The Media Will Show You All The Pictures You Need To Have An Opinion

Oh, that crazy Donald Trump. He’s at it again with more racist policies. This time, he’s signing an executive order to double the minimum salary for H-1B workers to $130,000, making it impossible for those poor Indians to come over to America and take all the tech jobs.

Facebook is enraged. Every public post on the subject has said that Trump is a moron/racist/sexist/idiot.Well, he might be all of those things, or none of them. But one thing he certainly is not is a Democratic Congresswoman from California named Zoe Lofgren.

See, the problem is that Trump had nothing to do with this bill. It’s not an executive order. It’s a proposed piece of legislation in the House, introduced by the aforementioned Ms. Lofgren, who represents the Silicon Valley district. However, in the court of public opinion, reality doesn’t matter. Just throw up a picture of the bad, bad, Cheeto man and get to slanderin’ on the Facebook!

Trump’s bill? Uh, no.

Well, you can expect him to have nothing to do with this particular story!

Uh, what now?

Nobody read the effing article! Not one of them! They saw something they thought was BAD AND RACIST AND NOT INCLUSIVE and they went full-on white guilt.

Never mind that H-1B contracts are akin to slavery. Never mind that they make it impossible for Americans to get good paying tech jobs. Never mind that there is such a massive backlog of H-1Bs waiting to come to our racist country that this legislation probably won’t make a difference.

That’s not what’s important here. The important thing is that we’ve gone from a nation of readers to a nation of lookers, and we’ve gone from critically thinking and evaluating to rushing to be “first” to comment. And the media is only too happy to support your pre-conceived biases by throwing up a picture of the white devil and letting you go to town.

It’s frankly so upsetting, I don’t even know where to start.

70 Replies to “The Media Will Show You All The Pictures You Need To Have An Opinion”

  1. WhiskeyRiver

    I’d be for raising H-1B minimum wages as high as they can go. Why stop at $130K? Why not half a million? A million!

    At some point the cost of hiring H-1B would be so prohibitive that the problem would solve itself.

    Reply
    • Jack Baruth

      I have to give this woman credit.

      The average salary of an entry-level skilled tech gig was $40/hour in 2001 — $88k/year.

      Today, it’s $25-$30/hour — $60k or a bit more.

      That’s not an accident. I’m reminded of what Daniel Day-Lewis says in Gangs Of New York about Irish wages.

      $130k/year gets you pretty much any white guy you want outside the major markets… and with a whole generation of kids who WANT to live in small apartments and do without cars/boats/Cessnas, it probably gets you people in SF as well.

      Reply
    • Eric H

      They need an auction for them.
      There are X visas a year. The top paid X get them, minim bid $130K.

      I’m a highly skilled programmer (device drivers, firmware, kernel work, parallel algorithm optimization – that sort of thing) so I’m not really of the kind that get outsourced (especially as I’m an American in Canada) but I’ve seen it happen to friends. My wife has two real degrees and can’t get a work visa in the US, but I easily got accepted into Canada based on actual skills and job history. The current H1-B visa system is laughably broken.

      Reply
      • VoGo

        I do find the optics on this may be challenging. This member of Congress appears to be saying that the minimum wage for non-Americans is $65/hour, but for actual Americans, $15/hour would crush American business.

        Reply
        • jz78817

          you don’t see the difference between unskilled minimum wage jobs, and skilled technical jobs where companies claim “there are no American workers” (bullshit) and need to basically import wage slaves?

          Reply
          • CJinSD

            Vogo understands nothing until George Soros sticks his hand up Vogo’s ass and moves his lips, putting words together denoting said understanding.

          • VoGo

            CJ,
            Honestly, if you have something productive to add, go for it. You don’t have to agree with me. But when all you have are silly insults, you only strengthen me and my arguments.

          • CJinSD

            Are you the same Vogo that dedicates 25% of his time to personal attacks on Ronnie? Is Vogo a pool of SJWs who don’t even compare notes about tactics or failed arguments?

          • VoGo

            25%? Let me do the math on a typical week:

            30% Sleeping
            30% Working
            6% Commuting
            15% Time with Family
            10% TV/Internet
            5% Personal hygiene
            2% Personal attacks on Ronnie
            2% Responding to douches who comment on RG because they were banned from TTAC for being pricks.

            That sounds about right.

      • Yamahog

        Thank you! Yes!

        Maybe bifurcate the market between accredited educational institutions and strictly non-profit research labs and businesses but other than that, make the H1B workers dear to the companies that employ them.

        Reply
  2. Tyguy

    To be fair, Trump has mentioned H1B reforms as a priority. Her bill also mirrors several others. http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/30/technology/trump-h1b-visa-immigration-reform/index.html

    As someone who works in technology, and have sponsored visas. I’ve seen the abuses of the programs by the Indian outsourcing model. Where a 130k salary would not prevent all displacements it certainly would be a kick in the nuts to most outsourcer’s business models. Realistically 130k is not a very high salary for talent in IT, especially in high cost geographical areas. But at that cost, perhaps we would only pursue bringing in talented immigrants rather than indentured drones.

    Reply
    • Jack Baruth

      Exactly. Nobody’s against somebody bringing in a math wizard from Serbia. It’s the million-plus $60k fake-degree congenital liars who in no way resemble the “Vishnu” who took the phone interview. They’re killing tech in America.

      Reply
      • Tyguy

        The amount of absolute liars I’ve interviewed is astounding, including the obviously different person on the phone than in real life. I once interviewed a girl DBA from S&P who could not write a select statement. I have seen much more of that type of thing from Indian immigrants than Americans or American born (second generation) Indians. Still in the industry as a whole I find that about 10% of the people do 90% of the work and most others aren’t trusted (rightly) to do anything other than busy work.

        Reply
        • JDN

          Yeah it’s depressing the number of people that seem unable to accomplish the simplest tasks that still have found employment for years in the field.

          Might just be that they’ve been filtered out before they got to my step in the interview process, but I never really noticed much of a difference between US born/educated and foreign – the percentage that were acceptable was tiny either way.

          Reply
  3. Arbuckle

    It’s fun watching the former “Fight for $15” crowd suddenly embrace free market capitalism, while talking about the necessity or outsourcing, the inevitability of automation, and price sensitivity.

    I remember seeing Clinton and Sanders march with the CWA and call center employees on strike this summer. I wonder why those two didn’t just say “these jobs can’t be saved and aren’t coming back. Robots can do it better and other countries can do it cheaper.” And then offer an awesome retraining program to the unemployed 50 year olds.

    It’s like how both parties flipped their opinions on the virtue of paying income taxes between 2012 and 2016.

    Reply
  4. VoGo

    This is what happens when the concept of curation is lost. People got sick of reading news they didn’t like, so they attack the “MSM” and retreat to niches where the news always matches what they want to hear. Truth is secondary.

    I subscribe to the New York Times online, but if you don’t want to spend the money, you can read 10 articles/month for free. Yes, the same NYT which has left-leaning editorials. But you’re allowed to skip those and focus on the news itself, which is high quality.

    Reply
    • J. Howard

      This was… actually a great comment. Totally agree. Even I am starting to wall myself in because people are posting so many fake, knee jerk articles. I just can’t take the intellectual dishonesty from some of my old friends anymore. It’s not entirely side exclusive either… it’s a real fundamental problem on social media as a whole. I am totally OKAY with reading biased material as long as the writer openly admits the bias and frequently is honest about the struggle they have agreeing or disagreeing with something that deals with their fundamental beliefs.

      Reply
      • silentsod

        I deactivated my Facebook account for similar reasons and am likely to pull financial support from another site I frequent because their policies in the past couple of years have essentially shut down any real discussion and open sharing of opinion.

        Reply
    • Nickoo

      Your comment has nothing to do with the problem of H1B Visa abuse, predominantly by Indians, and predominantly because tech companies excerpt influence to keep it that way. You just wanted to go off on some unrelated tangent to feel smart, didn’t you?

      Reply
  5. VoGo

    Bark,
    You didn’t need go all the way to India to find false news. Just look at Fox News’ recent coverage of the recent Mosque attack in Canada.

    Reply
    • everybodyhatesscott

      This is such crap. Everyone originally reported there were 2 suspects because that’s what the police said. Of those 2 original suspects, one of them was Moraccan according a French Canadian Paper. Fox tweeted that. The police then release, ‘one of the people we originally reported as a suspect is a witness’ and Fox updated their story. They weren’t chasing anything and they weren’t even the first to report it. And you can pretend ‘what’s race got to do with it?’ but now that it’s a white guy, apparently a lot.

      Reply
      • VoGo

        From CNN:
        Amid pressure from the Canadian prime minister, Fox News has apologized for a tweet that inaccurately identified the suspect in Sunday night’s Quebec mosque terror attack as a man of Moroccan origin.

        “FoxNews.com initially corrected the misreported information with a tweet and an update to the story on Monday. The earlier tweets have now been deleted,” Refet Kaplan, the managing director at FoxNews.com, said in a statement. “We regret the error.”

        Reply
        • Kevin Jaeger

          And where do you think Fox got this info? Google cache is full of EVERY SINGLE news outlet in Canada, including the government-owned CBC which Trudeau is responsible for, announcing the names of the two suspects arrested. The police later cleared the Moroccan guy after the investigation showed he was a witness and no longer a suspect.

          Try the search “Mohamed Khadir site:cbc.ca” and see how many stories still show up in the cache. Of course they are updated now and clarify he’s no longer a suspect, and the leaked name was incorrect in any case.

          Reply
        • VoGo

          As I wrote,…
          This is what happens when the concept of curation is lost. People got sick of reading news they didn’t like, so they attack the “MSM” and retreat to niches where the news always matches what they want to hear. Truth is secondary.

          Reply
          • Ronnie Schreiber

            Because the New York Times and CNN don’t match what you yourself want to hear VoGo, n’est pas?

            Seriously man, you’re a cliche filled with projection and hate that somehow allow you to think you’re a moral avatar, or at least that’s the asshole you play on the internet.

          • TAFKADG

            “Curation” is a nice way of saying “controls the narrative”.

            Remember, goys, the problem was never the MSM staffing itself exclusively with shitlibs. The problem is that you’ve stopped listening to them.

          • VoGo

            In this context, curation refers to the quality of the content. If citizens don’t distinguish between high quality content (like, say NYT, WSJ, Bloomberg, Economist) and stuff some guy on the internet posted, then they will find themselves in a pizza shop under fire because some gullible fellow cannot distinguish the difference between hosting a fundraiser for Clinton and running a child sex trade operation.

            Cue the ‘pizzagate is real, man’ rants…

          • Jack Baruth

            The problem in a nutshell with the so-called high-quality media is that after seeing two of the above outlets post Niedermeyer’s bizarre know-nothing rants about an industry in which he’s never worked a single day, I don’t see why I should treat anything else on any other subject in those sources with any respect whatsoever.

          • VoGo

            Jack,
            That’s the correct conclusion if you are incapable of understanding the difference between news and op-ed.

          • Mike

            He does understand but likes to be obtuse. He also like to creepily (his word) follow people he disagrees with passionately and come onto their own website and post often. Then he projects that behavior, erroneously, onto others.

  6. Matt

    Without opining on the racism or attention span of anyone mentioned in Bark’s piece, Axios reports that it has seen a draft of a Trump Executive Order doing exactly what is described: raising the “price floor” for H-1B’s.

    So it’s entirely plausible that there is both a Democratic bill in the House AND an EO.

    Reply
  7. MrGreenMan

    If the H1B is what they say it is – a way to recruit the highly skilled that we just don’t have – the high wage requirement is immaterial, since somebody with skills in demand should command that salary. Further, there would be no squealing.

    If the H1B is what we’ve all seen and heard – a way to achieve cost savings that would be called national origin or age discrimination otherwise – then the high wage requirement will break its use as a cost savings tool. There would be lots of squealing.

    What? You say there’s squealing?

    You mean when the Chinese grad student came to my business to apply for a coding job, and he said he’d only need a certain salary on paper, but I could deduct the cost of the H1B and other administrative expenses, so long as he could stay here, and I told him GTFO, that everyone has that same experience?

    Reply
  8. Bigtruckseriesreview

    Copied from my Facebook post:

    [Fox, MSNBC and CNN take their turns misinforming the public – or simply flooding the airwaves with RUMOR, CONJECTURE and ALTERNATIVE FACTS.
    It’s a sad day when I have to rely on WORLDSTAR HIP HOP for unbiased, uncensored video because the news triumvirate can’t be trusted not to edit the clips or try to spin them.
    Journalism is DEAD.
    This new group of inexperienced, ideologues isn’t worth the toilet paper their agenda is printed on.
    I am glad that the Presidency of Donald Trump has forced people to re-evaluate their trust in the media and their relationship to the government. Suddenly everyone knows everything about the Electoral College and the co-equal branches of government THAT THEY SHOULD HAVE LEARNED IN SCHOOL. The only shame of it is that now they see a Republican COTUS, a Conservative SCOTUS and a POTUS headed by someone many hate.
    The media should be ashamed of themselves for their insulting and disrespectful treatment of the Presidency, going back to the Clinton, Obama and Bush Jr. administrations.
    And now they are suggesting President Donald J. Trump will be impeached based on NOTHING – to which I reply: by who?
    The Republican COTUS or the Conservative SCOTUS?
    It’s not gonna happen.
    You’e stuck for the next 1440 days with this guy.
    So what I recommend is that you turn that misplaced anger towards those who are misinforming you and feeding you LIES.
    Your only opportunity to change this government’s COTUS is to VOTE out your local representatives in 2 years and replace them – but so long as there’s no term-limits, you DO NOT HAVE A CHOICE ABOUT THE REPRESENTATIVES OF OTHERS LIVING IN OTHER STATES.
    Changing the COTUS is the only way to limit the POTUS (if that’s even possible given the rate he’s signing executive orders), but the SCOTUS is pretty much locked up.
    Ginsburg better make sure she lives for the next 4 years.]

    Reply
    • WhiskeyRiver

      I don’t see much to argue with here except the premise that this Presidency is going to endure for 1440 days and not 2880 days.

      Reply
  9. WhiskeyRiver

    These h-1B visas may actually be necessary.

    Can you imagine what Common Core base 16 math would look like? Or Common Core Physics?

    I don’t know what that says for the future of American computer programmers or engineers. Gonna take a while to feed the system properly qualified college candidates for those programs.

    Reply
  10. -Nate

    Holy cow ~ $65K wasn’t enough ? .
    .
    I never made that much Lolly in my dreams .
    .
    I’m getting ready to do my 2016 taxes and I made just shy of $29,000 last year, that’s not a typo .
    .
    -Nate

    Reply
    • jz78817

      it really depends on where you live. $65k where I am will get you pretty far. $65k in the Bay Area means you’ll be living in a closet.

      Reply
      • -Nate

        “Pretty far” is a wildly variable target .
        .
        I’m well pleased to no longer live in New England, more so because not a trailer next to a swamp either .
        .
        Where I live makes Jack’s old Riverside Green look like Malibu but I like it just fine…..
        .
        -Nate

        Reply
  11. Paul M.

    As someone who works in IT, and has been with my current fortune 20 employer for over 20 years I have seen these abuses first hand. We have lost thousands of IT works at my company, in waves. It started with huge outsourcing deals to accenture and EDS and IBM.
    After one year, and a bonus to retain those American folks promised at the end of the year, the jobs were either moved to India data centers, or Indians were brought here to be the face of IT for our business clients. My peers had to train the Indians during that one year.
    The company later moved the contract to Infosys and Tech Mahindra to even reduce the costs further. Accenture and IBM are looked at as high cost outsourcing firms. Because there are language barriers, all kinds of tricks are used, like mid-shoring, hiring some at Indian reservations out west that can at least speak English. Our help desk is a mess as it was outsourced/mis-shore outsourced, and the outsourced again to India completely.
    In these cases, it is really hard to say what the $ rate is. Americans were rated at close $100 an hour based on our pay scales (including benefits) around 10 years ago, though it has not gone up much since. This was at first promised to be cut in half by accenture and EDS. Later with infusion of Tech Mahindra and Infosys, our rates have been reduced to $20-30 for mix of large offshore outsourced and some that are here on H1s. It gets very tricky how they price these people as part of these large contracts. An accenture partner friend of mine in NJ left accenture because he was a devout Catholic and couldn’t accept what was going on in his daily life.
    I still work for this company, a great company for me personally, but when I now venture to our buildings, it is like you walk into some Indian location. Full of young Indians men and women, that look like they just got off the plane. The abuses of American technology workers that I have seen, is beyond measure. I am glad people are going to do something, but these outsourcing companies can do tricks with mix and match of offshore and onshore.

    Reply
    • Ken

      1/3 the price to offshore work that takes 4x times to do correctly is saving money. …At least that’s how most executives see it.

      Reply
    • 1A

      Thanks for sharing. I’d venture to say most do not know this even exists. Sure, they may know of a few small instances, but not like you’ve described. Thanks.

      Reply
  12. N3TRUN

    To be fair, this kind of ‘reporting’ and ‘false anger’ has been going on since well before the current administration. For me, I was aware of it during W’s administration and O’s. I can see that if you’re excited by the new president and you weren’t excited about the old president that you’d become suddenly more aware of it now. Doesn’t make it new, tho.

    Reply
    • Ken

      So true. Although I’d add with the rise of 24 hour cable news and now social media the race to the bottom has never been faster.

      Reply
  13. ArBee

    You’re right, it’s not new. By my recollection it started with the Johnson presidency during the Vietnam War, accelerated under Richard Nixon, and was firmly established by the time of Gerald Ford. Remember the relentless press depiction of Ford as clumsy and stumble-footed? It was untrue, and it was shameful.

    Reply
    • -Nate

      Musta been that awful ‘ lib’ral media ‘ , right ? =8-^ .
      .
      -Nate
      (sarcasm font busted for those too stupid/angry to notice)

      Reply
  14. Zykotec

    Well, reliable news sources are getting scarce, but Facebook was never one of them in the first place.
    Reknowned as us Norwegians are for being socialist pinkos who love everyone, we have already had rules in place to hinder ‘social dumping’ for some years. Meaning that you can’t hire an imported worker for a lower wage than a Norwegian worker.

    The argument for the law was to stop employers from ‘abusing’ immigrants (who were more than happy to make 4-10 times the amount they would make at home) by paying half of what they pay Norwegians, but I think we honestly just did it to keep wages from dropping. So now the jobs get outsourced instead…

    Reply
  15. Ronnie Schreiber

    I worked in IT for DuPont as some of these changes were starting to happen. DuPont had one of the best corporate IT teams in the world. We moved from the mainframe era to PCs and Macs almost seamlessly and everything worked well. We had very smart and creative folks at all levels from local support staff to the mainframe guys in Wilmington. Then some suit decided that they could reduce fixed costs by moving most of our in-house IT staff into Accenture, CSC, and temp providers. I was one of the few people that stayed with DuPont and I watched how the tail started wagging the dog, how our vendors were in charge of some very important tech and policies of the company.

    As for Memsahib’s “support” crew in Bangalore, it’s annoying as someone who has staffed a phone bank and done actual support for desktop, local network and even the odd mainframe job, to have to sit through someone reading a script asking me if I’ve reset the modem five minutes after I’ve told them it’s a fucking network problem that they have to report to the engineers in the U.S.

    Reading a script isn’t support, it’s the imitation of support. Yes, we all use checklists to make sure we haven’t missed part of a problem, but problem solving requires actual thought.

    I hate it when I know more than the person who is supposed to be helping me.

    Reply
    • VoGo

      It might be helpful to entangle some of the elements here. Corporations sometimes:

      1. outsource work to another company. In theory, this can be a good move when you outsource to someone that specializes in the work and can do it more efficiently. Example: The vast majority of corporations do not own power plants – they outsource electricity production to a utility.

      2. offshore work, often to India (IT) or China (manufacturing) or The Philippines (financial processes). The drive here is to take advantage of the wage differential between offshore talent and onshore, and also to find strong talent pools globally. You may have noticed that GM increasingly leverages its global talent pools to engineer platforms, e.g., the Chevy Cruze was mostly engineered in by GM engineers in Korea.

      3. shift work to lower level employees. Here, the work was previously done by a $60/hour talented engineer, but now the company has tried to document his knowledge into scripts read by $10/hour CSRs.

      Each of these is a major shift, requiring thoughtful planning, tireless execution and ongoing management, i.e., leadership. When you try to combine them and are not committed to retaining process effectiveness, you are courting danger.

      Reply
      • jz78817

        GM Korea isn’t really “off-shoring” in the sense people have a problem with; GMK is General Motors. Problematic off-shoring is things like customer “support” from the other side of the globe by people who don’t even likely know what the product they’re supporting is.

        the other is software. This can really be a ball-ache, because when you outsource the writing of actual code to a firm with people who have no idea what your software is supposed to do, what you get back can only ever be as good as your specification(s.) and if there’s any ambiguity and/or misses in the spec, you’re in for a long session of bug-hunting.

        Reply

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