[palmotea]

> Culture of importing cheaper labor that they can manipulate.

> The H1B program is broken and ripe for abuse.

Offshoring is a much bigger problem. These abusive companies can "save" way more money by exporting the job than importing a worker to fill it, and pandemic-era changes have accelerated that.

[supportengineer]

I'm starting to think offshoring is better for America. Because house prices are unaffordable. Should a simple house really be $2 million ?

[palmotea]

> I'm starting to think offshoring is better for America. Because house prices are unaffordable. Should a simple house really be $2 million ?

Do you really think it would be better for the rest of America to become like Detroit? Too few have jobs, so housing craters?

The solution to housing affordability is to build more housing (or relocate jobs to where housing is more affordable), it's not to make the common people poor.

[rvz]

> I'm starting to think offshoring is better for America.

Except you are offshoring for less than the "Best and Brightest" that can be done in the US, especially at Amazon.

In fact, the most unqualified of the bottom of the barrel are being sought out because it is cheap. Not for actual skills and 'talent'.

> Because house prices are unaffordable. Should a simple house really be $2 million ?

Given that everyone believes that their house will keep going up leads me to think that thanks to AI, we are certainly going to have a 1929 style flash crash in house prices with less jobs when AI companies start declaring "AGI".

[linguae]

Be careful what you wish for. We could end up in a situation where we have unremarkable homes for $2 million and no local jobs capable of making the mortgage payments.

[klipklop]

We are already pretty much there. Only probably a few percent can buy homes now in areas that have good job markets. The SF bay is firmly a 1%'er area now to buy a single family home. You need to now have two L5 incomes or so to even consider it...and somehow make that wage for 30 years... Yeah, no.

[linguae]

Yup. I am a CS professor at a community college in the Bay Area. I make good money for a tenure-track professor (slightly under $112,000, in fact), but the problem is that there are many thousands of households in the area that make multiples of what I make, and due to our limited housing supply, I can’t compete with them. Thus, home ownership within a 30-minute commute is not in the cards for me unless I become rich, and I’d need to make a 90+ minute commute from exurbia to find homes I could afford that are in safe neighborhoods. Even if I quit my job and somehow landed a high-paying software engineering position, I’d be scared about taking on a 30-year mortgage for over $1 million, especially since there’s no way to guarantee making a $200,000+ salary the entire length of the mortgage.

Thus, I rent an apartment, and I anticipate being a lifelong renter as long as I’m in the Bay Area. I also don’t anticipate being able to retire in the Bay Area, though that’s not for another 30 years. My long-term plan is to save a down payment for a vacation home somewhere affordable that I’ll use as my retirement home when the time comes.

[lotsofpulp]

Depends on its location and how many dual earner high income households want to buy it. There is no reason a specific lot should not be worth an arbitrary $x.

[supportengineer]

Is such gross inequality really good for America?

[dragonwriter]

You think offshoring current domestic high wage labor so that the US is exclusively split between low wage labor and ultracapitalists will reduce gross inequality?