As some unfortunates may be aware
of, the May 2020 updates for Microsoft Windows 10 have been the cause of much
pain and suffering. Personal experience:
As usual, despite setting a time of my “choosing” for the automatic (i.e. no
choice) update, the operating system still decided to give in to outside pressure
and updated on a time of Microsoft’s choosing, and disaster struck. Shortly
after the next time the software booted-up, the screen “froze” with no response
from any key command, forcing a hard shut down. Twice on power-up it showed a
black screen, and then on the third it went into automatic diagnostic/repair mode
and then again went blank, and after several more re-starts it finally went to
blue screen where you were provided with system restore “options.”
To make a long story short none
of the “options” fixed whatever the problem was, and I was forced to do a
complete restore from a USB drive that would completely erase all personal
files and third-party apps. Before I did that, in order to save some vital files
from oblivion I had to get into the command prompt to gain access to them,
which was an aggravatingly painstaking operation, since the files could only be
selected one at a time to copy to an external hard drive, and obviously I wasn’t
going to waste more time on the less essential files.
But it meant that all of the
third-party apps had to be installed again, and drivers updated, and since then
I’ve had a few too many close calls—such as on boot-up the hard drive would start
and stop spinning, with the keyboard lights inexplicably blinking on and off, and
then just shut down by itself. Windows 10 refused to boot from the USB drive,
and only after playing around with the “F” keys and numerous starting and hard
shut downs to no apparent effect, the thing just arbitrarily decided to boot-up,
but not without continuing aggravations like unexplained “100 percent” disc use when no
apps were even running, and the ever present threat of the next forced-fed “update.”
I ask myself “Who is to blame for
this?” It has to be somebody who thinks they are “smarter” than you and me. Gordon Kelly of Forbes recently noted that beta-testers
of Windows 10 updates find that their warnings of bugs are often ignored by
Windows software engineers: “Microsoft has missed out on multiple issues that
have been reported by the users but were not added to the known issues page”—with
the end result “buggy” updates, to be "fixed" by the next "update" with its own bugs the next update has to fix, and so on and so forth. Maybe it is that the software engineers don't understand American English idioms? Not all of the recent “updates” are totally useless, of course;
although I’ll probably keep using Firefox, the new Edge web browser is a huge
improvement over its completely pointless predecessor, and more streamlined than
Internet Explorer. However, what I have noted to my continuing frustration is
that with each new update, despite it being a mid-range gaming laptop
with plenty of horsepower, my still less than two-year-old machine's performance
is getting progressively more and more sluggish. I really do hate Windows 10.
Ok, but back to the question: “Who
is responsible for this?” A few claim it is “know-it-all made-men” from the Gates/Ballmer
era, who may be coming up with the ideas for what goes in Windows 10, but they
are not the ones who are actually writing the code. Microsoft’s CEO is Satya
Nadella, and the fact that Microsoft is one of the most outspoken companies in
favor of the H-IB visa program, one suspects that Nadella was selected for that
position to make the company more “inviting” to his fellow Indians. From
2017-2019 Microsoft filed almost 17,000 labor condition applications, of which only
a handful were rejected, while filing almost 6,000 certifications for green
cards, again only a few which were rejected; since H-1B visas are good for up
to six years, and spouses can apply for work in the same fields via the H-4
visa program, who knows the real number being employed at Microsoft. Many, and perhaps most, of these workers are software engineers, and while it is matter of
conjecture the quality of the work they do, we can presume that many of them share responsibility for what is going on with Windows 10.
Companies like Microsoft claim that
they need H-1B workers because of alleged shortages of qualified workers, but
as the Economic Policy Institute points out, the real reason is because they
are paid significantly lower wages—anywhere from 17 to 34 percent below the
median—than non-H-1B workers. The Institute suggests that the only real way to
know if there is a true shortage of qualified native-born workers is if employers
are forced to pay H-1B employees at least the median wage—that is assuming that
the hiring manager is not Indian who only wants to work with other Indians,
particularly those who are of the same “caste” because of shared “culture.” On
the website insights.dice.com, you find comments like this:
You should
take a look at all of the Indian recruiters and staffing firms out there. I get
anywhere from 25 to 50 emails per day looking to fill American jobs at
ridiculously low rates!!! I also
get at least 10 follow up phone calls per day. Most of the emails are for the
same roles at the same company. They lowball the hourly rates to the extreme
down low. Americans really are getting the sh-t end of the stick with the
massively huge list of recruiters and staffing firms.
We really need to get organized into a group and stop the H1-B gravy
train. These people have screwed the market hard. All the dirty tricks they use
have ruined this field. Fake papers lying. They set people up for bad
interviews so they can claim they were not able to find a local candidate. Pure
lies! I am Indian I was sponsored here and when I was eight years old and I am
a citizen. I have insights on how this shops are operating. They are ruining
the local job market most people are able to fill these roles and this is cheap
labor for the tech companies.
And
Many H1-B
holders of expired visas assume American names so they can’t be tracked for
overstaying the max 6 years allowed by the H1-B program. There is an estimate
that there over 1 million holders of H1-B visas that are expired. A research of
Linkedin indicates that only 1 in 10 go home. Many work for the worldwide
monopoly, Microsoft, this should be resolved using current anti-monopoly laws. They
have complete control of I.T. contract consulting. Rarely do I receive e-mails
from American recruiters. Still, they will fill the positions with their own
people before Americans, because they fear being found out regarding their
expired visas.
And
I currently
work as a contractor for a 15 billion dollar company who outsourced to the
supposed best outsourcing company there is. The outsourcing company is all
Indian and they don’t know the hardware or the software, they guess most of the
time. There have been more outages in the last 2 years than there where in the
previous 10 and they are doing about 70% less work than the previous group.
What does one Indian have to say
about these complaints?
This is very sad that how most Americans don’t like Indians through we
work hard and try to go above and beyond at work, where are most Citizens I
have seen either do not want to work hard or don’t care about work(especially
in govt sector). Who do you think handles the work at the time of thanks giving
and Christmas holidays? There is no one at work and we are the only ones
sitting at office and finish the work. The reason why the young generation is
not getting the good jobs are baby boomers don’t want to retire!!... people
here just don’t want to work hard, mostly lack the skills!!!! Companies have to
depend on H1B talent because we do the dirty work which you refused to
do(citizens just leave at 5, where as if needed an immigrant stays longer to
finish the work (even work remotely) and do not expect compensation(some companies
pay overtime some don’t), and that is what companies like about us!!
Let’s see—Americans don’t want to
work hard, don’t want to work on American holidays, won’t work overtime without
compensation, baby boomers don’t want to retire—well that’s interesting,
because he is suggesting that there is a “younger generation” of Americans
looking for good jobs that are being given to H-IB visa holders instead. Oh, and
Indians do what he calls the “dirty work” in the office without “compensation,”
which is what companies “like” about them. This guy makes it sound like H-1B
workers are out there picking cabbages. Meanwhile, the San Jose Mercury News, which reports on the
goings-on in the Silicon Valley, prints a story every few months or so about
yet another discrimination lawsuit filed against Indian-managed companies and
their hiring and employment practices in regard to non-Indians.
Now, I can’t really say who,
exactly, is to blame for Windows 10, and believe me I have tried all over Google
looking for that information (Google, of course, is also one of the H-1B visa
programs biggest customers). One thing I do know is that when I call a technical
support number or Amazon customer service, I always come away with the idea
that not only was I not “helped,” but that I knew more than the person who was
supposed to “solve” the problem.
I have to confess, however, that I
don't say any of this without a chip on my shoulder. There was a 7-Eleven in Kent that I stopped by
almost every day for 15 years which employed people who members of community, were generally
friendly, and if you were a “regular” they even bothered to know your name.
Then a few years ago the powers-that-be shut the place down, demolished the
building and replaced it with a new building. When it re-opened, the old
employees were nowhere to be seen, becoming yet another casualty of the South
Asian takeover. It isn’t this way at all convenience stores, but there must be
a franchise rule at 7-Elevens that employees are supposed to treat customers who
are nonwhite or non-Indian as second-class citizens or “foreigners” in their own country. I
avoid going to 7-Elevens because I don’t want to get so mad I forget my debit
card in the machine again.
One other thing: during this
pandemic there have been calls to issue green cards to doctors—again mainly
from India—to help combat an alleged shortage of medical professionals in this
country. But there was a story that appeared last year in the Economic Times that noted the report
that there was only one government-certified doctor per 10,000 persons in
India, far below the WHO’s recommendation of one per 1,000 persons. Of course,
there were those who disputed this “slur” on India’s medical establishment,
pointing out that the “actual” number is one doctor per 1668 persons, close to
the WHO’s recommendation. A shortage of 600,000 doctors and 2 million nurses
was still acknowledged, but India was “working” on rectifying the
situation—just as it is engaging in crash program building outhouses after a
WHO report revealed that 60 percent of the people in India are so poor they
have no access to indoor toilet facilities. One indignant blogger did however admit
that the doctor-patient ratio is still bad in rural areas, and the doctors do
not like working in poor districts, which is to the greater part of India.
However, the claim that India is
engaged in a crash program to build more medical schools to cover the shortfall
was undercut by the confession that India has a shortage of teachers qualified
to staff more than a few of them. That is where the 10,000 to one figure comes
in; most doctors who received their medical education in India do not have
sufficient training to practice what Americans would assume their own family
practitioners are qualified to provide—have knowledge of and prescribing drugs
and antibiotic medicines. Yeah, that’s right: only a small percentage of
“doctors” in India are qualified to prescribe even the most basic life-saving
medicines, which come under the term allopathic medicine. It probably isn’t
coincidental that the percentage of doctors who are government-licensed and
those who are qualified to practice allopathic medicine are about the same. Yet
even when a patient has access to such care, most of them cannot afford the
out-of-pocket expense to pay for it, given the lack of government-supported
health care, near the bottom in the world in percentage of GDP spent on health
care.
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