> Yes, because obviously we as a country should prioritize creepy VR avatars over understanding climate change.

As a country we have decided to let the market decide what to prioritize. Who are we to judge "creepy VR avatars" are less important if people are willing to fair and square pay for them? If they are creepy, don't pay for them.

> No charities should exist.

No that is not the appropriate conclusion. People are of course free to work for less and balance their circumstances. If they want to volunteer for a charity by choice, more power to them. But no, using taxpayer money to fund "charities" is by-and-large corruption in my book.

> It’s a very cynical, even nihilistic view.

If we are doing labels, yours is a very communistic, statist, view.

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P.S. regardless of your PoV, I like that you acknowledge my core point: that the OP is seeking special treatment in the form of cheap labor from the US. You are simply arguing for that special treatment being justified, not denying that's the core demand.

Profit is not and shouldn't be the primary driver for whats useful economic activity. There is a lot of good work to be done that can't or won't be sustained by the market. Basic scientific research for example.

I mean sure you could argue that, as communists and others perhaps do, for instance, but we are chiefly talking about the US, where individual profit is decided, IMHO correctly, as the primary metric. Sure, you may want to choose to minimally do certain things for national security or other legitimate reasons as the people vote for (as I mentioned in three posts above), but that is supposed to be a deliberate choice of the people and their representatives, driven by their desires, not as an automatic subsidy to any pre-established business, in the form of lax immigration policy which can have second-order effects.

Who ends up paying for the decision to pay a meta engineer x, but the climate change engineer x/5?

It’s the engineer who picks the climate change job instead.

Essentially what you’re saying is that due to society not being willing to pay competitively, engineers should take the kick to the nuts and be paid peanuts to make up for societies bad decisions.

Sounds like a pretty stupid decision, frankly.

Sure the engineer ends up losing out. Thankfully, some people put values over personal profit.

It sounds more like someone is taking advantage of people, using nominative idealism to do so.

You are very confused about how the US works. Go find out where the Internet comes from, for example.

Ironic that you use it as an example, since Internet blew up exponentially the moment commercial activity was allowed.

It blew up with commercial activity, but it never would have existed in the first place if it hadn't been created in taxpayer-funded research labs.

[citation needed].

ARPANET was not the only network in existence, even then. Networks existed in various forms. Later, BBSes existed. My guess is sooner or later there would have been something (probably more than one, even) our current internet, but we would never know. Would it look worse or balkanized or proprietary, my guess would be yes, I give you that, but we'll never know that either.

(I originally noted in my topmost post minimal, surgical, involvement is the aspiration, not necessarily zero, but I digress.)

You have a good point. We should fund government positions more so they can pay people better. Then the government orgs would have better talent and produce better output that would benefit everyone, since these are charities.

Someone that wants to do some good in the world can have a bigger and better impact by getting paid much more and donating half the difference to charity.

Working for a company that launches satellites that examine climate change is far less impactful. It's not worth a big pay cut even when you're focusing on altruistic motives.

> Someone that wants to do some good in the world can have a bigger and better impact by getting paid much more and donating half the difference to charity. [Citation needed] Working for a company that launches satellites that examine climate change is far less impactful. [Citation needed] It's not worth a big pay cut even when you're focusing on altruistic motives. [Citation unavailable as its purely subjective]

Working for a company that sometimes makes satellites that make measurements of climate change is so indirect at helping people if at all. Donating to that company (by being paid less) is not a good use of money, in terms of charitable benefit. I don't think any of this is wild enough to need citation in a discussion where the median comment is not expected to have citations.

How many people honestly think it's a good idea to donate to a for-profit company?

> It's not worth a big pay cut even when you're focusing on altruistic motives. [Citation unavailable as its purely subjective]

I'm talking about level of benefit, which is not subjective.

Edit: Also I just reread the original comment and realized the climate change measurement was listed as a negative, so for the two citation neededs I point back at the original post about the company. Donating a single dollar beats a negative.

This is entirely reasonable as marginal analysis but it's not universalizable. Ultimately, somebody has to work for the charities or there wouldn't be anything to donate to.

We're not talking about working for a charity though. Just a rather ordinary company.

For the broader analysis, the people that can easily get huge salaries should prioritize donation, and the people that can't should prioritize actually working at a charity.