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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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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.

consumer surplus generated by Microsoft products mostly ceasing to suck.

This is such a tremendous lie I can't take the rest of your post seriously. Was this meant as sarcasm or a joke?