probablynish

None of the gear in this article is particularly cheap.

The $4 baseball cap isn't bad :) Darn Tough socks are also arguably also pretty cheap over a lifetime of use since the company mails you a free replacement pair if you wear one out

Hi Peter - a followup question if I may. Do you think that this kind of "solo entrepreneur" business model would be a good fit for the E2 visa? In particular, where the individual does not envision employing any other people, nor getting large amounts of VC funding (think more like bootstrapped growth). Or does the E2 visa require more 'scale'?

Thank you!

Hi Peter - I understand that it's possible for recent STEM graduates to be self-employed, or a 1-man C-Corp, for the first year of their post-completion OPT. But in the 2 year STEM extension, it seems that you need a distinct supervisor to fill out I-983.

How do you suggest that a "solo entrepreneur" modify their business structure so that they can continue working on their business projects during the STEM OPT period? I've heard some people say that you need to have US Citizen co-owners of the company who own a majority share; others say that it suffices to have US Citizens on the Board, as this technically gives them the ability to remove you. Is there any such setup that is clearly within the bounds of the STEM OPT program?

Also - are there any other options aside from the STEM OPT extension? In particular, if the individual is from an E2 treaty country, is this the sort of business that could qualify for an E2 visa, or do those businesses have to have the potential to employ US Citizens?

This is not really a fair comparison - even without a congestion toll, people have to pay to drive on a road. They need to buy the car, pay for its maintenance, fill it with gas, pay for insurance, pay annual registration fees to help maintain the roads. Presumably some of the money from buying a train ticket goes into doing the equivalent things: purchasing and maintaining the trains, etc.

Not saying the implicit subsidies/taxes on each mode of transport is equal, but it doesn't seem to be as simple as 'one is paid and the other is free'.

What if some AI generated content is...good?

Oops. Didn't mean to push so strongly then. Sorry grecy!

Depending on your background and circumstances, there are ways to opt out of the race to a greater/lesser degree. Moving to a cheaper city in your country, or a cheaper country altogether, is one of them. Finding a less stressful way of making less money is another.

I don't know you but I hope things work out :)

Ah, I see - same question though, I'm curious which citizenship you eventually acquired without stepping foot in the country?

BTW I spent the last 15 mins enjoying your blog, particularly the entries on Tanzania (I grew up there). Glad you enjoyed your time there :)

I continued to do so because I was working towards permanent residency in another country.

I'm curious, what country let you work towards permanent residency without you being physically present in it? (Sounds like you were driving around different places at the time)

Most individuals like being able to acquire more goods and services. A lot follows from there

If induced demand for housing were accepted, it might expose how weak an argument it is against road use. 'Lets not build more roads because it allows more people to make journeys they want to make'?

Every foreign employee getting that tech job is a US citizen from the Midwest not getting it.

This concentration of high paid tech jobs would not exist in the first place if it weren't for the foreigners. Look at the number of tech startups founded by immigrants. More broadly consider that if a different country became the global hub for top tech talent, capital would go there, and that country would become the home of high paid tech salaries.

The main input into a tech company is 'human capital' (hard working, highly intelligent, people) - Americans benefit from the spillover effects of having their country be the global nexus of human capital.

BTW, India is seeing significant upwards pressure on tech salaries and a boom in the number of domestic tech companies and jobs. This is at least partly spurred by restrictive American immigration policies forcing Indians to go back home. Purely economically speaking, I don't think America is the winner here.

I interned at a company that can hire H1Bs. They do so often. My manager and several coworkers were not US citizens. I received the hourly equivalent of more than $78k/yr, with a great working environment. I'm not sure what your comment proves?

There are several companies in my area that can only hire US Citizens, and they all pay lower than the company I interned at.

This kind of issue cannot be analyzed anecdotally.

The article says that most of these approvals are going to tech entrepreneurs / startup founders. The effect of this seems to be to create new companies that otherwise wouldn't have existed, spurring demand for tech workers. The net effect of this is upwards pressure on wages if anything.

More generally, if another country became the global nexus for top tech talent, capital would eventually follow there, and the long term effect on US tech salaries would be negative.

NY has a lot of finance/law/consulting businesses that California doesn’t have as much of. It’s possible that the effect of banning non competes would be different for different industries

Ha yeah I was looking for the explanation of how he just leaves with the persons phone after they hand it to him to swap socials.

If you're considering not just tech, but the general mindset of being somewhere that builds/produces things that other people use, as opposed to just industries of middlemen who skim off the top, then I'd argue India also has that mindset, maybe a few other SE asian countries too, and furthermore that nowhere is quite as bad as Europe in terms of having the opposite mindset.

It's tempting to read just the headline and see an opportunity to express your views on the great Europe vs US online debate (everyone has a take), but the article does have an interesting thesis.

If you wanted to regulate AI, I think you’d want to regulate somewhere at the production level, not at the consumption level. Why is it that the EU regulators are focusing entirely on the consumption level?

Well, because they are consumers

[...]

I didn’t really get this until I moved to San Francisco. I had never in my life met people who make stuff.

Do you think there's a better way to do this than spending some time playing around with the latest releases of different tools?

Yep, probably true, but the government redistributing income is in itself kind of part of our economic system.

So you trust in what you already have faith in? That's not a source that inspires confidence in our discourse.

I trust central bankers to not straight up make up or lie about facts, because I worked in one and formed an impression of what the institutional culture is like, yes. I did volunteer that information to you though.

The rest of what you're saying sounds like older people have seen increases in net worth because of asset price inflation, and younger people have seen increases in net worth because of covid-related measures ("CDCs moratorium"). That sounds right to me too!

I agree that a lot of the net wealth increase came from asset prices going up, but your original comment said "don't actually own the assets they utilize" which is not the case as evidenced by the data I linked.

You can also see that debt has fallen, p31 of the report I linked. So that's another mechanism through which median net wealth has increased, which is not asset price inflation.

As far as sources, I trust a technical Fed report more than an opinion analyst piece written by 'economists' in a private bank. I may be biased as a formal central bank economist :) That report is half speculation about the future ("looks set to end soon, with excess household savings likely to be depleted by year-end"), whereas what I linked is actual data from the past.

Net wealth is basically the value of all the assets you own, minus all the debt you have. The data ( https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf23.pdf ) just doesn't support what you said. Even within the bottom 25% of households ('bottom' with reference to their net wealth), the median net wealth increased from $400 to $3500, and this is adjusted for inflation (all in terms of 2022 dollars). Source is p18 of that PDF I linked above

Unlike many things in life, your progress is almost entirely dependent on your consistency and the effort invested

This really resonates with me. Not powerlifting myself, but I have a strength training routine at the gym with the goal of improving my right knee pain. I have to take things very slow (increase by 1 rep each session, up the weight every ~2 weeks by the smallest possible increment) but looking at my graph this year is very satisfying. This little corner of my life feels a lot more under my control than anything else right now

Median net household wealth increase far more than mean net household wealth in the 2019-2022 period: https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf23.pdf

Mean: about +22% Median: about +35% Median within the poorest 25% of households: +900% (!)

Median household net worth increased by 35% from 2019 to 2022, adjusted for inflation. For the bottom quartile of households, the median household net worth increased by a whopping 900%.

Pessimism seems to be in vogue right now (or maybe always?) but in this case the data doesn't seem to bear it out.

Thanks, that makes sense. I wonder to what extent the two rates are directly linked - household savings coming from direct govt transfers like covid stimulus checks and student debt forgiveness.

Actually median (and poorer) households did well between 2019 - 2022. See https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf23.pdf or the related blog post https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/great-news-about-american-weal... . This chart doesn't seem to be about households alone.

The personal savings rate has a big spike over the pandemic, and household net wealth increased a lot between 2019 - 2022 (https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf23.pdf)* which is maybe what that safety net headline is about.

The story seems to be large government deficits balancing out the high savings of households/businesses, which is why the overall savings rate is near zero.

* Median household net worth increased by 35% from 2019 to 2022, adjusted for inflation. For the bottom quartile of households, the median household net worth increased by a whopping 900%.