charliea0

I assume it's to make it harder for competitors to train on Claude's Chain-of-Thought.

That's a very fair point. :)

Given all of that, the unemployment rate is still only 4.5%.

We should just set a number of H1Bs and auction them off.

The unemployment rate in the information-technology job market is 4.5%?

To make this concrete, suppose that Elon Musk never immigrated to the US. SpaceX and Tesla are never founded, or are founded in some other country.

The American electric car market is never kickstarted, none of the American employees of SpaceX or Tesla are hired, there is no space renaissance.

Keeping out Elon Musk is somewhat good for United Launch Alliance and for Ford, but it's worse for all the Americans who have to buy worse cars and pay more for satellite internet.

I hire a programmer to code my app, SuperConnect++. I charge $0.99 to download the app. People buy the app if it's worth more than $0.99 to them.

If 150,000 people buy the app, then I have ~$150,000 of revenue. I can pay a programmer $100,000 a year and have $50,000 left over. 150,000 people benefited from the app.

Now say I have to pay an additional $100,000 visa fee for my programmer. My cost of $200,000 is less than my revenue of $150,000. I don't build the app. I don't get $50,000. 150,000 people who would have bought the app don't benefit from it. The biggest loss is to the Americans who don't get to buy the app.

There are other possibilities, maybe I increase the price to $1.99 or I hire an American. We can see that those are both bad. The former extracts $150,000 extra dollars from American consumers. Since unemployment is low for Americans and an American programmer can't have two jobs at once, the later just means that some other project that the American programmer would have worked on is not completed.

A better perspective is that the median H1B holder created $100k+ worth of value for some US company. Salaries are lower than the value you create, or else your employer would stop paying you.

There could be some rare edge case where you are undercut by a direct competitor, but overall America is much richer with H1Bs that without them.

I'd only really be worried about barriers to entry and composition.

One limit on wages is $ of value / hour. If AI makes existing programmers more efficient, then you would expect total wages to go up.

If AI makes it easier for folks to become programmers, then the value produced could be split over more people. Alternatively, if you need fewer programmers then more value could be captured by a few superstar winners.

We can definitely offer subsidies for manufacturing in the US - we've already gotten TSMC to open several fabs.

I think punishing interest rates are better than an equity stake. As Intel's rally shows, having the government as your equity holder is actually amazing for investors.

The government should avoid bailing out big, uncompetitive corporations. If the government is acting as lender-of-last-resort in some crisis, then it should demand senior debt to that it gets paid back before any shareholder.

If a lawful order is enjoined by a district court, you can appeal to higher judges. If the higher judges agree with the district court, then you can appeal to the Supreme Court.

If the Supreme Court agrees with the district court, then the order probably isn't lawful.

Is there any justification for this beyond increasing Google's ad revenue?