They already do this, listen to the radio at off hours and there will be many job ads with instructions to apply via postal mail. Of course the reason isn't to deter LLMs it's to deter Americans so the employer can claim no Americans applied in their visa and green card filings.
As much hate as H1Bs get, I’ve worked at two large companies where the publicly posted salary range for H1B applications were consistently higher than my own. In all humility, I was more qualified and more experienced than required by the position.
Maybe there is a dearth of talent, maybe it’s about control, maybe is someone trying to get a friend hired. I don’t think it’s about the money.
> maybe it’s about control, maybe is someone trying to get a friend hired
Control of the employee is a huge one.
When telling a US citizen they have to work 80s, the citizen can tell you to fuck off and leave for the weekend. The H1B debates the risk of their visa not getting renewed/revoked.
The second issue is a huge problem in some large companies. Instead of a branch being a random assortment of people based on merit it becomes a tight knit group based on loyalty to the person that got them hired with few actual interests in the company itself. These can become serious risks for companies as classism and racism very commonly occur. Also with everyone covering for everyone else fraud and other means of overcoming accounting controls is at higher risk of occurring.
Take a look at the job ads in your local paper's classified section. You'll have to search as classifieds don't have their own section anymore, but it'll be in somewhere.
You'll likely see some listings with very specific and odd instructions to apply. I seem to recall there was a ruling/advisory that requiring application on paper doesn't actually meet the requirements for immigration, but it used to. You would see very detailed and specific requirements, and it would be cumbersome to apply, and the hiring company would be hoping that only the candidate they already knew would apply.
Then doesn't it make more sense for the people who prefer living among a high fertility rate to move to the places where there's a high fertility rate? Why should people who don't have that preference have to endure mass migration when they don't want, didn't ask, and didn't vote for it?
The folks in charge have made it pretty clear they want Caucasian people, especially northern European or white South African. They believe what made the US great in the past wasn't a diverse population sharing power. Rather people like them at the top, owning and ordering around everyone else.
Because they operate in a non good faith model where discouraging voting and gerrymander is normalised. The electoral commission is politicised, not neutral and independent. Because voting is held at times and dates which disadvantage working poor, because voter ID rules are capricious and partisan.
When looking at supporters of voter ID laws, look at whether they support free IDs, expansion of DMVs/issuers of IDs, etc.
Similarly, opposition of mail-in-voting typically ignores or supports closing down polling places (in strategically partisan areas), making it difficult for groups of people to vote.
These issues are always (by design) discussed in isolation, while ignoring the intrinsically related issues.
TL;DR: Voter ID laws are fine, only if, coupled with universal free IDs for citizens. And no mail-in-voting would be fine, if voting occured on a national holiday, and polling places were reachable by all eligible voters. This is not supported by any (elected) proponent of voter ID laws or opponent of mail-in-voting.
- Free FEC federal voter ID (requires proof of citizenship) to be used ONLY for voting
- Voter ID can be obtained early (age 16?) but DOB is connected to ID and you can’t vote before the legal age
- Funded FEC program to register students for voter IDs at schools and colleges and teach them about voting
- FEC to work with agencies like social security and IRS to determine if a voter is deceased (messy process). Likely deceased voters are communicated to the states ASAP. States must report confirmed deceased voters to FEC ASAP for recording.
- Federal 2 week minimum early voting period
- Federal funding and monitoring of elections requiring adequate polling site coverage of geographic areas, notification of residents, etc
- Federal program to provide free shuttle to and from nearest polling station for residents without transit. Operated federally, states have no involvement. Contract with private transit as FEMA does.
- Mail in ballots heavily restricted, must provide proof of absence or be military
- Voting day is a national holiday
- Federal ballots are separate and simplified to speed up counting/recounting (ballot complexity is often cited as a reason for slow counting)
It will never happen but this would solve so many issues.
Yes, which is why no politician who supports stricter voter ID laws or limiting mail-in-voting would support those proposals, because those issues aren't about strengthening democracy/participation but about voter suppression.
Another illustration of how absurd current IP laws are. A company has exclusive rights to a character created 87 years ago by a guy who died 50 years ago.
It makes for a nice "holly-jolly Christmas" story that Montgomery Ward give an employee the rights to something they had already paid him to create.
It's completely absurd and rather "Scrooge-like" that there's a bureaucracy that has been micromanaging its use for half a century after the creator died, and will continue to do so for decades to come.
We already have more IP than any human could ever consume. Why do we need to incentivize anything? Those who are motivated by the creation itself will continue to create. Those who are motivated by the possibility of extracting rent may create less. Not sure that's a bad thing for humanity as a whole.
Even without insider trading it's a negative-sum game. Every dollar won is a dollar lost, and the platform takes a cut. Like all negative-sum games you should only participate if it's purely for entertainment or you have a clearly definable edge over the other players. If you can't spot the sucker, you are the sucker.
People like to gamble. I expect that the vast majority of interaction with these systems is seen by participants as gambling. "Who will win the presidential election" and "who will win the jets game" are similar kinds of questions. Both are negative sum.
And people do get upset and feel cheated when the bet isn't "fair." We just saw a big scandal where various athletes are changing their behavior in order to enable their buddies to win big in sports betting.
I really don't think that "well, we should just educate people about the fact that prediction markets are actually battlefields of insider information and their purpose is not to enable gambling on the future but instead to give society some model of future outcomes" is going to stick.
Auto manufacturing is low margin and capital intensive. BYD is valued as an auto manufacturer. Tesla is not.
Even all of that aside, the idea that foreign investors will be allowed to meaningfully participate in the upside of Chinese companies is questionable. Every Chinese company is one recapitalization away from zeroing out the common stock owned by foreigners. What are they gonna do, sue in Chinese court?
For quite some time, Warren Buffett was a BYD investor via Berkshire Hathaway. If you tried to get into EV stocks after the Tesla exuberance started, you were already mostly too late.
> The filing by Berkshire’s energy subsidiary recorded the value of its BYD investment as zero as of the end of March, down from $415 million at the end of 2024.
> Buffett’s company began investing in Shenzhen-based BYD in 2008, when it paid $230 million for about 225 million shares, equivalent to a 10% stake at the time.
> It began selling those shares in 2022 after BYD’s share price had risen more than twentyfold.
This is fascinating, because from what I've heard, Warren Buffett did not favor tech stocks. Does anyone know what gave Buffett the faith that this company was a real deal?
It was Charlie Munger who became enthusiastic about BYD after learning about it from investor Li Lu, leading him to convince Buffett to make Berkshire Hathaway's $230 million investment in 2008.
I think this was mostly a Munger pet investment, he had an extremely high opinion about the CEO and could see he was delivering on his goals one after another.
Berkshire was never tech investor. They looked for solid manufacturing with good price and potential to scale like manufacturing. Not everything is tech and you can still grow without being tech.
Isn't BYD a VIE? Most "internet" (ie tech) companies in China cannot legally be owned by foreigners. And what you get is some proxy based in the Cayman Islands that is circumventing Chinese law. Not something I'd touch with a ten foot pole.
You misunderstand - that doesn't make any difference. Foreigners cannot legally own internet stocks. Of course the Chinese government doesn't care if foreigners purchase internet stock proxies. It's a great deal for them.
> BYD is valued as an auto manufacturer. Tesla is not.
This in no way addresses the accusation that Teslas valuation is built on nothing. BYD also has self driving software. So what exactly does Tesla have that is not cars and batteries?
The ludicrous humanoid robots with dubious use cases? That’s not it either because the stock was absurdly high before that was a thing.
I have never seen a better example of how arbitrary and irrational markets are than Teslas valuation.
If your hypothetical happens, yes.
China has been working hard to turn domestic investment away from housing. A trustworthy domestic stock market is key.
* The Shanghai and Hong Kong stock market seems to have improved regulatory enforcement. I have no way of measuring this...just stories from others.
* Over the past 10 years the China gov pressed on with building more housing in part to dilute value. Each year they have warned that houses are for living, not speculation. Last year, they dumped a huge amount of cheap lending into the market to provide movement...warning this is the last step...a month ago the 2026 gov priorities list removed protecting the housing market...first time in modern history. Expectation is the next two years will see realized losses in property. It would be a huge mistake if the gov hasn't ensured regulatory enforcement of other segments have not reached maturity for the retail investor. We'll see...
* As for civil courts, over the past 20 years I've run into quite a few stories from friends and business colleagues that needed to go to China court. The stories are similar to what you may hear in the US. No one suggested the court/process itself was dodgy/unfair.
> No one suggested the court/process itself was dodgy/unfair.
for civil disputes, i am sure they are.
For disputes between the gov't and you, i highly doubt it. Is there a single instance of the gov't being sued for a policy that was meant to be political in nature affecting the supplicant?
Even someone like jack ma is unable to use the courts to obtain any justice - his Ant Financials IPO was shut down for political reasons, and he was reeducated. There's no such thing as due process in china.
Name me a single country where a rich person goes against the government and wins? You just don’t see it happen much in the US because the government is run by rich capitalists, but pretty much every country is the same.
It happens all the time here. Wealth isn't even a precondition, but indeed, one needs time and/or money. It helps being organized with other people to share the burden. Over here we have also got the ombudsman.
It is a matter of degrees. The harder it is for a poor individual to be done justice against the government, the weaker the rule of law. On a tangent, parties that play the horn about "law and order" usually mean "rules for thee but not for me".
Not sure where here is for you. But anyway, even if you can win a battle you can’t win a war. If a government wants to do something, it will regardless of how any individual person, rich or not, feels about it.
It just so happens that most western “democracies” are run by rich people, so they can avoid all that unpleasant business by just running the government in the first place.
I would say that’s an extension of the idea that rich people run the US government, which runs global organizations such as the world bank, which runs these ISDS courts.
China is just big enough to be able to ignore these global orgs.
Now try to win a case against the interests or connections of a high ranking official in China.
"Law and order" is not equal to "the rule of law". Both China and the US ascribe to the idea of "might makes right", which is in essence an organized form of lawless state. It is conceptually the same as in criminal gangs, only with vastly better optics. That is why anyone not in power should strive for a rules-based order, for their own best interest at least.
Not sure why you think China is Orwellian and the US isn’t when ICE is literally kidnapping people off the streets. Wake up mate, the Orwellian is coming from inside the house.
European governments regularly lose cases brought by individuals in both domestic and European courts; below are some well-known examples across different countries and legal issues.
E.g.
Broniowski v. Poland (ECtHR, 2004)
Doğan and Others v. Turkey (ECtHR, 2004)
Hirst v. United Kingdom (No. 2) (ECtHR, 2005)
Scoppola v. Italy (No. 3) (ECtHR, 2012)
KlimaSeniorinnen v. Switzerland (ECtHR, 2024)
These judgments show that individuals and civil society groups can hold European states accountable for violations involving property, voting, asylum, climate, and broader rule‑of‑law issues.
They often lead to legislative change, financial compensation, or policy reversal, and many are used as precedent by lawyers and activists in new cases across Europe.
I’m not a lawyer, and many of these cases are not famous enough to be reported on in a format easily understandable to a layperson. I’m also not going to read through case resolutions to respond to a hacker news comment. I did take a cursory look at the examples you wrote though.
I will admit that my original statement lacks nuance, which makes it easy to nitpick.
Having read some of your cases though, a pattern emerged: it’s usually supra national organizations adjudicating these cases, and the nations are not bound by the rulings.
For example, in Hirst vs UK it was ruled that it’s a violation of human rights to deny prisoners the vote, and yet the UK government deliberately ignored that ruling and as a result prisoners still can’t vote in the UK. Not to mention that when this case was brought up in a UK court it was dismissed.
Hirst v United Kingdom (No 2) (2005) ECHR 681 is a European Court of Human Rights case, where the court ruled that a blanket ban on British prisoners exercising the right to vote is contrary to the European Convention on Human Rights. The court did not state that all prisoners should be given voting rights. Rather, it held that if the franchise was to be removed, then the measure needed to be compatible with Article 3 of the First Protocol, thus putting the onus upon the UK to justify its departure from the principle of universal suffrage.
There are numerous examples of citizens winning court cases against the government.
Take the just the uk, three examples:
Anti‑protest regulations (Liberty v Home Secretary)
Air pollution litigation (ClientEarth v UK Government)
Rwanda asylum plan (AAA & Others v Secretary of State
Windrush - Members of the Windrush have repeatedly challenged the Home Office over wrongful detention, removal, and denial of rights, leading to government admissions of unlawfulness and an official apology in 2018.
Your claim is false. The world is not the same the world over, civil liberties are better in some places than in others.
Prisoners still can’t vote, people are getting arrested for peacefully protesting holding signs, and the Rwanda ruling was overruled by parliament and the only reason the plan was stopped is because the PM changed.
> Each year they have warned that houses are for living, not speculation. Last year, they dumped a huge amount of cheap lending into the market to provide movement...warning this is the last step...a month ago the 2026 gov priorities list removed protecting the housing market...first time in modern history.
Perhaps one of a few genuinely positive policies which only China can do. Meanwhile western countries will rather stab their economies to death than accept even just stagnating real estate prices.
>> No one suggested the court/process itself was dodgy/unfair.
Not sure where this is coming from. The EU recently just won a WTO dispute[1] against China that prohibited patent holders (often EU companies) from pursuing or enforcing patent infringement cases in non-Chinese courts -- it violated several provisions of the WTO's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement), including Articles 1.1, 28.1, and 28.2.
Foreigners generally view the Chinese court system with significant skepticism, primarily due to a perceived lack of judicial independence from the ruling Communist Party (CCP), opacity, and the use of the judiciary to serve political goals.
1. DS611: China – Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights
The future of the Chinese economy depends on being able to access the global capital markets, which means that by extension, its future depends on foreign investors being demonstrably "allowed to meaningfully participate in the upside of Chinese companies".
Funnily enough, the future of the Chinese economy depends on being able to access their local market. The chinese people save too much and aren't buying their own products
You are right that getting Chinese households to invest in the domestic (Shenzhen, Shanghai, Hong Kong) stock market is also a key goal that they're rolling out incentives for.
> The chinese people save too much and aren't buying their own products
Nonsense.
Total Retail Sales of Consumer Goods went up 4.6% in the first 11 months of 2025. That is the number with spending on automobiles excluded. A total of 24 million cars were sold in China in 2025 with vast majority being Chinese brands. If 24 million car purchases a year is "aren't buying their own products", then car industry doesn't exist in the US.
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