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Archive for June, 2009

How to measure Browser Speed?

June 30th, 2009 Sidd No comments

I found this interesting quote from Microsoft:

Knowing the top speed of a car doesn’t tell you how fast you can drive in rush hour. To actually see the difference in page loads between all three browsers, you need slow-motion video. This one’s also a tie.

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Categories: Technology, Web Tags:

EB Immigration Bills Introduced in the 111th Congress

June 12th, 2009 Sidd No comments

Here is the original post on the thread deleted by IV:  (they didn’t actually delete it, they just made it so that only I can see it – an ingeneous way to make sure that I don’t know that it is deleted). Here is a link to the thread -
http://immigrationvoice.org/forum/showthread.php?t=26320

1. S 1085 – Reuniting Families Act (4 sponsors)
GovTrack Link
OpenCongress Link
Vote this Up on Ideascale – Obamas official idea submission site
Relevant to Employment Based Immigration – Visa Recapture, Increase country quota to 10%

2. H.R. 2709 – Reuniting Families Act (58 Sponsors)
GovTrack Link
OpenCongress Link
Relevant to Employment Based Immigration – Visa Recapture, Increase country quota to 10%

3. H.R. 264 – Save America Comprehensive Immigration Act of 2009 (1 sponsor)
GovTrack Link
OpenCongress Link
Relevant to Employment Based Immigration – - GC for long term residents of US (5+ years and are not even subject to quota – the wording is unclear to me but it might just be that if you are in the country illegally for 5+ years, you are now legal), Aged out Children, Widow Penalty

4. H.R. 182 – Parents of Citizen Children (21 sponsors)
GovTrack Link
OpenCongress Link
Relevant to Employment Based Immigration – Will allow immigration judges to determine if alien parent of citizen child will be allowed to stay in US

5. H.R. 1791 – Staple Act (1 sponsor)
GovTrack Link
OpenCongress Link
Relevant to Employment Based Immigration – GC for folks with PhDs

6. H.R.1868 – Birthright Citizenship Act of 2009 (74 sponsors)
GovTrack Link
OpenCongress Link
Relevant to Employment Based Immigration – no citizenship for us born children of non-GC holders

7. S.887 – H-1B and L-1 Visa Reform Act of 2009 (2 sponsors)
GovTrack Link
OpenCongress Link
Relevant to Employment Based Immigration -
Bad: More stringent requirements for H1 employers – online ad for 30 days, negative impact on H1B/L1 contractors, stricter application review by DOL (marginally), new requirements for hiring at new company locations or at startups
Good: Fairer pay requirements, Employer punishment for abuse of H1B/L1 workers

Some notes about the above bills
1. and 2. were also introduced in the 110th session. 1. had only one sponsor and 2. had only 4 sponsors. This time they have 4, 58 sponsors respectively so the idea that something needs to be done is spreading.

The above thread was hidden because of the following posts:

So tell us exactly what the money is for. Be transparent. Give us quarterly or monthly reports on how the money is spent, how much is collected.

Something simple like:
1Q 2009
Carryover from before: ##,###
Total Collected: ##,###
Spent on Lobbyist for XYZ: #,###
Spent on Organizing XYZ: #,###
Spent on travel to meet REPs XYZ, ABC, QWE: #,###
Spent on the Website: ###
Total Remaining: ##,###

Then you can say.
Please donate. We need ##,### more for ABC, XYZ, ASD etc.

I can tell you this. I don’t trust anybody. So unless there is some transparency, there is no trust.

and

Originally Posted by gc_on_demand
If you need inforamtion regading account .. you can find online. If you need link to that site PM me . I think IV had concern that anti immigrants will see our financial strength and also none of non profit org out there puts there financial information online. ( I have none seen so far ).

http://indiapartners.org/about/financial.php
http://www.redcross.org/pubs/ – See 2008 – there is a financial report and tax returns
http://www.worldwildlife.org/who/fin…nfo/index.html
http://www.africare.org/aboutus/financial/index.php
http://www.scouting.org/About/Annual…tatements.aspx
http://www.voa.org/NewsPublications/…2/Default.aspx
http://www.good-sam.com/finances/information.asp
http://www.aclu.com/about/financiala…rts/index.html
http://www.numbersusa.org/forms/irs_form_990.pdf (even numbersusa publishes their numbers)

Actually there is not a single non-profit that does not post its financial info. Nobody would give them any money if they hid their financials. Every month I contibute part of my paycheck to Indiapartners. The University offers us a complete list of Charities that we can automatically contribute to and they not only have financial information they also need to show how much actually goes in charity work compared to overhead e.g. for Indiapartners you can see that 93% of their money goes toward actual charitable purposes.

If they did not do this, how would you know that they are not stealing your money?

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Categories: Immigration, Rants Tags:

Immigration Voice Tax Returns

June 12th, 2009 Sidd No comments

For a non-profit Immigration Voice is highly secretive. They keep on deleting posts related to transparency and posting their tax returns online.

IV has been a great resource for me throughout my immigration process but lately there have been more and more pushes for donations. But when asked about financials or transparency, they just delete those posts. So I dug up their tax returns for the last couple of years and here they are

2006 Form 990
2007 Form 990

They also delete/hide all threads that ask for transparency or financials. They even delete threads that discuss relevant topis if someone asks for transparency in the thread. See my other post about this.

Also there are some dicrepancies between what they claim and what’s on the tax returns. For example they claim that they have hired Patton Boggs as a lobbyist but the tax returns show that payments were made to Quinn Gillespie. Also some of their budget items sound pretty suspicious like a 39,000 travel budget and a 27,000 advertising budget.

If I were contributing money to them, I’d seriously like to know whether the organization members are taking vacations with the travel budget or are they really doing something.

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Categories: Immigration, Rants Tags:

What do Americans really want?

June 4th, 2009 Sidd No comments

The Whitehouse recently announced a new program for getting feedback from people on what they really want. You can visit the site at http://opengov.ideascale.com/ and vote on other ideas or add your own.

I went through many pages of the site and it turns out that half the people want to make marijuana legal and the other half want to see Obama’s birth certificate.

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Categories: Web Tags: