORP	351
ERNST & YOUNG LLP	321
PATNI AMERICAS INC	296
TERRA INFOTECH INC	281
QUALCOMM INCORPORATED	255
MPHASIS CORPORATION	251
KPMG LLP	245

IIRC, H1B includes fashion models too. So there's a double-benefit for corporate tech execs. Bring in the cheap help and bring in the yacht girls. I've been around here all my life. And I can tell you without a doubt that it ain't home grown girls with New England accents sitting in bikinis on deck with the 60 year old men. Was taking amtrak on the regular for work about 5 or 10 years ago. Wednesday mornings there'd be a gaggle of them coming off the ferry stop from the islands, taking the bus to the train station with huge bags and top end luxury clothes, some headed to Boston, others to NYC. They were hard to miss! BTW, what do you think being bound to the job under threat of deportation does in that scenario...nothing good, I'm certain.

Far as the H2Bs go, this is why every waitress and ice cream stand worker on the Cape and Islands speaks Russian or Ukrainian or something these days. And I suspect they might end up at some of the parties with their better-paid H1B counterparts after working hours. But it's not just here. Went to Yellowstone and saw the same thing in Gardiner, MT. I'm sure it's even more obvious in Aspen and Silicon Valley. Back in college I had a night job making deliveries. Even back then the party rental company in an old mill had about 4 or 5 dozen eastern European Girls doing laundry and prepping napkins and table cloths and all that for the seasonal weddings and parties up and down the shore. It's a wild thing to experience locally before you really put it into a global context.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: med costs

As I understand it, H2B visas are for unskilled labor like landscape and farm work, while H1B visas are for specialty work, and it seems IT jobs dominate. The large banks like Chase have loads of folks from India, Pakistan, Nepal...
Here's a list of the top companies sponsoring H1B visas from thos site https://visacoach.org/2009/02/26/the...ored-us-visas/
Corporations really love the foreign H1B engineers. They accept lower wages, helping push pay scales down for all workers.
The H1B workers are bound to the job - if they quit, they get deported. So they can be pushed to work longer hours for lower wages, which sets a certain tone for all professional staff.

COMPANY	No. of Visas
INFOSYS TECHNOLOGIES LIMITED	4,559
WIPRO LIMITED	2,678
SATYAM COMPUTER SERVICES LIMITED	1,917
TATA CONSULTANCY SERVICES LIMITED	1,539
MICROSOFT CORP	1,037
ACCENTURE LLP	731
COGNIZANT TECH SOLUTIONS US CORP	467
CISCO SYSTEMS INC	422
LARSEN & TOUBRO INFOTECH LIMITED	403
IBM INDIA PRIVATE LIMITED	381
INTEL CORP	351
ERNST & YOUNG LLP	321
PATNI AMERICAS INC	296
TERRA INFOTECH INC	281
QUALCOMM INCORPORATED	255
MPHASIS CORPORATION	251
KPMG LLP	245

[Polish_Silver]

Re: med costs

The H2B VISA labor certification program establishes a means for U.S. nonagricultural employers who anticipate a shortage of domestic workers, to bring temporary nonimmigrant foreign workers into the U.S. H2B VISA eligibility requires that the job and the U.S. employer's need for the foreign worker be of a temporary

I Did not now what the H2B was. Sounds like what we need LESS of them, not MORE of them.

As for this "American workers would not do it" . Pure BS. If wages and working conditions were decent, they would do it.

[Polish_Silver]

track record of proportional representation

That would certainly do the trick. But it's such a huge structural and constitutional change, it seems unlikely. The other thing to consider is the long term. No proportional system has lasted so long as the United States. There's something to be said for longevity.

In the end of the day, this is how the American system works. Nothing changes for 30 to 50 years. Then suddenly in four or five years everything changes. It's a punctuated equilibrium. And we're due for drastic change, soon.

All it takes is one wave election where you get 60 Senators, a majority in the House and the Presidency. It happens infrequently. Not since 1964 clearly. Close in 2008, but barely and Kennedy dying killed it. We weren't ready then anyhow. When we are, the change will be remarkable and swift. My money is on fewer than 10 years now. The way it goes is not ordained. But we can't keep going with the way things are for much longer.

Proportional representation is common for governments formed after 1942 (europe, Israel, and I think India) . So there is a 70+ year track record. I am not aware
of proportional representation before that. Is there a nation you think failed because of proportional representation?

I'd say the US is functioning now because of the federal system and separation of powers. And the current electoral system is precisely what could destroy it.

The lack of change after two absurd wars, a financial crisis, and the patriot act is what convinces me we are going down hill, with no brakes. There was no leadership
able to bring change during any of those times. And very few elected leaders even wanting change. Health care has been exorbitant in this country for 30 years.
And who but Trump even says so?
I actually think we could get presidents MUCH worse than trump.

[dcarrigg]

Re: med costs

It almost doesn't matter. Facts don't matter...deportations fell under Trump

Here's another one: Trump Admin expanding H2B visas by 30,000 more per year. 100,000 more per year than ever under Obama. Of course, I read that in the Martha's Vineyard paper. The rich folk here who actually own everything are cheering it on. Not a big surprise to me. Not sure how many folks here interact with the masters of the universe with any regularity. Wild how far reality and perception can diverge these days.