Most people have probably heard about it, but I feel that it’s worth mentioning here. The American government is back at censoring the internet and removing domestic freedoms from Americans. First it was SOPA and now it’s CISPA.
Infographic designed by Lumin Consulting
Blueseed is a company that is looking to help foreign workers work in the USA. The American immigration system is broken and people who do want to work in the USA simply can’t essentially because of a backwards perspective on immigration.
Blueseed is looking to get around this by providing a boat offshore in international waters close to Silicon Valley that will ferry workers back and forth to meet clients on land. Sadly, it’s not as crazy as it sounds.
This is not the first such attempt to work around America’s broken immigration system. Many high-tech companies have established oversees R&D units to gain access to foreign talent. The Oscar winning director Peter Jackson moved his entire film production infrastructure to Wellington, New Zealand in part because of his ease in attracting global talent. Several years ago, Microsoft established a major innovation center outside Vancouver to act as a portal for global scientific and technical talent, a move which my Martin Prosperity Institute colleagues Kathrine Richardson, Kevin Stolarick and I studied in depth in a 2009 paper.
Read about the floating city at the Atlantic Cities.
That all being said, I know many people who would like to work in the USA for American companies but can’t stand the politics in the country. By politics this includes immigration laws, lack of health care, little to no vacation time, etc.
Occupy Wall Street (OWS) started with very little media attention and now even Fox News has to acknowledge that the movement exists. Sure the Faux News coverage is horrendous and all they seem to be able to do is support religious anarchists on the fringe.) Still, the movement is growing and with that growth the mainstream media is forced to acknowledge the concerns of the OWS movement.
What are those concerns anyway?
Well, like most social-conscious protest movements you’ll be hard pressed to find an agreed upon idea of what should change and when. This is a good thing because it forces people to talk and constantly reassess their priorities and negotiate with one another to improve everyone’s standing.
Business Insider has done a great job of summarizing the plethora of concerns that people have that has lead to the OWS movement.
Do they have legitimate gripes?
To answer the latter question first, yes, they have very legitimate gripes.
And if America cannot figure out a way to address these gripes, the country will likely become increasingly “de-stabilized,” as sociologists might say. And in that scenario, the current protests will likely be only the beginning.
The problem in a nutshell is this: Inequality in this country has hit a level that has been seen only once in the nation’s history, and unemployment has reached a level that has been seen only once since the Great Depression. And, at the same time, corporate profits are at a record high.
In other words, in the never-ending tug-of-war between “labor” and “capital,” there has rarely—if ever—been a time when “capital” was so clearly winning.
Get a load of all the graphs here.
I’ll leave you with what I think is the most striking graph and description:
And, by the way, few people would have a problem with inequality if the American Dream were still fully intact—if it were easy to work your way into that top 1%. But, unfortunately, social mobility in this country is also near an all-time low.
And as a final thought and fun thing, here’s Chris Hedges taking Kevin O’Leary to school.
Now it’s up to everyone to play the game of making the economy more just and fair for all the players.
For many start-ups in Canada being acquired by a larger company is a sound exit strategy, however that process can be complicated by ownership structures. Entrepreneur Carl Mercier has an excellent blog post on how to structure your Canadian company to be easily acquired by an American company. It seems almost too simple to believe.
Karabunga owned all the IP, the Defensio name, the trademarks, the code and the servers (in our case, EC2). Karabunga owned and controlled all the value.
QC-inc was a simple consulting firm that had only one client: Karabunga. Our employees, office, dev computers, ping-pong table and our infamous Dev1 development server all belonged to QC-inc. The idea is to keep both companies as independent as possible. If QC-inc went out of business for whatever reason, it would not have impacted Karabunga in any way (aside from losing all the employees). QC-inc also obeyed Quebec’s French-language laws such as Bill 101. Hopefully you don’t have that problem where you live.
Karabunga is the company we sold to Websense and the employees became Websense employees. I later dismantled QC-inc since it lost its only client and no longer had a purpose.
Read the full rundown on being a Canadian company incorporating in the states.
New Games on the App Store
