This would take an extraordinary departure from our current politics. Government intruding on software would (rightly) cause cries from the most stalwart Free Software advocates and from proprietary software companies.
Can you imagine the outcry if a new Linux fork had to seek government approval in order to post their distribution?
Can you expect Google or Oracle to fail to lobby the government to make sure they don't have to get each major revision certified?
The upper bound isn't limited by the number of dollars in circulation. The upper bound is limited by what's economically feasible. The outcome of the theoretical Alabama community college language teacher is that the language program just gets cut. The fees for a niche program wouldn't support a highly-paid faculty member.
And then what? Yes, an Alabama community collage can't pay for a language teacher, that's a fairly normal problem for community collages. It does not suggest there is somehow a market failure.
PS: I think you miss understood my upper bound. I doubt people want an immigration policy based on filling any jobs that pays more than ~30k/year.
So why is this a better outcome than letting them hire one on an H1B? No American loses their job, and a community college program remains, giving people access to education.
I don't see what "market failure" has to do with the H1B at all. Just because the market worked correctly doesn't imply that the outcome was desirable.
Some distant collage may chose to pay for such a teacher and then gain students from the community collage who want that instruction. So, in that context your community collage bringing in the H-1B may end up costing an American a job. It could also depress wages for teaching that language discouraging other students from learning it thus extending the shortage over time. Alternatively, the demand may simply not be there for the language at which point the collage is better off paying for a different type of instruction that more students want.
In the end your H-1B is clearly a boon for that collage. However, if may end up hurting the country overall.
The way it's supposed to work is people who already have those job skills enjoy a temporary boom in compensation, and then other people think "I could do that. I will learn that skill and get paid the big bucks."
The H-1B system short circuits that mechanism. The salary doesn't rise, and young people are savvy enough to realize once an industry starts using foreign workers it never will.
Voila! Permanent shortage of Americans willing to do that job.
It might be a better outcome for native translators who see higher demand increase their salaries. The market has to be fair for all participants. Salary will never increase with demand, if increases in demand are always undermined by bringing in H1B workers.
The company officers or agents who were served with the letter could be held personally liable for failure to comply with the order. I think it's a little unfair to expect employees to go to prison for contempt of court in defiance of the order.
Yes, that could happen. But there's the Spider-Man Rule: "with great power comes great responsibility".
They're running a major international media outlet over there, and they do have some pretty heavyweight responsibilities that come with that, even if it conflicts with their personal lives.
You're only observing how we're caught in this trap, you're not providing any constructive way out.
Sure, it's unreasonable to expect this of people. It's also unreasonable for the government to expect they'll help in spying on their customers. It's also unreasonable for the government to do this in the first place.
Everything's unreasonable. Someone has to step...the...fuck...up. And the government has demonstrated it won't be them.
Who does that leave? Would it be better to kick back, admire the problem, and simply let things continue as they are?
You aren't providing one [constructive way out] either. It's not Twitter's or any other company's fault, yet you want them to pay the price in form of risk. Why don't you pay it yourself?
Well, no one can prove what they'd do if they were in this situation. But I can't pay this cost for twitter, because the government hasn't asked this of me.
I don't believe they'd go to jail though. I do believe they'd cause an utter shitstorm for themselves personally and professionally though, but that they'd get a lot of attention to the matter and come out the other side OK. I can think of at least 5 non-profits who would jump to pay their legal costs, just to be in the battle and stick it to the government if this sort of thing ever came up.
What do you think the real consequences of standing up to the government are? Publicity is mostly my bet. Note that if we're dealing with the CEO of twitter, hustling him off to a secret prison somewhere with no trial isn't an option, as that's the same as setting off a big media bomb.
But you know, nobody wants to be inconvenienced, and it is a risk, so I suppose many people feel that's adequate justification for twitter to do nothing and keep serving punch to the crowd.
Right. So I think you and I agree on some element of responsibility and that it feels too convenient for those companies to just say "sorry, there is nothing we can do". On the other hand, I think it's clear now how things generally play out behind the scenes, so at leats we as users of those services can either stop using them entirely, or seek alternatives that are hosted overseas (relative to US) and where US jurisdiction is weaker. That would secure us a bit as individuals, but it does nothing for the big picture. I don't see a clear way out.
They're being paid a great deal of money on the theory that their jobs have a lot of responsibility. If they choose to ignore whatever parts of that responsibility they can get away with, perhaps they don't actually deserve that compensation after all.
Anyone who risks their own wellbeing for the greater good is usually applauded, for good reason: it is not expected.
Edit: if you'll pardon the expression, it takes serious balls to put your entire way of life on the line. Yes, history sometimes venerates the brave...sometimes posthumously....so it all might seem glamorous. But it's a lot harder than that in real time, when you don't know what will come of it.
That's why disclosure needs to start at the top and come from someone big enough to survive the fallout. If (for example) Zuckerberg genuinely wanted to do good and grew a pair, he'd do it. He's too busy exploiting your data to get rich and virtue signaling via acquisitions though.
They might, but he'd have better odds than your average Joe (and certainly a better legal team).
"With great power comes great responsibility" isn't just a line from a movie. Of course we can choose not to hold our leaders to high expectations, but that leads to a markedly worse world for the rest of us.
This is the mark of a viewpoint unfettered by exposure to the other side. Assuming malicious intent of someone just because they have an opposing viewpoint is simplistic and naive.
1. Manning leaks: exposure of one war crime and its coverup. Hardly a trend. Furthermore, Wikileaks edited the Collateral Murder video to imply malicious intent and obfuscate the ambiguity in the situation.
2. Snowden leaks: where was the U.S. military implicated in any of them?
3. Hospital bombings: yes, targeting fails happen in wartime. It is tragic and regretful. War zones are dangerous.
4. Senate report on torture: wasn't that the CIA as directed by Attorney General Gonzalez?
5. Obama refusal to exercise the laws against torture: this is the first time I'm hearing of this, please discuss.
6. Gitmo: hardly the U.S. military; this is an artifact of a Congress that refuses to allow any appropriations toward relocating prisoners elsewhere.
7. Kill lists: how would you approach terminating military commanders engaging in continuous operations (that kill noncombatants) against your country, yet they don't belong to a nation-state?
In the last 100 years, the U.S. military is guilty of much wrongdoing. Compared to other nations, and considering the volume of combat in which the U.S. military has been engaged, the U.S. military fares well when compared to other nations. The reality is that warfare inherently involves the killing of people who should not have been killed, simply because their homes were in a combat zone. You could argue that the U.S. shouldn't have entered most of its wars; that might be true. At the time, it was considered to be the right thing by the U.S. electorate in order to prevent much more bloodshed. World War 2 is the textbook example of a war entered too late to prevent massive bloodshed. This informs U.S. decision makers and cannot be discounted.
1, your willingness to whitewash the calculated murder of a civilian journalist is chilling, it's hard to believe you argue in good faith.
2. Clapper lying under oath to Congress, numberous illegal programs under the NSA.
3. Just another isolated example right? Honest mistake, just like the weddings and the explicit double tap strategy that explicitly targets emergency medical responders.
4. Forget about abu ghraib? Just another isolated example... Seeing a pattern here of your refusal to look past the numerous examples, as if you have your head in the sand.
6. Gitmo is the result of our Governments decision to violate the Geneva convention on the handling prisoners of war, the Taliban certainly qualified, but our military industrial complex did the legal contortions of enemy combatants instead. Gitmo existence is a clear war crime.
7. I'd pursue by continuing to respect the rule of law, international law, and our Constitution, apparently trifling concerns to you.
5. Look it up, Obama violated his oath by refusing to execute the law of land against one of the most henious crimes possible.
1. His point was that the Manning leaks revealed one war crime, not a trend.
2. Clapper is/was not a military official.
3. Being a former US Army infantryman, I have no clue what you are referencing with regard to an "explicit double tap strategy." However, you did describe a well-used TTP of insurgents in Afghanistan.
6. A "clear war crime" GITMO is not; it is an artifact of civilian policies in a legal grey area. Personally, I think it does more harm than good and should be shut down, but there are real questions (i.e. where do the prisoners go?) that CIVILIANS in Congress can't answer yet.
7. That sounds lovely, but lacks any real substance.
Fascinating:
The Court of Appeals ruled that for a software licensee's
violation of a contract to constitute copyright infringement,
there must be a nexus between the license condition and the
licensor’s exclusive rights of copyright. However ... that a
finding of circumvention under the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act does not require a nexus between circumvention
and actual copyright infringement.
The DMCA's anti-circumvention section appears to be the only thing that preserved parts of the original finding. Perhaps the next time this law is up for review, some less onerous terms can be placed for reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability.
Can you imagine the outcry if a new Linux fork had to seek government approval in order to post their distribution?
Can you expect Google or Oracle to fail to lobby the government to make sure they don't have to get each major revision certified?