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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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Twitter had a very interesting few days before Christmas, we even saw the return of the huwhite man Jared Taylor to Twitter, which is a fairly surprising thing. I try to not post about India but this is kinda important and has to do with the US so here we go.

In the h1b debate, the point about country caps for skilled migration in the US recently picked up a lot of steam. Trump appointed Sriram as Senior policy advisor for artificial intelligence and his tweets about the removal of h1b caps caused a lot of chaos. David Sacks and the entirety of the tech platoon was defending Sriram, the removal of country caps and ultimately sacks tweeted that Sriram will not control the vias issues since his department is AI.. Many also pointed out Srirams tweet where he openly advocates for active IQ Shredding. Spandrell who coined the term IQ shredders as an example makes a case against such migration as in the end both nations lose bio capital, sriram for instance believes America to be an idea over a people and is fine with all smart Indians leaving en masse which will drop the average iq permanently here. They won't have kids in the US either and the US will have to keep incentivising more people to join to keep up the rate of tech innovation.

India has the highest wait times for h1b visas due to having had IT sweatshops and plenty of fraudsters hustle the legal immigration route. You see most H1Bs coming from three states of 29 here and IT sweatshops which make the backbone of the Indian IT sector indulging in absolute fraud to the point of regular fines spanning more than a decade, fun fact, the founder of Infosys is Former English Prime Minister Rishi Sunaks Father in law. It is a difficult thing, India itself has had anti-migration sentiments within the country as the largest IT hub Bangalore has people routinely asking for fewer migrants as they are not Kannadigas, the local ethnic group.

The political class, however, was unanimously criticising it. Blake Masters, another Theil Capital person turned politician, even asked for the total removal of H1Bs and only keeping O1 visas. All factions of the right did this, including Andrew Torba, Zionists like Laura Loomer, dissidents like BAP, Captive Dreamer and ofc Groypers.

Full disclosure, I am an Indian guy who is in tech, I am still in my home country and cannot comment on this topic without being called a self-hating Indian. India has fat tails and a lot of Indians are not politically scheming migrants, at least not the competent ones. I can't lie about this on an anonymous forum here since I don't like lying but inevitably I also cannot say this publicly as I don't want decent people to get cornered. I am an Indian dude who very likely may migrate after all. It is far easier to simply generalise groups, Tutsis or Yorubas are simply seen as Africans. The Amerikaner is correct but if you are an upper-caste male here, you will never sniff political power, anyone who is smart will be made to live as a nerd and might as well be a nerd doing cooler stuff in a better society than live here and be treated like garbage.

Trump is unlikely to curb the h1b but the most likely outcome will still be more Telugus and other south Indian states having a small number of sweatshops gaming the migration in the US even harder like Gujarati and Punjabis in Canada and rest of the anglosphere.

I feel like a certain part of the debate is circling around the conflation of 'high paid' roles, 'productive' roles and 'socially valuable' roles. Indian H1Bs, to me, have an odd spot in which the Indian American success stories that come to mind are the Satya Nadellas, the Parag Agrawals. Custodian elite bureaucrats who are incredible at 'playing the game' of office politics, but relatively few narratives of actual personal innovation and development.

The narrative coming down to arguments around international competitiveness and the 'best of the best' feels silly when a large chunk of the roles that are filled by the imports are managerial within developed businesses or the creation of further dashboards to track clickthrough rates on advertising. This is hardly Werner Von Braun developing rocket science

Given what a replacement-level CEO did to Microsoft, Satya Nadella's value-over-replacement is in the low trillions of dollars, not counting the consumer surplus generated by Microsoft products mostly ceasing to suck.

Mature companies with P/E ratios north of 20 (which includes all the US tech megastars) are being priced on the basis that the business will outlive the current leadership. Not Boeinging a successful mature business is extraordinarily valuable, and apparently harder than it looks given that Bill Gates' chosen successor couldn't.

Microsoft products mostly ceasing to suck.

Are you out of your damned mind? My experience with every Microsoft product I use has gotten worse to the point where I'm planning on quitting Windows after support for Windows 10 finally ends in only a year.

I mean, lets start with Windows 10. They keep randomly pushing ads into my default experience. Windows updates will constantly start shoving ads into my start menu, lock screen, etc, that I then I have to look up how to turn off. Basic fucking shit like "Solitaire" has been turned into some Games as a Service crap they expect me to pay a monthly fee for in order to skip ads. On solitaire!! Windows 10 was the start of Microsoft pushing updates that, oops, brick your fucking computer. Our bad.

And good god, when it comes to my work, where I'm also locked into a Microsoft ecosystem, to this day nobody knows the correct settings for IIS to keep a web application running instead of going to sleep. I have to keep an instance of Docker running on Windows Server, but every time there is a Windows Update it somehow manages to fucking break "Boot Docker on Startup" and I have to run around figuring out some new goofy script or workaround to make it happen.

It is unfathomable to me that anybody can claim Microsoft's products have gotten better for the user since Satya took over. It's been downhill in a truly unprecedented manner, with unreliable software that is constantly shoving ads into every visible surface. It's enough that I'd rather go back to Win9X, rebooting my computer every day because it was so unstable, versus dealing with the cavalcade of forced advertising and things breaking out from under me that modern Windows represents.

Wait, how do you get all this stuff? I lobotomized my copy of 10 with powershell when I first got it, and set it up to look just like XP. I'd go fucking nuclear if I ever saw an ad in my operating system.

I don't recall every one, but the latest was they added "Weather and More" as a widget to my pristine lock screen. The "and more" is ads. Nonstop obnoxious ass ads. I had to find just the right submenu in Settings to remove it. Which brings me to another gripe. I can't fucking believe how the settings are still scattered across a Windows 8/10/11 style "Settings" menu and a Win9x/2k/xp "Control Panel" menu.