TeknOShEeP
23d ago
Incorrect, and known to be wrong since the time of Adam Smith - specialization is limited by the extent of the market.
You are talking about a generalization that doesn't apply to the specific situation- right now the the specialization exists. You can pay money to get it. As an example, FAANGs poach each others workers all of the time. But if you, out of a lack of affordable specialization, turn to alternate solutions, then maybe that specialization was not actually as valuable as once believed.
Are we to believe that there's no loss or inefficiency involved in keeping your accounts in a paper ledger rather than a database? What about the applications that are simply impossible without database engineers?
Database engineer is just a job title, and maybe some certs. I know at least three control systems engineers who took much bigger offers to become database engineers because the fundamental math behind optimization is the same for both disciplines, and they are all extremely successful in their new roles. When a FAANG says they cant find an American database engineer and need to parachute in an H-1B, that is, to put it politely, bovine excrement. At best it is incompetent recruiters, and more likely a flat out lie.
TeknOShEeP
23d ago
At some point, however, the price will exceed the value of the work, and the work just won't get done.
Which is a perfectly acceptable business tradeoff.
You see this with minimum wage employees getting replaced by kiosks as the minimum wage goes up
Yes, and I have happily stopped any transactions I would ever have with these sorts of places. I'll still patronize my more local chains (in the vein of In 'n out but better), or even national ones (like Chick-fil-A) that don't treat their employees like cogs. Same with grocery stores. If a business can't cope with rising costs of labor than it deserves to go under.
at the top, I expect you'll simply see progress crawl to a halt (and no, that's not a good thing).
Gonna start an engineering smug war here, but as I see it "tech" progress has already meaningfully ground to a halt outside of LLM babble, and even that is debatable. Ever better targeted ads do not leave the world better off. Recruitment pitch to all of you young programmers stuck in FAANG limbo- go look outside to those clunky old manufacturing, transportation, energy, and industrial companies. They are desperate for good embedded systems engineers, and you can do some fantastically cool shit that will actually make measurable differences in the average person's life.
TeknOShEeP
23d ago
But if the lack of labor drops the value of the output... the output was never valuable in the first place. Say you are having difficulty hiring a database engineer, and eventually you give up and find another solution. Turns out you didnt actually need any database engineers at all.
I do actually think there is something to this, as "tech" seems to be completely infested with solutions (and programmers working on said solutions) searching in vain for a problem. Adding in more people making more "solutions" is not a cure for the condition.
TeknOShEeP
23d ago
There are plenty of roles where demand exceeds supply, however
Then by the iron laws of economics, the price must increase. In this case you can make a very simple argument that H-1Bs are depressing American wages.
About a single hundred thousand, not all of those American
If you limit your pool to CS graduates, yes. But I humbly submit that essentially any engineering or math graduate can be trained fairly easily to do junior programmer job at a FAANG, and i personally know many who have taken that route. That at least triples your available talent pool.
TeknOShEeP
23d ago
Eh, again YMMV but speaking to my experience and that of my colleagues and family, I cannot point to an H-1B that I would say is good for the country. So yeah, I would say its universal abuse (this is not a universal judgement about the character of people receiving those visas, many are fine folks put in a sub-optimal situation).
100k absolutely does not wipe out Apple's backend developer. Thats between 25-33% of their salary, not including benefits. It makes them more expensive, so you have to be more careful, but this is big tech we are talking about, they have more money than God and are not afraid to sling it around.
TeknOShEeP
23d ago
He also tried to get rid of the SALT tax exemption in his first term, which is probably the single most progressive piece of tax policy pushed in the past 70 years (and perhaps the only thing AOC agreed with him on).
Prediction: in 50 years historians will look on Trump like they are now looking on Nixon- unexpectedly the most progressive president of their cohort, and completely unrecognized for it in their time.
TeknOShEeP
23d ago
All the H-1B workers I've met at FAANG were great workers, no different from native born Americans, and they were not paid less.
Then respectfully, their jobs should be going to American workers. There is no role in any FAANG company (unless you mean NVIDIA instead of Netflix) where there are no qualified Americans. As an industry "tech" does not have any super secret squirrel sauce that you can't find employees for in most first world countries, its just about how many you can find and what you pay them (chipmaking is a different ball game of course). American universities are graduating hundreds of thousands of them every year. But its easier for a company to import H-1Bs (and even pay them the same!) who's loyalty you own and who on paper have the skills you need than hire domestic talent that might on paper need training and experience.
But a country should have labor policies that benefit its citizens, maybe even at the expense of other countries citizens, thats one of the points of being a country in the first place.
TeknOShEeP
23d ago
Yeah, I think one of the ones I called an EB-1A is actually an O-1 as he has family back in europe that he will return to. But same concept- the genius visa exists for 95+ percentile individuals, and frankly i dont think we should be recruiting below that at the expense of our domestic labor.
TeknOShEeP
23d ago
I disagree. H-1B is not just "certainly abused", it's universally abused. I'm not saying that H-1Bs are all morons, but some are, and the not-morons are, while competetant, not above replacement level. America generates highly skilled in-demand workers from its domestic population in sufficient numbers to fill any role an H-1B would fill, its just that corporations jave not wanted to spend the time and money to develop the pipeline.
Also, 100k is almost the perfect amount of money to do what you say you want- if your talking about a highly skilled worker (lets be honest, a coder at FAANG or similar) than 100k per year is not actually that big of a deal compared to the rest of their compensation package. It will prevent companies like Cognizant from just chain migrating half of Bengaluru to provide substsndard IT services, and will also prevent scummy hospitals from hiring immigrants instead of domestic medical workers, but isn't stopping Apple from hiring some uber talented backend developer.
TeknOShEeP
23d ago
H-1B allows us to do it by attracting the best and brightest from other countries.
Thats not what H1-Bs are for though. The EB-1A is the "genius visa", and it does not appear to have the $100,000 fee.
H1-Bs are for filling "specialist" roles that "cannot be filled by Americans", and are universally acknowledged to be heavily abused. While I have only run into a few H1-Bs in my industry, none of them impressed me with their acumen or work ethic, and frankly i would have let them go if I had control over it. The EB-1As Ive worked with though have all been frigging rock stars.
TeknOShEeP
29d ago
To me Buttigeig managed to utterly disqualify himself by being probably the worst Secretary of Transportation America has had in at least a quarter century. He essentially was AWOL for at least a quarter of his stint (though given the SecDef was also able to go AWOL for medical reasons, perhaps this was an unannounced policy of the Biden admin?) and offered the weakest possible response to any of the notable transport disasters that occured under his watch.
What policy he did managed to push seemed entirely focused on DEI rather than any actual effectivity or improvement, and in doing so he managed to deeply piss off a number of otherwise apolitcal career professionals, any number of which would be happy to offer damning soundbites to the media outlet of your choice.
The lesson here is if you get a cabinet post as a pay-off for dropping out of the primary, be like Hillary and actually get shit done (we can argue about whether the shit being done was good or bad, but no one was debating that she wasnt capable). If you pull a Pete, your career is dead.
TeknOShEeP
30d ago
Yes, in generally virtually none of the managed/hedge funds outperform the S&P 500, but thats not the point of most of them. Their point is to offer returns uncorrelated with how the S&P500 is doing, hence the term "hedge". In the long run, having a portion of your assests sufficiently diversified from the rest will return higher overall yields.
TeknOShEeP
1mo ago
So... you're reading a bunch of transcripts and concluding that he was a mainstream milquetoast conservative. Well, you'd be correct on that. But Charlie Kirk's power was not in his ideology, or his ideas, or his intellect. Charlie Kirk was extraordinary because alone among any political commentator in the US, he would go to various colleges and universities and welcome open, civil debate with anyone who showed up. This is something that our society is sorely lacking and we need more of, but there are very few people who have the courage to do it. Probably fewer now.
If your point is to dismiss him because he's not an ideological tentpole of conservatism, you are missing the big picture entirely.
TeknOShEeP
1mo ago
Metalworking? No- despite the popular misconception water and ice are considerably more compressible than essentially all metals. You'd probably want something more along the lines of Dexpan, which when mixed with water can (according to the tech specs) provide 18 ksi of compressive force, which might be enough to form some softer metals like copper or aluminum.
TeknOShEeP
1mo ago
This is excellent information, thank you!
TeknOShEeP
1mo ago
Conversely, NY, CA, WA, etc... could be significantly more gerrymandered.
Uh, without some blatantly illegal actions, none of those three could be really any more gerrymandered than they already are. NY was a 57-43 D-R split last election, and yet splits seats 19-7 (76-24%), CA was a 60-40 split and yet seats are split 43-9 (82-18%), and WA was 57-43 splitting seats 8-2.
Conversely Texas was 58-40 with independents, and split seats 25-13 (66-34%).
The problem (and dirty secret) of the DNC in this whole dust up is they have no juice left to squeeze. Their biggest safe states are already gerrymandered as hell, and even friendly courts only bend so far. Gavin Newsome won't do shit because if he pushes harder he might get his already incredibly advantageous map thrown out for one that might more proportionately represent the voters.
To his credit though- he's not as cringe as the Connecticut democratic party and governor who are taking the high road on social media about how they are "avoiding partisan warfare". This conveniently glossed over the fact thst they have already achieved what is proportionally the most gerrymandered state in Amwrican history- the 42% of GOP voters gets exactly zero congress critters, a flawless victory.
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
So since we last spoke, i stumbled across this video which has only reinforced my suspicions that SIG knows they have a serious engineering defect. TL;DW- despite having nominally the same fire control group as the P320, the P365 incorporates a number of changes clearly intended at providing additional layers of safey against accidental discharge, which is why it hasn't been indicted in this whole cluster foxtrot.
As it stands now, while i am happy with my P365, there is no way in hell i would buy or even shoot a P320.
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
perhaps calling Republican Rome atheistic is a stretch
It's not a stretch, its just entirely wrong. It would be wrong for Imperial Rome as well. Like, there are many, many dissertations written about the importance and universality of religious ritual in Rome, but if you really want to experience it first hand, just go there and tour any of the hundreds of temples they built. They didnt do it for aesthetics.
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
Er, where are you located? That sounds just ridiculous enough to interest me.
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
Lol, options are so much fun. They will fuck you 99.99% of the time. But the one time they dont... your broker calls you on January 27 about that Gamestop $10 call you bought 6 months ago on the advice of some idiot degen who's math actually penciled out. "Dude... you gonna exercise or what?"
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
Agreed only on practical grounds, and only for the moment.
It is impossible with current technology to not use a nuclear bomb and adversely affect basically everyone on Earth. Millions of people use guns every day without affecting anyone who doesnt choose to be affected (usually on the gun range wearing ear pro). When humanity spreads among the stars, if you want to make pretty flashes on airless chunks of rock utterly devoid of life, you should be able to.
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
Disagree entirely. While i do not agree with them politically, many of my leftoid friends have suddenly discovered the purpose behind the second ammendment, and are wondering why our state has so many idiotic gun laws.
Guns may be fun, and they may provide a constructive outlet, but their purpose is potential violence. Thats the point. Pretending otherwise is dishonest and pointless.
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
The telos of a great many very useful inventions that are today essential to a civilized world was first to kill people.
Satellite navigation was invented for the explicit purpose of missile guidance during nuclear sneak attacks.
The internet was invented as a command and control loop to enable retaliation in the event of a nuclear sneak attack.
Precision measurement and machining was invented by the gun industry, to make guns, which kill people.
Pesticides that enable the feeding of 8 billion people and freedom from devastating famines are just repurposed chemical weapons.
Modern central planning and crisis response centers are organizational descendents of the Prussian General Staff, which was invented to enable the Prussian army to be a great deal more efficient at killing people.
Essentially any breed of horse not explicitly a draft animal is the result of breeding for war.
That the common European value system ignores these basic truths is not a recommendation in its favor. Rather it serves to illustrate how divorced from reality it is (just in case its current suicidal impulses weren’t obvious enough). Homo Sapiens did not evolve to sit atop this world by being pacifists. We exist because our ancestors (and some currently alive) embraced the necessity of potential violence.
TeknOShEeP
2mo ago
I guess it depends on what your standard for pulls is, I dont own a P320 but i would called them on the lighter side of average for the ones I've shot.
But again, engaging the sear to any point before release should not fire the gun. Tolerance stackup is a thing, but it needs to be managed for safety critical applications.
The issue here is that this gun has like 3 million copies in the U.S. and has undergone numerous rigorous testing and trials.
Sort of? The XM17 selection has been controversial for a while- the P320 did poorly on the drop safety tests resulting in a redesign, and then after down select to just Sig and Glock, Sig was awarded the contract before endurance testing was actuslly accomplished (allegedly because Sig cut their price massively at that point). Police departments appear to have based their selection on the military's selection, but I havent heard much about any of their testing, there doesnt appear to be a whole lot of it done.
Now I agree if this was just bitching about one Glock-clone vs another then there might not be anything to it, but the P320 is not a Glock clone, and has some rather unique elements to its design such as a fully cocked striker on recoil that no one else has done (including Sig on their other guns like the P365), and there appears to be a good reason for that.
Yes, we have a name for that: a politcal party. We could create a new one, or maybe just get one of the existing ones to pick up the idea in exchange for support at the ballot box.
I'm not sure where the idea that politics has to be about high-minded ideals instead of basic collective self-interest, but its crept in somehow and is disastrous in its effects.
More options
Context Copy link