Do they tell students they may be saddled with debt for 30 years and that the cost of tuition is much larger than the incomes they get from their majors?
> BloomTech falsely claimed its “income share” agreements were not loans, did not create debt, did not carry a finance charge, and were “risk free.” In fact, the agreements are loans with an average finance charge of $4,000. The loans carry substantial risk, as a single missed payment triggers a default and the remainder of the $30,000 “cap” becomes due immediately. BloomTech further hid the cost and nature of the “income share” loans by not disclosing key terms like the finance charge and annual percentage rate, as required by law.
Student loans from a legitimate lender don't come with balloon payments, the APRs and any finance charges are clearly disclosed, etc., and they're not making up graduation rates.
Sorry, but this can't be right. Companies fly in people on B2 visas all the time to do onboarding, work on specific projects for a short period, and participate in offsites.
I've done this 10+ times in my career, for big and small companies, and it was never an issue even when explicitly saying these things with border patrol/immigration.
What gets you in trouble at the border is the risk of permanently staying, and the risk of drugs&money.
OK, I really hate to point this out but this America we are talking about - we literally use the Visas and GCs to allow in those we want and not those we don't and how we decide who we want isn't arbitrary - it's mostly racist.
I think people coming from Western countries that speak English and are a certain color will have a completely different experience than those coming from anywhere else.
That comment about the New Zealand program for graduates to come work in the US for a few years - I've worked with freelancers from India that own their companies that were denied entry to the US.
There is a reason all of our companions just setup local shops everywhere in the world.
For the record I hate that we do this. I'm under the belief that if you can get here you deserve to be here - I don't care if your tired, hungry or poor - I'd still take you, it's how it ought to be.
You were lucky. I was questioned about this, and officer was considering for whopping 10 minutes. I insisted I am coming only for "meetings", and even then it took a superior to greenlight me.
I am pretty sure I would have been denied entry if I said the truth
I think this is start ups where European "employees" are contracting for the US entity as there's no local EU entity. You then do your visit through ESTA.
I'm sure Peter Roberts is a fine professional, however, I have passed border patrol/immigration personally this way dozens of times and know of many other people who do it. You can find people doing this in an instant if you want.
I once got in trouble with BP because they didn't believe me that I was coming in to work on a project and thought I would be looking for a job to stay illegally. BP finally decided to let me in and told me that what I was doing was fine, but they just didn't find it credible that I would leave my GF alone for a month in Argentina.
I commented as a "not lawyer" since it wasn't clear if the lawyer would answer and I have extensive experience, research, and have discussed this with lawyers. Just trying to be helpful.
The implied “problem” is that these companies are loopholing the H1-B process to hire for positions that American workers were laid off from. Of course, lawyers know how to make things work.
> The intent of the H-1B provisions is to help employers who cannot otherwise obtain needed business skills and abilities from the U.S. workforce by authorizing the temporary employment of qualified individuals who are not otherwise authorized to work in the United States.
> for positions that American workers were laid off from
Is this true? My observation at Google has been that very few teams had layoffs and now have open headcount. The teams that are hiring aren't the ones that had people fired.
I was on a two-person team that was, due to recent client poaching, pretty severely overstaffed. Our manager had just been promoted and we got a new one hired in.
He viewed our lack of work to do as temporary and started recruiting. He eventually hired a third member and we started training her. After the first day of training, I was fired with no notice and no severance. The manager remarked, in the surprise exit interview, that he had taken a look at staffing recently and we had too much.
There are a couple interesting things to consider here:
1. We had been severely overstaffed (as advertised!) for several months before he even started hiring. He was well aware of it.
2. My team's original manager had offered to me that I was free to live anywhere in the world, as long as it had an internet connection. He left the team so soon after I joined that this didn't happen. But the new manager gave many indications of being acutely uncomfortable with the idea that I had made a request that he wasn't willing to grant immediately.
My question to you is, was I fired because we were overstaffed, or was that mentioned in the exit interview for no particular reason?
And my followup question is, did the companies discussed here do layoffs because they were overstaffed, or because they felt they had the right amount of staff, but they wanted to pay them less?
I dont know, but companies need to keep hiring because of both staff turn over and switch of priorities. Presumably, the people getting hired are for positions that are perceived more valuable by management than the work people being let go are doing.
And of course, companies also have practical right to make mistakes, from overstaffing to understaffing, or to place bets that do well or do not.
The point is that these things would happen even if things were being run perfectly, so they are not indicative of nefarious practices or abuses.
Wages are not downstream of profits - they are a price in a market for labor. If companies could pay 0 they would pay 0, and if employees could charge infinite they would charge infinite.
It's better this way - otherwise employees at companies that make no money would have to take no salary.
Many small businesses seek to treat their employees well. It's not out of some ulterior 5D chess profit seeking scheme, nor is it out of naivete of the fact that they could earn more. But simply out of having some degree of social values and ethics. Wanting to make a profit or to become rich, isn't the same as being willing to screw everybody (or anybody) over in pursuit of such.
In America today only 57% [1] of people have a positive view of capitalism. And that percent is only that "high" thanks to much older individuals who are probably envisioning our capitalism as it was in the past, before MBAology became the default corporate worldview. Take only 18-29 year olds, and 40% have a positive view. What do you think's going to happen as the older generation dies off?
Capitalism is not sustainable without more of society pushing back against sociopathy. Normalizing it because 'this is how big companies act' isn't going to normalize it, but simply turn people against capitalism - and ultimately bring us closer to swapping over to ["this time it'll be different"]ism iteration #73 or whatever.
It's not related to capitalism or labor organization. It's that the relationship between profits and wages is misunderstood. If you want your income to be completely tied to the business results, you want to be a business owner.
There is no sociopathy, it is a simple enterprise where someone absorbs the risk and others don't - it is collaboration.
That's the status quo - a distinction between owner and employee. And it's good for the owners, who get to maximize profits - but is it good for employees? I'd say there's less risk, but they get impacted when business is down, and may not reap the profits when business is good.
Some companies are experimenting with other models - there's no law or force of nature saying an employee can't be a partial owner of a business.
The deficit always grows in nominal terms because of inflation. Scaled properly [1], the deficit isn't great, but it's improving and far from unprecedented.
I don't think that's true? SVB was insolvent because they had to sell bonds at a massive loss in order to cover illiquidity that was a problem due to the bank run.
What is your source for this? From everything I have read, the first point at which they were clearly insolvent was what I mentioned previously, when they sold a huge swath of bonds at a massive loss at or around March 8th 2023, which was less than two weeks ago.
My read is that they were either holding the MBSs as tradeable assets (in which case they had taken a massive real loss that wiped out their equity) or until maturity decades away (in which case they didn't have enough current assets to remain solvent as a bank).
The depositor withdrawals forced them to admit that they had taken a massive loss because of insufficient hedging against interest rate hikes, but they didn't really seem to have a path to unwinding their underwater positions in any realistic timeframe. HTM was an accounting misdirection to try to hide the hole in their ship while they bailed water, but it was a massive hole and they had a tiny bucket.
But the withdrawals didn't force them to admit they had taken a massive loss, the withdrawals forced them to take the massive loss at all. It's not a loss until you sell, right? They sold to cover withdrawals.
Apparently they had $48B in withdrawals in a one-day period. Trying to imagine any bank that wouldn't need to take losses (to the point of being potentially insolvent) in order to deal with that. Yes, obviously SVB was still very poorly hedged given current interest rates, but they probably could've unwound their position in a much, much more favorable way without the run, to the point where it's possible they could've done so without ever being "insolvent".
There are two different definitions of the same word.
One is balance sheet insolvency, the other is cash flow insolvency.
But it’s two forms of the same thing! Cash flow insolvency is usually a result of holding illiquid assets that can’t be turned into cash. In this case the assets were perfectly liquid though, so it wasn’t just a cash flow insolvency.
The bank was reporting the future value of the bonds, the problem was the present value was much lower.
