All We Are Asking IS Give Kids A Chance

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

It’s one of those things… Apparently Vivek Ramaswamy, whom I’ll remind everyone was not my choice for president at any time (for a variety of reasons) decided it was a good time to put the fox among the hens by running his mouth from his own insular perspective on the need to import more foreign workers.

This is one of those things in which I’m divided. As one is.

I mean, on the one hand I think absolutely the US should get the best from anywhere else in the world. My perspective on what the best is though is somewhat different from Vivek’s. Now part of this might be self-interested perspective coming from the fact that I absolutely wasn’t the best when I moved here (I mean, sure, elite academic credentials, but honestly none of them translated into a job here. Also, sure, IQ measurements in the mumble, mumble mumble percentile, but there is a very good reason for me to doubt that IQ applies to success/achievement in the real world [If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?]) And a lot of you, particularly the leftists hate-skimming will say I’m still not the best. All of this is true, but you can’t say I don’t work hard as heck. And I believe I’m d*mn good value, considering in 40 years here I’ve never been on welfare or any other kind of assistance.

So I think sometimes “the best” should be “Clears minimal requirements and won’t go on assistance for 20 years.” Because in a time of high tech change you can’t tell if the person who is the best at digitizing whatchmacallits will be adaptive enough to stay the best when watchmacallits go out of production altogether. And there is no way to pick for “intelligent and highly adaptable” except by looking back at someone’s life.

Anyway, let’s start with my biases. Eric S. Raymond wrote a tweet that I substantially agree with which is rare, because I tend to at least have some quibbles with his takes. (And sometimes very substantial ones.) (My only quibble with this one is to take offense at finding myself lumped as a MAGA nationalist. I’ve recently come to the conclusion I’m a libertarian nationalist (for one I think libertarianism can only work here for now. And thanks to Charlie Martin for the moniker in which he includes himself.) MAGA as an aspirational direction is fine. MAGA as a movement is too much of an hodgepodge pulling in everyone to the right or even only slightly to the left of Lenin.)

https://twitter.com/esrtweet/status/1872404345003692207

This is the link if you want to read to the end and lack twittex.

He is absolutely right about all of that. But then there are things he isn’t as right about, or where it seems to me he’s groping at the problem but not quite grasping it. Perhaps because of his own innate biases. (We all have them. The best I can do is try to lay mine out.)

First, let me start by saying that I’m HARD CORE FOR MERIT IN HIRING. Not only is it important to always hire the best you can for the job, it is also important to always select for merit. Because merit breeds merit. There are other valid reasons to hire, sure. Like “I trust this person.” The US has been pushed more an more that way in areas not infected by DEI by the DEI crazy and the litigiousness of the woke. BUT regardless of good reasons, the end result of hiring for anything but merit is driving merit out. It always is. Mostly because people who are only marginally competent or barely competent, or even who are competent but KNOW THAT’S NOT WHY THEY WERE HIRED, tend to hire less competent people, because they’re afraid of being shown up. Oh, not all of them. Humans are individuals. But over time the process repeats.

So, in that sense it is important to hire the best. Yes, even if they’re from abroad.

But while we’re at it, an important caveat: When you talk about hiring the top 0.001% it’s the merest bullshit. No such things exists. No, I’m serious. THERE AIN’T NO SUCH ANIMAL.

People who are very good at that level, are very good at a specialty of a specialty. And drawers at everything else. No, seriously. At that level you’re dealing with almost idiot savants.

And a lot of them never bother developing the other needful things for the profession. So, sure, you might hire the best data cruncher that ever crunched. Or to put it another way because this is something I’m familiar with only at a distance, you might hire someone who can, instinctively create a new branch of mathematics and bend an entire program around it to do the THING you want. But they might suck at everything else. In fact, there’s a high chance they won’t fully understand or integrate what you want, won’t listen to their co-workers, will be resistant to debugging and will generally be a human interaction disaster to the point their program might be the best, but not necessarily the best for what you want.

So let’s go a step below to the best of the best who are still human. Cool beans. How do you find the best among them? Answer, you don’t. It’s not that some aren’t better than others. It’s that above a certain level it doesn’t matter. And that certain level is about the top 5%. Above a certain level you’re hiring for “feel” more than anything else.

I know this because the process this guy describes:

(Here for those with no twittex.)

for resumes is substantially the same as for submissions to a medium size magazine or publisher. Above a certain level, you can’t select the best. You just select “It’s the best for me now.” Or “I feel like it.”

This leaves the process vulnerable to people THINKING THEY’RE SELECTING FOR MERIT WHILE SELECTING FOR OTHER REASONS.

So, while American education sucks — I’ve been the one here raising the possibility that all the cases of plagiarism are because people at the ivy leagues and promoted into positions of power CAN’T READ FLUENTLY. Their behavior to me seems like that of an ESL trying and failing to make a policy of copy pasting sentences (because they can’t write their own coherently) sound like they were part of an original essay. I ran into this in the early oughts while teaching in college. People who sounded like normal human beings in speech couldn’t write an essay at 4th grade level coherently. That’s a failure in learning to read/write enough that you’re fluent in it. — if you’re talking the best it’s pretty damn hard to say something like “This doesn’t exist in the US.”

Is it possible? Yes, quite possible. Likely? Not in the least.

That top 0.01%? Unless you’re hiring the man who created the new quantum computer (and good luck with that) that works on two molecules of super-excited water (again, good luck–) you’re just as likely to find them in the US.

Except for– well, your search which is hell of borked, but will take a whole post to explain. Let’s say though that our HR works mostly as either a DEI factory or a way to not pass anyone on to the hiring process. At this point firing HR departments by the score and getting rid of automated computer keyword sorting might be the best fix for that. (How bad is it? Well, one cheat to get your otherwise fully functional resume passed up is to “print the add in white” on your resume. The computer reads that and passes it on, because congrats, you have the keywords. Note this has nothing to do on whether a human looking at your resume sees you’re a perfect fit. You just need those keywords, exactly. This is what’s known as stupid.)

Vivek is right that there is a massive problem with our culture. It is not what he thinks it is. I have no clue what hole he crawled out of, but if you’re basing your ideas of what kids learn and who they idolize on Hollywood’s crazy ideas, you already lost.

Again I’m going to invoke “My kids are in their early thirties, smart and geeky, and so are most of their friends.” I will actually need a full post to unpack this, so put a pin in it. But all the people saying their education was giving a medal for participation are wrong. That was MY generation and we’re in our sixties now. My kids were the generation where they “corrected” for that. Stupidly, as only a deeply screwed up education establishment can. My kids’ generation had a “tokenized” education. No, I don’t mean race and sex and… Oh, those too. The ladies’ A is a thing. BUT mostly they weren’t so much educated as they “collected tokens.” Like…. “Participate in science Olympiad, winning team” put that token in your resume. This started in kindergarten, where they assured us if our kids — in a little mountain town school in Colorado — didn’t collect the right tokens they’d never make it to college, let alone a good college. Kids were so busy doing special projects and collecting tokens for their resumes most of them never learned to read properly.

However among all kids, the nose to the grindstone, and run around like crazy acquiring “accomplishments” were a thing. It’s not their fault they weren’t taught anything substantive. And it’s outright stupid and nasty to call them slackers. A lot of these kids hit the job market with a massive case of the burnout, yes, but that’s not the same as being slackers.

Yes, I am still me, and being still me I said no, and put my little hooves down. My kids weren’t booked into three different after school activities, five different extracurricular classes, or ten different “accomplishment learning.” They still got a “resume” but that was almost incidental due to being massive geek-o-nerds. So, younger son learned Greek after bullying me into putting him in an online course. Also art. Older son got professionally published in fiction at 13. And placed second in a state singing competition. If anything we taught them by the geek-slacker model. I.e. we’d throw money, books and resources at their enthusiasms, and sometimes they achieved something/the enthusiasm stuck. Sometimes … it didn’t. They also both learned to build computers and write software, though younger son cordially despises it, I suspect for the same reason it required a lot of work from me (Look, I was a geek girl in the late 70s/early 80s. Of course I learned starter programming. I just haven’t done it since. And no, I wasn’t even doing it for the guys. In retrospect I think I puzzled a lot of them, taking my lunch hour in the computer lab and NOT on the hunt.) because he is dyslexic, and misplacing a letter or punctuation mark in a thousand-line program means sweating bullets while you proof it. (At least for novels I can be the despair of my copyeditor and have backup.)

Anyway, all their friends are more or less the same kind of kid. More or less proficient depending on parents, but good, smart geek kids. Entering their thirties. Most of them working for starvation wages, if not on those jobs that are supposed to give you exposure and training but literally pay nothing.

Now there are issues with our education, as I detailed. And there are issues with the fact we’ve banned “child labor” so thoroughly most people are having trouble finding starter jobs in their twenties.

BUT I can tell you from observing this group that any of these kids given half a chance JUMP on it, and work their *sses off to be good.

No, they probably won’t be any good to begin with. But they learn. And they work very hard at learning.

Which brings us to–

What is better for those top of the top people? Picking a generic “genius” from across the world, from a culture that has its own drawbacks, and trying to fit him in your company? Or picking someone who knows nothing but is eager and has tons of potential and who will when fully trained be exactly what you need?

Yes, there are problems in the way, such as you can’t give them IQ tests. But I’m sure you can give them “placement tests” to figure out how they fit in your company and it would take a trained psychologist to know the difference. Same with establishing basic literacy and numeracy.

Also, I’ll fully agree with you companies shouldn’t have to teach employees the basics.

But the thing is hiring from overseas is not painless EITHER. Look, I’m not singling out Chinese and Indians. I too come from a culture where you hire your cousin over anyone else. There are reasons for this, deeply baked into the culture, like the opposite of high trust culture.

And I’m not going to say every overseas-hire does it, because that would be a lie. BUT a significant portion of them does it, because culture is sticky and takes an extraordinary individual to overcome.

So the price of hiring ready-trained and far more compliant with orders (the training is often different, though. Particularly in medicine) from overseas is to see entire departments flip to that ethnicity only. Which wouldn’t be a problem except that: see dictum: hire for any reason other than merit, it degrades merit.

Also I have many complicated opinions on women in corporate culture (several posts waiting on that) but I can promise that there are women who are more than pulling their weight, and hiring from deeply misogynistic cultures (which includes a lot of Europe, you’ll find, beneath the happy talk) will make them be overlooked/mistreated. As well as a lot of the native born males.

In addition to that: I’m not a nativist. It would be extremely weird if I were. But I’m just going to say it: you can’t treat the people of your own country worse than you treat foreigners. You do that and you’re setting yourself up for large scale revolt.

For decades now I’ve heard from friends in technical fields about their departments being eaten from the inside by hiring foreigners on work visas, who work for less and do whatever they’re told no matter how outrageous (or borderline illegal) in the name of the visa. And how those imports, once secure and with some power run the natives out.

I’ve heard (and seen it, even 20 years ago, coincidentally (?) in companies that then foundered) enough that you know there is not only truth but widespread truth in it.

Combine it with what is shaping up to be a lost generation, say 25 to 35 (with some older outliers) due to stupid child labor laws, competition form illegals and work visas at the bottom, flooding of the market with “imports” from above and driving down wages, and our incredibly broken education system, and you have a cauldron of resentment.

Which is why Vivek stomped on a fire ants nest.

That is the measure of resentment going on.

Look, again, this is self interested me. I have an audible accent. I could get rid of it, but it would eat my writing time, and I’m in my sixties. Writing the books is more important.

And Obama’s policies of race-division have already made it so that my American-mutt sons get asked by total strangers what their race is. On the street. Out of nothing.

What I don’t need is crazy people pinging off the oddness of our behaviors (my family, the rest of you. Come on, we’re Odds for a reason) and deciding we’re foreign interlopers being treated to the GOOD jobs. (Or paying jobs, at all.)

What we don’t need is a wave or riots and lynching. And I’m here to tell you that’s quite likely. Just judging from the reaction to Vivek’s running his mouth.

So, we need to clean house, peeps. If you can, teach your kids yourself. Make sure they’re literate and FLUENT at reading and writing. (And if you’re not, find someone who is to teach them. Hint, get boys old comics to see them between picture books and real books. It bridges the fluency gap and has more complex stories.) If you can’t, teach them yourself anyway, after work. And as a culture, let’s can DEI and HR, shall we?

Meanwhile, Mr. Ramaswamy kindly shut your trap. You’re right we have problems, but your solution is going to destroy everything and get people killed.

And Mr. Musk, sure, you can have your 0.01% top engineers from abroad. As soon as you explain to me how you’re discerning their excellence at that level. Ouiji board? Tarot cards? Because at that level you CAN’T and I don’t care how smart you yourself are.

Sure, though, they’ll be what? 10 people for all your companies. Go ahead, import them.

But train yourself some smart local kids meanwhile. You might need them when the geniuses crap out.

The rest of us: Yeah…. we have a lot of clean up to do. Because I don’t want riots. I don’t want lynchings. And I don’t want epic, all consuming cultural clashes. So.

Let’s get busy building under and over and around. Because when it all blows we need structures in place to take the weight.

107 thoughts on “All We Are Asking IS Give Kids A Chance”

  1. Remember that horrible, psychotic children’s book, Rainbow Fish, about the fish with glittery scales? Remember how the other fish basically gave him an ultimatum, by telling him that if he didn’t rip off pieces of his own flesh and give it to them, because they wanted it, they’d ostracize him and he’d die alone?

    Yeah. We (the US) aren’t obligated to hand out goodies at our own expense to the entire world just because they demand it. They can pound sand,  which is usually in abundant supply in the awful third-world snakepits they’re yelling from.

    Liked by 2 people

    2. Why are they awful third-world snakepits, though? They have natural resources, they have people, they have access to all the same knowledge we do, so why don’t they make life better for themselves?

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      1. Because it’s relatively easier to fester in their filth while blaming colonialism and Westerners, or alternatively, quicker to just scamper over here and take what they want. In short, they don’t have or desire the ideological and cultural backdrop that produced America or Europe. They just want goodies.

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        1. Call it culture. I call it attitude. They just don’t have that good ol’ American git-er-done attitude. In most of those countries, honest work is considered demeaning, degrading and disgraceful. Work is for peons, not The Good People. They’re supposed sit around sipping imported tea while their overseers flog the serfs.

          Which is why they so hate American industrialists. They got rich by working, fer Ghu’s sake! That’s low-class and lowbrow! And now they expect to be equal to the Anointed Class, just because they’re rich! (Even worse, they’re richer than most of the Anointed) Such hubris!

          And they hate the American middle class because we don’t bow down to them.

          Liked by 1 person

  2. Colleges that put more emphasis on “volunteer” experience and “well-rounded lives” than on academic accomplishment and literacy are part of the complex of mess. There’s nothing like learning that a possible student opted out of harder classes that he liked because “I need time to do all the community services and outside activities in order to get into a good college.” (Not mine, different school). Double Facepaw!

    Liked by 3 people

    1. they noticed that kids who had useful interests and volunteered were better, so they made the ‘volunteering’ mandatory, so now the volunteer orgs get high school seniors who need the ‘volunteer’ time to graduate showing up, trying to get checked off for their 40 hours and then disappearing.

      That really doesn’t help the kid or the volunteer organization.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Spending all their “volunteer” time on their phones, as often as not.

        Our sponsoring organization loves our scout troop, because when we volunteer, everything gets done. They’ve had us less than a year and are so happy with us that they picked up a Cub Scout pack as well.

        Note also that our troop currently has… eight? members. But we get. stuff. done.

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    2. 10 years ago, I used to interview for the new residents in pediatrics. They were all good boys and girls, had volunteered in a 3rd world country. Had published a paper or two, frequently as a second author, and toed the liberal line. Don’t think it ends after college.

      I would ask them why that country needed medical volunteers (untrained ones at that), and what should be done economically to improve the situation, were the volunteers helping or hurting the native system. Then watch them stutter. After a while it lost it’s humor, and I stopped interviewing.

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      1. That’s because your questions didn’t have pre-programmed sound-bite answers, the only kind they’d encountered through all of their “education”. 😒

        Liked by 1 person

  3. It’s bad enough when the idiots say that we need “immigrants” to do the garbage that Americans won’t do.

    We don’t need more idiots claiming that we need “immigrants” to do jobs that Americans Can’t Do.

    😡😡😡😡😡😡😡

    Liked by 1 person

  4. I HATE Townhall archives. Shannon O’Donahue JUST did a post about H1B workers willing to work for less than Americans can AFFORD because at the end of the journey there’s the magic visa. Eliminate the magic visa or make the US companies pay foreigners the same as US citizens…or burn the NLRB at the stake and admit what coding is. It’s apprentice work. High school students, college students, stay at home parents could be doing it part time if we had an actual gig economy. Instead we have an economy so jacked up that I couldn’t afford starting wages in the degrees I got either. I hope the H1B person is doing well at them. Jolie LaChance KG7IQC

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  5. I’m glad Vivek said this. This boil needs to be lanced, the pus drained out, and poultices applied. Maybe even hot iron slapped to it.

    The sooner everyone realizes that HR departments run by toxic credentialed morons who are guided by requirements decreed by equally toxic credentialed morons in government and the governmental bureaucracy, the better. These fools are killing industry, business and education, the sooner this can be addressed the sooner we can load all those responsible onto Golfinchian Ark B and have done with them.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Yes. But.

      And as an informational aside, I speak to this issue with a couple and a half decades in Silicon Valley cubeland serving in the trenches on the semiconductor manufacturing front.

      There’s a tension constraint between the HR department idiots and the hire-only-from-where-I’m-from engineer-who-climbed-to-management idiots. Nuke HR and there’d be even more seventh-cousin-of-someone H1b and prior-H1b-who-finally-got-their-green-card hiring. Just as, if HR had its way unopposed, only purple-haired gender-indeterminate-how-dare-you-assume would ever be hired for hardcore engineering jobs.

      The fighting it takes to do something absolutely crazy, such as the hiring manager getting the full pile of resumes and then interviewing to find the best by merit, is buffeted from all sides by contrasting demands and requirements and targets and hints and roadblocks. ANd then they get the same thing from above.

      And this does not touch at all on the main contrary opinion I have to Vivek on H1b slave labor. I guarantee you that the main, primary, number one reason for hiring H1b employees is they hire in cheaper, never ask for a raise, and don’t job-hop for the entire indentured servitude period until they get that green card. This savings on payroll expense directly flows to the bottom line, and their bottom line is what keeps a VP or EVP getting stock options and bonuses.

      The only way to free the slaves is to reform and enforce the existing requirement, which are laughed and and filled pro forma, that the job in question cannot be filled by a US Person before one can even consider shopping overseas. I don’t know how to reasonably do this, but if that part of the immigration law was actually followed I’d have no problem with H1b visas.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Requirements like “must have 3 years experience on tool XYZ” when XYZ not out more than 6 months, or the earliest alpha/beta releases no more than 18 to 24 months old?

        Never mind that every job I started at I was not only dead cold on the systems (okay first one at least no one had to define company terms), but most if not all the tools (at best had a class or seminar). Yet up to speed well with in < month (when 6 months before touch code was the “norm”). And, while I’m good, very good, I am not exceptional (not compared to some I’ve worked with, although they had major savant blind spots …)

        Yes. I might have issues with tech hiring practices from the ’90s and early ’00s. Might color why I despised job hunting.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. I got very lucky in my last job because it had a hard requirement of a number of years of a specific business domain and diverse technical background. I was one of a few jackpot hires for the contract.

          The specific tools didn’t matter as much, since any diligent person can learn yet another API, scripting language, ETL system, network, hardware, etc and optimise the heck out of the processes.

          I was also lucky that the subcontinent mafia couldn’t meet the requirements for all of the team’s positions. They would have if they could.

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      2. yes, the punchline is important. Looking at it seriously, it is morally repugnant to decide our cirizens are useless or “un-essential” even when they’re marxists who hate us. It is wrong. And it is wrong for our govt systems to have the opwer to decide who is essential. Theyll be as bad at that in immigration as they are in everything, which is why Sarah is right but the BS .01% comment.

        But bigger issue is Sarah was born with the values of an American, and as Vivek showed in technicolor, he hasn’t the faintest idea what those values are. Waves of unrestricted immigration in the 1800s were accompanied by mediating institutions to help accomplish the assimilation.

        Now there are anti-assimilation systems in k-12 and church based welfare. Whether h1b or illegal, both types of immigration promote slavery and indentured servitude of immigrant (to the state or worse, to each other –yes the Indians enslave each other– and the trafficking is all about slavery) and result in a demoralized citizen.

        the values of America are unique even in Christendom, and did not appear in non-christendom. The high trust society that worked even with a melting pot of people was unique. The desire to help each other when the other was other was unique. The fierce loyalty to fixing something until it worked was unique. Individuals can harbor them or adopt them, but without assimilation, unconstrained immigration is a cataclysm.

        Liked by 1 person

  6. It’s not fun anywhere else in the hiring market if you don’t have the right tokens-or have too many of the wrong ones.

    Age is a big one in tech these days-unless you’re one or two guys I know who is in that 0.01% of programmers who can handle certain legacy systems, you’ve either moved into management by 40 or you’re gone. Anybody I know that’s my age in tech has found a niche that it is cheaper to pay them than to hire the six or seven people required to replace them.

    I’m having to look for a backup job and because I’m white and male in trying to apply for jobs in the various government offices (and I’m not going into a “manly” job like law enforcement, firefighting, or EMS), I’ll do three or four rounds of interviews and they choose around me. Usually “ethnic” and usually female. Often because they know each other through other places.

    I’m in agreement with ESR in a lot of ways-the H-1B system has been used for decades as a way to legally “enslave” labor (who would then turn around and work the HR system to get people they know hired, because they come from countries where being a cruel sociopath outside your immediate clan is traditional) to keep costs down, while companies are too busy trying to keep the venture capital and Wall Street people happy.

    There’s a lot of things that need to be fixed, and while we can’t fix them all in the next two to four years, we (meaning Trump and his staff) need to get started immediately. It’s not going to be pleasant, but it’s damned long overdue.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I recommending finding a niche that cheaper and less experienced workers can’t fill. For me that was a combination of knowing literal bit-fiddling, and being an ontologist. You need to be trained 50 years ago for the first, and have trained for 40 years to be the second. But then I never did things the easy way.

      Liked by 1 person

    2. I basically baled on trying to get full-time work after about 2008. I filled in by temping, and some patchwork as an independent contractor, but as soon as I could opt for social security, I applied for it. That and the military pension, and the fact that I had a mortgage that wasn’t impossible… but I think all the work/jobs that came to me after a certain point was through friends of friends, and various free-lance gigs. After a certain age – no employer is interested.

      Liked by 2 people

        1. My last paid job was via contacts. Knew the sales rep for the machine, and the machine manufacturer needed people to get a new capability up and running. I was suitable, so got the job. (Was laid off from my semiconductor test/product engineering job shortly before my 49th birthday. Circa 2001, and the trend was well spotted.)

          By that time, I’d been programming that company’s machines for about 10 years. I knew most of the tricks and quirks, though I didn’t learn all of them until I had conversations with the company support people. (“It does what!!!??? OK, not what I expected. Can you document it, please?” Or else, politely implied…)

          Liked by 2 people

    3. “Age is a big one in tech these days-unless you’re one or two guys I know
      who is in that 0.01% of programmers who can handle certain legacy
      systems, you’ve either moved into management by 40 or you’re gone. Anybody I know that’s my age in tech has found a niche that it is cheaper to pay them than to hire the six or seven people required to replace them.”

      ……………

      Nothing new. And I was one of those who could work in a lot of legacy languages if not the systems themselves.

      “do three or four rounds of interviews and they choose around me. Usually “ethnic” and usually female.”

      …………

      Must of been the “ethnic”, because being female in tech sure didn’t help. In fact it dang near derailed me for “fit” at the last company.

      I am so glad I am out of the tech working market.

      Liked by 2 people

    4. Well, I’m screwed then.

      I’m 58. White, male, plus conservative, Christian, and Southern and firmly settled where I am. And where I am is a pretty good job market…if you’re Indian. All the employers here in my area, which is very heavy on finance, have their IT staffs at least 50% Indian or Indian-American. My company’s QA department where I work is more like 65%, and closer on 100% for our many contractors both on- and off-shore. All the recruiters who contact me…are Indian working for Northeastern contracting firms that are themselves, from what research I’ve done, basically 100% Indian H-1B body shops.

      My screwup was, I always figured that my soft skills in communication would help me out as I got older. Come to find out, now that we’ve got zero-generation Indian(-American) imports in middle and upper-middle management, nobody gives a damn about communication any more. You can write your documentation and emails and your PowerPoints in Hinglish and nobody cares. The business people are used to it and the tech people speak it natively.

      I don’t want to get into management. I wanted to find a nice niche and curl up in it and do my job and ride it out until retirement, and I have to a point. But it’s a niche where I suddenly find myself under management that is using the highly hierarchical, metrics-driven, impersonal, top-down Indian management style. And yes, that is a thing. I actually had to go to a class at my job a few years ago about cultural differences and that was one of them. Indians learn management as “shut up and do what I say” instead of collaborative teamwork. So I had a boss for a few months that was literally making me make a new spreadsheet every week to track the same thing, micromanaging the size and formatting of the columns, making changes to it behind my back, and then telling me “don’t worry about actually bringing these two junior engineers into your team, they’re just here to automate testing so don’t use them for anything else, or teach them anything about the system they’re working on. All we want is for the numbers to go up on your sheet every week so {MANAGERS} are happy.” Fortunately, I got moved out from under him a few months later and he surprisingly got laid off two weeks ago. But after ten years of great reviews I got a bad one last year simply because the only thing my department head cared about was test automation. That was it. Never mind all the dozens of cool features we put in or the low error rate or the fact that automating tests on a phone system is not the same as a web page. Low automation, therefore you’re not meeting the goals I set for you, therefore you’re on thin ice.

      I don’t want the H-1B visa program reformed. I want it blown up, destroyed, and every single H-1B visaholder sent home. Full stop. That won’t help me as my problems are with folks who are here as citizens or permanent residents working in management, but it’ll help the next generation of American tech worker at least. I don’t want to say that citizens must be given preferential hiring, because that leaves behind at least a rump remnant of the DEI hierarchy, but maybe they should? That’s for somebody smarter than me to work out.

      Sarah is, sadly, right. There’s a pressure building. I know it because I’m smack in the middle of the fault line. Vivek just found it out when he stepped on a landmine on Xwitter. The American worker is ANGRY. And the technocrats, whether they’re allegedly “MAGA” or not, are ignoring that anger at their own risk.

      Liked by 4 people

      1. The American worker has, by the rules of the culture, been promised some things over the last sixty to eighty years.

        And it’s taken this long for those promises to be fully and completely broken.

        The only thing that’s going to fix it is fixing the things that have failed.

        End H-1B (anybody that says it isn’t modern-day slavery either hasn’t studied it or is lying to your face). Make it harder for companies to use that excuse to low-ball American labor.

        Reduce utility costs-cheaper gas and electricity will echo in the economy in so many different ways.

        Start hard-core law enforcement and deportations of illegals. There are people that are innocent and trying to do something legal in the system. I might extend an amnesty, but only if they start the process of getting legal ASAP.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Your first line hit me this way. The Bonus Army and the governments response to it. As it ryhmes not equals I cannot push the analogy, it is analogy. Something will break.

          Liked by 2 people

        2. I was laid off/retired before H1b was a thing. Offshoring was my nemesis, plus “we have to shrink the company’s product lines to look good on Wall Street”. Still a crap sandwich.

          I was 50 when it was clear that my job description no longer applied in Silicon Valley, and (circa 2002) we thought the housing bubble was going to burst Real Soon Now. The old house might be “worth” 3 times what we sold it for, but we got enough equity to get a decent place in Flyover County and to make the place what we wanted. Got a little(!) tight before retirement could be tapped, but we made it. (Generous MIL helped. Not my favorite person for other reasons, but she helped us get through.)

          Liked by 3 people

          1. Depends on the industry. H1b was a well established thing waaaay back when I was a fng in my first windowless cubical back in the late 80’s in semiconductor tech.

            Like

  7. It still boggles my mind in how my husband lucked into a career. (23 years so far is a career—almost unheard of for my generation.) You know what happened? Among thousands of applicants at this new hot store job… his was the one with shipping and receiving experience. As in, he’d worked in a warehouse.

    And he worked well at it. And he got promoted out of it. And he then went back to work at it when his replacement was found to be making fraudulent returns, and his methodology for fixing a completely wrecked set of inventory impressed the corporate end, where he was trying to get hired. And the corporate end hired him.

    And aside from one bad boss (that saying about not quitting bad jobs so much as bad bosses really rings true), he’s been going strong ever since.

    And it happened because somebody human looked at his resume, realized that his skill set was desperately needed, and called him in for an interview.

    Liked by 2 people

  8. There’s another component to the debate that nobody has mentioned. From earliest Colonial times, immigration had a 60-year cycle. 30 years of high immigration, followed by 30 years of low immigration. Wave 6 started in the early 1960s, SHOULD have ended in the early/mid 1990s…but instead, the immigration valve was welded wide open.

    Americans have been overwhelmed. We want the Criminal Invaders removed, but we also want legal immigration severely curbed. An immigration holiday of several decades, to give us time to assimilate Wave 6. Teach them our ways, get them into the assimilation pipeline.

    Otherwise, things are going to get ugly. Fast. There’s a lot of pent-up anger and bitterness.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Instead, what we’re getting from Elon and Vivek is that we’re inbred raaaaacists for daring to bring it up.

      Like

      1. I, personally, have been in the position of selling to guys in construction/trades that I know have been coming to the same place for three years… half of them insist they “no speak English” and the others have not improved what they do speak, at all. It wears on you.

        Liked by 2 people

  9. I’ll add that if you’re in the software or engineering fields, the only safe employment is with the Department of Defense or the defense industry. Foreigners can’t get security clearances.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Which is why we let Chinese nationals / contractors become database system admins on the OPM clearance background check database a few years back.

      “But they don’t have clearances yet?”

      “10% for the Big Guy and something can be arranged, right?”

      I am really tired of being screwed by corruptocrats and then being told I just didn’t work hard enough.

      Liked by 3 people

        1. As far as I ever heard not only were there no OPM rolling heads (“I was promised rolling heads!”), there was no wrist slapping or stern talking to either. They just issued the contract to give me and everyone else for whom Chinese State Security was cc’d on their security clearance forms free credit monitoring forever.

          Liked by 1 person

  10. We have some personal experience with this as SIL worked for Infosys, the Indian coding firm, for about a year after graduation. A few things, Infosys was hiring Americans because Infosys has a huge issue communicating with the end users and they were trying to fix the problem. Second, Infosys sends all new employees for training at a facility in Mysore. All employees because the level of fraud in Indian universities is such that they couldn’t believe anyone. The failure rate is very high even though the level is quite low and none of the Americans had the slightest difficulty. None of the Americans seem to have lasted long because management with Indian characteristics is a thing.

    all that said, if they believe that the supply is limited, they should pay more and let the market clear. Given the HUGE margins in tech, they can afford it. Let the market work rather than whore for subsidies.

    Liked by 2 people

  11. There a couple of things about “hiring the best”. First, in any significant enterprise, you need the best at many different skills, and it’s hard to test for that. Lots of folks say you need big, strong men for firefighters/emergency responders. But sometimes you need somebody small enough to get in and out of a tight place. You don’t want everybody on your football team to be 6 foot 8 and 320 pounds. Some great halfbacks are close to the ground and have a great sense of balance. You need to understand how to make best use of the talents of many different folks with many different skillsets. There’s room for both the A-10 and the F-22.

    Second, as you point out, it’s not just knowledge but potential, and it takes someone savvy to judge potential. I don’t want just the accomplished to come to the US, but those who will make their best accomplishments here because they have that pioneering spirit. Would you turn away an Andrew Carnegie at age 12? Of course there were lots of other folks who didn’t become Andrew Carnegie either.

    I applaud ex-twitter because Vivek got all the right feedback now that the censorship police aren’t running things anymore. Hopefully, he’s now heard and listened to those he didn’t encounter in his daily life, who have a different perspective.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Well…. maybe not. Because Elon has admitted that if you have lots of followers who then unfollow you, you’re throttled and reach reduced. All it takes is the right bots….

      “Ruled by algorithm”…. Exhibit A.

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    2. I agree. Sometimes you need small, strong men.

      I still remember when the shrimpy little nazi-larper cold straight-punched moldie-locks and she bounced off the pavement. She wasn’t big, but she was bigger than he was.

      If we could trust women to have honor, and men not to simp*, we could have the far end of the female bell curve in these jobs, too.

      Torques me off that we cannot.

      I suspect it is a modern-day thing, not a necessarily-true-always thing.

      (*in general. See Sampson & Delilah. Or Adam & Eve. It goes back a loooong time. Western cultures, including ours, have mitigated the base urges)

      Like

  12. Everyone thinks Elon is all that because he’s going to get us to Mars.

    A laudable goal.

    Mike Rowe and his compadres are going to keep us alive and in clean water, decent food, and warm hovels here on earth.

    I you have an offspring or grand-offspring of either gender who is willing to or especially LOVES to work with their hands, the trades are the way to go.

    Plumbers, electricians and automechanics need to be onsite. There is a desperate need for the trades. If you have any aptitude whatever, you will always be able to make a good living. If you an run and troubleshoot a CNC machine, you can always get a job.

    Liked by 1 person

      1. This. There’s a yuge shortage of A&Ps. But it’s the industry as well – the youngins who finish the course and pass the FAA tests at the local -public-JC-affiliated A&P school regularly get poached out to be paid much more money working in the service department at local Porsche and Lexus dealerships.

        Liked by 1 person

      2. $OLDER_BROTHER got his A & P just as the airlines hit a major recession (back when 747s were new). As he proved to be prone to, he dropped all thought of trying after the recession in favor of “something else”. He’s my brother, not my kid. Took a while to embed that thought when dealing with him…

        Liked by 1 person

    2. One of my nephews is going through trade school right now for HVAC work and was telling me that, once he’s got some experience under his belt, he could go down to Texas and potentially pull in 6-figure pay.

      And, honestly, I believe it. If he keeps training to where he can work on refrigeration units, that gets his foot in the door for commercial equipment and potentially even more pay.

      Liked by 1 person

  13. This is, at best, a tangent or a sidebar to your actual point, but…

    OMG, “token based” education is the best description of something that has bothered me for fifteen years that I haven’t been able to distill to essentials the way your phrase does. The closest I came was calling it “checkbox education”, and knew that wasn’t quite right. I’ve watched very intelligent parents ride herd on their very intelligent kids to make sure they got all the “right” tokens (as much as Odd kids would allow) so they could go to the “right” universities, and it rubbed me wrong for reasons you crystalized, but I couldn’t explain at the time. It also makes perfect sense because it maps to video game structure: collect tokens, unlock achievements. (And many people my age and younger grew up on video games, so the fact that it “just feels right” is, basically, trained in.)

    And that feels like it ties in with something else that’s been in my mind the past few days. There is a phrase that, the moment I heard it, I despised, but I can’t stop seeing it apply: “basic bitch”. It’s one of those trendy phrases that’s used by not terribly insightful people to dismiss anything they don’t like. And yet… “token based” education is the basic bitch way to get your kids into the right schools with the right credentials, no insight required. (The phrase came to mind because Ted Cruz did a podcast listing 25 of his favorite movies, and I was frankly shocked at how basic bitch the list was. There were some outliers, and the list was catered specifically to be recommendations for his wide podcast audience, which probably caused him to keep to “more normal” stuff, but still it was not a particularly personal list — outside of a few selections — which I would have expected from him.)

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Just occurred to me that this comes in two flavors. There’s the “Asian,” “Work hard, study hard, focus everything on getting that right education/job, revere brains not brawn,” thing Vivek seems to be suggesting. And there’s the aristocrat’s, “Junjor, you will go to the ‘right,’ school, and get the ‘right,’ major for a person of our wealth and class. Then your father’s friend/ally will offer you a position in the ‘right,’ firm or you will work in the ‘right’ NGO, as is appropriate for One of Us.” Two sides of one coin?

      Thing is, that’s not the same as, work hard, study hard, grab opportunity when it pops and run with it.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. No. The thing you’re identifying in the second is the upper classes.
        The rest of us is “Your child must do this, if you expect him to get into college at all.”

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  14. I’ve been watching all of this on X with a certain degree of amusement. That there’s an issue has been clear for over a decade, when the stories first started emerging of workplace veterans being summarily laid off, and told that they could only get a severance package if they agreed to train their foreign-born replacements.

    The good news is that some eyes appear to have been opened. For example, Brad Wardell – the CEO of Stardock (a video game publisher) – described a positive experience in which his company used an H1B to bring in an artist, and then were able to hire several American artists to work under the one that had been brought in with the H1B. Unsurprisingly, he’s generally in favor of the overall idea behind the program.

    But at the same time, he admits that he wasn’t aware of how heavily abused the system is. For those not following this, apparently all of the H1B applications are public. You can look them up online. And there are plenty of such visas granted for “high-end” jobs as “cooks” who get paid $22K a year.

    Another problem that people point to is the HR department issue. There has been more than one story of someone submitting a resume upon the recommendation of the head of the department, only for nothing to happen as a result of the application. When this is eventually followed up on, it’s discovered that the HR department discarded the resume without informing the department that the application was for. Sometimes this is due to “evil white male must go away” attitudes. Sometimes it’s due to sloppy screening software, and HR people who aren’t familiar with the actual needs of the departments that they’re supposed to be screening for.

    There’s been a lot of chatter about possible fixes. The simplest has been to completely do away with the H1B program, while keeping the O-1 program (which apparently is aimed at the people who are at or close to the tops of their respective fields). Another has been to put a high surcharge on each H1B application. If a company has to pay an extra 100K for each H1B employee, then it will hopefully be too expensive to recruit indentured chaff. A third option would be to move away from the lottery system that’s currently in place, and switch it to a bidding system. Once again, this would hopefully encourage employers to only shell out money for quality foreign hires.

    Unfortunately, the biggest problem right now is that there are too many people invested in the current system. Congress would need to be persuaded that any changes are necessary, and there are a lot of lobbyists with fat wallets who are very interested in persuading Congress to leave things as they are.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Many years ago, my wife (SheSellsSeashells here on the blog and Discord) worked as a secretary in an immigration lawyer’s office. She handled the paperwork on a lot of O-1 and similar very highly specialized visas–no H-1Bs, this guy was way way too high dollar to work on mere H-1Bs.

      The sheer amount of paperwork for one of those O-1s, or even more restrictive “national interest waivers” is INSANE. And the procedures are Kafka-esque. One tiny mistake, one glitch, the whole thing gets thrown out and started over again. It can take a year or more.

      At the same time she was working for this lawyer, I was working a block away in IT for a financial institution. We had an H-1B get hired at my level (I was pay “grade 14,” which was a “lead” role) in another team. He was really good, I mean hella good. A serious asset. But they had to publicly post those H-1Bs by law, and so I got to see the job opening.

      They literally tailored the job opening for this guy. As in, literally wrote the experience clauses needed to match his job experience. And then, they listed it as pay “grade 10.” Four pay grades lower than every other lead role in the company. That meant he was making maybe, at best, 2/3 of what I was.

      From what I’ve heard over the year, this type of chicanery is common. The whole system is being massively abused and needs to be torn down to the roots and then salted so it can’t grow again. Our immigration system is completely broken, letting in floods of people on the low end but making it nearly impossible for the REAL top-end best of the best to get in.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. The funny thing is that depending, your financial institution might not have been saving all that much money. If the H1B was a contract placement, then your employer might have been spending almost as much on the H1B employees as it would have for an American employee, with the difference going to the company holding the contract.

        All of my jobs for some time have been “placement company recruits me for a contractor that has the contract with the company that I’m actually working for”. The placement company is the company that cuts my paycheck. While I don’t know the exact value, the placement company takes a *huge* chunk of the money that the contractor pays for my services. There’s a good chance that anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 of the money that the contractor pays the placement company for my services stays with the placement company, and doesn’t end up in my paycheck.

        That’s a *lot* of money.

        Further, if I get hired directly by the contractor or the company I’m doing work for, then the placement company gets a very hefty bounty. That bounty remains the same whether I’ve been on that job for six months or six years.

        And placement companies are how a lot of those H1B employees get hired by American companies.

        Liked by 1 person

    2. “HR people who aren’t familiar with the actual needs of the departments that they’re supposed to be screening for.”

      I look at my son’s process coming out of college. Two different example sets. He had two chemistry lab lead engineers working with him to customize his resume to submit a copy to them and the temp to hire agency their respective companies used. Why did they need a copy? Because they had to hand walk it to their bosses then “make sure” his application was properly pulled by company HR and the agency. Nothing came of this because both local companies got bought out, for intellectual and process patents, and everyone already working were scrambling for their own jobs at the new companies. Round two, these are cabinet making firms, but same thing. Recommended by workers (fellow Eagle from same troop at first one), position opens up, but to insure to get son pulled by HR and the agency, they have to walk it through, or it doesn’t happen. Second firm, head hunted by a former manager, away from the first one, same exact process.

      It seems like anyone only has to say “HR ….” and everyone else just nods and sighs.

      Liked by 3 people

    3. Some “black-pill” was warning that we were approaching the point where CisWMs had only two things of value, votes and bodies for the b00g.

      Trump was the attempt to use votes….

      Like

        1. I don’t like it; I just refuse to ignore the growing body of examples of why it may be necessary. And I don’t much like the ratio between “promises” vs “policy” Elon and Vivek are growing.

          Like

  15. I was in my late 50s and had to get a job. I got lucky as there was a job for a left handed geek who could read Sanskrit. Kidding aside I had the weird combination of education (MsEd) work experience (law enforcement and corrections) and computer skills. So the wonderful boss hired the old guy as she figured I was the one who could actually do the job.

    It worked out well for me up to retiring and never having to work again. I got lucky and was thankful for how it worked out. The funny part was I was the old guy who could help the youngsters out when the program failed or hung up. Good genes also helped as I didn’t “look” old. The new hires always figured I was 15 or 20 years younger than I was. Good times. Glad I am out now.

    The system desperately needs change and my wife who retired from HR agrees as she retired when all the regulations and hiring requirements favored the non citizens when management played the game frustrated her and she wouldn’t just go along so instantly a housewife. Again good times

    Liked by 2 people

    1. I’m 63. I was “downsized” out of a job (owner of the company went into semi-retirement, running the reduced company of just himself out of his own home) this past June. I’ve been looking for work every since. I’ve had a few “nibbles”–a couple of phone interviews, and one or two automated web interviews–but nothing until just a bit ago with a tentative job offer as a patent examiner and I’m still slowly grinding through the process of trying to turn that into an actual job–which can fail at any point.

      This has seriously been an unfun process.

      Liked by 1 person

    2. I’m 63. I was “downsized” out of a job (owner of the company went into semi-retirement, running the reduced company of just himself out of his own home) this past June. I’ve been looking for work every since. I’ve had a few “nibbles”–a couple of phone interviews, and one or two automated web interviews–but nothing until just a bit ago with a tentative job offer as a patent examiner and I’m still slowly grinding through the process of trying to turn that into an actual job–which can fail at any point.

      This has seriously been an unfun process.

      Liked by 1 person

  16. Personally, I’m reasonably confident Musk is getting that top talent, because I’m reasonably his HR department consists of the project engineers reading resumes and interviewing people.

    Just as I’m reasonably confident that the companies with the HR drones reading resumes and interviewing people are getting dumped by fraudulent credentials and work histories, and paying low engineering wages for what they could have gotten better from an enthusiastic teenager.

    Like

      1. Based on where his companies are at, I doubt he is doing it wholesale, and I strongly doubt they are systematically abusing the system the way mostid-life.companies are, or we would be seeing much more spectacular and embarrassing failures from them.

        All of that said, he is absolutely the exception that probes the rule, not the baseline.

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      2. I would say that based on the results, Elon is getting the top talent.

        But part of it is that they are equally willing to get rid of people. In the recent book “reentry” about SpaceX history, there is a story of someone who was hired for a job, who found out on his first day that they had hired two people for the same job with the expectation being that “one of you will quit or be fired within a month”

        When you have companies that the best engineers are clammering to work in, and are ruthless at replacing them as they burn out or show that they aren’t up to it, what remains will get spectacular work done.

        Like

        1. and are ruthless at replacing them as they burn out 

          At which point, you have been exposed to Elon’s trade secrets, whether AI or electric cars or rocketry. Anyone want to place any bets on what his non-compete / disclosure agreements look like? Did you just make enough to wait that long for your next job? And what will that gap in your resume look like when you can look again?

          Everyone is looking at this through their piece of the elephant; you may try to eat it one bite at a time, but you have to kill it first or you’re going to have a lot of wastage getting it to sit still for it. What I just put up is just one of the pieces of the puzzle.

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          1. There are too many Tesla and SpaceX folks out there founding new companies that compete with Tesla and SpaceX for there to be the draconian non-compete agreements you fear.

            Remember, Elon is on the record saying that he thinks pursuing Patents is a bad idea and has offered all of Tesla’s patents to their competition (mutual disarmament of patent claims, not you sue my patents but sue me over your patents handouts)

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  17. My answer to the H1b abuse isn’t to set numerical limits, but instead set a minimum wage. H1b claims that the people you are bringing in are needed because you can’t find the experience locally. So set the minimum wage to something like $250k or something like that. If you really are bringing in experts, companies will be thrilled to pay that wage (and would probably already be paying more)

    but it will cut out the gaming of the system to pull in people to undercut the pay

    Liked by 2 people

    1. This (or some variant of it) seems like a winning move. Play up the “H1B is slavery” angle using the visa farms as proof, and throw in “Pay the top talent what they’re worth.” to seal the deal. The slavery accusation is hard to defend against and resonates across the political spectrum, while the fair wage argument should placate the honest meritocrats. “Fewer and better paid.” is a sweet spot.

      That just leaves the employers who explicitly want cheap labor, which is a hard case to make when they’re using H1Bs to undercut American workers. That won’t stop the lobbyists from trying to preserve the status quo, but with the right pitch, you might be able to line up most of the country against the people who are profiting from this.

      Liked by 1 person

  18. I’ve always considered myself a constitutional libertarian. I could tag nationalist on the end, works with the theme.

    There’s a whole host of confusions with the Elon/Vivek controversy, not least of which the complicated morass of our legal immigration system and the MASSIVE corrosive pressure of illegal immigration which surrounds the whole discussion in toxic fog. But I’m gonna point to a couple that I haven’t seen enough coverage on. One, both of these guys are viewing the situation from the top of their orgs, through data already filtered past nepotistic hiring managers and irretrievably corrupted HR departments. They’ve got a rosy picture missing the muddy manure at the roots. Not unusual, not unexpected. Two, they’re both products of successful immigration stories, and they carry some biased assumptions. Not wrong assumptions, just not universally applicable.

    So, they’re stepping in it. And not just as applies to the narrow argument, but into the whole complicated mess of our legal and illegal immigration situation and all the entirely justified anger and resentment boiling around it. Makes for a hot, messy stew. They’re big boys, though, they’ll deal.

    The bit I’m taking a really dim view toward…well couple quotes out of The Washington Examiner:

    We welcomed the tech bros when they came running our way to avoid the 3rd grade teacher picking their kid’s gender – and the obvious Biden/Harris economic decline. We did not ask them to engineer an immigration policy. -Matt Gaetz

    “We’ve already started to see a problem where it looks like Musk is calling the shots like what we last saw last week with government funding,” said a GOP Senate aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity in an effort to reflect candidly on the situation. “We need [Musk and Ramaswamy] to stay out of the conversations about immigration policy on social media. It’s divisive, and I’m sure the incoming administration would prefer to have these conversations behind the scenes instead of debating them out in the open.”

    “We are about to have a GOP trifecta, and we need to be united as a party, and this only proves to divide us further,” the aide added. – from the article, Trump Base Splits…

    The H1B visa convo needs to happen, and (contra dipshit senate aides) it needs to happen in public view. Backroom politics and “party unity” (united in corruption, weakness and failure?) have not served us well. Employees get the benefit of unsupervised work after establishing a trusted, quality record. Congress? Nah.

    Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are putting their ideas out there on a public platform, open for critique and debate and they’re getting it. For, against, pissed off, belligerent…they’re definitely getting it. All to the good. They’re not “engineering an immigration policy” FFS, they’re debating ideas in detail and in public. Maybe pols oughta try it.

    As to Gaetz and the “we welcomed…we did not ask” formulation: Welcome to coalition politics. The voting block in not homogeneous, it’s a raucous crowd of individuals with expectations (often conflicting, at least superficially) and the days of “thanks for the vote, now sit down in back and shut up,” well they’re fading. Politicians better learn to MAKE THEIR CASE and FIGHT for it.

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    1. Yes, it is a discussion that needed to happen. The left thinks this means we’re dying. But we’re not. In the end this is for our good. We’re the side that GROWS on disagreement.

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      1. I’m giving up on WP for today. I typed out a wonderfully pithy comment (I swear it was pithy) on my phone, logged in to post and *poof!* off into the ether. Probably lurking, waiting to pop up and embarrass me with it’s distinct lack of pith.

        Are we to the “salt the ground” stage with WP, yet? ‘Cause I really wanna.

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      2. Yup.

        Cernovich on the X:

        The low grade racism is bot activity and maybe even being boosted by H-1B mills. Vivek gets standing ovations at events. Harmeet is propped up. Kash is king. And not in a token way. REAL LOVE. I know MAGA and nobody real talks in the vulgar way seen these last 48-72 hours.

        Vivek in the replies:

        In the real 3D world, it’s always been real love. Grateful for it. Good debate makes us stronger.

        As an aside, this is the second comment I tried posting from my phone that dissolved into the ether without explanation from WP (in addition to my stint in moderation purgatory, which was probably a mis-key issue on my part). Is this an ongoing problem for anybody else? (posting this from the desktop) Maybe the desktop login is killing the phone login? Dunno.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. It also varies from computer to computer. I sometimes get spammed or moderated from this (mac) machine, while the PC I occasionally use goes through without a hitch. No clue what’s going on. (I don’t think the people running WP know, either.)

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          1. Hmph. Figures.

            I’m not convinced there are people running WP. I suspect twisted inter-dimensional beings with dark motives and an insatiable lust to feed on our frustration.

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        3. It may be more widespread than that. I also had trouble with comments on a number of sites, both WP and otherwise. Disqus was particularly bad.

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    2. EVERYTHING needs to be debated out in the open!! That is OUR government they’re monkeying with, WE need to see what they’re doing in our name! Secrecy leads to lies and corruption; see Exhibit A, the Sewer of Sodom on the Potomac.

      If they don’t want We The People to see what they’re up to, that’s proof enough that we NEED to see it!

      Liked by 1 person

  19. So I’ve been hanging out on teh X today, shouting into the void and watching Elon get incredibly aggressive about defending the H-1B program (but at the same time saying he’s open to gutting it while making it easier to get the true best-of-the-best). And I saw Vivek say something that actually managed to piss me off. Paraphrasing, it was something like:

    “Merit or group quotas. Can’t have both.”

    Actually, my friending, yes you can. You can quite easily prioritize American citizens over immigrants and THEN hire on merit. I fail to see how prioritizing American citizens in hiring is somehow a “group quota” or “DEI hire.” Citizenship MEANS something, or at least should.

    After all, America First should mean Americans First, should it not?

    Also, I get annoyed with Elon’s constant reference to hiring the best of the best like you’re drafting or signing free agents for a sportsball team. We are not a sportsball team. We are a country. And while we are less hidebound and nowhere near as “volkisch” as almost any other country in the world, there is still an American culture and an American way of life, as our Dear Hostess often reminds us. And if you come here wanting to take advantage of our benefits, you damn well better become part of that culture and way of life or you can take yourself back home.

    PS: Happy 39th anniversary Sarah and Dan!

    Liked by 1 person

    2. The worst H-1B techno-serfdom here in America is better than the best they can hope for back where they came from.

      That’s not our fault. American workers don’t deserve to suffer for the deplorable conditions in other countries.

      Liked by 1 person

    3. In earlier H1-B discussions the ones favoring it would point to Los Alamos and the Manhattan Project. von Neumann, Teller, Bethe, Fermi, Seaborg, and Wigner, and fly-bys by Bohr. “Look at the stature of those men! We couldn’t have done it without them!”

      Yet… the Soviets did, and the French did, mostly on their own. Contrary to common belief, the Soviet scientists got very little information from their spies; Stalin mistrusted the scientists, most of whom were political deviants by Soviet standards, and Beria mostly used his spy reports to cross-check their progress. (the Soviets also absorbed the Japanese atomic bomb project when they invaded north Korea)

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  21. @ Anonymoose: I note that the video on how companies are deliberately avoiding hiring American workers was made in 2007.

    Nothing has been done to fix the fraud in 17-plus years (I don’t know when it all started; probably before the ink on the president’s signature was dry).

    If Elon and Vivek are ignorant of the scam, they need to be educated.

    If they continue refusing to listen to the people they claim they want to help, then their promises are broken, and DOGE is finished before it starts.

    If they know about it, they are not honest brokers, and one is inclined to wonder what they expected to get out of their DOGE appointments.

    I really, really hope they go with the first option and listen to people outside their silos.

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      1. Sarah, thanks for the update in your Monday post.

        I agree with all of your points, and am very glad that they went with the first option: actually listen to people!

        That gives me hope.

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