I hear you, I took umbrage with that comment as well. But I think it’s fair to consider whether we are doing enough for Americans just as we are welcoming newcomers to settle here at the same time? My experience as a native born Californian, raised by a single immigrant mother living in urban poverty is no, we do not. Granted I escaped poverty by self-funding my engineering education (Federal Loans and working full time) but it took the better part of my 20s to do so, at great personal cost and risk. In many ways that experience taught me just how unfairly stacked the odds are against the working poor, let alone their children.
I am really curious how welcoming do you think US is to new comers.. Most of the early immigrants in 1800s and early 1900s were blue collar workers (exactly like the people coming from the south of the border). Do you think there is any part of the system that is welcoming to them?
The brain-drain from the rest of the world to US started only after WW2 when US became the only industrialized country with a viable student -> employee -> citizen path and even that only works for a very small set of people.
I would love to hear about programs where the newcomers are treated better than you as a native citizen when both of you are equally qualified.
You make a good point about China. It’s still an ethnostate, and I don’t see how it can reconcile such a strong ethnic nationalist identity with its own demographic crisis and competition for labor from abroad.
I think your explanation about large numbers of motivated students pursuing lucrative Non-STEM degrees is incomplete without mentioning the cost of an undergraduate and graduate STEM education in the USA.
The most critical shortages of STEM graduates are in roles requiring advanced degrees. Your median undergraduate education (~$40k) and median graduate education (~$60k) saddles students with approximately $100k in unforgivable student debt! Never mind the years lost that one could otherwise be working. So it’s no wonder students are motivated by the ROI of their degrees, it’s why I chose Computer Engineering over Electrical Engineering.
These are expensive STEM degrees which students on visas are all too willing to pay for a chance at a residency and a pathway to citizenship. So no wonder the majority of undergraduate and graduate STEM students are foreign born in the US. The ROI is not worth it for the debt. We don’t have enough need based scholarships available to finance the STEM graduates this country claims it needs.
Your entry point is a masters and probably Phd in Electrical Engineering, specializing in some aspect of semiconductor manufacturing. It’s definitely not CS.
Surely there is a lot of software involved in the design / operation of these fabs, it's not just designing the chip directly. Another commenter mentioned EDA so maybe I'll look into that.
There is a huge amount of software in every single step of making an ASIC, digital or analog. Or even a PCB for that matter. Long gone are the days of cutting tape and etching anything yourself. Apple's M3 has 25 billion transistors. No human drew those.
So I've listened to Vivek in interviews, and its clear to me at least that he
1) Doesn't like poor immigrants, considers them a net drain on national resources.
2) Believes that the profile of a desirable immigrant is Educated, English Speaking, Westernized (As far as American civics/ideals are concerned).
3) Doesn't think Americans are culturally capable of upskilling and retooling to bring back the semiconductor industry.
So given the above. What does his appointment spell for the tech industry. Do we expect an uptick in H1b-visa workers? Are we onshoring the semiconductor industry in the US?
Ehh, I think you’re projecting quite a bit here. From my experience, side projects are what sets sets students apart in undergraduate. I frequently show around my side projects at career fairs and get lots of interviews as a result.
Same goes as for food: buy local, short supply chain etc. Meaning also not every single thing is available, but at least you know what you get and where you got it from. And obviously: depending on where you live there won't be any people making what you want..
Its not just the obvious examples like cocaine and methamphetamines. Im mean MDMA and other synthetic drugs are usually manufactured abroad and smuggled into the UK/US by criminal organizations whose income also finances violence and corruption.
Theres no stopping the demand for party/recreational drugs, we may as well legalize them already. But if you buy these illicitly you should know that you’ve likely financially contributed to despicable acts abroad. I find the idea of ‘safe’ illicitly purchased drugs deeply ironic.
> whose income also finances violence and corruption
I find this concept problematic. Does violence or corruption require funding? What sort of violence or corruption? Isn't the point of violence or corruption often to make money, rather than the other way around?
This argument is often made about drug sales but I'm not sure it holds up. It seems to me that making money is often the end-goal of such an operation.
> But if you buy these illicitly you should know that you’ve likely financially contributed to despicable acts abroad.
Even if this is true, is that the moral responsibility of the buyer? If the government decided to ban carrots tomorrow and a black market sprung up around vegetables, whose fault would any collateral social damage be?
What do I mean by financing violence and corruption?
I mean that the money these organizations make is then used to strengthen the power and reach of these organizations through violence and corruption, the means of coercion. Mexico is a perfect example of how criminal organizations destabilize a country through both.
About moral responsibility...
If carrots were the only food around and the choice were between starvation and buying them, then of course it wouldnt be the consumers fault.
But were not talking about foodstuffs or basic needs here, I’m mainly concerned with recreational drugs whose consumption is not a prerequisite for survival. In this case I think that consumers have some kind of responsibility here to exercise discretion. I just find it deeply ironic that people in 1st world countries are paying for fun times, while their money goes on to destabilize other countries. I’m not sure what it is, but it just feels wrong to me.
Ah - you mentioned "chain of production" so I assumed you were only referring to the production of the drug, not its trafficking.
When you include trafficking you're right - but I did mention examples in my post that don't involve any exploitation, such as pharmaceutical diversion and people who grow and supply their own drugs.
I really don't care if people consume/purchase/make/sell drugs if the money isn't financing terrible things someplace in the world. I think the first step to making these kind of guarantees for consumers is legalizing the market for drugs.
I've got friends who grow weed and Ill smoke their stuff anyday cause I know where it comes from.
Most trafficking is not forced or exploitive. It's some poor person seeing a quick payday and going for it.
Beside, most drugs flowing into the US are from underground tunnel, or shipping container, or the back of a commercial truck. At one point they were buying used 747s, flying them full of coke to the US, and then just ditchiing the plane because they made way more than the cost of the plane.
> Most trafficking is not forced or exploitive. It's some poor person seeing a quick payday and going for it.
I'unno - after watching TV shows like _UK Border Force_ (which won't be unbiased, and undoubtably uses contrived selective editing to trigger some strong emotion from the viewer - either sympathy for people in crappy situations and the human-interest sob-stories, to reinforce xenophobic and anti-immigrant views about foreigners by focusing on the people the border officers refuse entry, and so on) but there's seemingly a lot of people shown who clearly were in very, very shitty situations where being a drug-mule was the least-worst option - like needing to find $20,000 quickly to pay for medical care of a loved one in a country without universal healthcare (INB4 jokes about the US).
In any event, ideally no-one should be in a position where they need to compromise their criminal record - or moral principles - to achieve at least a minimally comfortable standard of living.
> At one point they were buying used 747s, flying them full of coke to the US, and then just ditchiing the plane because they made way more than the cost of the plane.
I think that was happening in Africa with smaller jets. Which... is not that far from Brazil. Then smuggle over-land across Africa and mix in with N. African exports/shadow boats.
Who was ditching a 747? The joke from the cartels was they could afford to do that if they wanted to. Plenty of GA aircraft were ending up in fields and at the bottom of the Atlantic and gulf, though.
We all certainly have the capacity for it, but by no means can you say each and every person on Earth gives into it. Rise above it or not, its your choice.
Haven't seen a person (on the Internet or otherwise) who doesn't act in a manner consistent with your description. So far the evidence is pretty strong.
I think you have a very cynical view of things and expect anybody short of being a saint to be a hypocrite. Sure people care about some things while ignoring others, but that doesnt make them indifferent, there is only so much moral bandwidth a person can handle.
The suggested food pyramid suggests mostly grains and carbs, which spike insulin and trigger the satiety response. It's much easier to eat two thousand calories of protein and fat, than two thousand calories if carbs. Also fat is more than twice as dense in calories than carbs.
Combining this with the human body's capacity for adaptation (it becomes gradually easier to eat bigger meals), eating two days worth of calories in even one sitting is not that difficult.
You don't get enough calories to maintain a stable weight. The only reason I can think of why a 21st century human would deliberately starve themselves is weightloss.
