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Bring Me Your Accents. Immigration Fuels Innovation

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Re: Bring Me Your Accents. Immigration Fuels Innovation

#61

Post by snitko »

kops wrote: post #27
snitko wrote: post #7

Slightly offtopic: The whole idea of the immigration restrictions is ridiculous. There is not a single justification for it. Unless of course you believe that somehow your people deserve better than everyone else. When people bring up the fact that it drives down wages and residents lose as a result - why don't they also mention that residents win by getting a cheaper product or a service? When people bring up the we…

sure...how about you throw a party at your home and a thousand people show up and want in? Unrestricted anything leads to chaos and trouble.

But you don't invite them to your house. What makes you believe that somehow you have more right to land that doesn't directly belong to you than another human being from Earth? America is a big country with plenty of land where many more people could live not bothering each other.

Re: Bring Me Your Accents. Immigration Fuels Innovation

#62

Post by sliverstorm »

cglee wrote: post #37
tedunangst wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discrimination is not irrational. As a society we have determined that we value an individual's desire to get a job more than a business's desire for an efficient filtering mechanism. "Discrimination is rational" and "discrimination is bad" are not mutually exclusive.

The fact that discrimination seems natural means that we need to fight against it consciously, not rationalize it as acceptable. If you value diversity, equality, etc, then you have to actively monitor your own discriminatory tendencies and lead with respect, compassion, love instead of rationality and pattern matching.

cglee, I'm curious, what would you do if you were making investments and you knew that a certain cultural background was correlated with a tenfold increase in risk on your investment?

Re: Bring Me Your Accents. Immigration Fuels Innovation

#63

Post by rogerchucker »

tedunangst wrote: post #51
cglee wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that discrimination seems natural means that we need to fight against it consciously, not rationalize it as acceptable. If you value diversity, equality, etc, then you have to actively monitor your own discriminatory tendencies and lead with respect, compassion, love instead of rationality and pattern matching.

Pretty sure I didn't say it was acceptable.

When you call something is rational, you automatically label it acceptable. So please stop trying to be coy.

Re: Bring Me Your Accents. Immigration Fuels Innovation

#65

Post by tonyarkles »

skylan_q wrote: post #49
tokenadult wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's empirically false that high rates of immigration lead to lower real wages. International comparisons show that it is actually the other way around. The "lump of labor fallacy" is still very persuasive to people who have never studied economics, but people who have traveled around the world notice examples like Hong Kong (high immigration, high wages for region) and reflect that new people in a place leads to mor…

I've studied plenty of economics and have been around the world and back. Bringing in more labor increases the supply of it and there's also the added effect of immigrants willing to work for less than the local population. To deny this is to deny supply & demand and data.

I don't know that it's that cut and dry. People don't exist in a vacuum. New people show up, and they still need to eat, live, buy TVs. Some of them will probably start companies and increase the labour demand. etc etc.

I'm not an expert by any means, but it didn't take much to find an article that supports this idea:

--cut--

We find that the increased supply of non-EU low skilled immigrants pushed native workers to pursue more complex occupations. This reallocation happened mainly through movement across firms. Immigration increased mobility of natives across firms and across municipalities but it did not increase their probability of unemployment. We also observe a significant shift in the native labor force towards complex service industries in locations receiving more immigrants. Those mechanisms protected individual wages from immigrants competition and enhanced their wage outcomes. While the highly educated experienced wage gains already in the short-run, the gains of the less educated built up over time as they moved towards jobs that were complementary to those held by the non-EU immigrants.

--cut--

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/08/29/immigration_a...

Re: Bring Me Your Accents. Immigration Fuels Innovation

#67

Post by snitko »

ahamilton wrote: post #43
snitko wrote: post #7

Slightly offtopic: The whole idea of the immigration restrictions is ridiculous. There is not a single justification for it. Unless of course you believe that somehow your people deserve better than everyone else. When people bring up the fact that it drives down wages and residents lose as a result - why don't they also mention that residents win by getting a cheaper product or a service? When people bring up the we…

> The US was built on the hard work of immigrants. The US was built by the descendants of Europeans who nearly wiped out the existing native population. How did immigration work out for the Native Americans and their descendants?

The reason the native population was wiped out was primarily because of the diseases brought by Europeans, not because Europeans were particularly brutal. In fact, Indians were as brutal to the colonists as colonists were to Indians. The first colonists themselves died in large numbers, mostly due to hunger and malaria. Also, Indians were technologically behind Europeans. Modern western countries, to which immigration is desirable, are more technologically advanced and we certainly don't have a problem with immunity to diseases - at least you can't call it an equally serious problem.

So, comparing colonists and indians to the current immigration problems is simply unfounded.

Re: Bring Me Your Accents. Immigration Fuels Innovation

#68

Post by [deleted] »

snitko wrote: post #67
ahamilton wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US was built on the hard work of immigrants. The US was built by the descendants of Europeans who nearly wiped out the existing native population. How did immigration work out for the Native Americans and their descendants?

The reason the native population was wiped out was primarily because of the diseases brought by Europeans, not because Europeans were particularly brutal. In fact, Indians were as brutal to the colonists as colonists were to Indians. The first colonists themselves died in large numbers, mostly due to hunger and malaria. Also, Indians were technologically behind Europeans. Modern western countries, to which immigratio…

[deleted]

Re: Bring Me Your Accents. Immigration Fuels Innovation

#69

Post by dud1983 »

sliverstorm wrote: post #62
cglee wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that discrimination seems natural means that we need to fight against it consciously, not rationalize it as acceptable. If you value diversity, equality, etc, then you have to actively monitor your own discriminatory tendencies and lead with respect, compassion, love instead of rationality and pattern matching.

cglee, I'm curious, what would you do if you were making investments and you knew that a certain cultural background was correlated with a tenfold increase in risk on your investment?

sliverstorm I'm curious what would you do if you were from one of those cultural backgrounds that are seen as bad for investors and were denied the opportunity to do something solely on the ground of your origin, an origin which you had no choice but to accept because you were born into?

And it does not matter that you are the next Jobs, because the moment the investors hear you greeting them with a foreign or exotic accent they are not paying any attention about what you have to say, at all.

What would you do? would you still support pg? even if that keeps you from ever being able to raise any funding?

Re: Bring Me Your Accents. Immigration Fuels Innovation

#70

Post by dud1983 »

the_watcher wrote: post #54
defen wrote: post #8

This whole "controversy" is so stupid. It consists of people taking pg's words out of context and assigning the maximally stupid interpretation to them. I mean, are there any examples of successful U.S. based founders who have accents that are so heavy that you struggle to understand what they are saying? I'm genuinely curious.

PG is a huge supporter of the Founder Visa, but he hates immigrants? Come on everyone, dig a bit deeper. Luckily, PG has written an entire essay on this sort of topic[1], and how "taboos" are generally seen poorly by history. I'm sure the taboo biasing towards extreme political correctness and willfully ignoring things that can improve outcomes for people because they don't fit in some idyllic worldview will suffer t…

And yet he supports FWD, a stealth superpac whose only mission is to get as many cheap temp. engineers as possible in the country.

Foreign founders are SOL, no company is going to hire he who will disrupt them out of the market, and those who get in are doomed to menial positions with no change of getting ahead in the company.

The real losers will be local engineers who will be priced out of the market, downwards I mean.

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