"Community input is bad actually" is not spicy, it's table stakes. If you have rights and the rule of law, you make laws and follow them. Housing is by right, and the only community input happens years earlier, when laws, including zoning, are decided on.
Your observation about community input is dead wrong in CA and in many other areas of the US. No matter what the zoning classification is, the neighbors dictate what actually gets built. I know this after a 5 year very expensive legal battle to build a small 60-bed memory care facility in LA on a 35k cars/day street adjacent to a residential area infested with NIMBY fear mongers. Taking that power away from them would be a great first step. Electing council members with integrity and a longer vision than five minutes would also help.
"Expand high-skilled immigration, such as the O-1 and H-1B."
H-1B has not been a route for high-skilled immigration for decades now. It is instead a way for companies to replace native workers with low-skilled immigrants who get paid less because they are locked to one company. It needs to die and possibly be replaced by something that actually brings high-skilled immigrants.
Yes exactly. The H-1B software engineers brought in are not high skilled, they're cheap.
A fix for this might be to enforce a large minimum pay for anyone brought in. The original idea for the existence of the H-1B visa was to bring in people you couldn't get in America, not to bring in cheaper workers.
The problem for this would be enforcement. They're not enforcing the existing rules, so why would they enforce new ones?
I'm from Hungary, I know quite a few folks who are good engineers and went to the US with H1B. And they get the permanent residency relatively fast (in ~2-3 years) because the green card quota is per-origin-country.
One quora answer estimated that for 2016 less than half of the green card recipients were H1Bs. (~48K / 113K of work-related recipients)
And around 1M people get the card each year.
So it's basically a drop in the bucket. *shrug*
And likely the alternative for these companies would be to *keep* the positions overseas. At least so far I haven't seen any data about how many people are getting replaced by H1Bs, but as far as I understand it's simply not how it works. These big "tech" (glorified IT support) companies are mostly giving these as perks, it helps recruiting *at home*.
Regarding the 90-day approval-by-default. Is the assumption that enforcement happens after the fact, during the actual project? If not, BillyBob's brother-in-law who's in charge of permit review can easily run out the clock to make sure BillyBob's development goes ahead, regardless. Makes cronyism incredibly easy and plausibly deniable.
At a quick glance, nearly all your examples seem to be drawn from libertarian/classical liberal or center-right sources. Is that intentional or accidental?
Maybe just reflects my personal political leanings! But even the left-leaning folks I know in the progress movement think regulatory reform is necessary to pull back the vetocracy and let us build again. If you want left-wing goals like making the green energy transition happen or providing lots of affordable housing, you need that.
If there are relevant sources I left out, please share!
I would describe your article as practical and nonpartisan, but to the extent that it has a political view, left liberal. Surprised anyone thinks otherwise, but then too life is all about people having different views.
Nuclear; clean, safe? Is there a way to measure the cancer related to the Fukushima disaster? Or Chernobyl? Do we just send the spent rods into space? Isn’t it something like a million years before nuclear byproducts approach “safe” for humankind?
What to do with the spent rods: they can be easily encased in concrete and safely buried. The amount of waste generated is extremely small, so it's not a lot of work to deal with. And it is not a million years, more like 600 years: https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/a-tale-of-two-particles
Good list. The big addition I would suggest is criminal justice reform. I think there is an opportunity to dramatically reduce crime and improve public safety while still reducing mass incarceration.
I'd also quibble with including crypto on the list, since I think it's actually a net negative for society.
Great collection and take!
I bet Elon Musk would love legalizing supersonic
"Community input is bad actually" is not spicy, it's table stakes. If you have rights and the rule of law, you make laws and follow them. Housing is by right, and the only community input happens years earlier, when laws, including zoning, are decided on.
Everything else is YIMBY Underreach.
Your observation about community input is dead wrong in CA and in many other areas of the US. No matter what the zoning classification is, the neighbors dictate what actually gets built. I know this after a 5 year very expensive legal battle to build a small 60-bed memory care facility in LA on a 35k cars/day street adjacent to a residential area infested with NIMBY fear mongers. Taking that power away from them would be a great first step. Electing council members with integrity and a longer vision than five minutes would also help.
"Expand high-skilled immigration, such as the O-1 and H-1B."
H-1B has not been a route for high-skilled immigration for decades now. It is instead a way for companies to replace native workers with low-skilled immigrants who get paid less because they are locked to one company. It needs to die and possibly be replaced by something that actually brings high-skilled immigrants.
Software engineers are typically on H-1B, to pick an example I know well. That seems high-skilled?
Yes exactly. The H-1B software engineers brought in are not high skilled, they're cheap.
A fix for this might be to enforce a large minimum pay for anyone brought in. The original idea for the existence of the H-1B visa was to bring in people you couldn't get in America, not to bring in cheaper workers.
The problem for this would be enforcement. They're not enforcing the existing rules, so why would they enforce new ones?
Software engineering is a skill.
And they are paid a lot
It can be. Or the job can consist of looking up examples from Google and pasting it in.
Look - I work in software development. But I don't work in the US. So I don't have personal experience of H-1B visa holders as such.
But I do have experience of people who talk a good game, but can't code to save their lives. And I'll let you guess what the common threads are.
I'm from Hungary, I know quite a few folks who are good engineers and went to the US with H1B. And they get the permanent residency relatively fast (in ~2-3 years) because the green card quota is per-origin-country.
One quora answer estimated that for 2016 less than half of the green card recipients were H1Bs. (~48K / 113K of work-related recipients)
And around 1M people get the card each year.
So it's basically a drop in the bucket. *shrug*
And likely the alternative for these companies would be to *keep* the positions overseas. At least so far I haven't seen any data about how many people are getting replaced by H1Bs, but as far as I understand it's simply not how it works. These big "tech" (glorified IT support) companies are mostly giving these as perks, it helps recruiting *at home*.
See https://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/document/data/h-1b-petitions-by-gender-country-of-birth-fy2019.pdf.
Hungary had basically 0% of the visa applications. Your experience is not representative of H-1B.
There are other pages where there are listings for H-1B jobs. They're...not highly skilled. Nor do they pay all that much.
When's DOGE gonna end the penny?
Regarding the 90-day approval-by-default. Is the assumption that enforcement happens after the fact, during the actual project? If not, BillyBob's brother-in-law who's in charge of permit review can easily run out the clock to make sure BillyBob's development goes ahead, regardless. Makes cronyism incredibly easy and plausibly deniable.
Yeah as I understand it you certainly don't get to break the law with impunity simply because you got through the first 90 days!
At a quick glance, nearly all your examples seem to be drawn from libertarian/classical liberal or center-right sources. Is that intentional or accidental?
Maybe just reflects my personal political leanings! But even the left-leaning folks I know in the progress movement think regulatory reform is necessary to pull back the vetocracy and let us build again. If you want left-wing goals like making the green energy transition happen or providing lots of affordable housing, you need that.
If there are relevant sources I left out, please share!
I would describe your article as practical and nonpartisan, but to the extent that it has a political view, left liberal. Surprised anyone thinks otherwise, but then too life is all about people having different views.
What part of it seemed left-leaning?
Nuclear; clean, safe? Is there a way to measure the cancer related to the Fukushima disaster? Or Chernobyl? Do we just send the spent rods into space? Isn’t it something like a million years before nuclear byproducts approach “safe” for humankind?
Yes, nuclear is clean and safe: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh
Radiation deaths from Fukushima: 0–1. Yes, really. Chernobyl was worse, but it was also the result of very bad plant designs that are not used anymore and were never used in the US. https://ourworldindata.org/what-was-the-death-toll-from-chernobyl-and-fukushima
What to do with the spent rods: they can be easily encased in concrete and safely buried. The amount of waste generated is extremely small, so it's not a lot of work to deal with. And it is not a million years, more like 600 years: https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/a-tale-of-two-particles
More here: https://blog.rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop
Good list. The big addition I would suggest is criminal justice reform. I think there is an opportunity to dramatically reduce crime and improve public safety while still reducing mass incarceration.
I'd also quibble with including crypto on the list, since I think it's actually a net negative for society.