Amid Conflicting Accounts, Trusting the Officer - NYTimes.com

I'm disappointed in the Fergeson Grand Jury decision.  It is hard to believe that they took over 3 months to review the evidence.  Most grand juries are much quicker.  This NY Times article attempted to summarize the proceedings. Amid Conflicting Accounts, Trusting the Officer - NYTimes.com.  Yes, it is possible that the NY Times took a "liberal" side on this situation.  However now the public has the testimony and we can read it ourselves and make our own decisions.  There seems to be a lot that wasn't questioned in Wilson's testimony, however.

Yes, there is a LOT of evidence: See this link -- but I think there wasn't enough for 3-1/2 months of delay.  In most cases the "Prosecutor" prosecutes in a Grand Jury proceeding.  This one was unique in that the prosecutor apparently wanted to not push the jury towards indictment.  I think the public needed Wilson to be tried by a jury of his peers.

Somehow, I have the feeling that a prosecutor in this type of situation has a built-in conflict of interest.  If a prosecutor doesn't "go easy" on a police officer, the other officers may not support that prosecutor in other trials.  It seems that the overall process of handling a situation like this needs to be changed.  Maybe an outside Federal prosecutor should be involved when a grand jury is considering charges against a police officer.

The Tech Worker Shortage Doesn't Really Exist - Businessweek

Bloomberg Business Week had a good article about the "tech worker shortage" --The Tech Worker Shortage Doesn't Really Exist - Businessweek by Josh Eidelson.

As a retired "tech worker" electrical engineer with a son and son-in-law working as software engineers, I have not been a fan of H1B visas.  Clearly the visas have reduced the salaries of engineers in the USA, which affects the pocketbooks of engineers.  It also discourages people from enrolling in engineering degree programs because the perceived return on investment in education time and money doesn't appear to have the same "payback" as other fields.  Another problem of the H1B visas occurs when the visas expire and the workers return to their native country.  They return, and take back expertise, skills, corporate secrets and business acumen that can be used to compete directly with US firms.  Those workers also may have children born in the US who become citizens, and a lien on USA welfare roles





See text of article below:

Along with temporary deportation relief for millions, President Obama’s executive action will increase the number of U.S. college graduates from abroad who can temporarily be hired by U.S. corporations. That hasn’t satisfied tech companies and trade groups, which contend more green cards or guest worker visas are needed to keep tech industries growing because of a shortage of qualified American workers. But scholars say there’s a problem with that argument: The tech worker shortage doesn’t actually exist.

“There’s no evidence of any way, shape, or form that there’s a shortage in the conventional sense,” says Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University. “They may not be able to find them at the price they want. But I’m not sure that qualifies as a shortage, any more than my not being able to find a half-priced TV.”

For a real-life example of an actual worker shortage, Salzman points to the case of petroleum engineers, where the supply of workers has failed to keep up with the growth in oil exploration. The result, says Salzman, was just what economists would have predicted: Employers started offering more money, more people started becoming petroleum engineers, and the shortage was solved. In contrast, Salzman concluded in a paper released last year by the liberal Economic Policy Institute, real IT wages are about the same as they were in 1999. Further, he and his co-authors found, only half of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) college graduates each year get hired into STEM jobs. “We don’t dispute the fact at all that Facebook (FB) and Microsoft (MSFT) would like to have more, cheaper workers,” says Salzman’s co-author Daniel Kuehn, now a research associate at the Urban Institute. “But that doesn’t constitute a shortage.”

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The real issue, say Salzman and others, is the industry’s desire for lower-wage,more-exploitable guest workers, not a lack of available American staff. “It seems pretty clear that the industry just wants lower-cost labor,” Dean Baker, the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, wrote in an e-mail. A 2011review by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that the H-1B visa program, which is what industry groups are lobbying to expand, had “fragmented and restricted” oversight that weakened its ostensible labor standards. “Many in the tech industry are using it for cheaper, indentured labor,” says Rochester Institute of Technology public policy associate professor Ron Hira, an EPI research associate and co-author of the book Outsourcing America.

Asked what evidence existed of a labor shortage, a spokesperson for Facebook e-mailed a one-sentence statement: “We look forward to hearing more specifics about the President’s plan and how it will impact the skills gap that threatens the competitiveness of the tech sector.”