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America COMPETES Act of 2022 passed House and Senate

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Re: America COMPETES Act of 2022 passed House and Senate

#51

Post by sudosysgen »

beaconstudios wrote: post #25
cherioo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tariff may help US company to buy US product, but it won’t encourage anyone else to buy potentially uncompetitive US product. At some point, we need to increase product competitiveness, which ultimately benefits everyone. That or sanction china so they can’t build competitive product, like Huawei.

the US can't compete with China's artificial suppression of the Yuan price to help export prices, or the high levels of exploitation and lack of rights & regulations to benefit Chinese workers.

Of course, it can. The solution would be to depress the USD. It's just that the US decided it is more profitable to extract value by holding the reserve currency.

Re: America COMPETES Act of 2022 passed House and Senate

#52

Post by jeffbee »

hwbehrens wrote: post #2

In case you are wondering what this does (like I was), Wikipedia states "This bill is designed to solve [American dependence on China] by reducing reliance on Chinese manufacturing of semiconductors and increasing America's scientific and technological achievements." Basically, it allocates a bunch of money for supply chain and production improvements.

Imagine using government money to fund Intel, AMD, Micron, Apple, etc with combined capitalization over 4 trillion dollars. Instead they should be levying massive windfall taxes on these companies' overseas cash hoards, and using those revenues to fund onshore semiconductor startups.

Re: America COMPETES Act of 2022 passed House and Senate

#53

Post by adtac »

0des wrote: post #13
ipnon wrote: post #12

To give an idea of how much content is in this bill, please see "Sec. 74029. Beverage containing coconut water." where duties on imports of beverages containing at least 10% coconut water are hereby free .

That is the stupidest shit I've ever seen. Just flat rate everything and get rid of all the special exemptions and trash that just creates loopholes. If this results in a lot of things soon containing 11% coconut water, I might just snap.

Why should the import duty on luxury cars and medicines be the same?

Re: America COMPETES Act of 2022 passed House and Senate

#54

Post by colechristensen »

civilized wrote: post #38
colechristensen wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trade policy is explicitly to manipulate balances of imports and exports, that doesn't happen with flat rates. Some things you want to protect, some things are bargaining chips for concessions elsewhere. Of all the stupid shit in government, trade exceptions are far from the worst.

Many people might be skeptical of the premise that it's beneficial for the government to manipulate balances of imports and exports.

Many people are skeptical that the world is round, when you phrase a statement like that you have the luxury of being right but without having said anything at all because "many" and "skeptical" are extraordinarily vague and trivial to make true about anything.

Having trade policy is as old as government, skeptics or not. "Free markets" in the absolute sense have never and will never exist, and talking in absolutes isn't helpful, a "assume a spherical cow" kind of approximation which is just as useful to the real world.

Re: America COMPETES Act of 2022 passed House and Senate

#55

Post by kelnos »

huy-nguyen wrote: post #9

Per [1], the House version contains important immigration provisions. 1) The bill would create a new category of non-immigrant visa called the W visa for owners (W-1) or essential employees (W-2) of start-up companies and their dependent family members (W-3). 2) The bill would exempt applicants holding a PhD in a STEM field from the annual per-country green card limits, enabling them to quickly apply for permanent re…

> 1) The bill would create a new category of non-immigrant visa called the W visa for owners (W-1) or essential employees (W-2) of start-up companies and their dependent family members (W-3).

I'm always disappointed in this style of visa. These are the kinds of people we want to keep, not make their stay contingent on working at or running a startup. To me, it's really stupid that anything but a tourist/business visit visa should be non-immigrant; all long-term stay visas should provide an easy path to permanent residence (sure, assuming whatever reasonable qualifications are met).

And I wonder if these W-* visas will be similar to the H-* visas, where if you quit or are fired, you need to find similarly-qualifying employment in a disgustingly short amount of time, or you're forced to leave the country. So you end up having very little employment mobility, and many people end up feeling trapped in a job they hate, because finding a new employer that will sponsor your visa isn't always a slam dunk, and plenty of things can happen to screw it up.

All this is just band-aids on the current crap immigration system we have. But no one has the political courage (or capital?) to completely throw out the current system and write a new, sane, humane one from scratch.

Re: America COMPETES Act of 2022 passed House and Senate

#56

Post by throwawaygh »

mwint wrote: post #40
paxys wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forgot all PhDs, it is next to impossible for most students and researchers who get advanced degrees from American universities to get work visas or permanent residency. We get the best talent from all over the world, spend billions on educating them, and then force them to go home.

Is the US spending billions to educate them, or are they spending billions to be educated here?

> Is the US spending billions to educate them

One PhD student costs a professor about $100K - $200K per year. A third of that is stipend and the other two thirds is... well, in CS I'm not even sure. A good bit of administrative welfare AFAICT. (Universities don't pay FICA taxes for grad students and grad student healthcare premiums are actually more of a subsidy for the risk pool of the aging faculty/admins than an actually half-reasonable benefit for the grad students.)

The US graduates 2K PhDs per year, of which >60% are foreign nationals. So we spend something roughly like (2000 * .6 people) * (150000 $/person) = $180 million per year. So a couple billion per decade.

Now... we do get folks with CS BS degrees for 1-5 years at $30K/yr, which is a fucking steal, and at least a great universities they are often from the upper quarter or so of the undergrad distribution. So maybe the students are also paying in the form of subsidized labor. But we do spend hundreds of millions per year in any case.

All of that said, as long as universities are staffing mathematics departments with shit paid ad juncts it's kind of hard to argue that our country is failing to compete due to a lack of phds...

Re: America COMPETES Act of 2022 passed House and Senate

#57

Post by vondur »

ipnon wrote: post #17
huy-nguyen wrote: post #9

Per [1], the House version contains important immigration provisions. 1) The bill would create a new category of non-immigrant visa called the W visa for owners (W-1) or essential employees (W-2) of start-up companies and their dependent family members (W-3). 2) The bill would exempt applicants holding a PhD in a STEM field from the annual per-country green card limits, enabling them to quickly apply for permanent re…

The United States should be offering permanent residency to practically everyone with a Ph.D.

Don’t we have a glut of Ph.D’s here in the US already?

Re: America COMPETES Act of 2022 passed House and Senate

#58

Post by b112 »

0des wrote: post #13
ipnon wrote: post #12

To give an idea of how much content is in this bill, please see "Sec. 74029. Beverage containing coconut water." where duties on imports of beverages containing at least 10% coconut water are hereby free .

That is the stupidest shit I've ever seen. Just flat rate everything and get rid of all the special exemptions and trash that just creates loopholes. If this results in a lot of things soon containing 11% coconut water, I might just snap.

If this results in a lot of things soon containing 11% coconut water, I might just snap

Just wait until the hearings, the media frenzy, when those products are tested and found to contain 9% juice!

Re: America COMPETES Act of 2022 passed House and Senate

#59

Post by jazzyjackson »

paxys wrote: post #31

This is definitely needed, but the government needs to take some ownership stake in companies that these funds are being distributed to. The financial success of the effort needs to be shared with the general public, not just used to make some billionaires richer.

Don't income taxes of employees and sales taxes of their products constitute the public sharing in the success of those billionaires?

Bezos may not pay income tax, but all his engineers do...

Re: America COMPETES Act of 2022 passed House and Senate

#60

Post by ceeplusplus »

killjoywashere wrote: post #50
newshorts wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be amazing.

Keep in mind that China will not stop being a problem, it just moves it around. The CCP will have more people in the US with family back in China, so they can manipulate those in the US to steal and spy for them. They will grow the presence of CSSAs and universities will become increasingly dependent on income from fulltime Chinese students, which will paradoxically disincentivize US universities from educating US st…

Ah yes, because every PhD immigrant that comes to the US must be a CCP agent. Why don't we just dispense with the thin veil you're trying to hide your racism behind?
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