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People already freak out about the sustainability of the welfare state supporting just the elderly with worker-dependent ratios of 3:1 or 2:1. Imagine if also all the working age population got welfare, it'd be completely unworkable.

When you buy services, is your bar good enough, or do you look for best value for money? And are those who try to optimise bigots merely for not buying from their local provider?

But anyway, the decrease in hiring in the US will be mostly driven by foreigners that will still be hired, but now not relocate to the US. Why hire someone on a H1-B at an extra cost of 100k when you can hire the same person in some other office and not pay that cost? It's a self-own by the US.


That’s just another way of admitting that H1-B was always about lowering costs rather than lack of talent.

No, it's about being able to hire more people at the same hiring bar and comp for companies hiring at scale, like (pre-2022) big tech. If you limit yourself to only hiring Americans in your US office, then you are at a talent disadvantage unless/until you open another office in a more friendly jurisdiction. And if you open such a satellite office and hire there, then that's worse for the US than if you had hired them in the US, because the US misses out on the income tax.

Many other countries have the exact same sorts of visas, because it is good to attract talented, high-paid workers to your country.


It's comments like this that make those of us who are of immigrant origins or the children of immigrants indifferent to losses even if we are impacted as well.

Employers abusing the H1B process like WITCH is a known problem and everyone wants it resolved, but going back and implicitly implying that immigrants are subpar pisses people off.

If a cabinet member trashes a semiconductor launch [0] that would have made 9k jobs in GOP-leaning upstate NY, the CEO of that company (who also invented the entire field of flash memory) may as well hedge and shift abroad [1] helping other countries move up the HBM value chain [2]. And even the Trump admin is giving a helping hand [3][4].

If you can't respect our community, why shouldn't we geopolitically hedge as well?

[0] - https://www.syracuse.com/micron/2026/01/trump-cabinet-member...

[1] - https://www.digitimes.com/news/a20260123VL207/micron-commerc...

[2] - https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZAICbxB0kT0

[3] - https://youtube.com/watch?v=uDtm-k6JvI8

[4] - https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2025/04/the-india-us-tru...


That was not my intent. H1-B visas were sold as helping talent shortage. There are many genuinely talented immigrants and always have been. Fantastic! A previous company hired an H1-B visa and he was truly a talent in robotics.

However that doesn't mean that the real political support for masses of H1-Bs was ever about talent. It was about lowering labor costs by semi-exploiting large numbers of immigrants willing to work insane hours knowing they'd loose their visa's otherwise.

There's also lots of talented American's here by immigration or born here who were affected by all developer salaries being suppressed by the big H1-B visa abusers.


I graduated 15 years ago, and I think the exams in my degree were actually the most LLM-proof part of the student assessment. They were no-aid written exams with pencils and paper, whereas the assignments were online-submitted code only that an LLM could easily write.

Food stamps are an inherently paternalistic program. The whole point is to ensure people get enough to eat, even when they can't or won't provide for themselves. Same with other voucher or in-kind welfare programs in housing, healthcare, education, etc.


For exceptional items, can't the parent pay for them from non-SNAP money? For instance from the child tax credits they also get? SNAP's stated purpose is nutrition, not making birthdays fun.


Oh good, you have demonstrated how money is somewhat fungible and therefore any moralizing about what welfare is spent on is a little odd

>SNAP's stated purpose is nutrition

SNAPS purpose is dual, and it was always also about ensuring american farmers had more demand, including for corn syrup. Horrifically, EBT being spent on soda is intentional.

If that bothers you, we can reduce corn subsidies without taking candy from literal children, or keeping poor parents from buying chips.


Who cares? It's $5.00 to buy a box of cake mix and a can of frosting. Let poor people have fun sometimes instead of trying to use the welfare as a leash to harry them constantly about their choices.


If they want total freedom, they don't have to spend food stamps. They can always provide for themselves.

You are right, a single box of cake mix once a year is fine. But between banning processed foods, or allowing everything, the former is far closer to the "just cake once a year" scenario. Allowing unlimited spend on junk food will in most cases lead to worse outcomes.


"Let them eat cake"


I saw a homeless guy in the park eating a block of raw cake mix.


That's not really a lot of protein on a low carb diet like they are suggesting.


Google considers the consumer's side, not just the publishers. Users often don't want to visit someone's website (and then dodge ads and cookie/newsletter/notification popups). If the query can be answered without veer visiting a website, so much the better.


There are little link icons at the end of each paragraph. They open a list of sources.


How old are you? Most millennials grew up with unfettered access to the internet, including porn, because our non-digital-native parents were easily outsmarted. We were fine. This seems like the same helicopter parenting fallacy that has already destroyed kids' in-person lives.


My kids are millenials. They are fine too, but that is only because my wife and I worked really hard to regulate their access. We caught our 7 year old son searching for some offensive stuff on the internet and when asked, his answer was "my friends are looking for it".

In his teen years, we started hearing some stuff you'd typically associate with the toxic manosphere. A number of discussions later it turned out he was picking this off the internet.

Parents who talk about the difficulty of dealing with all this are labelled as hysterical, emotional, helicopter parents...the list goes on. My only response to that is what I tell most people - don't judge parents too harshly until you've had the opportunity to be one.


I think it actually is a radical totalitarian demand, if the only accepted form of age verification is government ID scans or selfie face capture. People should have a right to serve content without having to deal with the SPII of their clients.


... but they specifically don't have to, right? You can just use a third party verification company. Or you can not, if you'd prefer not to. You just have to do something vaguely meaningful that isn't just "Pinky swear you're 18".


> You can just use a third party verification company.

That will ask for a government ID scan or selfie face capture. It solves the company-side problem only.


How do they perform age checks?


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