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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29352 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-theory-that-men-evolved-to-hunt-and-women-evolved-to-gather-is-wrong1/

It's hard to trust Scientific American when they mix communicating real, good science with blatant contradictory nonsense. Their article on Man the Hunter being inaccurate makes great points about how women can be excellent endurance runners, outpacing men over long distances. But then it also has a this paragraph about gender vs sex.

Before getting into the evidence, we need to first talk about sex and gender. "Sex" typically refers to biological sex, which can be defined by myriad characteristics such as chromosomes, hormone levels, gonads, external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. The terms "female" and "male" are often used in relation to biological sex. "Gender" refers to how an individual identifies—woman, man, nonbinary, and so forth. Much of the scientific literature confuses and conflates female/male and woman/man terminology without providing definitions to clarify what it is referring to and why those terms were chosen. For the purpose of describing anatomical and physiological evidence, most of the literature uses "female" and "male," so we use those words here when discussing the results of such studies. For ethnographic and archaeological evidence, we are attempting to reconstruct social roles, for which the terms "woman" and "man" are usually used. Unfortunately, both these word sets assume a binary, which does not exist biologically, psychologically or socially. Sex and gender both exist as a spectrum, but it is difficult to add that nuance when citing the work of others.

How many pre-historic humans would actually have any seperation between the concept of a "female" and a "woman"? Not to mention they way they actually bring up "women in social roles" doesn't acknowledge their own distinction- you're never going to get a pregnant trans women, but you could get a pregnant trans men. We don't know anything about "gender" as progressives view it in pre-historic societies- we only know about sex, what we observe through things like skeletal remains and inferences from behaviour of human-like animals. The article would've done better to solely use female and male the whole way through and not try to seperate sex and gender.

Later, there's a paragraph about how athletic studies don't do enough research on females that wasn't relevant to anything else in the article. A non-sequitor that wasn't relevant to the article since we do know enough about female biology to determine their relative advantages and weaknesses at physical activities compared to men.

The article does have some good informative material in it.

Important for the purposes of this discussion, estrogen also improves fat metabolism. During exercise, estrogen seems to encourage the body to use stored fat for energy before stored carbohydrates. Fat contains more calories per gram than carbohydrates do, so it burns more slowly, which can delay fatigue during endurance activity. Not only does estrogen encourage fat burning, but it also promotes greater fat storage within muscles—marbling if you will—which makes that fat's energy more readily available. Adiponectin, another hormone that is typically present in higher amounts in females than in males, further enhances fat metabolism while sparing carbohydrates for future use, and it protects muscle from breakdown. Anne Friedlander of Stanford University and her colleagues found that females use as much as 70 percent more fat for energy during exercise than males.

Correspondingly, the muscle fibers of females differ from those of males. Females have more type I, or "slow-twitch," muscle fibers than males do. These fibers generate energy slowly by using fat. They are not all that powerful, but they take a long time to become fatigued. They are the endurance muscle fibers. Males, in contrast, typically have more type II ("fast-twitch") fibers, which use carbohydrates to provide quick energy and a great deal of power but tire rapidly.

Females also tend to have a greater number of estrogen receptors on their skeletal muscles compared with males. This arrangement makes these muscles more sensitive to estrogen, including to its protective effect after physical activity. Estrogen's ability to increase fat metabolism and regulate the body's response to the hormone insulin can help prevent muscle breakdown during intense exercise. Furthermore, estrogen appears to have a stabilizing effect on cell membranes that might otherwise rupture from acute stress brought on by heat and exercise. Ruptured cells release enzymes called creatine kinases, which can damage tissues.

But then later it had this infamous paragraph:

Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves."

I had never seen that paragraph in context before. Knowing the context, that they just explained the inherent biological differences, then denied them right after, makes it worse! Right after they broke down in detail how females have hormones and muscles built for stamina over power! The reason why male pacesetters aren't allowed for women's endurance running is because the male pacesetter would be setting the pace too fast for the women, who are built for going a longer distance at a slower pace than men, as they had literally just explained earlier in the article.

They also downplay the evidence that "Man the Hunter" was accurate, but at least they include it.

Males living in the Upper Paleolithic—the cultural period between roughly 45,000 and 10,000 years ago, when early modern humans entered Europe—do show higher rates of a set of injuries to the right elbow region known as thrower's elbow, which could mean they were more likely than females to throw spears. But it does not mean women were not hunting, because this period is also when people invented the bow and arrow, hunting nets and fishing hooks. These more sophisticated tools enabled humans to catch a wider variety of animals; they were also easier on hunters' bodies. Women may have favored hunting tactics that took advantage of these new technologies.

In conclusion, their own conclusion perfectly demonstrates their own double think:

Female physiology is optimized for exactly the kinds of endurance activities involved in procuring game animals for food. And ancient women and men appear to have engaged in the same foraging activities rather than upholding a sex-based division of labor. It was the arrival some 10,000 years ago of agriculture, with its intensive investment in land, population growth and resultant clumped resources, that led to rigid gendered roles and economic inequality.

They claim at the same time that females are biologically optimized to perform certain activities better than males, but also that females and males performed the exact same activities in an egalitarian society.

A lot of old anthropology like the original "Man the Hunter" article this article is a response to, is flawed. But at the same time, modern anthropology is just as if not more biased than the anthropology of the 60s. Their intro has a line saying,

Bystanders might be left wondering whether portrayals of women hunters are trying to make the past more inclusive than it really was—or whether Man the Hunter-style assumptions about the past are attempts to project sexism backward in time.

The reason why bystanders are so confused is because that's exactly what organizations like Scientific American are trying to do. If they really were just trying to correct a mistaken historical record, bystanders who don't do deep dives into human pre-history could safely trust pop sci and wouldn't be so skeptical. But when Scientific American blatantly tries to push an agenda, bystanders rightly grow skeptical.

That reference to running is weird as well because pacesetters are actually doing part of the work that a runner would otherwise do (https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/drafting-runners-research/). Though, I'm not sure having access to faster male pacesetters is that useful. I'm sure you could always find some female pacesetters to run at the same speed as a male for part of the race. But I guess the problem is they wouldn't be able to run as far at that pace and you are not able to continuously swap them out. My theory of pacesetters for faster times is they run part of the race at a desired pace and they take the lead in order to take some of the work away from other runners then they fall off at some point because they are not able to maintain that pace while doing the extra work for the whole race.

When Roger Bannister ran a 4-minute mile he cheesed the rule against pacesetters by organising a special exhibition race where two other competitors functioned as pacesetters. One ran the first half-mile at 4-minute pace and then slowed down, the other jogged until he was almost lapped, and then ran the rest of the race a lap down at 4-minute pace.

Having a pacesetter run slightly ahead of you at the speed you need to maintain makes a huge psychological difference, even if you don't draft behind them.

Every once in a while we find yet another uncontacted tribe of people somewhere in the world. The most recent one I read about was in the Amazon.

Now, if these tribes were previously unconnected to the rest of the world, whatever "patriarchy" the rest of the world follows would not affect them. It's an unbiased sample. All of the published pictures I'm seeing are all men and no women.

The thing is that, in general, these tribes all seem to follow generally the same social schemes... the men seem to do the hunting, and the women tend to do the child-rearing and non-hunting activities. Now I'm sure there are some outliers where women are also doing hunting, but generally this isn't a thing.

From a purely physical perspective (and I'm assuming this isn't a controversial stand), being pregnant, giving birth, and the first year or so after giving birth to a child is hard and energy-intensive endeavor that would preclude many strenuous activities. Seeing as women are the only members of humanity that can do this, it would follow that societies would be set up around this. To be super specific, when I'm saying "women," I mean members of the human species who are adults and with a body form intended to produce the larger gametes we call "eggs" and gestate offspring internally and can produce nourishment for said offspring. The fact that I need to write this out, I find silly.

Men and women are different. Both men and women are needed and valuable. The progressive stance that men and women are entirely interchangeable and indistinguishable is laughable in my opinion. Men and women are different, and that's a good thing.

On the topic of SciAm, well, I dropped my subscription when they endorsed a candidate for the presidency last time around. To have science mix with politics takes away from the science aspect. Science is the search for truth -- not just "truth" that meshes with currently popular ideas.

This is true, however I’d just point out, uncontacted tribes in the Amazon usually do have contact with other tribes.

The word used in countries where these tribes are typically found is more accurate, people who are in “voluntary isolation”.

Not saying this to make any point one way or another, just because the subject interests me.

Point taken. Some of the pics from the linked article have cow skulls strung up on a stick, so there's some contact with the outside world. But that said it still says something that the only photos of the tribe only have men. However, I sincerely doubt that the interaction with outsiders caused a shift in gender roles for this (or other) tribe(s).

It all reeks of starting from a conclusion and working backward to make an article to support it.

Another thing I just thought of which is unrelated to this: insurance rates. I'm a guy in my early 50s, which means at some point in the past I was a teenager. I've also worked in insurance for quite a while -- not the actual underwriting, but I had plenty of interactions with the people who did. There's a vast disparity between the accident rates for young men compared to young women, which leads to the disparate amount charged by the companies. There's something pretty obviously different in the behavior, in the aggregate, between men and women from a purely behavioral standpoint concerning risk-taking.

Similarly, all one has to do is look at the prison population and note that the vast majority of inmates are men. Some of this is caused by women getting lighter sentences for the same crimes, but that doesn't explain the order of magnitude difference between the behavior of men and women.

Even discounting differences in physical strength, there's something fundamentally different in our wiring.

Their article on Man the Hunter being inaccurate makes great points about how women can be excellent endurance runners, outpacing men over long distances.

This is not a great point! The claim is based on extremely thin evidence from a few races that don't include genuinely top-tier athletes. At all distances that have been optimized by deep fields of professionals, men run ~10-12% faster than women with no dramatic diminishment at long distances. There are bioplausible reasons for women to get more competitive at extreme distances (or at least requiring less aggressive fueling), but the evidence for it is scanty at best.

Perhaps more to the point, considered in the context of hunting, it really doesn't make much sense to be talking about 200 mile races. Men are faster at every distance that a human would plausibly have covered during a normal day and this difference widens if they're forced to carry any sort of kit with them.

Yeah, I wonder why people keep making this claim. It's so easy to look up record times by distance and see that men always outperform women and by nearly the same margin.

This is just basic level stuff, and yet people get it wrong all the time. Why?

My guess is availability bias. Distance running is more trainable than sprinting. So a trained woman can easily beat an untrained man at distance running. She can't necessarily do the same at sprinting.

I looked at this list of records for the Badwater Ultramarathon. The women are fairly competitive with the men. That would never happen in something like powerlifting, or intellectual sports like chess or esports, or sprinting.

https://www.badwater.com/results-history/

For normal races, men are about 10% faster, whether its 100 meters or 100 miles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramarathon

I took a look at the Badwater and it seems that, in recent years, the men's champion is about 10% faster than the women's champion, although with high variance. Sometimes, it's only a small difference. Sometimes it's a HUGE difference. In 2012, the best woman's time was 30.6% longer than the best men's time! That's about the same difference as between Usain Bolt and the world record 9 year old. In other words, a giant chasm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badwater_Ultramarathon

Early years of the race were weird and should be thrown out. Consider this:

During the early years of the race, no particular route between Badwater and Whitney was specified and runners attempted various "shortcuts" between the start and finish. Adrian Crane, one of the competitors in the inaugural race, even used cross-country skis to cross the salt-flats at Badwater.

The Badwater only provides more data that men dominate in long distance events just as they do in short distance ones. The only thing weird about the Badwater is that variance is much higher than normal.

Just find a casual enough pool. Ultras are still mostly amateurs, nice white college educated people.

Look! Here's race where you have to hop on one leg while saying the alphabet backwards for 7 miles. One year, a woman beat 5 male competitors to win the race.

From that we conclude that women have superior endurance.

I Actually know someone who won badwater one year. It's a really swingy race with few participants. Much depends on who shows up for the year and who doesn't need to drop out. You train for it in a sauna and need a whole team and strategy to maintain hydration. It's a day long run at high elevation in extreme heat.

Perhaps more to the point, considered in the context of hunting, it really doesn't make much sense to be talking about 200 mile races. Men are faster at every distance that a human would plausibly have covered during a normal day and this difference widens if they're forced to carry any sort of kit with them.

The way I've always heard it, endurance running is exactly what made human hunters OP, not speed. It's why we traded fur for excess sweat capacity.

Endurance hunts don’t take literal days, though.

endurance mostly in the ability to sweat to cool down while other less sweaty animals overheat, this is a process that might take hours on the absolute long end, not long enough to require this kind of distances. Gazelles can go something like 5 miles before needing to rest.

I'm always kind of skeptical of this story, for practical reasons -- a gazelle can do the five miles (at which point it is well beyond the horizon, even on the savanah!) in like 5-10 minutes. Which is like twenty minutes faster than even a very fast, unencumbered person.

So how long does it need to rest? How long can it go for if it only needs to average 15 mph to keep away from the humans, rather than top speed?

My suspicion based on personal interactions with furry animals (and documented hunting tactics of North American Indians) is that the way to hunt without great ranged weapons is either herding (see buffalo jumps) or hiding -- this is what lions mostly do, for instance, and they are way faster than people! (with built-in weapons, to boot)

Wolves are an animal that can sometimes run prey to exhaustion, but only in specific circumstances AFAIK (crusty snow that will hold them but not the deer), and again, they can run a lot faster than people.

I believe endurance hunting is mostly done by tracking, after the animal has already been wounded by the hunter- it’s blood trailing as is taught to hunters today, but over much longer distances. The limiting factor here is not so much the range of the weapons as their destructive impact; 30-.06 puts animals down better than broad heads better than flint tips better than pointy sticks. I can tell you from experience that when a wounded animal stops to rest, it will probably not get back up and won’t move very effectively if it does(and usually hits the densest thicket it can find which encumbers quadrupeds handily- a good thing if hiding from coyotes, but not from human hunters. AFAIK blood trailing dogs work by surrounding game in thickets until a hunter arrives to take advantage of the bipedal mobility advantage in heavy brush, but I’ve never used them).

Modern day hunting has a eccentric and hardcore subset who hunt by stalking, tracking a game animal and sneaking close enough to shoot it with a bow, pistol(30-50 foot effective range), or shotgun. If I ever manage to meet one I’ll certainly ask more questions along this line. But it’s definitely possible to sneak up on a deer or hog close enough to throw a spear into it, even if very difficult.

Not much to add, other than this is all just modern day lysenkoism, but did anyone else see Neil Degrasse Tyson defend all this on Maher? That was just jaw dropping. I got to wonder if NDT doesn’t have some MeToo skeletons in his closet that he is desperately trying to keep hidden with all this claptrap

Being a woke feminist does not seem, in practice, to protect men against me too claims.

True but I think in some mens minds it does

It's not "in his closet," he's been publicly accused by multiple women and it led to his TV show being stopped: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_deGrasse_Tyson#Sexual_misconduct_allegations

That said, those accusations don't seem very bad and I still kinda like the guy and wish him well.

I got to wonder if NDT doesn’t have some MeToo skeletons in his closet that he is desperately trying to keep hidden with all this claptrap

The simpler explanation is that he's a grifter who abuses his charisma to earn money by playing the role of a scientist, and he's been gradually expanding his repertoire to have more business opportunities.

And with the media being mostly far-left, pretending that far-left nonsense is scientifically valid, is the way for him to get more shows and such.

You are probably correct on this.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”

Men outperform women in short distance events. And endurance events. And ultra-endurance events. That women dominate the Montane Spine is a flat-out lie. Or that they dominate swimming the English Channel. Or the Trans-Am bike race.

I believe men are innately vastly more competitive than women. A man who trains for 50 000 hours will probably beat a woman who's trained for 5 000, even if she has a biological advantage.

The fact that women show up in the top ranks of ultra-endurance competitions at all, where as for the vast majority of other competitive events the top ranked woman will often be ranked like #203 or somewhere thereabouts, I think is strong evidence they have a real biological advantage.

And where women are competitive, it’s almost never against men, but against other women.

What evidence would convince you that you are wrong?

It's not a very strongly held belief of mine. A combination of experts and highly upvoted/liked posts in ultramarathon communities agreeing women are just worse would probably be most convincing.

Why would you need 'experts' (often captured by ideology) or even worse, upvoted posts (virtue signalling), rather than just look at the hard data? Nearly all sports allow for intergender competition and/or have an objective measurement of performance (often timings). In most sports the gaps are so enormous that there is no doubt at all.

Why would you need 'experts' (often captured by ideology)

It's just an extra data point. There's a lot to learn from experts. Heterodox experts, e.g Charles Murray, are still experts too.

upvoted posts

Because redditors in niche subreddits are usually still somewhat bound to reality.

Nearly all sports allow for intergender competition and/or have an objective measurement of performance (often timings). In most sports the gaps are so enormous that there is no doubt at all.

Yes, so when nearly every sport is like that, including mental sports, that makes me think there are significant differences in the brain too, not just muscle/bone structure.

Speaking anecdotally as a moderately serious running hobbyist that runs with pretty strong athletes in a club, I would say that there is no meaningful difference in training between men and women above some (fairly low) level of running. By the time you get to even low-level college running, the women are generally pretty serious. I'm sure there are noticeable filters in terms of how many people are interested in going into these things in the first place, but among elite athletes, the training regimens are just not dramatically different. Everyone that doesn't get injured from it is running 100+ mile weeks with some mixture of VO2max intervals, lactic threshold work, and long runs. Women aren't just casually competing at a surprisingly high level, the women at that level are putting in the same rigorous training that the men are.

I did mean men are more competitive on average, I know there are lots of very competitive women out there. And I'd assume a lot of the athletic and most competitive women would go into fields they're at minimum roughly equal biologically to men in, like long distance running or gymnastics. But I expect at the very highest levels of competition, like Olympic-tier athletics, the best men are putting in more hours/more intensity than the best women. But I do know there are vast numbers of women who put in more hours and intensity than I do at anything.

I think its crazy to think at the olympic tier men and women are not putting in the same hours training. They are going to have same coaches and if a coach sees an edge they can push at this level they will force their athletes to do it. Possibly some of the prevalence of drugs is even due to pressure from coaches.

I might be way off base, it's just the general impression I get. Even Olympic athletes have lives and don't spend all their time training. I think the most elite men cut out more non-training time than the most elite women do though.

100+ mile weeks

Woot? That is something like 22 km per day or every day a half marathon. :-o

From my experience in professional and semiprofessional basketball I'd say the differences are pretty big.

My amateur/semi-professional team where no-one had any illusions of truly going pro (I hope) took our exercise much more seriously than literally professional female basketball teams. It was ridiculous. The same thing seemed to be true for soccer, but I have less intimate personal experience there.

On the other hand, the women I've known that have engaged in high level solo sports like swimming, running and tennis seemed to have taken things very seriously, sometimes too seriously.

If it that competitiveness is innate, then it is a biological phenomenon and a biological advantage for men. Otherwise it could not be innate. So what you're arguing doesn't point to a biological advantage for women, it says the opposite.

Yes, I was talking about muscle biology advantage. The neurological biology advantage in my model would still be with men

Debiting men and crediting women for greater male competitiveness aside, how far can we take such an argument? Should the US women's national soccer team being sometimes competitive with regional 14-15 boys teams (but likely not so for say, the basketball equivalents) be taken as evidence that, given greater male competitiveness, patriarchal oppression, societal conditioning, stereotype threat, internalized misogyny, having to spend so much of their lives performing emotional labor, and other modifications to the dragon, women have a real biological advantage in soccer?

If the gap between the best women and the best men in soccer is smaller than the gap between the best women and best at basketball, that is evidence for the biological advantage men have over women in soccer is smaller than it is for at least one other sport. To see if women have an actual biological advantage and not just a smaller disadvantage, it'd have to be compared to competitions where you knew there was no phsyical biological gender differences, just mental biological differences.

Chess, soccer, and boxing are three very different competitions and the men’s division handily outclasses the women’s in all of them.

For these ultra-distance events (unlike, say, a local 5K), you're already selecting among the most competitive. No one's doing the Montane Spine (particularly the Winter Spine) without a lot of motivation.

They also seem to forget that the women would have been pregnant a large portion of the time.

Also performance enhancing drugs have made many of the female pro athletes barely female.

The focus on amount of muscle fiber feels like pilpul. They are trying to get away with a distraction that ignores the elephant in the room, what about breasts? Breasts are undeniable evidence for sex (not gender) based division of labor. And unsurprisingly we generally find women doing the kinds of activities that are suited to performing with an infant on your hip occasionally nursing, slow moving activities in and around the home. I have to imagine in premodern times, before the advent of birth control that women were more or less either nursing or pregnant for most of their adult lives.

But it does not mean women were not hunting, because this period is also when people invented the bow and arrow, hunting nets and fishing hooks. These more sophisticated tools enabled humans to catch a wider variety of animals; they were also easier on hunters' bodies. Women may have favored hunting tactics that took advantage of these new technologies.

The fact that they seem to be counting fishing and setting nets as hunting seems like BS. While it is maybe technically true in a sense it obviously doesn't contradict the idea conjured up when one says "men were the hunters". I wonder if this is behind their uncited study of Agta people and they are counting insect gathering or fishing with a hook and line as hunting.

Are you sure the women are doing the nursing? This graphic in the article clearly shows that men have more muscle mass because they habe to carry infants around:

https://static.scientificamerican.com/sciam/assets/Image/2023/saw1123Ocob32_m.jpg

A recent study of ethnographic data spanning the past 100 years—much of which was ignored by Man the Hunter contributors—found that women from a wide range of cultures hunt animals for food. Abigail Anderson and Cara Wall-Scheffler, both then at Seattle Pacific University, and their colleagues reported that 79 percent of the 63 foraging societies with clear descriptions of their hunting strategies feature women hunters.

An article from 2020 about that:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/early-women-were-hunters-not-just-gatherers-study-suggests-180982459/

Their analysis revealed that regardless of maternal status, women hunted in 50 of these societies—or about 79 percent. And more than 70 percent of female hunting appeared to be intentional—rather than opportunistically killing animals while doing other activities, per the study. In societies where hunting was the most important activity for subsistence, women participated in hunting 100 percent of the time.

“The hunting was purposeful,” Wall-Scheffler tells NPR. “Women had their own tool kit. They had favorite weapons. Grandmas were the best hunters of the village.”

The researchers also found that women played an active role in teaching hunting, and they used a wider variety of weapons and hunting strategies than men did. For example, while men tended to hunt alone or in pairs, women hunted alone, with a man or with groups of women, children or dogs. Women hunted small game in 46 percent of the studied societies and took down medium or large game in 48 percent of them. In 4 percent of societies, they hunted game of all sizes.

I mean, Artemis is after all a female goddess: (2nd century statue copied from a Greek original dating to 330 BCE). And as Thomas Carlyle meant to say, the real use of bow & arrow is to make all humans tall.
https://www.worldhistory.org/uploads/images/10157.jpg

Plus the easiest way of hunting animals is trapping. You don't need to be strong or athletic endurance to catch squirrels and rabbits with snares. Look at this boy trapping birds, which is so stupidly easy probably even a girl could do it as long as she isn't vegan and doesn't mind being cruel:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trapping#/media/File:34-caccia_tortore,Taccuino_Sanitatis,_Casanatense_4182..jpg

I don't know how to interpret the statement "Grandmas were the best hunters in the village", but I imagine their hunting looks less like battling a grizzly and more like these Aborigines finding a lizard (from 2:50), Also an example for opportunistically killing animals:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=iP7Nn3whUTo&t=160

That said:
I wonder about the math here. If in 46% of foraging societies women hunt small game and in 48% larger game and then 4% all sizes how does that result in 79% of societies with women hunting? And I wonder what the total calories provided are. Was it more a novelty thing women did when they were bored or out of necessity or was hunting their sole profession? I read the book about the Pirahã in the Amazon (who have this strange language without recursion which refutes Noam Chomskys central thesis) and the role of the man was mainly to fish on canoes in the river (protein, every day staple meal) and going into the jungle to hunt was done less often because it was more dangerous and also you could come home empty handed to your disappointed wife and hungry children (but if you brought meat you were the king of the village and shared with everyone) and the women digged for vegetables/tubers (carbohydrates, also everyday staple food).

You Americans have more stories about Native/Indian American tribes, how and what did Native/Indian women hunt?

2024 study critiquing the many methodological errors in that study:

Female Foragers Sometimes Hunt, Yet Gendered Divisions of Labor Are Real: A Comment on Anderson et al. (2023), The Myth of Man the Hunter

We have outlined several conceptual and methodological concerns with the analysis of Anderson et al. (2023). Specifically, the Anderson et al. (2023) analysis is not reproducible because their sampling criteria are not clear and 35% of the societies in their sample do not come from D-PLACE, the database they claim was the source of all the societies in their sample. Moreover, these 35% were heavily biased toward societies that they coded as ones in which women hunt. Many other societies with extensive information on hunting are also not in D-PLACE yet were not included in their analysis, and authoritative sources on hunting in the societies in the Anderson et al. (2023) sample were not consulted. Additionally, there are at least 18 societies in D-PLACE with information on hunting that were inexplicably omitted from their analysis, none of which provide evidence for women hunters.

Finally, there were numerous coding errors. Of the 50/63 (79%) societies that Anderson et al. (2023) coded as ones in which women hunt, for example, our recoding found that women rarely or never hunted in 16/50 (32%); we also found 2 false negatives. Overall, we found evidence in the biased Anderson et al. (2023) data set that in 35/63 (56%) societies, women hunt “Sometimes” or “Frequently”. Moreover, compared to the 17/63 (27%) socie- ties in which women were claimed to hunt big game regularly, our recoding found that this was true for only 9/63 (14%). A precise estimate of women’s hunting in foraging societies must await a future thorough and unbiased analysis of the ethnographic record (see, e.g., Hoffman, Farquharson, & Venkataraman, 2024), but it is certainly far less than the Anderson et al. (2023) estimate and is very unlikely to overturn the current view that it is relatively uncommon.

The fundamental issue is that women’s hunting is not a binary phenomenon, and treating it as such, especially with a very low threshold for classifying a society as one in which women hunt, obfuscates gendered divisions of labor within groups.

Shit like this is why I put 0 value on a very large number of humanities fields. They should be told to either clean up their rooms and get in good shape or else we will defund them completely.

Venkataraman also wrote this on his page:

http://www.vivekvenkataraman.com/blog/2023/7/5/debunking-a-debunking

we found that reports of women’s hunting were genuinely rare.

Most reported prey sizes are small- or medium-sized. Of the cases that do involve large-game hunting by women, some pertain to whale hunting; some involve firearms and/or dogs; some occur in the context of husband-wife pairs in which women contribute to hunting success indirectly; some involve cases of women hunting large game alone out after the death of their husbands; other instances of large-game hunting are explicitly stated by the ethnographer to be very rare. This is not to say that these are not cases of large-game hunting, but the broader context of their occurrence casts suspicion on them as cultural regularities. This provides a starkly different picture of women’s hunting in these societies compared to the analysis of Anderson et al (2023).

Artemis is after all a female goddess

So is Athena. Yet there are remarkably few women among Greek strategoi.

Sure, but doesn't Aeneas encounter a young Carthaginian huntress (who is actually his mom Aphrodite in disguise)?

His mother met him herself, among the trees, with the face

and appearance of a virgin, and a virgin’s weapons,

a Spartan girl, or such as Harpalyce of Thrace,

who wearies horses, and outdoes winged Hebrus in flight.

For she’d slung her bow from her shoulders, at the ready,

like a huntress, and loosed her hair for the wind to scatter,

her knees bare, and her flowing tunic gathered up in a knot.

And she cried first: ‘Hello, you young men, tell me,

if you’ve seen my sister wandering here by any chance,

wearing a quiver, and the hide of a dappled lynx,

or shouting, hot on the track of a slavering boar?’

And later

Then Venus said: ‘I don’t think myself worthy of such honours:

it’s the custom of Tyrian girls to carry a quiver,

and lace our calves high up, over red hunting boots.

While this could be a fantastical detail imagined by Virgil, I don't find it hard to believe at all that some places around the Mediterranean might have had a tradition of women hunting, and this potentially contributing to Artemis being a huntress.

Hunting wasn’t particularly gendered in medieval Europe, either. But Greco-Roman depictions of hunting invariably show men doing it, and it’s gendered at least a bit in modern cultures.

You Americans have more stories about Native/Indian American tribes, how and what did Native/Indian women hunt?

I was taught in school that Indian men would catch up with and shoot the buffaloes on horseback, then the women would follow along behind and pitch camp wherever the buffaloes died(because they’re too heavy to drag back to camp), including butchering them onsite. This idea is sufficiently widespread in American culture that mass media about Indians features masculine hunters refusing to clean their own game even when it’s completely different tribes, eg those in the northeast, hunting different game.

Doing a quick perusal of atleast one of the authors of the article in question makes it pretty clear this is just political axe-grinding in the form on a scientific article.

Either that, or she's completely and utterly delusional.

(I'm trying to be nice here, but if you claim to be an amateur powerlifter and then turn around and say that physical differences in men and women are simply due to culture, I'm going to question your sanity.)

Others have already discussed the merits of this article as a piece of science communication (or rather, lack thereof). If anything, it is proof positive of how little time progressive science writers spend around pregnant women. I will point out that the article provides receipts that are useful to counter another kind of propaganda.

TERFs like to engage in a particular kind of revisionist history that claims that men in women's sports are yet another insidious ploy by the patriarchy to keep women down. When confronted with the argument that men in women's sports are simply the natural outcome of decades of feminist propaganda claiming that any and all biological differences that disfavour women are the product of a misogynistic culture and nothing else, they employ the usual gaslighting: Nobody thinks that, you are delusional, it didn't happen and if it did that's a good thing.

To have the Scientific American authoritatively state that "Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports." is quite the trump in that discussion. It will be countered by No-True-Scotsmanning of course, but that's the way of things.

TERFs like to engage in a particular kind of revisionist history that claims that men in women's sports are yet another insidious ploy by the patriarchy to keep women down. When confronted with the argument that men in women's sports are simply the natural outcome of decades of feminist propaganda claiming that any and all biological differences that disfavour women are the product of a misogynistic culture and nothing else, they employ the usual gaslighting: Nobody thinks that, you are delusional, it didn't happen and if it did that's a good thing.

I don't necessarily think this is a good characterization of TERFs.

There is not just one "feminism" - it is a bunch of different ideologies with different starting premises, and different conclusions about what is to be done. While there's variety within so-called "TERFs", many of the people who get called TERFs that I'm familiar with online tend to be of the opinion that "the thing that makes you a woman is the combination of being a biological female in a world run by biological men, with all that entails." (AKA difference feminism as opposed to equality feminism.)

Now, I do acknowledge that TERFs themselves are a diverse group, and if I had to break down the TERF pie based on what I've read and seen, I would imagine that the grouping consists of some combination of the following:

  • "Old school" difference feminists who were fighting for feminism in the 1960's through 1980's, and whose beliefs just haven't moved on since then. (Think Janice Raymond and her book The Transsexual Empire.) Some of these are the only actual "radical feminists" in the TERF camp.
  • Modern difference feminists who often started as postmodern feminists or equality feminists, and who were "burned" in some way by those movements. (Either they had a string of blackpilling relationships with men that soured them on mainstream liberal feminism, or they were cancelled or ostracized and then ended up in a bubble that made their views more "radical" over time.)
  • A small handful of social conservatives LARPing as feminists. Could be grifters, could be an example of horseshoe theory.
  • A small handful of postmodern feminists, who, as /u/RococoBasilica suggests, believe almost everything progressive gender-focused feminism believes, but who arrive at the conclusion that transwomen are another form of patriarchal male oppression.

I mean, sure. But that distinction is about as meaningful as the difference between a groyper and a Christian Nationalist is to a California progressive.

A movement is what it does. And what feminism does, despite all protestations to the contrary, is to decrease the cost of women's actions and expand the extent of female privileges (almost always at the expense of men). What those privileges are varies depending on which feminists do the feministing and may range from unearned professorships to higher salaries for professional soccer players. Thus, "difference" becomes important when circumstances particular to the female condition demand special attention (and resources), while "equality" is the rallying cry when it comes to "equalizing" the spoils men and women are entitled to (without ever equalizing the corresponding duties). That another kind of woman, namely that of the Y-chromosome variety, has hacked that system is somewhat amusing. It is also the reason wokeness seems to have peaked for now. It is still legacy women who call the shots and you cannot go against their interests for all too long.

Maybe this is a subset of your first group, but also transhumanist weirdos like Shulamith Firestone. That's what radical feminist used to mean, but like almost any term that gets politicized, it's been mangled so often so many different ways that nowadays it basically means whatever the speaker wants it to, like Carrol's Humpty Dumpty.

Not commenting on the political aspects, but it seems like they covered way more benefits of estrogen than they did benefits of testosterone. This irks me because it reminds me of all those nutrition articles that praise one food's benefits, like how uniquely special quinoa is because it has magnesium, this, that, etc. When you could write the same exact article replacing "quinoa" for some other food, because there's tons of foods with identical or better nutrient profiles. Anyway:

You can't just list the cellular and global benefits of estrogen and not list the same benefits of testosterone. Testosterone has to be just as if not more muscle-sparing than estrogen. It is interesting and probably true that estrogen would shift fuel source more to fat, which does sound useful for very long-distance events, but just like women have more estrogen receptors and all the benefits that come with it, men have more testosterone receptors and all the benefits that come along with it, benefits that I could imagine would be relevant to hunting as well. The article doesn't seem to be doing a fair comparison.

For one, male-levels of testosterone uniquely allow tendon and ligament CSA to increase from exercise, which is injury-protective. Bone and muscle CSA will be larger, and fast-twitch muscles and power will be useful for certain game. I think it depends on what kind of game you are chasing, and whether you're going to run 100+ miles or maybe just a marathon or maybe just a short distance, idk.

This irks me because it reminds me of all those nutrition articles that praise one food's benefits, like how uniquely special quinoa is because it has magnesium, this, that, etc. When you could write the same exact article replacing "quinoa" for some other food, because there's tons of foods with identical or better nutrient profiles.

The good news is that LLMs exist now, and you can write those articles about other, non-trendy foods too! Just imagine, "6 Reasons Why Rutabagas Are An Underrated Superfood". Be the change you fear to see in the world.

Please list 6 Reasons Why Rutabagas Are An Underrated Superfood

Result (Copilot):

Rutabagas are indeed an underrated superfood, packed with a variety of nutrients and health benefits. Here are six reasons why you should consider adding them to your diet:

  1. Rich in Nutrients: Rutabagas are a great source of vitamins and minerals, including vitamin C, vitamin E, potassium, calcium, and magnesium. These nutrients support immune function, bone health, and overall well-being.
  2. High in Fiber: Rutabagas are high in dietary fiber, which helps promote healthy digestion, prevent constipation, and maintain a healthy weight by keeping you feeling full for longer.
  3. Low in Calories: Despite being rich in nutrients, rutabagas are low in calories. This makes them an excellent choice for those looking to maintain or lose weight without sacrificing essential nutrients.
  4. Antioxidant Properties: Rutabagas contain antioxidants, such as vitamin C and beta-carotene, which help protect your cells from damage caused by free radicals and reduce the risk of chronic diseases.
  5. Supports Heart Health: The potassium in rutabagas can help regulate blood pressure and reduce the risk of heart disease. Additionally, their high fiber content supports healthy cholesterol levels.
  6. Versatile in the Kitchen: Rutabagas can be used in a variety of dishes, from soups and stews to roasted vegetables and mashed sides. Their slightly sweet and earthy flavor adds depth and nutrition to many recipes.

Next time you're grocery shopping, don't forget to give rutabagas a try! Your body will thank you.

Recently, I was linked to an anti-Cybertruck viral song clip. I fed a related prompt to an AI and got better lyrics that referenced specific issues I had heard about (rust, frame strength, windows, angular appearance) in one attempt:

There once was a truck that sailed the streets,
The Cybertruck, with angles neat,
But oh, the folks, they did not cheer,
For the truck was quite a sight to fear.

Oh, the Cybertruck, it came to town,
With a body made of steel so brown,
But the people said, "It's just too strange,
We'd rather have a truck that's plain."

The windows cracked, the body bent,
The Cybertruck, it made a dent,
In the hopes of those who dreamed,
Of a truck that wasn't so extreme.

[Chorus]

The design was bold, the look was new,
But the Cybertruck, it split the view,
Some folks loved, but many frowned,
As the truck rolled through the town.

[Chorus]

So here's a tale of a truck so grand,
That tried to change the auto land,
But in the end, it couldn't sway,
The hearts of those who walked away.

[Chorus]

Just for fun I asked: https://chatgpt.com/share/6773255e-8f74-8004-915d-56088ff34dc2

I'm not going to include the whole thing here so as not to fall afoul of the rules.

Now I want to get me some rutabagas...

It is interesting and probably true that estrogen would shift fuel source more to fat, which does sound useful for very long-distance events

My understanding (and it might be bro-science) is that for very long distance events, you're not using either stored fat or glycogen for most of it; you're using what you take in, so your limit is how much you can eat and absorb.

This is correct. Running a marathon is essentially incompatible with doing a keto diet. Throughout the marathon, all the runners will be doing their damnedest to guzzle as much glucose and isotonic drinks as they can stomach without puking and/or shitting themselves. Hitting the wall is the point in the marathon at which you've exhausted your supply of carbs and must burn fat instead, at which keeping to any kind of reasonable pace is effectively impossible.

Wikipedia tells me that Scientific American is published by Springer Nature, a German British publishing house.

Which means that, like the Holy Roman Empire, Scientific American is neither Scientific, nor American.

Or perhaps I should say was, because the magazine's slide into political propaganda hasn't gone unnoticed, and perhaps the editor resigning last month for calling Trump voters fascists was the woke wave cresting. I can't imagine many of the actual contributors to the magazine are happy to have their bylines on a publication that thinks men and women are equally good at sports.

I can't imagine many of the actual contributors to the magazine are happy to have their bylines on a publication that thinks men and women are equally good at sports.

Funnily enough, I was rereading this Hanania post yesterday, and he touches on the curious observation that many academics working in hard, rigorous disciplines don't seem to be that embarrassed to be working in the same profession (or even in the same university) as the woo peddlers in the assorted _____ Studies departments. Of course people who are visibly, publicly embarrassed about this phenomenon exist, but they seem far from the majority of people working in these fields. Hanania has an interesting theory as to why.

I think the whole thing stinks of presentism. The thing I observe about history is that the farther back you go, the more literal people seem to take things. In ancient texts, probably up until really Islam, the idea of Gos was pretty physical. Any God you care to read about has a body. They eat and drink, they occasionally come down to earth and walk around, even in descriptions of the afterlife, it’s physical, a garden or a city, or people eating good food and having drinks and so on.

And even in other forms of thought. It just doesn’t seem like up until Plato or Socrates that there was any sort of meta analysis going on. No real thought about categories or how to think about the world. It was all very much rooted in practical, realistic, and everyday sort of concerns. I can’t say that any ancient human in the Bronze Age ever thought about whether or not animals thought, or what makes a woman a woman.

As such, I don’t think modern ideas like sexuality or sex/gender descriptions are even possible n the remote past. The ideas are simply too abstract and complicated for a mind that deals mostly in the here, now, and the physical. It’s a product of our time, something we do because we are used to meta thinking and abstractions and symbolic thinking. We are no longer bound to what we can see and touch. In fact I suspect that AI is starting the next level of abstraction for human minds. Not just dealing in logical and symbolic abstract reasoning, but thinking about how we think, and thinking about what kinds of thinking will do the most good.

In ancient texts, probably up until really Islam, the idea of Gos was pretty physical. Any God you care to read about has a body. They eat and drink, they occasionally come down to earth and walk around, even in descriptions of the afterlife, it’s physical, a garden or a city, or people eating good food and having drinks and so on.

Are you sure about this? I've been doing a bunch of research on Plato for personal reasons recently, and this really doesn't match up with what he seemed to believe. From my reading of ancient religions, I get the impression that a lot of ancient people understood religious myths as metaphorical, and they most definitely understood the importance of symbols and symbolic meanings - just look at the Eleusinian mysteries.

I can’t say that any ancient human in the Bronze Age ever thought about whether or not animals thought

They don't quite date back to the Bronze Age, but the Pythagoreans came before Plato and were famous for their belief in the transmigration of souls, and advocated vegetarianism on the basis that inflicting suffering on a living being unnecessarily diminished the human soul. Those concepts also showed up in the early Orphic religions as well, to the point that several authors said that Pythagoras was just repeating what he'd learned from them.

, or what makes a woman a woman.

The story of Tiresias directly presents an example of someone changing sex but retaining their identity as a man (despite giving birth to a daughter) and then returning to masculinity. Just to be clear I'm not saying that they would endorse modern gender ideology, but they most definitely understood the idea that you could have an inner self whose gender/sex didn't match up with your body.

Are you sure about this? I've been doing a bunch of research on Plato for personal reasons recently, and this really doesn't match up with what he seemed to believe. From my reading of ancient religions, I get the impression that a lot of ancient people understood religious myths as metaphorical, and they most definitely understood the importance of symbols and symbolic meanings - just look at the Eleusinian mysteries.

The people and faith clearly could think metaphorically or as God as a transcendent being before Islam.

@MaiqTheTrue is probably right in the sense that if you wanted to pick up the canonical texts and not run into an embodied God you'd fail with the OT and NT (assuming Jesus is God). They have a lot of language about an embodied God - just as they have more transcendent visions - because the books were written over a long time and don't agree with each other or even themselves.

Islam as a late redaction that emphasizes strict monotheism can cut out a lot of the embarrassing references (when the author even knows about them). It polemicizes against the other religions because of this too. Qur'an 5:75 rejects the deification of Jesus and Mary (why Mary is added is a question for another day) by pointing out that they can't be deities because they "both ate food".

This isn't going to phase any Christian that believes in the Trinity and Jesus' nature as both man and God and you'd think the divine author of the Qur'an would know that but w/e.

This isn't going to phase any Christian that believes in the Trinity and Jesus' nature as both man and God and you'd think the divine author of the Qur'an would know that but w/e

Interestingly, Islamic doctrine contains quite a bit of self-contradictory falsehood about what Christians believe. In Mohammed’s time there were definitely Christians in Arabia, so it’s unclear why.

There are a lot of Christians in America today, but there are a ton of false beliefs (both by non Christians and even sometimes by other Christians) about what they believe. I'm not too surprised that sort of thing happened in Mohammed's time as well.

Not just Christians. There's the claim that Jews think Ezra is the son of God that people have puzzled over since.

The likely reason is that the author didn't have the Bible in front of him but was going off oral tradition (which explains the stew of both canonical sources and apocryphal ones, and straight up legendary elements or how the Qur'an could conflate two Marys). Reynolds also suggests that the author is weighing in on theological debates nearby churches had, things could have become extra garbled by disagreement by the time they got to the author.

Mohammed’s time is too late for massive theological disagreement- my main point was ‘the Quran is definitely not dictated by the angel Gabriel, and probably not double checked either(like the kind of book an illiterate man makes up)’.

Well, I think it's a bit more nuanced than that re: the Christian texts.

Jesus is treated as a taking on of flesh by a God who is not material. And the old testament has things like Jeremiah's, "Do I not fill heaven and earth?" among others. I'd be inclined to argue the deliberate lack of depiction in the design of the ark etc. is gesturing towards God's immateriality as well, which would make it hard to argue that it's some late development. The New Testament, at least, you can't pass off as a contradiction between different authors. It's just a more complex position.

Yeah, Jesus' eating food isn't a problem; the contrary position would be worse, in light of Hebrews 2:14 and 17.

Their article on Man the Hunter being inaccurate makes great points about how women can be excellent endurance runners, outpacing men over long distances.

I believe that this claim relies on cherry-picking a few individual races. If you look at records for various distances and times, the male record in every event is better than the female record.

A related article (that I've unfortunately lost) found that women are faster at Ultramarathons based on selection effects: the women who enter those races without professional sponsorship are faster than the men who enter those races without professional sponsorship. You should expect to see the median female racer finishing before the median male racer, and the slowest racers (whether they finish or not) will likely be men.

It's an important finding for race organizers who want to know how long to keep the finish line staffed, but that's not how it was discussed on social media.

Not this again, this whole furore over man the hunter is so fucked. Here is my recreation of a conversation I had with my SIL on the subject:

"Why does anyone give a shit if men hunted more than women or vice versa?"

"Well because hunting implies agency and strength and therefore prestige! Which is more admirable - keeping the village fed and safe by killing dangerous creatures or keeping the village fed and safe by gathering crops and keeping people clothed and healthy?"

"You already know my answer."

"Both are valuable, but you only value hunting more because of your patriarchal ideals! Gathering is just as valuable!"

"No, I value truth and if gathering was just as valuable as hunting it would have been deemed just as valuable as hunting in matriarchal societies, which doesn't seem to be the case. And it seems by your own admission that hunting is more valuable than gathering, if it wasn't you wouldn't care who did what except out of curiosity and you would feel as confused about all of this as I do."

"But how much of that is our own internalisation of patriarchal concepts? Besides if you think about it, hunting isn't just stabbing tigers with spears, it also includes trapping rabbits and sharpshooting quail and fishing and if you include that kind of hunting women did plenty of it, so women were hunters too!"

"Ok yeah, I guess women did lots of hunting if you redefine hunting. Wouldn't it be easier to just not value hunting more?"

"That's easy for you to say, you're a man."

thinking "If I were luckier a meteor would drop from the sky right now and wipe life off the planet."

Damn, that’s obnoxious.

Perhaps I should add to the list of things I’m grateful for—that I generally don’t have such female biological or in-law family members who shit-talk as such. Much less male members.

My female in-laws (wives of my male biological family members) are generally quite respectful.

I am feeling second-hand shame right now. How did Scientific American stoop down to the level of "Black people in medieval Bohemia"?

It's literally the same quality of discourse: your game has zero Africans in it, but here's a couple references that show that medieval Bohemians have been exposed to the concept of dark-skinned people, therefore showing rural Bohemia as having zero Africans is wrong. Except it's of course 99.99% correct to have exactly zero Africans in a story that doesn't involve an Ethiopian mission or an Ottoman sultan's harem.

You can see check ultra marathoner times, they aren't even close. My sister and her husband are ultra marathoners, it's so insulting to woman runners to insinuate that they're just not trying hard enough. The idea that women are choosing to use slower pace setters acts as if these really competitive athletes who spend dozens to hundreds of hours a week practicing their sport just decide they don't care enough to optimize something that's supposed to explain like 20-30% differences in times? Really?

I don't have a lot to add but Bryan Caplan's take is just so irresponsible:

The ultimate result of an open border between the U.S. and India would not be two countries that look like India.

It would be two countries that look like the U.S.!

Like, what if you're wrong Bryan? Where does he go from there: "Well, shucks, I guess we ended up with two Indias after all. My bad."

To me that's the problem with immigration. It's permanent. Even Communism, as destructive as it is, can be tried and discarded. But immigration permanently alters a country.

We don't have many historical parallels to the sort of mass immigration that has happened in recent years. Prior to recent times, most large scale immigration was on the heels of an invading army and usually involved genociding the old population. America might be a country of immigrants, but tell that to the Pequots.

Like, what if you're wrong Bryan? Where does he go from there: "Well, shucks, I guess we ended up with two Indias after all. My bad."

Caplan is Jewish. If he's wrong, he can just fuck off to Israel. Must be nice to have a backup country...

Is there any actual evidence that he specifically has dual loyalties?

It doesn't matter, Israel will take in any Jew: American, Russian, Ukrainian, patriot of his old country or not.

Is there any actual evidence that he specifically has dual loyalties?

He's a citizen of nowhere. I'm sure he'd be just as open to migrating to Israel as he would to Singapore, Switzerland or any of the many tax havens around the world.

Caplan is Jewish. If he's wrong, he can just fuck off to Israel. Must be nice to have a backup country...

Rich, intelligent people with powerful passports always have a backup country, whether they are Jewish or not.

Caplan is pretty open about wanting to cultivate his own little bubble and not caring about the rest of the country he's in.

Unlike most American elites, I don’t feel the least bit bad about living in a Bubble. I share none of their egalitarian or nationalist scruples. Indeed, I’ve wanted to live in a Bubble for as long as I can remember. Since childhood, I’ve struggled to psychologically and socially wall myself off from “my” society.

Caplan is pretty open about wanting to cultivate his own little bubble and not caring about the rest of the country he's in.

I feel like the passage you quoted should be near enough to convince anyone not to take this guy's open-borders ideas seriously.

You've been told not to post low-effort sneers like this before. I tell you the same thing I tell all the Joo-posters; you're allowed to hate Jews, and you're allowed to write about why you think we should consider Jews invidious parasites, but you have to put effort into it (and also pretend you believe the Jews you are talking to are human beings who are entitled to participate here too, even if you don't), not just drop snarls about how anyone can be dismissed because he happens to be Jewish.

You have a very bad history. You are in that category of poster whose posts are 90% "Goddamn I hate Jews and women." You earned a couple of AAQCs over a year ago but since then have a long string of warnings and temp-bans (and tons of posts that are borderline but we usually let pass).

Improve the quality of your posts and tamp down your spite or you're going to be banned again.

Israel exists because the US pays for its existence, if support from the US wanes sooner or later Israel will be overwhelmed by its hostile neighbors.

Israel was able to fund its existence for decades before the US started "paying for it", and so long as the counrty has nukes I don't think they're ever getting overwhelmed. Who among their neighbors would even be capable of that? Lebanon?

Israel would be fine if the U.S. withdrew its support tomorrow.

Like, what if you're wrong Bryan? Where does he go from there: "Well, shucks, I guess we ended up with two Indias after all. My bad."

I vaguely remember an exchange someone had with him on Twitter back when his book with the SMBC webcomic artist came out, where someone basically asked him this, and his response was that it's good to support immigration and open borders because then a world-famous economist can get a job teaching — in English — at any number of universities in any number of countries and maintain his "beautiful bubble" and standard of living. When asked about everyone else left behind, well, that got the usual argument about why the "beautiful bubble" in the first place — being a libertarian means he owes nothing to nobody, doesn't have to care about anyone else unless he wants to, and that he'll support whatever policies benefit him personally, and if those same policies cause you harm, that's your problem.

Is "asshole-tarian" a thing? This is exactly why people say libertarianism can't work; if people don't really believe it but use it at their convenience, it's a dead letter.

Ironically that's exactly what the nativist right wing is doing in the US right now: supporting anti-immigration policies because they perceive that will benefit them regardless of what other people in the US or the potential immigrants themselves think.

America might be a country of immigrants, but tell that to the Pequots.

Native American cultures indeed has been largely wiped out by European settlement. But America hasn't ceased to be the country of immigrants since the Piligrims arrived, and there were many other ethnic groups that came later. Scandinavians, Irish, Italians, Jews, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Cubans... and many others. And yet, it did not destroy the Protestant culture in America - at least not in the way that the Europeans destroyed the Native American ones. It looks like America can deal with the permanent immigration just fine, under some conditions: a) immigration is limited to the numbers that could be successfully assimilated within reasonable time b) the immigrants actually see the host culture as human culture they have to at least coexist with, yet better - accept and c) the host culture itself is strong and independent enough to provide the immigrants with some framework to which they have to adhere - if there's just "diversity is our strength" and nothing else, then there's nothing to assimilate and everybody just keeps whatever they got, without forming a joint culture. I think, in keeping with these conditions America can welcome Indians just fine (and people like Vivek, for example, are a decent example of that) - but I don't think open borders would preserve these conditions.

It's not permanent. This isn't the 1920s anymore. People can cheaply and easily move to a country. They can also cheaply and easily leave. Even revoking citizenship is possible. We haven't done it before, but we also have never before seen the kinds of massive population movements we are currently seeing. Modern problems, modern solutions.

The longer version of Bryan Caplan's take still seems reasonable to me:

https://www.betonit.ai/p/reflections-on-india

There are serious problems with Indian governance. And the Soviet style experiment that you think can easily be shaken off is still influencing them to have awful agricultural policies.

The difference between the worst poverty in the world and one of the richest countries in the world is not biocapital it's government policy. It's most clearly visible in Korea, where the DMZ separates two governments, not two people. And the difference between them is as stark as things get.

The governance is a result of the people though.

To some degree, but the Korean situation proves there's more to it than that. There's no way the North Koreans are just genetically suited to Juche.

The biodeterministic hypothesis effectively asks us to believe that there is some magical property of the 35th parallel that causes Koreans born above it to be genetically predisposed towards Communism and Koreans born below it to be genetically predisposed towards Capitalism. Ditto the border between the former East and West Germany.

Do you believe in magic?

The biodeterministic hypothesis effectively asks us to believe that there is some magical property of the 35th parallel

It absolutely does not, that's an absurd strawman.

Nobody is literally 100% biodeterminist (in the sense that your genetics determines things like what language you speak). Biodeterminists believe that genetics matters a lot, not that it is literally the only thing that matters.

It's not an "absurd strawman" it's the logical consequence of the claim being made by multiple users in this thread (including the one i was responding to) that "bioleninism" will always trump policy and culture.

My point is that unless these people are prepared to argue that the observed disparities in quality of life between North and South Korea, East and West Germany, Red States and Blue States, etc... are all biological in origin I am going to argue that thier hypothesis has been falsified via experimentation, and that the best thing the "policy and culture don't matter" crowd could do for thier cause is to stop attracting attention.

No one is arguing that the differences between capitalist and communist countries are biological in origin. That the gaps in wealth between North and South Korea or East and West Germany are explained by economic policies alone is self-evident. That does not mean that biological and cultural differences don't exist or matter.

Looking at communist countries alone we can see the difference between those with high human capital (East Germany, the Soviet Union, North Korea), which are able to maintain an orderly society with advanced weapons manufacturing and scientific research and pose a credible military threat to their neighbors, and those with lower human capital (Angola, Benin, Cambodia, Ethiopia), which are a threat to no one but their own miserable inhabitants.

No one is arguing that the differences between capitalist and communist countries are biological in origin.

They are though, or rather they are arguing that people become capitalist or communist due to biology. Which then begs the question, what is it about the 35th parallel or the border between East and West Germany that causes genes to express themselves one way on one side and a different way on the other?

Boy if you're mad at the way the US educated elite have steered our country, get a load of how they got directed since independence.

While I think Bryan Caplan, Noah Smith, and co are correct that with reasonable economic policies India could climb above the deepest rungs of poverty i.e. no more shitting in the street, basic literacy, and an end to chronic child malnutrition, and that this is something the rest of the world ought to encourage and celebrate, they are far too bullish on its long-term convergence with industrialized nations.

Caplan's last point in particular strikes me as either willfully ignorant or completely insane:

Even if you have cultural fears about immigrants in general, what exactly is culturally objectionable about Indians? I live in one of top centers of Indian migration in the United States, and no one here even claims that they’re clinging to their native culture of crazy driving and rampant littering. They’re definitely not unleashing stray cattle on us. Yes, I know Indian Americans are self-selected from high castes and top schools. But after ten days in India, I confidently declare that the children of randomly-selected Indians would do well here. Like the Indians who are already here, they’d adopt almost everything good about modern U.S. culture, while retaining the strong family values that Americans have been foolishly forgetting.

First off, this man has apparently never told an Indian Uber driver that he's in a hurry to get to the airport. And as a supporter of elite Indian immigration (we can certainly quibble on what "elite" means, since that's really the crux of the issue here), I must strenously oppose the claim that we can just import randomly-selected(?!) people from any country and expect a good outcome, economic, cultural, or otherwise. We in fact have a pretty good idea of what importing random Indians looks like, in the form of Guyana and Trinidad, and it isn't pretty.

As for North Korea, I think the fact that in their current state they are still able to build and test nuclear missiles and field an impressive IMO team, among other achievements, is a testament to the inherent biocapital of the Korean people, and something we don't see in other nations with similar regimes like Eritrea or Turkmenistan. With nations as with individuals, you may sabotage someone with the potential to be intelligent and successful by starving them as a child or hitting them in the head with a hammer, but I have yet to the see the opposite.

Caplan's last point in particular strikes me as either willfully ignorant or completely insane:

I'm never sure what to make of Caplan. He's clearly contrarian enough to acknowledge that genetics and IQ matter (see The Case Against Education) but he also states explicitly that he believes in Magic Dirt (or as he describes it, 'Magic Institutions') in The Case for Open Borders.

He also seems to believe that a migrant increasing his wages by moving to a rich country is actually increasing his productivity, rather than just benefitting from cost disease.

I remember reading one of travel pieces about Japan, and there were a lot of comments asking him to square what he noticed about Japan (the trains run on time, people are hyper-polite, there is no crime) with his support for open borders. The one I remember was something along the lines of 'Should Japan open its borders to Somalia? If yes, is this because it will benefit the Somali migrants or because it will benefit the Japanese?). I can't find the comment now, so I guess he deleted it. But looking here, he seems to be mostly interested in the gains for migrants.

He seems to believe that open borders will turn the whole world into the USA, rather than turning the whole world into South Africa.

I think Caplan is the worst sort of individual; an isolated elietist living in a gated community that will never have to face the reality his choices make for everyone else, who's intent on maximizing his investments, regardless of the wider consequences.

If that wasn't clear enough, I think he's abhorrent and deserves alot of things, none of them good.

There was a documentary that someone did on the efforts of a Chinese engineer contracted to build a road in the Congo and all the trials and tribulations he had to deal with in regards to the locals. I wonder how he'd react to that. I'm sure it would be telling.

Caplan doesn't believe in the blank slatism, nonetheless he attempts to justify his position with a mix of libertarian autism, utilitarian autism and hypothesized GDP maximisation.

He works for libertarian think tanks, so you should think of him as ‘a propagandist for rich people’. The arguments are just spins for increasing immigration, which benefits his employers by providing them with cheaper labor.

This is a common fallacy in the nature v. nurture argument.

Just because it is possible to mess up a high IQ society does not mean it is possible to redeem a low IQ society.

Communism can ruin North Korea. But good government can't fix India. At least, not if the Indians are allowed to vote.

Consider this analogy. You could raise Lebron James in a cave and starve him of nutrients and thereby ruin his athletic potential. But that doesn't mean you can take an average person and turn him into an NBA player with great training. Nature determines your potential. Nurture helps you realize it.

Its common because it it is observably true. Whatever effect "biocapital" might have is small when compared to the effects of culture and policy.

The million dollar question that everybody here seems to be dancing around is that IF all this nonsense about "bioleninism" and "elite human capital" are true, why are the "best" in India struggling with issues that the "middle" in states like Mississippi and Alabama solved 100 years ago when said states are supposed to be degenerate backwaters only barely removed from the third-world?

Are the English a high IQ society? I'd consider them middling at best. Germany and Switzerland are both probably better off, and most Jewish sub communities within Europe, like in Hungary were easily way higher.

The industrial revolution started in England. It was undoubtedly good policies and culture that got them there, because their smart neighbors had to play catch-up rather than leading the way. And they were arguably filled with a bunch of malnutritioned low-IQ idiots breathing smoke and drinking alcohol constantly while they accomplished the whole thing, its possible they were much worse off in "biological" potential than India is today.

In your analogy you are talking about a zero sum competition: "being an NBA player". There are limited spots and not everyone can do it. But I don't think that applies to having a high standard of living and a working civilization. In the analogy it would be more like "can you learn to play basketball at all". I think a 4ft tall not very bright child can learn to play basketball. And I think having a working civilization requires about a similar level of biological potential.

The reason it doesn't happen more often is that getting the culture and the policy correct is the actual really difficult part.

Are the English a high IQ society?

The average IQ in Europe is about 100 (tautologically, most of the IQ tests are normed here), the average IQ in India is 76.

What India has (thanks to the caste system) is thousands of different ethnic groups, some of which are clearly very intelligent. It hardly makes sense to talk about Indians as an ethnic group, any more than it makes sense to talk about Americans as an ethnic group.

Could the industrial revolution have started in East Asia if their economic policies and political systems were different? Absolutely. Could it have started in India? I'm skeptical. An intelligent smart fraction (that is kept smart through not intermarrying with the masses) can certainly do a lot (see South Africa), but median must matter too. If it didn't, we would see a lot more wealthy countries than we do.

Europe's average IQ is 100 today. And that "100" has been a has changed in meaning over the last century with the Flynn effect.

We don't know what it was in 1800, because the test didn't exist at the time. We do know that a bunch of things with negative impacts on IQ were part of their daily lives. Everyone was drinking beer and wine, since it was the main way to get clean water. Which means alcohol during pregnancy, and early adolescence. They were burning coal and wood constantly to keep warm, that destroys health. There were rolling famines in Ireland, and refugees from it were suffering from malnutrition in early childhood.

I would not be surprised if the average IQ of Britain was in the 75-85 range in the late 1700s. They dealt with it and built a world spanning empire because of superior culture and policy.

Well the developed world has also had dysgenic fertility since the 1800s, so it could well be a case that the two things balance out.

You have to also consider that the rest of the world also had famine, disease and pollution in 1800. You're comparing India now to (a rough outline of) Britain in 1800, as opposed to comparing India in 1800 to Britain in 1800.

India's average IQ is far too low to merely be a product of not having gone through the full Flynn Effect. Maybe once it's more developed it'll be 86 instead of 76, but India is not going to see IQ scores like we see in East Asia, the gap is too vast.

The industrial revolution started in England.

Mostly spearheaded by Scots, IIRC.

Are the English a high IQ society? I'd consider them middling at best. Germany and Switzerland are both probably better off,

What's your basis for saying that?

The industrial revolution started in England. It was undoubtedly good policies and culture that got them there,

Not necessarily - there are some other pretty compelling arguments as to why it was specifically 18th century Britain where the factors leading to the industrial revolution converged (i.e. the access to coal, and economic viability of mining it)

The industrial revolution started in England. It was undoubtedly good policies and culture that got them there, because their smart neighbors had to play catch-up rather than leading the way. And they were arguably filled with a bunch of malnutritioned low-IQ idiots

Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms suggests eugenic selection pressures as the primary reason behind the industrial revolution starting in England.

In your analogy you are talking about a zero sum competition: "being an NBA player". There are limited spots and not everyone can do it. But I don't think that applies to having a high standard of living and a working civilization. In the analogy it would be more like "can you learn to play basketball at all". I think a 4ft tall not very bright child can learn to play basketball. And I think having a working civilization requires about a similar level of biological potential.

One can always quibble with an analogy. I can easily break a glass cup by throwing it. It's much more difficult to assemble a bunch of glass shards into a cup. Dropping a baby would be an easy way to lower its expected IQ, not so easy to improve a baby's IQ beyond the basics of housing, feeding him or her, sending him or her to school or homeschooling. As dictator you can at your leisure lower the IQ of your country by Pol Potting the smart fraction, not so obvious how to improve your country's IQ, or a segment of your country's IQ. Stateside progressives have been trying for decades with taxpayer money, resources, and children.

Clark's point raises the question "why Britain in the late 1700's?". The selection effect he talks about has been in place just about everywhere in history. The rich upper class reproduced in high numbers and crowded down the poor into subsistence and eventually starvation. Why not a continental European country? Honestly take your pick and they probably looked similar to England.

I don't think I was "quibbling" with the analogy. I do think that happens sometimes, when you can stretch the analogy to make a point that doesn't make any sense in reality. But my point stands outside of the analogy: a working civilization does not require a high IQ population. It requires good culture and policy. Reproducing those things is hard, but does not require high biological potential.

The rich upper class reproduced in high numbers and crowded down the poor into subsistence and eventually starvation. Why not a continental European country? Honestly take your pick and they probably looked similar to England.

Is there one—or better yet, multiple you can pick—or any arbitrary continental European country(ies) I can pick and you demonstrate as such like Clark did with England?

But my point stands outside of the analogy: a working civilization does not require a high IQ population. It requires good culture and policy. Reproducing those things is hard, but does not require high biological potential.

To circle-back to a basketball metaphor, this does not sound too different from from the claim height isn't required to be good at basketball, it just requires good skills and feel for the game. It dodges the empirical finding that height, is in fact, quite vital and overwhelmingly so to being good at basketball, and crowds out other factors, despite height not being ex-ante necessary nor sufficient for being good at basketball.

France.

And I'm tempted to just rewrite exactly what I wrote above. Working civilization is not a zero sum game like competitive basketball. It's not about being better than everyone else, it's about being good enough to cross a threshold. More like can you shoot a basket, rather than can you win a game of basketball.

Okay, and France how so? Along the lines of the evidence of what Clark described.

Please provide more than argument by assertion. I shouldn’t have to ask. Nor am I wedded to Clark’s hypothesis.

And it’s noted that you tried to dodge your previous claim of “Honestly take your pick and they probably looked similar to England,” and the basketball metaphor in general, skipping over the possibility that I select the country or countries to be evaluated. Maybe I was too charitable in leaving you a potential out.

And I'm tempted to just rewrite exactly what I wrote above.

Ditto… one can always re-assert.

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Trump's which is handwaving, inaction, minor lip service and then letting things happen as they already are.

Maybe this is the right choice. I don't think this issue is very important in the long run.

And in the long run, we're all dead.

There's a prejudice by the Extremely Rationalist towards long time preference that goes way too far, and at its most unflattering can be said to be variants of 'how does this effect you personally?' It papers over the important questions - what is a nation, and its peoples?

You could say the same thing about anthropogenic global warming. But people aren't saying the issue isn't very important in the long run. In fact, they're overreacting. Meanwhile, mass migration by neoliberalism is creating a crisis of the social democracies that is very much going on as we speak, having immediate effects on the daily lives of everyone in the West.

In the end, there is no great list of Priority Issues of which must be tackled in order. A great deal of people care about this and it can't just be handwaved away to Providence. The fact that the economic and academic elite are downplaying it makes it all the more important that it be addressed. Issues with elite support don't need apologia on our part: they have plenty of support from the institutions themselves.

Ok. I don't think it's very important in the short-run either.

There is a direct causal line between outsourcing software development to Indians and the enshittification of the software that runs most of modern civilization. Shitty Indian devs are hardly the sole cause of this, but they're definitely a major one, and bringing them en masse into the US (as opposed to the current status quo of merely outsourcing and then having competent US devs fix their mess) will only accelerate this rapidly.

There is a direct causal line between outsourcing software development to Indians and the enshittification of the software that runs most of modern civilization.

What is the evidence for this?

Observation?

Less flippantly i don't know whether its a cause or an effect but there does seem to be a corelation between the professional managerial class' hostility to the basic practices of quality control and the outsourcing of work to India.

Outsourcing to India is definitely not what we're talking about here, which is H1Bs. You don't need to hire a single H1B to outsource to India.

Management is obviously interested in cutting costs and that obviously results in less QA and cheaper employees. That doesn't mean that if we just stop hiring cheaper employees, we'd stop having shitty products. That's not how the casual connection runs.

I didn't claim there was a causal relationship only a correlation.

There is a direct causal line between outsourcing software development to Indians and the enshittification of the software that runs most of modern civilization.

No there isn't. The two things only look related because they share a common cause: both are actions taken by companies who don't care about the quality of their product, only that profits must go up. But while outsourcing and enshittification are similar, the former did not cause the latter.

Maybe this is the right choice. I don't think this issue is very important in the long run.

In addition -- it's also important that heated disputes get resolved by the party in general rather than always being dictated by the leader. Having the head stay above the fray is beneficial.

I needed some time to clarify this in my mind, but here's a few more words... the entire debate is a distraction. It's a time-tested, well-worn, same-as-it-ever-was, hand-waving, smoke in mirrors attempt to get conservatives to take their eye off the ball.

One of, if not the biggest, issues that got Trump elected was the mass migration of humanity across the Mexico border that ballooned under Biden. Millions are estimated to have crossed in the past few years hoovering up all kinds of services and national goodwill. Conservatives point at gangs taking over apartment complexes and many (poor) liberal voters point at cities that take their resources and give them to migrants. The problem -- broadly understood -- is an open border and a flood of people.

The solution -- broadly understood -- is closing the border and sending all the people back. The reality is this can't be done, at least not in a meaningful way and not much more than is already happening. It's safe to assume that half or more of these people are already in the wind. The people who will be sent back first are the ones we can get our hands on. It is precisely the same argument I'd give libs/progressives about the gun debate: you cannot stuff that particular genie back in the bottle, but if you were going to try you'd go after all the guns you knew about first.

So, who's up first? How about some of those 85K Visa holders! We know where they all are and we already know they follow the rules and will do what we tell them. You want to show bigly action on sending back migrants but most are dispersed -- or worse, dangerous? Send the easy ones back first! DUH. Get those numbers up! We didn't need them anyway! They were just doing the garbage programming work that no one really cares about. Boring entry level stuff like, updating warehousing services for Wallgreens, or front-end development for Door Dash, or using PuTTy to monitor Python scripts and shell services on data farms --the crap jobs we should be giving to the 820k STEM college grads. It's an easy win.

But Musk says, "hang on, we kinda need these guys, there's more of those jobs than you realize!" Now the in-fighting begins. Keep your eye on the ball: the Indian guys aren't the problem anyone actually wants fixed. The H1-B visa people are not stealing American jobs or warping American culture. They slot in precisely where we want immigrants to our immigrant nation to slot in -- legally, usefully and competitively. America consumes these people like Popeye eats Spinach. This isn't Britain or Germany. This is still the world's strongest economy and it's ravenous.

Are H1-B visas a real problem? Maybe. Are they the actual problem we're trying to fix? Nope. It's a trompe l'oeil. A token gesture. A ruse. A Hail-Mary on the first play. It's the brazen hope that we don't notice that the people-flood isn't actually receding and a million illegal immigrants aren't getting forcibly repatriated. It's not what people actually voted for. It's a distraction. And if I had to choose a side (which i don't) I'd side with Musk. We need these folks to do the (digital) shit work--same as always.

***Yes, I'm making a prediction: wholesale deportation won't happen. My prediction is that the growth rate of deported aliens will not exceed 20% of what it already is. According to Reuters and others, there were almost 3 million border interactions last year with around 270k deported. I predict that number will not exceed 350k for at least the first two years of Trump's presidency. I have 85% confidence in this prediction. I think we're already sending back as many as we can and the debate over H1-B's is an attempt to goose the numbers.

The future here is incredibly bleak

If you go to various points in the past few hundred years, you could have looked at the then-current situations of China, Japan, or Korea and easily considered their futures rather bleak. Only a few decades ago Lee Kuan Yew was lamenting the cultural habit of people pissing in elevators in Singapore. Today they are all at or approaching the upper ends of most human development metrics. What could you say about India today that you couldn't about those countries then that suggests India couldn't achieve similar?

What could you say about India today that you couldn't about those countries then that suggests India couldn't achieve similar?

Poor genetic intelligence, obviously.

Weren't Europeans saying similar things about those other countries back then?

No? Asians have often been stereotyped as backwards and cruel, but generally not as stupid.

What has that to do with anything? They couldn't measure IQ. We can. This isn't a matter of opinion.

Only a few decades ago Lee Kuan Yew was lamenting the cultural habit of people pissing in elevators in Singapore.

So...did that problem become bigger or smaller after his rule?

Not sure if this was meant as a sincere question, but just in case: in my personal experience, I have never smelled urine in a Singaporean elevator. Unfortunately, I can't say the same for the US (or even the for US in just the past week...).

It's sincere.

As someone living the “not very well integrated brownish expat working a lot in high earning sector in the West” life it makes me rather nervous to see the calibre and the intentions of the people supposedly vouching for my interests in this debate.

The social contract I came here for is simple. I broadly like the society these people created. I don’t think a different people could/would create this society so I am happy people of broadly the same ancestry and culture stay in control of it. In exchange of living in it and having my children become a proper part of it I can pay a lot in taxes and generally be a modal citizen at the sidelines of the society.

I am aware of the costs I am imposing on the society here. I am pricing the residents out of the housing market, causing some wage suppression, watering down their culture and social cohesion and giving them mixed-race grandkids who doesn’t quite look like them.

The desirable scenario for me is that immigrants are not too high in numbers and generally similar in profile to me so that the tensions aren’t too big and our posterity assimilates without attracting too much negative attention.

The very undesirable scenario for me is that high profile individuals shout it to the regular people from the top of their lungs that their culture is worthless, their children are deadweights, and they will use armies of people who look somewhat like me to teach them a lesson.

This is a very dangerous game they are playing. Many PMC immigrants seem entirely incapable of sensing the zeitgeist and subterranean societal currents of the countries they are living in. The people from the subcontinent are especially bad at this

I get the feeling that a lot of H1Bs just want to make their bag and go home: Vivek is pissed that not only that he's being treated as new money (because, well, he is) that he's also not getting any respect for being an Indian. Sundar and Nadella may be CEOs of American tech companies but he might as well be a Level 1 IT call center man for all the difference it makes to the average American.

And that's the rub. He wants respect and status, but you can't get that by sneering at the natives. Complaining about the football quarterback that goes home to fuck the prom queen outs you as a particular kind of nerd.

Complaining about the football quarterback that goes home to fuck the prom queen outs you as a particular kind of nerd.

I don't think being "a particular kind of nerd" has anything to do with it. It all comes down to the "sneering at the natives". IE, if you're going to approach the natives with derision and hostility what reasons have you've given them not to respond in kind?

Nadella's got no room to complain; it's not like pasty white Steve Ballmer got a lot of respect.

you're beyond well integrated, you're self-hating

I think this is incorrect, incredibly-rude, and uncalled for.

almost none of us care about "mixed-race" grandkids

Because we live in a shockingly-ignorant era downstream of generations of constant indoctrination ensuring we're incapable of comprehending the existence of the foreigner. One of my favorite things about non-whites is that they tend to not be laboring under any illusions when it comes to how different we all actually are from each other.

think that well integrated immigrants ... water down our culture and social cohesion

"Well-integrated" is doing so much work here as to make this tautological.

Anti-Indian prejudice is widespread; I don’t think most of these people would be upset, specifically, to have grandkids with Indian features(and white/Indian kids just look Hispanic, anyways), but dislike of Indians as Indians is extremely common. Lots of the people objecting to h1bs would be less upset if they were Mexicans.

I mean, this is probably true, but German culture is hardly alien to Anglophone culture. They were already high church protestants who shared a culture and history. They shared the same work ethic and broad culture. German isn’t that alien.

Indians are not that close. They share almost nothing of our culture, our history, our religion. They don’t share the same work ethic.

German culture is hardly alien to Anglophone culture. They were already high church protestants

A significant number of German immigrants to the United States were Catholics. Some of the most Catholic places in the United States are predominantly German, and it’s not an unusual sight to see historically German towns where there’s a Catholic, Lutheran, and Restorationist/United/Nondenominational Protestant church all extant for over a century.

I agree Germans aren’t all that alien, and their religious and social culture shares a lot with Anglos. But Germans were at the forefront of “will these ethnic minority religious weirdos ever assimilate???” a little over a century ago, with a lot of Germans insisting on speaking German as a native tongue.

This was forced out of them, and as an Anglophile with significant German heritage, I’m glad for it. But I’m not so sure Germans are a great example of natural assimilation — yet they’re a great example of how assimilation can work if it’s enforced.

I mean I get that, but my thought is that cultural differences between the two groups matter. Even if the Germans hadn’t fully assimilated, the difference between a Lutheran and an Episcopal group of Christians is tiny. Even between Catholics and Episcopals Theres no gulf between them that would create a division. Even the Languages are fairly similar.

But the difficulty for Indians, various Muslim peoples, East Asians (although I think Japan and Korea have adopted a bit of our culture already) is that they aren’t really like us. Their languages are not like ours, their religion is different, their cultural assumptions and mores are different. And especially as we’re much less keen to enforce immigration and assimilation, this is tearing at the social fabric much more so than the largest community of unassimilated Germans could possibly do. And so I think talking about unassimilated Germans in an Anglo context is a false equivalence here. Muslims are no Lutherans. Indians are not Germans. Even if you enforce the assimilation to the point of them completely losing the language, you still have issues of religion and social mores and the degree to which they tolerate different ideas.

Reality is far harsher, bio capital here kept getting worse, elites kept getting outbred by proles,

I think that the truth may be even harsher than that. The Indian elite were never "elite" to begin with. They never learned responsibility, they were never housebroken, and that is why the moment anyone with actual agency and an entrepreneurial streak showed up, they were able to run the table on them.

I suspect that the obsession with sanskrit is a variant of the same woke mind virus that is currently turning blue-tribe professionals into mental invalids something about the preoccupation with symbols and structural "isms" at the expense of real world competence seems eerily familiar.

In the meantime I would argue that "bioleninism" has only slightly more basis in reality than marxist-leninism which is to say slightly more than none at all. Clarence Thomas is arguably more "white" or "aryan" than you (or your internet crush David Fuentes) will ever be, because he has at least taken up the burden.

The word Aryan denotes men of high culture...

Are you arguing that Clarence Thomas is not a man of high culture?

How do you distinguish between being "learned" and "cultured", or between " highly cultured and low?

You just said that "the word Aryan denotes men of high culture" now you're claiming that it's just some Sanskrit nonsense, which is it?

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people kept getting sanskritized and it was no longer Aryan in anything but name

Were the Aryans not the ones who brought Sanskrit to India in the first place? Or are you talking about attempts to diminish the influence of the Persian high culture of the Mughals?

Man, I gotta say those Charles Johnson links were not very compelling. I was looking for an omnibus summation of the H1B kerfluffle with some focus, ideally better researched than the many comments/posts/anecdotes all over the place (these all ring pretty true but just looking for the data-y version). What I got from Johnson was just endless ad hominem.

Trump does what a liberal from the 90s does

Given that Melania came in on an H1 and Vance would have to come back home to Usha, I'm not sure what you expected them to do. And we know what the Elon wing of the party thinks.

The complete and total shock of the ethnonationalist side of the GOP when the top three most visible members don't come out in their favor on this particular policy takes the cake for being both poetic and retarded all at once.

people should kick out and sue the living shit out of Indian IT sweatshops and be far harsher migration wise but then again nothing ever happens.

Kicking the shit out of IT sweatshops would be beneficial to exceptional Indian (and other) talent. The Elon branch of the GOP would sign up for that in a heartbeat.

I want a visa program for people like Melania or if Tendulkar were to headline an American Cricket league in the twilight of his career or if Musk wants to hire a handful of AI superstars who live in foreign countries, it should be limited to people being paid at least a pretty substantial multiple maybe 3x of Davis Beacon wages or the equivalent for salaried folks.

I think much of the opposition to the attacks on H1s would be muted if it was just about raising the wage floor for it.

Have people forgotten that Musk is an immigrant? He moved to the US in his 20s. People's shouldn't be too surprised he thinks tech industry immigrants are actually a good thing.

The Online Left seem to have missed that memo too.

And proceeded to kick everyone's ass for 10 years straight...

Kicking the shit out of IT sweatshops would be beneficial to exceptional Indian (and other) talent. The Elon branch of the GOP would sign up for that in a heartbeat.

The IT sweatshops and their ability to depress tech industry wages is precisely the reason the Elon branch of the GOP supports them. There's no point to importing a new class of desperate workers if you aren't able to use them to make money.

The tech industry isn't a monolith. Tesla pay a minimum of $150-200K for a far high class of engineer while some po-dunk IT consultancy sweatshop in Indiana pays $65K.

A higher wage floor helps his part of the tech industry grow. That kind of fraud is absolutely not helpful for him.

The tech industry isn't a monolith. Tesla pay a minimum of $150-200K for a far high class of engineer while some po-dunk IT consultancy sweatshop in Indiana pays $65K.

Industry pay rates are connected. When the wages of a job at the lower-end of the field are lowered, that puts downwards pressure on the rest of the industry. But more than that, you're lying.

https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=tesla+inc

76k isn't that much higher than 65k. You're kind of right in the sense that the higher end is getting paid a lot of money, but Tesla is still using the H1b visa system to import low-paid workers and drive down the prices and bargaining position of their labour.

A higher wage floor helps his part of the tech industry grow. That kind of fraud is absolutely not helpful for him.

Why would the owner of a single company care if he's helping his part of the tech industry grow? That kind of fraud is absolutely helpful for him, because it helps him pay less money to his employees and extract more value out of them.

I have a question: I've read anecdotes (not all from H1B opponents) that Indians in tech have strong preferences for hiring other Indians - has this ever been formally studied? I know something happened in California that got a bill about caste discrimination through the legislature (albeit vetoed), but I don't care to guess what political pressures were behind that bill.

Is "FAGMAN" and autocorrection of "FAANG?" Either way, what does it mean?

So, are the WITCH firms hiring foreign workers and then placing them at other companies as contractors? I'm unclear what they do. What were they sued for?

Can anyone corroborate anti-H1b/possibly anti-Indian comments like this?

There are plenty of other Republican candidates who would have won the 2024 election.

That's complete cope with no evidence. I can partially agree that it's not the Twitter anons that got Trump elected, though you're overselling it, but there's a reason why every other candidate got slaughtered in the primaries.

The things that the dissident right advocates for - and the ways in which they express those opinions - are completely anathema to the average conservative.

I don't remember them giving a lot of weight to the "but they're here legally!" argument when it was applied to Haitians.

Evidence that Trump is more popular than other Republicans is not evidence that another Republican candidate would not have beaten Biden/Harris.

I suppose, if you want to be strict about it, but it's still better evidence than what anyone has presented that another Republican candidate could beat Biden / Harris.

When the average Republican talks about "legal" immigration, they're talking about the social contract on immigration we had pre-2020, and that necessarily includes the demographic transformation that has unfolded before their eyes in the last 50 years.

Trump already ran and won on the immigration issue in 2016, MAGA's view on it obviously has to go beyond "just return to pre-2020".

The dissident right perspective on immigration and issues they believe are related - Holocaust Revisionism to deconstruct "myths" about the West, is miscegenation healthy?, black people are animals.

The DR is a catchall label for anyone right-wing who disagrees with the establishment right. I see no reason why anyone should answer for the people you highlighted anymore than center-leftists should answer for galaxy brained takes like One Billion Americans or Open Borders.

Otherwise, a majority of Trump voters would not be saying they want to either keep or increase immigration.

"Keep or increase" as a statistic is usually deception. Almost everyone wants to keep or increase the number of people who die by falling into volcanoes.

A wet paper bag could have beaten Biden/Harris. Biden has obvious dementia, but even beyond that, there was the economic crises (inflation AND recession), billions for Ukraine, the complete botching of hurricane relief (there are still people living in tents), and the border. There’s no positives to vote for.

Trump is winning because he at least wants to upend the system. Whether another person could win that handily, I don’t know, it’s possible. But only the ones who promise to fix the broken system so Americans have a functioning government again.

A wet paper bag could have beaten Biden/Harris.

Yes, everything is obviously inevitable now that it happened. Just go back to the pre-election predictions on this forum, even Trump supporters where pessimistic. I was maintaining "it's a toss-up" and I was in the minority, I remember precisely one guy telling everyone that they're nuts for being this blackpilled.

If it helps I both predicted publically here Trump would win due to the fundamentals (the economy) and believe that means a generic Republican would also have won.

Inflation hit too hard across the board for Democrats to have won absent some other major factor (war, big terrorist attack etc.).

The fundamentals were good enough for the Republicans I have a hard time seeing any decent candidate of theirs losing. Especially with switching Biden out late making Democrats look weak.

You are correct though that a lot of people here were predicting the opposite. Either out of doomerism or listening to the media/polls I suppose.

https://www.levernews.com/how-democrats-learned-to-love-losing/

I think honestly the secret sauce of MAGA and Trump is breaking the consensus of hyper normalization. Hyper normalization is the thought that basically, it’s broken, it sucks, and nobody can actually fix it. They don’t even try, and until Trump, nobody bothered to pretend to try. And especially on the democratic side, there’s just no thought process of “just doing something” to fix whatever the problem is. There’s no “buck stops here” in government in which the person or group promises to make actual concrete changes that will actually fix the problem. And because Trump is the guy at least claiming to try to fix things, he’s the guy who can actually win and people like him can actually win. Biden Harris were absolutely the opposite. They can pass acts that everyone knew wouldn’t fix inflation, they can appoint czars to head up not fixing whatever crisis they’re appointed to pretend to care about. But they lack the sort of extreme ownership, the will to actually take the levers of power and do something with them, the will to make decisions that the6 intend to stick with.

I think given how into hyper normalization the DNC is, just about any not-democrat could have won. The DNC is the party of “whelp, we tried absolutely nothing, and it didn’t work. Nothing else we can do, sorry, it’s just going to suck now.” Anyone promising “I can absolutely fix immigration, and here’s how we do it,” has the edge. Anyone who says “we can fix the government and make it work again,” who isn’t desperate to hear that kind of thing? Whether Trump can actually fix all of these problems is an open question. But I think the hope he’s giving that we can take the powers of the government to actually make life better — that we don’t have to accept that everything will be getting worse and we should sit and drink wine and watch America slowly rot away from the inside. Even if you don’t like him, the thought of someone trying to actually fix things is hope.

Politics runs on hope. When you have no hope to offer, no credible policy proposal that can serve as a vessel for the public's aspirations for a better life, policy starvation sets in and the public transfers their support to the most credible available proposal. Since people are lazy, the most credible available proposal will be at least somewhat more radical than the recently-discredited proposals. Repeat until the problem is solved or radicalization triggers a crisis that eclipses all previous priorities.

Well, if you paid attention what Trump was actually saying on the right you would get called a traitor / globalist / a fed / blackpiller / loser / brown / some combination thereof, so there wasn't a lot of critical examination going on.

Then there is the 4d chess plan truster thing - "of course he has to say that to get elected, but he's actually based you guys, once election is done all doubters will be deported / put into crystals". For some reason they never consider that 4d chess is for tricking them.

The real actual 4d chess happening right now is Musk doing a feint and pretending to retreat slightly from his positions. Give it a few months and when his position is a lot more secure and the Trump admin is chugging along he'll come out and strike the final blow out of nowhere against the nativists. The dude is one of the most skilled business operatives of our times, you think he can't play the (medium to) long game?

Give it a few months and when his position is a lot more secure and the Trump admin is chugging along he'll come out and strike the final blow out of nowhere against the nativists.

Im curious what do you think the political fallout would be if he did this and got domed in the head at range?

Well, it depends if whether the assailant was successful or not. If successful then there's massive blowback from pretty much everyone in the mainstream, the Dems probably find that they liked Musk after all (in death much is forgiven) and use him as a cudgel stick to beat the republicans with. Swing voters generally abhor violence so we get large Dem victories in upcoming elections and for the next few years which they use to push immigration even further (this time adding in the unskilled to the original plan for only skilled immigrants because Dems like unskilled immigration too). Republicans who wish to present a respectable face to society (most of them) disavow the ideologies of the shooter and lean into neoliberal policies (remember, Musk isn't the only big billionaire on the tech right, there are a few dozen other powerful people with similar views who'll step up if given the chance) even harder to capture more of the center which is slowly shifting away from them because the Dems keep making justified comparisons between the low brow right and the Brownshirts.

In the medium term (10+ years) the assassination of Musk turns out to only hurt their cause (not to mention massively hurt humanity too because at the moment Must is one of the few people really pushing us out further technologically). They end up emasculated and derided to the point no respectable person wants to be associated with them. Even people like MTG deny them completely and high immigration continues anyways because coming out against it marks you out as one of "them".

Now this might sound bad, but it's nothing compared to what happens if the nativist right tried to do this and failed to kill him. As they say: if you come at the king, you best not miss and now it's personal for Musk (I'd argue the current situation is already somehwat personal for Musk but this would be double extra 100% personal for him). Lets not forget that he's a highly highly skilled operative who's going to want to exact revenge, and his vengeance will be like that of a farmer against one of his flocks of sheep he has been wronged by: bloody, brutal and harshly efficient.

We probably start with the Republican party getting totally captured by the Elon wing after which they cut off the nativists entirely from polite society, cheered on by the left leaning 50% of the population (who think the Republicans aren't going far enough). This is followed by them getting declared as "Enemies of Humanity" (or something similar) and a regime something like the Chinese treatment of Ughyurs being imposed upon them, the goal of which is to completely eradicate their culture so that two generations down the line even their descendants hate what they stood for. Total memocide if you will. Think woke, but actually managed and implemented by competent people whose direct goal is punishment and reform rather than internal status games. The nativists will be left wishing they could go back to a world where everyone, regardless of their origins gets is treated equally.

And honestly, this is exactly the right and just thing to do if an attempt on Musk's life happens. Assassination attempts should not be free, you don't get to go back to the status quo if you fail, that just encourages people to try because worst case you're no worse off than at the moment. For a proper deterrent we need to have a system where if anyone attempts to kill another human for a cause the whole cause gets set back decades (like how Palestinian statehood has been set back by the Oct 7 Hamas attack).

For a proper deterrent we need to have a system where if anyone attempts to kill another human for a cause the whole cause gets set back decades

You see I think you make several assumptions here that are wrong, we live in a post-Luigi world. The left and even normal dems would not be tut-tutted by their media to feel bad at Elon being got and would react with unrivaled glee at his death, there would be many memes. This would leave the economic zone wing of the republican party with the realization that they have no real allies anymore and the general public with the realization that you don't actually have to sit around while the billionaires run circles around you and run the country you can just shoot them. Once people realize the emperor really isn't wearing any pants? I have no idea after that.

The Dissident Right and all these anon frog Twitter accounts didn't elect Donald Trump; the Democrats elected Donald Trump by adopting insane immigration policies, presiding over an economy that fucked the middle class, and doubling down on out of touch culture war issues.

And now top Republicans are wisely avoiding alienating those Indian and Hispanic voters with other-pole insane rhetoric excluding them from being real Americans.

And now top Republicans are wisely avoiding alienating those Indian and Hispanic voters with other-pole insane rhetoric excluding them from being real Americans.

Somehow, Trump's anti-immigration stance didn't keep Hispanics from voting for him this past election. Or does Trump not count as a top Republican?

Up till when I wrote this post, Trump (and Vance) had avoided directly commenting on it. Hence "avoiding alienating them".

In the meantime, he came out pretty strongly on we need competent people which signals a willingness to confront H1B fraud/abuses but not a desire to end skilled immigration entirely.

The online-right overplayed their hand here. Same as those agitating for a national abortion ban. I'd expect in both cases Trump to keep stiff-arming both of them.

In the meantime, he came out pretty strongly on we need competent people which signals a willingness to confront H1B fraud/abuses but not a desire to end skilled immigration entirely.

The online-right overplayed their hand here.

I don't know how you derive the second line from the first. Let's see what happens with Elon / Vivek, but they might be the ones that end up burned from this.

Sure, happy to see and cite this post if I’m wrong.

Let's see what happens with Elon / Vivek, but they might be the ones that end up burned from this.

To quote Parvini's most recent Substack:

Power is top-down. Democracy is an illusion. At best, one can say that this or that group of elites gets their friends elected. Power is never bottom-up, never comes as the result of a government-sanctioned street protest, a ratio, the fact you got 20,000 likes on Twitter, or because you ‘redpilled the normies’. When I wrote The Populist Delusion a couple of years ago, it was to teach these fundamentals of power. Many thousands of people read this book, but alas its lessons were not, in the end, internalised.

And later:

As I’ve pointed out countless times, there is no trade off. How it works is as follows: a big donor, whether Zionist, Tech Bro, or any other stripe, gives resources and in exchange they get what they want. You, dear voter, like the kids in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, GET NOTHING, YOU LOSE, GOOD DAY SIR. The costs to Trump of not going along with H-1B Visas or uncritical and blind Israel support is billions of dollars and institutional support. The cost to Trump of betraying the voters? None. ‘This time it will be different, get in the crystal’, they will cry. To which I can only say, ‘do not be silly, no it won’t be.’

All power belongs to a tiny elite; the masses do not matter. Elon and Vivek can't "get burned," because they're each one more powerful than all 77 million Trump voters put together.

Elon is an asset just through owning Twitter so I agree he has more weight to pull around than millions of ordinary Joes, though I don't think it's quite at the "I do whatever the fuck I want" level - his position is being propped up by the masses in a more direct way than that of any democratically elected politician.

What exactly does Vivek have to offer?

To add to this, I’ve never seen Trump claim that immigrants that come legally to work honestly and share the American dream are not real Americans. His rhetoric has always been about fake asylum seekers, criminals and others. Not conflating those two is critical.

I don’t see why he would: that would be alienating a demographic that’s powerfully anti-woke, especially the Asian population!

White-collar migrants are even worse since you are making college admissions and jobs even harder for your kid but you are also ensuring votebanks, unstable coalitions

That's how I (and I think a lot of Trump voters) feel about it. For a long time now the standard line has been that immigration is good, as long as it's legal and limited to people with some credentials. Which basically means either middle class white-collar migrants, or students aiming to enter that class. We cracked down hard on the lower classes of migrants workers, so now there's no one available to build houses, process poultry, nanny babies, or basically do any of the other low-wage jobs that no sane person wants to do. But instead there's millions of them here competing for scarse positions in the upper-middle class.

I guess from the point of view of Musk and other billionaires, the middle class is so far below them that he feels no threat there. For me in the middle class, I don't see much threat from the lower class, but I can see how a low-wage worker in the border states might feel more of a threat. I'd like to live in a society more like Dubai or Singapore, where we have lots of migrants workers but only for the low-wage jobs, and Americans are given a huge boost to help them enter the middle class.

so now there's no one available to build houses, process poultry, nanny babies, or basically do any of the other low-wage jobs that no sane person wants to do.

I think i speak for a lot of the American right when i say "fuck no".

The left claims without evidence that immigration is neccesary because immigrants do the jobs Americans don't want to do. The Right responds that necessity has nothing to do with it and that the truth is that they're doing the jobs that the left is unwilling to pay an American to do because the left are a bunch of moral degenerates who value cheap access to avocado toast over the health of thier community, and would rather have a serf than an employee.

It is the attitude of people like you that has made this an issue of contention in the first place because like it or not, proles vote.

the jobs Americans don't want to do

the jobs that the left is unwilling to pay an American to do

But those are functionally the same thing. Pay us enough money and sure, you can get an American to work in a chicken processing plant or wherever. But you'll also have to massively jack up prices. It doesn't raise overall prosperity, it just raises inflation. People have this fantasy that the entire country can all be rich and prosperous, but it's never been like that, there's always an underclass doing unpleasant work for shit wages, it's just a question of who is going to be that underclass.

To some extent, yes, but it's less a question of raising prosperity and more of shifting it. People who eat lots of chicken will be somewhat poorer, people who work in chicken processing plants will be richer. So it goes. I suspect it would do a lot for American cohesion.

At the risk of scoring cheap points, the last time America imported people to pick cotton for shit (no) wages, it didn't work out well.

Do you think the last 4 years has been good for American cohesion? Because we've gotten pretty much what you describe- higher wages at the low end, paid for by higher inflation overall. But people don't seem happy about it, especially people on the low end.

And I think there's a pretty significant difference between literal slaves and migrant workers, don't you?

Just to be clear, I'm not American and I don't have boots on the ground experience. My understanding is that Biden just pumped money into the system, which is obviously inflationary and primarily benefits those with assets. To the extent that working-class wages rose, it would only be to keep up with inflation. I don't think it's quite the same thing as reducing the lower-class / middle-class divide. EDIT: @Crowstep suggests that I am wrong and the rise in working-class wages is real. He's not American either but he has sources so I will concede.

And I think there's a pretty significant difference between literal slaves and migrant workers, don't you?

You were mentioning Dubai and Singapore, "where we have lots of migrants workers but only for the low-wage jobs, and Americans are given a huge boost to help them enter the middle class". My point was that, in the same way as having a slave caste, or post-slavery segregation, this system doesn't seem like it will be stable long-term. It seems likely to generate massive amounts of resentment and political struggle. Places like Dubai make that arrangement work because they're willing to do whatever they have to do in order to keep the migrants in their place; I don't know if that's stable either but I really don't think modern America has the stomach for it.

Whether it was Biden or other systemic issues, the distribution of the last few years has been strongly towards wage growth in the below-median (under $35K/yr) section.

Pumping money into the system, especially the pandemic giveaways and outright PPP fraud, seemingly (?) has allowed that segment of society to coast for longer without work.

Biden pumped some money in toward the beginning of his administration but a lot of the 2020 stimulus money was still beginning to make its way into the economy when inflation started taking off. Republicans like to blame Biden but, to the extent that inflation involved COVID stimulus money, there's plenty of blame to go around. Anyway, you can talk about COVID money pumping and supply chain disruption and this was all definitely part of it, but the low-end labor shortage and resulting wage hikes were obvious to anyone who wasn't still hunkering at home in 2021 or 2022. You couldn't walk into a restaurant or convenience store or retail establishment without seeing a help wanted sign in the window promising a signing bonus and a starting wage that was at least 50% higher than anything imaginable in 2019. Activists had been pressing for a $15 minimum wage for years, but, in the absence of any legislation, places that were paying like $9/hour were now proudly advertising $14. That this was necessary was evident in the fact that these places were all operating for fewer hours than before the pandemic and were obviously short-staffed when they were in business. It wasn't uncommon to go into a McDonalds at the height of the lunch rush and find a single cashier working the register. Even now Wal-Mart, which used to be open 24 hours almost universally, closes at 11 pm. All-night restaurants are a thing of the past. US Steel used to have a year-long waiting list for basic laborer positions and now offers 85k/year with bonuses and no overtime and still can't get people to stay more than a few weeks. I don't know how much this contributes to inflation, but I don't think it helps.

My lived experience is that the lower middle and middle classes would happily go back to 2019 in terms of both price and wage levels, but actual lower income people would not. Wage growth at the bottom is real.

As we all know, in America, absolutely no homes were built, no lawns were mowed, no children raised, no crops picked, no animals butchered, prior to the passing of the Hart-Cellar Act.

At one point, all of these jobs were done, and ones requiring a wage - as opposed to the family just doing it - paid living wages. The idea that it's mathematically impossible for chickens to be slaughtered at a living wage without immiserating the rest of the US flies in the face of all of recorded history.

Once again, I am begging the citizens of the Motte to stop with this "reasoning from first principals" nonsense; it doesn't work, it has never worked, and it is incredibly unlikely it can ever work.

This is true, but you are overlooking the fact that the average American in the past was very poor compared to Americans now. Yes, even poor people could buy houses and raise large families back then, but the standard of living was much lower. How many Americans would really be willing to pick fruit or lay roof for contemporary fruit-picker or roofing wages today if we just magically departed all the illegal immigrants? You might like to go back to the demographics of the 1950s, but you can't magically unroll immigration but not all the economic and technological changes since then as well.

Personally, I'd be willing to bite that bullet and say yes, let's deport illegals, pay Americans living wages, and eat the price increases in the grocery store and service industries. But I think a lot of people would regret asking for this, because I think those prices will get jacked to the sky compared to now.

Yes, even poor people could buy houses and raise large families back then

This seems super important.

But I think a lot of people would regret asking for this, because I think those prices will get jacked to the sky compared to now.

Even worse, it opens up the possibility of large-scale working-class organised labour movements engaged in industrial action, as with the UK General Strike. But still worth a shot, I think.

This seems super important.

Perhaps, but ... those houses were smaller, shoddier and had few modern conveniences (or safety features), and every man had to be a handyman to keep the walls and roofs up. Would you want to live in a 1940s (with no modern upgrades) house? Would you want to have a lot of children whom you will struggle to keep fed and clothed and educated? My point is that people point at how folks lived back then ("Large families, everyone had their own house!") but little notion of just how much harder and poorer their lives were compared to ours. Maybe that is a tradeoff a lot of trads would be willing to make, but I think the majority of people would not, and you should at least be honest that deporting all the immigrants doesn't mean suddenly lower class people will get to live like middle class people and middle class people will all be richer and more numerous.

In practice, those fifties houses don’t seem to exist at fifties price points in places people actually want to live in- clearly, people today are willing to live in them.

Would you want to live in a 1940s (with no modern upgrades) house?

In Britain this is basically standard, for reasons which have been discussed elsewhere. New builds are rare and the extent to which modern upgrades (dishwasher, tumble dryer, central heating, double glazing) are available varies wildly.

What you have to remember that where mod cons were unavailable they were compensated for by other things. My granny didn't get air conditioning until a couple of years before she died because she had a permanently-fuelled coal-fired oven, and she spent the whole winter in the kitchen next to it. Add thick walls, blankets and jumpers and you're sorted. The only mod cons I have trouble doing without are hot water and washing machines.

I read Scott's article on Cost Disease once and I've never forgotten it. I think that lots of people would be happy with 1940s housing and education at 1940s prices (adjusted for inflation). Medical care not so much. Food is complicated, because the form, quantity, quality and satisfaction associated with it has changed in so many ways that it's not easy to pin the changes as wholly positive or wholly negative.

Personally, I'd be willing to bite that bullet and say yes, let's deport illegals, pay Americans living wages, and eat the price increases in the grocery store and service industries. But I think a lot of people would regret asking for this, because I think those prices will get jacked to the sky compared to now.

Given the latest election under moderate inflation, I suspect that you wouldn't do that if you wanted yourself or your party to remain electable.

FWIW, I think it would be worse than just price increases. Many entire classes of services and establishments would no longer be viable. It's not just that Chick-fil-a would charge $10 for a sandwich, I think they would cease to exist.

(Tagging at @BahRamYou and @Tractatus because this is all kind of flowing together)

No one should be a chicken processor for their entire career. Or a waiter / waitress at a diner or fast casual restaurant (service staff at high end restaurants is another matter). Or the proverbial burger flipper.

These jobs should be more or less easy-in-easy-out temporary employment for people who need cash to pay their bills. If you read some of the mid century "road" novels, you'll see how a pretty common modus operandi was for the protagonist to roll into town on his last dollar, pick up a few days work doing janitorial work at a auto garage or something, and then go on his merry (usually drunk) way of philosophizing. I've written about this before. It's not so much that people in the 50s/60s were raising full families on these unappealing jobs, it's that these unappealing jobs were the equivalent of day rate motel stays.

So, problem number one is that employment law and regulation has become so burdensome that we literally have millions of jobs that are not worth having - for either the employer or employee. These are the jobs that immigrants (many illegal, all of them willing) actually end up taking. I think I actually saw the very beginning of this as I was finishing high school. One summer, I got a job at a book store - I filled out a single page application and was working the next day. I got a check at the end of the week. The next summer, I got a job at a decent restaurant. The first FULL DAY, I had to fill out pages and pages of digital corporation nonsense on the computer, then watch a bunch of compliance videos (mostly about not falling down in the kitchen or being on drugs), and then had to sign even more physical paperwork relating to me 'trainee' status. This is all so that this restaurant (owned by a corporate chain) doesn't get sued to death by various regulators for not ... self-regulating.

To put it in economist terms, the friction for labor is so much higher than it was decades ago, that it isn't worth going through that friction for some of the lower paying jobs.

For immigrants, however, employers might just skip the paper work and pay in cash. Or, if they employee is visa connected, the company knows they won't just rage quit one day and face deportation. I can't support this at present, but I also feel like the visa-employment situation has a cottage industry of consultants who help the employers manage all of the paperwork (for a fee).

But the fact remains that shitty jobs have always been shitty but, before, you could hop in and out of them, collect some cash, and be on your merry way.

The second issue is that market interference has made the cost of certain things untenable. The major one, of course, is housing. There simply isn't enough (because of burdensome construction regulations and the perverse incentives of home equity appreciation). Wages can't keep up. Wages, however, have kept up with some things that we now consider close to necessary - computers and phones. A decent laptop can now be had for less than $500. Same for a phone. Monthly cellular service is between $20 - $100 depending. nearly gig level internet at home is $100- $200 a month. Very few Americans who want a phone do not have one. Very few Americans who want broadband (and don't live intentionally in the middle of nowhere) do not have it.

All of this is to say I see "the immigration question" in it's economic context as really an outgrowth of a much bigger issue - over regulation and bureaucratization. I shouldn't care too much about low skill immigrants because, if I am competing with them, we're all essentially "taking turns" in that job pool. As we go up the skill ladder, I'm competing with fewer people and then things like community and connections (networks) become more important (which I, as a native, ought to have an advantage in). Instead, because jobs are such high friction now, I am at the bottom of the skill ladder competing with people who exist with the ability to better slide through the legal maze of employment because they are either (a) breaking the law or (b) part of a international labor movement system that penalizes me, ironically, for having been born in the right place.

These jobs should be more or less easy-in-easy-out temporary employment for people who need cash to pay their bills. If you read some of the mid century "road" novels, you'll see how a pretty common modus operandi was for the protagonist to roll into town on his last dollar, pick up a few days work doing janitorial work at a auto garage or something, and then go on his merry (usually drunk) way of philosophizing. I've written about this before. It's not so much that people in the 50s/60s were raising full families on these unappealing jobs, it's that these unappealing jobs were the equivalent of day rate motel stays.

I think you're the first person I've seen in the wild who seems to agree with me thay not all jobs need to pay a "living wage", and that that's okay! That some jobs should be just for the high school kid after school or during the summer, or someone who isnt trying to support a family on it ling term. I don't know how you deal with people getting stuck in a rut and eventually not being ready for retirement, though... I'm sure many will say that it isn't their problem to make sure others don't make poor life choices, but that doesn't help convince the general population when the news is publishing sob stories.

I'd be willing to bet that the number of people who:

  • Hop between these temporary jobs for their entire working life and
  • Have zero substance abuse issues and
  • Have zero contact with the criminal justice system and
  • Make it to retirement age with no savings

Rounds to zero.

Let's say you get the "burger flipping" job because you're not really doing anything else. You're living at home (or with a bunch of other underemployed roommates). Sure, maybe you get some cheap beer every weekend - fine, whatever. If you retain that job for two years, you're going to be promoted to some sort of assistant manager position by inertia and availability alone. The cycle repeats.

Or, you get the burger flipping job, decide that, yes, it does suck, and figure out a new job a little further up on the skill/wage level. You like this and do it again. The cycle repeats.

My more controversial take is that this should be the path for pretty much everyone.

College has become a pay-to-play social proof mechanism for bullshit jobs that mostly fuels middle class over-capture of resources - especially housing. There are some hacks around this (military service, community college pathways) but it, most of the time, boils down to a family being able to pay between $100,000 - $500,000 to jumpstart their kid into the professional class. Oh, by the way, for something like 50% of graduates, this has not worked and has been a fraud for 20+ years. Please ignore that.

At the bookstore job I alluded to in my original post, I got unofficially promoted to assistant manager by my second month mostly because I would follow the store close down procedures correctly each night. This was as a 17 year old. Several of the other 20-somethings working there would routinely forget to lock doors, secure the cash box, or do basic cleaning and organizing. It doesn't take much to be an above average performer and, with just a dash of talent, you can accelerate quickly. I've seen too many graduates of "prestigious" universities who can't metaphorically close down the bookstore making $100,000+ per year because they have the fancy sheepskin on their wall.

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I'm skeptical that you're getting a "normal" view of society from reading novels. Basically, anyone who can write a novel is above-average intelligence and motivation. Even more so if it's a famous novel like "On the road."

As a teenager, I worked a few shitty minimum-wage jobs. One I particularly remember was being a dishwasher at a fancy restaurant. It was basically like you described- I showed up, the manager told me bluntly that it was minimum wage, I told him I had no experience but I was friends with another kid who worked there, we shook hands and I started the next day.

It sucked. It wasn't "a step on the jobs ladder." It didn't teach me any useful skills. It mostly just sucked up all my time and energy and made me too tired to concentrate on my schoolwork. It also injured my body with scalding hot water full of sharp metal objects, which I had to work in like a maniac to keep up with the pace of dishes. The only way to get a break was to go smoke, so basically everyone in the kitchen was a hardcore smoker. Also, almost everyone there had a prison record. Most of them were not young people on the path to a better job- they were pretty much stuck in shit jobs for their entire life.

So no, I don't think I could "hop in and hop out" of a job like that, and be on my merry way to my "real career" as a novelist or whatever. A lot of jobs just suck, that's why we pay someone else to do them for us because we don't want to do them. Most of the people who do those jobs get stuck their for their entire life (or in a similarly shitty job). That's why we call it a "dead-end job."

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One of the important lessons of price floors/caps is that they cause competition on other margins. Think back to when there were price caps on gasoline. It caused shortages in terms of price, and produced competition on other margins - specifically, it caused people to have to compete or "pay" in terms of time spent sitting in line. Alternatively, you could curry favor with a supplier (say, your dad's brother runs a gas station; he might be willing to let you skip the line; presumably you're "paying" with good will).

Similarly, a price floor on low-skill labor (minimum wage) results in shortages in terms of price (unemployment) and competition on other margins. If you're not willing to work under shittier conditions, for example, you're easily replaceable by someone else who is, and since you're going to cost the same either way (in terms of monetary price), who do you think is going to "win" the job? It's very similar to rent control as a price ceiling. Tenants can't compete on price, so they implicitly compete on who is willing to endure the housing conditions getting worse and worse (lack of maintenance, etc.). If the "price" of shittier conditions gets too high for you, someone else who is willing to pay the higher "price" of shittier conditions, but is mandated to pay the same monetary price, will win the competition.

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So no, I don't think I could "hop in and hop out" of a job like that

But, like, you did.

But your very own account, you had this job as a teenaged, hated it (but made some money) and then worked hard at your studies to go build a different career. Not hopping-in-and-out of it would imply you either a) never got the job in the first place or b) are still working there (or a similar job).

You're proving my point here. Shitty jobs are shitty. People shouldn't have them for very long. But they're hand to have if you're close to destitute and need quick, honest cash (or if you're, I don't know, a student who would like some small income).

Please re-read my original post. I'm not advocating for shitty jobs as actually not shitty. I'm not saying people should be thankful for their shitty jobs and stay in the forever. I'm saying that shitty jobs should have low friction of entry and exit and that, because they do not, this contributes a level of extra competition at the lower end of employment that is wrong and unfair, especially for legally complaint native born Americans.

I think that there's some misinterpretation of what my point is and I'm not totally convinced it's innocent misinterpretation. I agree with "people shouldn't have to work shitty jobs" as much as I agree with "we shouldn't have wars" -- A nice thought, but unrealistic. Worse yet, I find that people who are super-duper anti-shitty job tend to be in favor of very generous Government cash transfer programs. This is a negative-sum game; the taxpayer base gets a raw deal, and the welfare recipients become strange pseudo-indentured wards of the state.

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nearly gig level internet at home is $100- $200 a month

If you live in a relatively new house which has been hooked up to cable/fiber it's $70-90 now for gigabit. And Starlink is $120/m, which gives you less than a gig but you can have it practically anywhere.

down on the farm, labor costs are typically less than 20% or for specialty crops close to 40% of total operating costs, and the price from the farm is about one-third the price on the shelf...

Quadrupling those wages might cost the typical family $300 in a year.

From Oren Cass' "Jobs Americans Would Do" https://americancompass.org/jobs-americans-would-do/

As we all know, in America, absolutely no homes were built, no lawns were mowed, no children raised, no crops picked, no animals butchered, prior to the passing of the Hart-Cellar Act.

Back in those days Americans were being paid well under what they're currently getting in real terms. If there are Americans willing to work for similar real wages as to what they were getting back then then yes, they can build homes, mow lawns, raise children etc. The problem is that they're aren't willing to to this for the much higher wages they are currently being offered, so what makes you think they'll happily accept the much lower wages (yes we are more technologically advanced today which means we can offer them higher real wages than those days without much loss, but we're not that much more advanced that we can just give them however much money they are asking for)?

As we all know, in America, absolutely no homes were built, no lawns were mowed, no children raised, no crops picked, no animals butchered, prior to the passing of the Hart-Cellar Act.

I have bad news to you about how most cotton was picked in the past. Even after 1865.

The idea that it's mathematically impossible for chickens to be slaughtered at a living wage without immiserating the rest of the US flies in the face of all of recorded history.

Immiseration is relative and it's well documented that relative deprivation is perceived far more sharply than the equivalent increase.

US poultry consumption was fueled by low prices -- taking that away now, even partially, is a dead idea.

I do agree that an objective sense, the state of Americans in the 60s eating far less meat was not immiseration. But that's not the same as saying that going back to that place now would not be perceived as such.

You say i should stop "reasoning from first principles", but that's what you're doing. The 1960s weren't some golden age of American prosperity. The average wage was far, far lower back then than it is today. The average person lived in a small, low quality house shared with a large family or many roommates. The average job was shit. They also had a huge underclass of both black Americans and refugees from 3rd world countries, in much worse poverty than we have today.

Please, show me your ideal society so that we can stop using reasoning.

And there were many more poor people in America circa 1960 than there are today! There were also far fewer labor-intensive services on offer- you mowed your own damn lawn.

You cannot run a society without Dalits. Middle class people don’t want to be janitors and meatpackers and peach pickers(I don’t either). When we stopped oppressing the blacks we needed some replacement.

Pay us enough money and sure, you can get an American to work in a chicken processing plant or wherever

Yes, that's the smoking gun that proves beyond any reasonable doubt that anyone claiming that "there is no evidence that immigration has a negative effect on wages" is either an idiot or a liar.

This is the crux of the issue. The left claims that they want people to be paid a living wage while doing everything in thier power to undermine and sabotage said wages.

As I said in last weeks discussion of this topic, i have yet to be convince that the exchange of labor is somehow exempt from the ordinary rules of supply and demand.

As I said in last weeks discussion of this topic, i have yet to be convince that the exchange of labor is somehow exempt from the ordinary rules of supply and demand.

The main problem is scale.

You want more eggs? no problem, raise wages and get more chicken workers.

You want more strawberries? No problem, raise wages and get more strawberry workers.

You want more of everything, across the board, espeicially in low-wage manual labor jobs that are hard to automate? Well... now you've run out of workers. You can raise wages as much as you want, but you're not going to magically get more workers out of thin air. It might have been different in 2010 when US unemployment was high. Now it's near record-lows, there's just not a lot of slack left in the economy. Or do you want to put my 90-yr old grandma at work building houses?

Prime-age male labor force participation rate is at 90%, off its all-time lows during COVID but still well under the 97.5% we had in 1955. So there's slack without grandma building houses. Unemployment is low, but it's been lower.

You're not "running out of workers" though, you just don't want to pay them. Labor force participation for people under 65 has been trending downwards for decades.

There is a free lunch here: the productive output of folks who prefer not to work and consume welfare instead.

They can do the jobs or starve. In either case the rest of us benefit.

The fake socialists like AOC have given up one of the key tenets of socialism: from each according to his means.

is your username legit? You really want to be like the USSR and feed all people into the industrial machine, letting the weak die off from starvation?

I want to replace our fake socialism/welfare state with real socialism where people contribute what they can.

The "weak" as you call them are not people incapable of producing value. They are just lazy wreckers who consume welfare and refuse to work. I want them to work for their dinner. This might be a net negative in EV - their consumption might exceed their production - but it's higher EV than having them sit around playing video games and doing drugs.

Dubai and Singapore have lots of middle-class immigrants too. They get treated better so they don't read as "migrant workers", but that is what they are.

Most of the Gulf monarchies (not sure if Dubai still works this way, but it did when a family member did a lot of business there) are societies where citizens have cushy government jobs and all the real work - blue and white-collar - is done by migrants.

Singapore is a crowded city-state where citizens get subsidised housing and middle-class immigrants pay market rate.

how many is "lots?" My understanding is that those places have temporary work visas, but no real path to long-term citizenship.

No path to citizenship in the Gulf monarchies. "Lots" as in two of my British classmates spent multiple years working in the Gulf (one as a petroleum geologists, the other as an accountant). My current employer has a Dubai office staffed entirely by PMC immigrants.

Anecdotally, permanent residence (usually after 5 years) and citizenship (after 10 years) are pretty automatic for skilled migrants in Singapore, although Brits working there often don't take them up because it exposes your kids to the draft. There are about 500k non-citizen permanent residents in Singapore out of a population of 6 million, and the vast majority of them entered as skilled migrants or dependents of skilled migrants.

All the Mormons I know know somebody working in the UAE as a pilot/structural engineer/other actually high skill job, so it’s clearly a substantial number of people.

True, but it doesn't really tap their welfare system and there's no longterm path to citizenship.

If the prevailing Western Democracies operated under similar principles of 'we will pay you well for your service but you cannot bring your sprawling extended family along and plonk them on pensions/medicare/welfare' the whole system would work better.

We cracked down hard on the lower classes of migrants workers, so now there's no one available to build houses, process poultry, nanny babies, or basically do any of the other low-wage jobs that no sane person wants to do.

And as a consequence, there has been a surge in working class wages that are the envy of the developed world, along with large growth in worker productivity.

Meanwhile in the UK and Canada, we've been importing low-skilled workers and their (many) dependents, and all we've got to show for it is skyrocketing house prices, a growing welfare bill and stagnating wages and worker productivity.

Its complicated.. i know there's a lot of charts and statistics to argue that working class living standards have gone up recently. But the "lived experience" of many people, which they've been screaming for 4 years, is that their living is being destroyed by inflation. I suspect there's a bit of both.... some people overestimate inflation, but the official inflation statistics also miss some important things, like home mortgage rates doubling.

At any rate, if working class wages have risen despite the immigration, what's the problem? @Corvos this is also my reply to you. I think America clearly has "the stomach" to do a lot, since we elected Trump again. The question is what are we going to do? Nothing, i guess?

It's not just interest rates doubling. Inflation tends to be calculated on a "basket of goods" system, where (in an ideal world) they try to react to trends in the real world by determining how much of a product the average consumer is purchasing in a year. For example, if there is a bad year for pork, most people will buy more chicken/steak, so it doesn't make sense to claim that the average person experienced the full inflation of the pork shortage.

The problems are:

  1. The people calculating the basket of goods know that bad inflation numbers will act against the current government.
  2. The basket of goods can accept inferior substitutions without reflecting that the quality of the good has gone down.

So people can feel their quality of life is getting worse because steak is outside their reach due to inflation, but the basket of goods now contains ground beef at the price steak used to be. If the government in power is favored by the bureaucracy, they can also choose to include irrelevant items, or exclude items that are relevant, to make the numbers more favorable (electronics tend to be cheaper over time, so they're a good one to use to balance the numbers if another category is too high). And with electronics especially, it's very easy to selectively say inflation is negative (the iPhone 12 has a better camera than the iPhone 11, but was the same price on launch - that represents a deflation rate of 6%!)

Four years ago, a bag of potato chips was around $3.99 CAD, with the expensive brand being $4.50. Looking at the same thing today, it's $6.39 for the cheap brand, and $8.49 for the expensive one. Inflation has far exceeded the official government numbers, especially for food.

Plus there's a lot of fudge factor in hedonic improvements. If a 60" TV is the same price as a 54" TV was last year did prices of TVs drop by 10%, more than 10%, or less than 10%? Or if this year's Intel $299 offering can do 10% megaflops how much better is this year's chip? Overestimating that can offset a lot of price increases.

Specific complaints about price increases tend to center around, mostly, things you’d be mildly embarrassed to tell people you buy a lot of, like candy or alcohol. I suspect the griping about continuing ‘grocery’ inflation is partly due to eating cheaper cuts of meat and partly down to soda addicts or alcoholics using it as a euphemism.

We buy our groceries at a membership outlet. We just did a grocery run this last weekend. We bought no alchohol or candy, nor any other specialty products, no junk food; we bought a variety of fresh fruits and veggies, milk, bulk ham and turkey, hummus, bread, and so on. our grocery bill is more than double what it was two years ago.

Yeah, that's true, and those are all good points for how inflation calculations are not the most scientifically objective measurement.

But interest rates are different because they're just straight up not included at all in the consumer price index

I know that economists give a lot of reasons for that. But I suspect that part of the reason is that any economist who's really good at math gets recruited into finance instead, where he can make vastly more money, so the people who work in academic economics tend to be risk-adverse and kind of weak at math.

In the US? Lots of people want to build houses. Nannying babies is a problem not because of lack of available work force but because taxes and regulations make it obscenely expensive. And there are indeed people available to process poultry, even though it is a thoroughly nasty job.

Indeed, in practice you can hire a teenager to nanny your baby for not much more than an illegal, and poultry processing plants have had great success replacing migrants with drug addicts and parolees. Construction is actually much harder, but it pales in comparison to the real challenge- finding someone to pick crops.

I seriously looked into opening a daycare center a couple years ago because my area was obviously chronically underserved, and found that workforce was in fact the main bottleneck. Finding people to do that sort of job for less than $35/hr is apparently impossible. Talked to a couple people who have made it work and they said the secret was to hire friends or people from church.

In-home daycares are also unbelievably scarce despite the much lower (still ridiculous) barrier to entry.

Nannies are likewise at least $30/hr.

People simply don't want to do the work.

Nannies are likewise at least $30-35/hr.

That's honestly fascinating, considering that matches nearly exactly the average salary for women with a default college degree. I think the market correction that happened to low-skill labor in 2020 was actually just ripping the band-aid off something that the Western world has to come to terms with, which is that most white-collar work actually just ain't that objectively valuable (and never really was), and the market is starting to reflect that. Hell, immigrating to the US and having only that job available is a raise over my current (exchange-rate-adjusted) wage in a high-skill technical profession at home.

Those rates are obviously going to be higher to the customer, so... who's buying this service and expecting to come out ahead? Is it the average middle-class woman who would rather spend 100% (or at least an overwhelming majority fraction) of her take-home pay to have another woman raise her child, is it the people who are making 200,000 dollars doing who knows what, or something else entirely?

thanks for this post, it's fascinating to get this kind of specifics from someone who really looked into the business.

There really seems to be this giant, gaping void in society now where we are lacking women in traditional roles, and the market just can't keep up.

Obviously it varies by area, but a while ago I read (might have been in Reason) that in-home daycares have to comply with a huge laundry list of expensive-to-follow health and safety regulations; one that stuck in my mind was that the house had to have a circular driveway to minimize the danger of cars backing up - a measure which would leave most neighborhoods bereft of daycare facilities.

Nannies are likewise at least $30/hr.

No they're not lol. That might be what an agency charges but the girl's getting paid $15-$20.

And why do you need an agency that employs the girl? Regulations.

Because the girl wanting to nanny and family looking for one have to be connected somehow, and the family is going to want someone who did background checks and stuff for them. Yes, technically it’s overhead on the transaction, but the transaction wouldn’t happen in the first place if it wasn’t for them.

Background checks are not so expensive as to require an agency to actually employ the nanny. A broker model with a one time fee for placement would make much more sense for the connection problem. But having an employee brings you under myriad regulations, and that's why people pay an agency instead.

I hate to break it to you but teenage girls are not very good at money maxing and looking out for number one, and people who can afford a nanny don’t care.

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Define "lots of people." My understanding is that there's a lot of people with a fantasy of "someday" building their own craftsman cottage, where money is not an issue. But very few people want to go out and hang drywall to make low-cost apartments.

There's a lot of people in the construction trades. Construction tends to follow a boom-and-bust cycle where one month there will be lots of unemployed construction workers, the next there's a labor shortage, but that's different than having a very few people in the trades.

Again, I'm asking you to please use actual numbers, not just vague words like "a lot of people."

My understanding is that most people doing construction in the US, especially in the low-paid jobs, are people born in Mexico or Central America. Some came her legally, some illegally, some... who knows. The "boom and bust" is often solved by those people moving back and forth across the border. It's not going to be solved by raising wages slightly so that a recently laid-off code monkey takes a job hanging drywall.

I can build a house top to bottom -- I'd actually be kind of happy to do so rather than bullshit SD work, but the money isn't good enough. Am I "in the trades"?

If you're going out there regularly, building houses as fast as possible for competitive market prices, then yes you're in the trades.

If you're just doing it as a hobby for yourself then no, because that doesn't affect the overall market. It would be the same if some carpenter or plumber wanted to dabble in SD in his free time.

I used to do that -- it's not as though I've forgotten how! If there were a massive boom (perhaps induced by stopping the cheap labour) that made the money more tenable, I could do it again.

Again, I'm asking you to please use actual numbers, not just vague words like "a lot of people."

I don't have a research agency backing me. The department of labor says there's about 8.5 million in construction and extraction, plus another million in construction managers. 2.2 million of those are construction laborers. But they don't break it down by where they're born.

As for drywallers specifically, the DoL expects demand to grow at about the average for all occupations.

Thanks. So by way of comparison, (statistica)[https://www.statista.com/statistics/193261/unadjusted-monthly-number-of-unemployed-men-in-the-us/] tells me there's a total of about 3.5 million unemployed men in the US right now. So we even if we took literally every single unemployed man and sent him to work in construction, it wouldn't massively increase the number of construction workers.

In fact, an increase of 3.5 million over a base of 9.5 million WOULD constitute a massive increase the number of construction workers. But there's also the men "not in the workforce" to be considered; prime-age male LFPR is 90% compared to 97.5% in 1955.

Lower end construction trades are full of hard drug users with what their bosses refer to as 'crackhead tendencies', you can get white Americans to do those jobs for market rate(which is like $17/hr starting these days), but illegals do it better, faster, cheaper, and more consistently.

In what world did we crack down hard on the lower class of migrants? There are more in America currently than ever.

Lots of them here illegally claiming asylum (or just straight up hopping the border). Very few here legally on work visas. That makes a difference.

The MAGA crowd is like someone who found a genie but can't formulate their wishes well. It is the good old trope of getting your three wishes but each wish comes with a giant caveat.

They wished for ended discrimination against Asians in college admissions and didn't get increased odds of whites being accepted.

They complained about migrant crime and got dorky Indians instead of Guatemalans.

They complained more about migrant crime and got a society in which cops look like soldiers.

They complained about muslim terrorism and got a surveillance state that rivals stasi.

They complained about muslim terrorism but instead of getting an immigration ban after 9/11 they got tens of thousands of largely right wing voters killed/seriously injured fighting wars in the middle east that caused a migrant crisis and effectively ethnically cleansed Christian populations. Their "clash of civilizations" ended with the US supporting Al Qaeda in Syria and opening the flood gates to Europe by bombing Libya.

The migrants are living on welfare they complained. So they got a migrant with a job.

If you can't even state your own self interest how on Earth do you expect to win anything?

I missed the part where politicians have to implement the voter's wishes as long as they're formulated correctly. For that matter, I even missed the part where voters even get to formulate wishes, rather than politicians making promises that they later refuse to keep.

politicians making promises that they later refuse to keep

Is there any research on the performance of subsequent cohorts of politicians when their predecessors were hanged or guillotined for poor performance?

"In this country, it is good to kill an admiral from time to time to encourage the others."

The performance of the Royal Navy did improve after Admiral Byng was shot. I remember reading an academic article making the argument that this was causal - that the knowledge that you would have to fight even against the odds changed the way that captains trained their crews and planned engagements. One difference the article pointed out was that British doctrine favoured engaging from upwind (which gives you superior mobility and allows you to determine the pace of the engagement) whereas French doctrine favoured engaging from downwind (which gives you better chances of successfully running away if that is what you later decide to do).

There is also the point that shooting Admiral Byng made harsh naval discipline a lot more tolerable to the men who suffered it.

"Nothing is so good for the morale of the troops as occasionally to see a dead general".

Field Marshal Slim

"It makes no difference which side the general is on".

Unknown British Soldier

It's an interesting situation. On the one hand, I can see that being absolutely correct. On the other, my reading of Admiral Byng's court-martial is that he was absolutely hung out to dry for political reasons. Which makes for an interesting social/moral dilemma: if you were involved in the process back then, and knew (or had an idea of) the beneficial effects it would have on the future navy, would you choose to have an innocent man executed?

I often wonder this about the justice system in general: if it means placating the mob, is it sometimes worth committing an act of injustice to a single individual?

I often wonder this about the justice system in general: if it means placating the mob, is it sometimes worth committing an act of injustice to a single individual?

The Ones Who Walk Away From Rittenhouse

More seriously, I think the general framing of this question—not mob placation necessarily, but “good” consequences as a potential reason to bend or break the rules—gets at the heart of act-utilitarianism vs. rule-utilitarianism, as well as deontology and other ethical schools. As for my opinion on the matter, fiat iustitia ruat cælum

I remember reading an academic article making the argument that this was causal - that the knowledge that you would have to fight even against the odds changed the way that captains trained their crews and planned engagements.

"Never Excuse as Stupidity" by @KulakRevolt?

No - it was an academic journal article. But based on the free intro, Kulak is making the same point.

I don’t mind his brand of midwit autism, but it is always surprising to me that his poor writing and lukewarm NrX observations have garnered 15,000 substack subscribers. Good for him.

And here I thought I was alone. He's long on chest thumping rhetoric and cherry picking and short on defensible positions. I wasn't impressed with his writing when he posted here (although I often share his feelings), so I'm confused about his substack success. The "catgirl" shtick is IMO distasteful, but reading his comments a while back, there are at least a handful of folks who think he's really that OF girl in his profile pic, so that probably helps. Anyway, "don't hate the playa, hate the game" as they say.

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The problem is that this depends on reliably appointing someone trustworthy and competent to a position of extreme power, at which point you could just use that mechanism to appoint officials.

when their predecessors were hung...for poor performance....

I doubt that that has ever happened, given that tapestries are seldom elected to high office. Hanged, on the other hand....

He just talkin' bout big dicked losers, fam.

Thank you for sending me down a bit of a rabbit hole, I've fixed it.

Though I now believe their effigies should be hung, not hanged.

In a similar vein:

UK voters: we want less immigration.

Boris Johnson: you want less Eastern Europeans? Heard you loud and clear! A million non-EU immigrants a year coming right up!

American conservatives: we're sick of the wokeness in universities.

Politicians: we will clear out protesters against Israel's atrocities immediately.

Both Vote Leave (Cummings, with Johnson as figurehead) and Leave.EU (Farage) made blaming the EU for specifically Muslim immigration a crucial part of their message. Cummings continues to insist (plausibly, given how close things were) that the Brexit referendum could not have been won without the "Turkey is joining the EU and then millions of Turks will come to the UK" lie. Cummings was also quite frank (on his blog during the period where he was out of UK politics) that "Get rid of the Eastern Europeans", while popular with core Brexit supporters, would have been a losing message with swing voters.

The debate between "near-zero immigration" and "continued mass migration but managed competently in the interests of the existing population" (at least in the UK, described as a "Canadian or Australian-style points system") is an intra-right one, not a battle for the median voter. From the point of view of the median voter, the immigration issue is closer to "nobody is illegal open borders extremists should be kicked out of the Overton window yesterday".

Turkey being accepted into the EU seemed like a real possibility before Erdogan went all strongman, so was it really a lie at the time of Brexit?

so was it really a lie at the time of Brexit?

No, it wasn't. There was no way in 2016 that someone could credibly claim that Turkey had zero percent chance of EU admission within, say, the next 15 years.

I'll go further.

Brexit only "failed" because post-Brexit politicians in Britain made all the same mistakes as their EU counterparts : mass immigration, heavy-handed regulation, anti-speech tyranny, etc...

Brexit was a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the revival of the British nation.

Despite everything, the UK is better off due to Brexit because it makes reform possible. Things can sometimes pivot quickly, and maybe within 5 years the reform party can take power and lead the country to a better path. But it would be a lot tougher with the EU barring the way.

This was, and is, basically my attitude. The government drastically underperformed my expectations but even so, it’s GOT to be a good thing that they can no longer hide behind “the EU says we can’t do that”.

Almost no reform was genuinely blocked by EU membership. Even stuff like mandatory ECHR membership doesn’t matter, because other member states routinely ignore rulings with impunity. The UK would never have been serious punished by the EU executive because there are always at least 2-4 other countries angry at Brussels for whatever reason. It was completely pointless and achieved nothing other than hugely accelerating mass immigration from the third world for no reason.

Almost no reform was genuinely blocked by EU membership. Even stuff like mandatory ECHR membership doesn’t matter, because other member states routinely ignore rulings with impunity.

True, politicians could have worked around the EU if they wanted to, but they didn’t want to. Thus the performative shock when anyone suggests ignoring the EHRC.

Leaving the EU was necessary not because it gave politicians more power, but because it removed their biggest excuse for not using the power that they had.

(That, and avoiding Ever Closer Union. The EU as it was in 2016 was a moving target, explicitly focused on making it ever harder to leave. It felt very much like a now-or-never moment.)

"nobody is illegal open borders extremists should be kicked out of the Overton window yesterday"

Can you clarify? If ever a sentence needed punctuation...

"nobody is illegal, open borders, extremists should be kicked out"

or

"nobody-is-illegal-open-borders extremists should be kicked out"

AFAIK the current level of immigration is very unpopular with the median voter, and it regularly comes high in people's concerns, but in that irritating British way they don't like politicians saying anything about it or doing anything about it, they just want the problem to go away. Which frankly we could do by issuing fewer visas.

but in that irritating British way they don't like politicians saying anything about it or doing anything about it, they just want the problem to go away

I'm unclear about this last sentence. Are you suggesting that the political class could do something about it, but the public doesn't want them to?

Because as you say, the politicians could easily reduce immigration by issuing fewer visas, but there seems to be a post-Blair consense that more immigration = more economic growth (a lie that was put to bed by the Boriswave, or indeed the entire post-2008 economic stagnation).

I am suggesting that a big chunk of the public (20%? 30%?) wants less immigration AND will react negatively to any politician who says that immigration should be lower, or to newspaper headlines showing active attempts to dissuade immigration. They want immigration to go down quietly and out of sight, whilst retaining the moral high-ground by never supporting anyone who comes across as anti-immigration.

There is a decent chunk of hardcore lower-immigration voters who don't care, but they don't form a voting majority without the high-ground chunk. And the pro-immigration groups can therefore force anti-immigration politicians to back down by putting them into a position where they either have to abandon attempts to reduce immigration or defend them in public.

there seems to be a post-Blair consense that more immigration = more economic growth (a lie that was put to bed by the Boriswave, or indeed the entire post-2008 economic stagnation)

In a UK context, I haven't seen this argument in the wild since 2014 or so. I don't remember it featuring in Remainer discourse - they focused on the loss of UK opportunities to work abroad and avoided the topic of incoming immigration because it was an obvious vote loser. And as you say, seeing salaries plummet during the Boriswave and soar during Covid quarantine made it really impossible to defend.

In a UK context, I haven't seen this argument in the wild since 2014 or so

It was pretty much what the Boris/Sunak governments believed privately, if not publicly. Sunak himself thought that if illegal immigration was under control, then the public didn't care what happened to legal migration. The assumption was that a massive increase in legal migration would supercharge tax revenues, reduce inflation (by suppressing wage growth) and give the Tories the best chance at winning the next election.

What they didn't realise is that non-European workers aren't nearly as productive as European workers unless they are heavily selected, which they weren't. Dependents are also unproductive. It was a completely unforced error.

That's true. I read them as being more concerned with avoiding potential economic catastrophe by cutting off the flow than actively believing that they could supercharge the economy by increasing it. The Singapore-on-Thames people were more willing to propose immigration up == economy up, but even then they usually talked about skilled migrants. Plus the internalised cringe that kicks in whenever a well-educated Brit tries to publicly or privately debate whether immigration is a good idea.

IMO this combination of cringe + PR + risk avoidance would explain why they continued the policy for so long and didn't implement selection or block dependents. But you may well be right.

The actual story is slightly more complex than that. The dumb rules the Tories passed mean that the OBR has a lot of implicit power, and the treasury’s “projections” showed that immigration was necessary for GDP / tax revenue growth sufficient for planned borrowing not to freak out markets. That was coupled with the fact that 80%+ of Tory MPs, even on the socially conservative Rees Moggian wing of the party, didn’t care at all about immigration. That left Patel and Braverman relatively isolated. Boris himself didn’t care about immigration, and Sunak doesn’t really care about anything, but they alone aren’t responsible more than the party at large.

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What they didn't realise is that non-European workers aren't nearly as productive as European workers unless they are heavily selected, which they weren't. Dependents are also unproductive. It was a completely unforced error.

What I found illuminating about this was that it really showed that even center-right to right-wing politicians mostly don't believe there are any actual group-level differences in ability to contribute productively in a highly developed economy. I think on some level I had assumed they recognised it but didn't acknowledge it publicly (for obvious reasons) but no, it seems they really did think that people from vastly different populations were all interchangable.

What I mean is that the noisy left sound like they support open borders, and that it sure looks to the average man-in-the-street (certainly in the UK, the US, and most of Western Europe, though not as far as I can see in Australia, or Canada before Trudeau fucked things up) as though the current immigration policy is de facto open borders through deliberately ineffective enforcement.

The median voter does not support open borders, either de facto or de jure, and so the immigration debate when both sides are talking to the median voter is about trying to credibly claim not to support the status quo. The actual substance of a sane immigration policy is less relevant. Telling people that you want to kick out their immigrant friends/colleagues generally goes down like a lead balloon with people who are close to the median voter on the left/right axis.

I don't think the median voter understands immigration numbers. If you focus-group the question of which legal immigrants we should kick out, the answer you get in the UK is basically "violent Muslims" and not much else. Dominic Cummings says that moving to an Australian/Canadian points system (which would not mean a large drop in overall numbers) is hugely popular in the UK. There are definitely people who don't like using European immigrants for seasonal agricultural labour, but they are closer to the typical Tory/Reform switcher than to the median voter. (Before mass immigration, Ireland was poor enough that the Irish did a lot of migrant work in the UK, and they don't really count as foreign.)

American conservatives: we're sick of the wokeness in universities.

Politicians: we will clear out protesters against Israel's atrocities immediately.

Most American conservatives like Israel. Certainly conservatives like Israel more than leftists do. This is a wish done as requested, not a wish twisted.

Most American conservatives like Israel.

There's a huge age confounder afaik. Boomers do, because they have been propagandized for decades.

This is a wish done as requested, not a wish twisted.

No? Because openly agitating against whites, males, conservatives is still acceptable? At best it's less perverse than the Boris Johnson case.

The people agitating against Israel and the people agitating against white males and red tribers(campus activists don’t seem to care very much about the actual beliefs of these people) are, in a lot of cases, quite literally the same people. They got the hammer dropped on them for one over the other, sure, but it did manage to bring quite a number of university admins more in line with the government’s demands that they stop giving in to grievance crap- in my own state UT has dialed back the grievance crap in response to state police wrecking Israel protesters’ shit to an extent that A&M(no anti-israel protests of note) is now the worst offender on grievance issues, because they didn’t offer that particular weapon to the state.

The MAGA crowd is like someone who found a genie but can't formulate their wishes well.

You've missed the point of all those genie stories if you think that. No one can formulate their wishes well enough to get what they want without worse side-effects; the genie is powerful and hostile.

It almost makes you wonder if the genie stories were political commentary to begin with.

Doubt it. Putting aside "The Monkey's Paw" which features a hostile (cursed) wish-granter but no genies, all the original genie stories like Aladdin feature a genie which is powerful and / or hostile* but if it agrees to grant wishes it does so in a sensible manner. The idea that a godlike being would vent its wrath by being really passive-aggressive is an entirely modern invention.

(Add in the possibility that the popularity of modern genie stories comes from dealing with modern power structures and that is political commentary haha).

*Sometimes the genie grants wishes for letting it out of a bottle, sometimes the genie threatens to kill people and so they have to trick it into a bottle.

Comedy skit about that:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=lM0teS7PFMo?si=GyB-7F1nMDamSbe4

One of my favorite parts:

Wisher: how about if I wish for the powers of a genie?

Genie: no, bad idea, how do you think I got this job?

It literally comes down to immigration. Bad faith posters will argue that H1B immigration is “legal” and therefor not the problem, but theyre deliberately missing the fact that the problem is H1B visa abuse, which is technically legal, but practically identical to the type of illegal immigration wr see from Guatemala and Mexico.

How is it being abused? I'm not aware that any significant number of applicants are being approved who aren't in compliance with the statutory language. To wit:

For purposes of the E-3 and H-1B programs (but not the H-1B1 program), specialty occupation means an occupation that requires theoretical and practical application of a body of specialized knowledge, and attainment of a bachelor's or higher degree (or its equivalent) in the specific specialty as a minimum for entry into the occupation in the United States.

I get the impression from some of the comments here that some may interpret this as being for the kinds of highly specialized work where you might not be able to find someone available to do in America and thus need to look abroad. Abuse, then, would be hiring H-1Bs for run-of-the-mill coding work for which American universities graduate thousands each year. The problem with this argument is there's nothing in the law supporting it. The way I'd interpret "specialized knowledge" as an attorney is as knowledge distinct from general knowledge, i.e., not the kind of knowledge the average person would have, even the average educated person. Knowing how to code may not be the rarest skill, but it's not so common that the average person can be hired to do it with no experience and be productive in a few weeks. If you're hiring someone with a bachelor's in computer science to do the job, then you've met the requirement.

Well for one thing, as far as I'm aware the law requires companies to post positions and get no applicants before they can get a visa. But I have seen, with my own eyes, when such a "posting" was literally placed on the side of the break room fridge that was 1" away from the wall. While that may comply with the letter of the law, it seems to me to be a clear abuse.

The illegality is in that many H1B positions are never actually open to American applicants. Particularly in tech a lot of the H1B positions appear to be subcontracted to what are the equivalent of "diploma mills" except for visas.

They complained more about migrant crime and got a society in which cops look like soldiers.

Do you think American conservatives, even the non-ideological MAGA kind, find this to be a problem?

The MAGA crowd is like someone who found a genie but can't formulate their wishes well.

I don't think this is a terribly accurate view, because this implies that if they simply formulated their concerns properly they could be addressed - and this just isn't the case here. The problems which they were complaining about are the negative externalities of policies which the wealthy donors and power elite who actually run western governments enthusiastically support and profit from. There was no way in which they could correctly word or formulate their desire for lower amounts of migration, because the people in charge of executing that policy had no intention of actually fixing the problems they were complaining about.

I would not have wanted migrants in the millions to a country I was a native of, period. White-collar migrants are even worse since you are making college admissions and jobs even harder for your kid but you are also ensuring votebanks, unstable coalitions.

As I said in a downstream reply, this is all a diversion. H1-B visas represent 85K per anum of imported workers. US universiteis graduate 850K STEM students per year, so it's basically and additional 10% of skilled workers added to a market that isn't nearly as tight as people think. H1-B Visas are not an issue, they are a solution to the wrong problem.

The problem is an open border across which millions (almost 3 million in 2024, from a basic Google search) of people cross and only 250k (8-9%) get sent back. That is an all-time high number of deportations. In other words, ICE is working at full capacity to "repatriate" migrants and it's a drop in the bucket. Closing the Border is the first step, sure, but sending people back simply isn't going to happen, not in any meaningful way that conservatives hope for.

So, how do you goose those numbers? go after the low-hanging fruit, i.e. the people you can find, who you already know follow the rules, and send them back.

The H1-B debate is a distraction so you don't notice that nothing will actually change.

Prediction: mass deportations will not happen. If we currently deport 250k that number will not rise above 350k. 85% confidence.

It’s not 85k, apparently it’s 868k every year, which then must be multiplied (to some mysterious degree) by: up-to 6 year extension; the family members brought in; those who overstay in sanctuary states

I thought the 868k was the number of certified applications, rather than the number of accepted ones (which is around 20%). I looked at the number of I-140 petitions, which is apparently how people on H-1Bs (legally) stay in America, and there are about 150k approved each year (~65k from India), this is then presumably multiplied by family members and so on.

You’re right actually, thanks for correction

To start with, this program is MASSIVELY popular with employers. The program has a statutory limit of 85,000 visas per year, but employers routinely receive approval for more than 800k applications per year (868k, or 10x the limit, in 2024).

I was looking for the part where the "900k application approvals" somehow became 900k visas, but he never got there. the 85k number seems to still be the amount we actually give out per year. I'm going to stick with the 85K number. His entire post seems to be focused on the applications, but I don't see how it's relevant to the debate. Every person in the world could apply for every role and we'd still only give out X number of visas.

I'm not surprised these are popular programs. It clearly keeps the costs down and from my personal experience, many of these large firms already have considerable populations of Indian employees and a working climate that is comfortable for them and self-reinforcing.

The big question that I haven't seen discussed is what's the actual jobs situation? Who's battling and for what? I asked ChatGPt for basic STEM jobs data. it seems reasonable:

Determining the exact number of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) workers hired annually in the U.S. is challenging due to the lack of specific data on yearly hires. However, we can infer trends based on employment growth projections and existing workforce statistics.

Current STEM Workforce and Growth Projections:

Current Employment: As of 2023, approximately 10.7 million workers are employed in STEM occupations in the U.S. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS

Projected Growth: Employment in STEM occupations is expected to grow by 10.4% from 2023 to 2033, adding about 1.1 million new jobs over this period. BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS

Annual Hiring Estimates:

Average Annual Growth: The projected addition of 1.1 million STEM jobs over 10 years suggests an average annual increase of approximately 110,000 new positions.

Replacement Needs: Beyond new positions, the labor market must also account for replacements due to retirements and other workforce exits. While specific data for STEM occupations is limited, considering both growth and replacement needs, the annual hiring requirement is likely higher than the average growth figure.

89k or 110K annual positions is a lot! Based on the other numbers, I'll grant H1-Bs something around 10% of the total STEM workforce.

Then we ask, "well what about native US STEM grads?

According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), U.S. postsecondary institutions conferred the following number of STEM degrees and certificates in the 2020–2021 academic year:

Associate's Degrees: Approximately 126,000 Bachelor's Degrees: Approximately 453,000 Master's Degrees: Approximately 168,000 Doctoral Degrees: Approximately 44,000 This totals to about 791,000 STEM degrees and certificates awarded during that period.

So we have 110k jobs annually for 800k grads + 90k H1B

Maybe everyone is too focused on STEM? Seems like there's a bigger issue in overproduction that dwarfs the H1-B discussion. From my perspective, the problem is that real advancement in tech requires the input of an extremely rare type of tech-genius -- let's call them huckleberries. In the real-world, most people are mid-level, mid-IQ flunkies doing make-work in Excel.

Back to the the X post:

You can see where I’m going with this. A casual perusal of the data shows that this isn’t a program for the top 0.1% of talent, as it’s been described. This is simply a way to recruit hundreds of thousands of relatively lower-wage IT and financial services professionals.

the X post backs up my claim that these are grunt-level positions. These are low-middle class folks who, by dint of a national culture overwhelmingly focused on STEM education, are trying to lever themselves up into the (American) upper-middle class.

From my perspective in a senior role in Fin-tech/IT who has done a reasonable amount of hiring over the past decade, we can't find good people for the high-complexity, high-responsibility roles we need filled. I've never hired an H1-B applicant as they've never passed an initial interview. I can also count them on one hand. The program simply does not concern me. If they're competing for jobs, they aren't the ones I'm trying to fill.

I maintain my claim this is not a big deal in the near or long term -- not nearly as big of a deal as STEM over-production in the age of AI. I also maintain it's a diversion from the real issue which is an open US-Mexico border and millions of low-skilled, unaccountable unknowns that will never be found let alone repatriated. It is a debate over wallpaper as the house burns down. Ending it won't do much, expanding it won't do much. What the discussion does instead is prime everyone to get upset about easily controlled, legal, largely pro-social and pro-American immigrants instead of 10x randos as it's a guarantee that the campaign promises of "closing the border and sending all the migrants back" will not happen.

As I said in a downstream reply, this is all a diversion. H1-B visas represent 85K per anum of imported workers.

That's what it is now - this got started in part because there was activism around increasing (perhaps substantially) the number of people admitted on such "skilled worker" visas, in order to fill the claimed shortfall in US skilled STEM talent.

My main point is it's a distraction from the actual immigration issues. I agree there is no reason to expand the program.

The claim there is a shortfall in skilled STEM talent is difficult because STEM is an overly broad category. Initially I dispute the claim -- there seems to me to be an extreme over-production of STEM graduates globally and in the US. Very roughly, 900k new grads for 110k positions. About 200k of those grads are Master's and Doctorates, the rest are under-grad.

the problem I have with the claim comes more from my experience. I think there may actually be a shortfall at the upper echelons of the various tech industries. The number of really good coders, deep algorithmic thinkers, experienced operators, etc. is kind of high. It's really tough to hire great engineers and no one wants the middling ones who fill out the fat belly of the jobs market. The H1-B program, if expanded, will produce more of these huckleberries, but only in proportions we already understand; you'll get a few more geniuses and a lot more chumps.

What I'm curious about is how we get the huckleberries without the H1-B program. We still require a legal path to hiring them and bringing them over. And maybe 99% chumps to 1% huckleberries is tolerable if that 1% initiates the next tech revolution. These types of games scale in ways that are difficult to predict.

As I said in a downstream reply, this is all a diversion. H1-B visas represent 85K per anum of imported workers.

I don't think so. The precise number coming in right now is irrelevant when they were proposing an expansion of the program, and when the "but they're here legally" argument was already deploy to dismiss concerns over small towns being flooded by Haitians.

the "but they're here legally" argument isn't meant to dismiss concerns. It's meant to highlight that the government is limited in it's ability to throw people out and the legal ones are always the easiest. The debate is a distraction. Republicans need to be able to show at the mid-terms that they "threw the bums out that Biden let in." They will dump numbers on us. Those numbers (people kicked out of the US) are already higher than they've ever been and unlikely to increase without a mass mobilization of the ICE, cops, Border Patrol, every sanctuary city and the military. But you know an easy way to juice the numbers? send back the people you actually have some control over and all you have to do is let their visas expire. Boom!

This is a time honored American tradition, the same game from here-to-eternity. People hate H1-B fine--whatever. I sincerely don't care. Just don't be fooled into thinking this is the real discussion. It's a preliminary distraction set to prime voters for the mid-terms.

the "but they're here legally" argument isn't meant to dismiss concerns. It's meant to highlight that the government is limited in it's ability to throw people out and the legal ones are always the easiest.

That's now how I remember it. When Trump/Vance brought up Springfield, I saw people deploy the argument in an attempt to point out hypocrisy ("but I thought you guys said you're only against illegal immigration"), literally no one said "we'd love to deport them, but it's easier to start with Mexicans.

The debate is a distraction.

It's not. The establishment really really wants more immigration in the west. They were getting it illegally all these years, but now that the negative sentiment against it is becoming unmanagable, they're looking for ways to still get it under the guise of legal immigration.

literally no one said "we'd love to deport them, but it's easier to start with Mexicans.

Well, I don't presume it would be easier to throw out Mexicans--I'm saying it's easier to throw out people you gave H1-B visas to as opposed to people you can't find because you don't know who they are or where they went. they aren't merely here legally, but have been granted the esteemed blessing of the state, which can be revoked at any time.

now that the negative sentiment against it is becoming unmanageable, they're looking for ways to still get it under the guise of legal immigration

The US will have immigration always and forever. It's not a switch, it's a dial. The Biden admin, cranked it so far the knob came off. Whether or not H1-B should be expanded, decreased or eliminated is not a conversation of consequence. We're talking sub 100k numbers not multiple millions. The real immigration issue that voters care about --the millions of voters who crossed party lines or got off their asses to vote for Trump--is the open border. Almost no one cares or even thinks about H1-B visas. It was a foolish topic to even bring up--unless, of course, you're trying to muddy the waters and misdirect people's attention.

I think we can squish this into a prediction space. I don't care about H1-B visas but my prediction is "no change" (+/- 10k total approved visas) with 75% confidence. I think I predicted overall deportations somewhere else, but I expect that number (currently around 270k) to grow by no more than 10% by the midterm elections, 85% confidence. I think both H1-B will not change meaningfully, deportations will not grow meaningfully and the conversation will be about a failed discourse around H1-B to obfuscate the failure in securing the border and deporting the mass of migrants from the Biden era. I suppose we can make a bet if you want, or just see how I did in two years. I wouldn't hate to be wrong...

The other reaction I had to this post was somewhat surprise to hear that the pro-immigration side "won". I don't really follow twitter/X stuff at all. I instead hear about politics through second hand sources, the main one is themotte. But the secondary one is via comedy podcasts.

Tim Dillon is one of my favorites. I feel like he has a good understanding of what I'd call the dirt bag political pulse. The kind of people that barely pay attention, and if they were to pay attention it would not add anything positive.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=3_LVaHqP96k?si=i4nFHV-slWKMUOXV

His latest episode covers this topic. And he unashamedly bashes Elon and Vivek. Especially Vivek. And the overall impression I got was that this is one of those embarrassing and wonky positions that people high up in the Republican side will take. But that it is a distinctly uncool position to take.

It might be an uncool position with the base, but does that matter if the overwhelming majority of important politicians in both the Democratic and Republican parties, plus the overwhelming majority of rich Americans, support the Elon/Vivek position? MAGA nativists can complain online but does it amount to anything more than one of those Middle Ages peasant uprisings that got quickly dispersed once the elites sent a few mounted knights in their direction? What are the MAGA rank and file going to do? Vote Democrat? Buy ten more guns that they will never use for any political purpose? I mean, they can sit out the next few elections and cause a bunch of Republicans to lose elections, but that would just mean the victory of a bunch of Democrats who are also in favor of the pro-immigration side.

If the MAGA base tanks their support of Trump then a significant number of Republican politicians will follow suit. I do not see MTG, Boebert, etc. going against the base, considering they will get primaried if they do. This results in two possibilities. The first is that it becomes impossible for Trump to do anything and he ends up in the same position Bush was after 2005 where he's still the president but has no influence and no one pays attention to him. The second possibility is that the Democrats and non-MAGA Republicans support the Elon/Vivek position. Trump can get things done, but not without making concessions to the Democrats, which may or may not be worth it. Either way, I don't think Trump wants to end his time in office being pilloried by his own base as a fraud and sellout.

MTG has already come out in support of Elon/Vivek, as has Alex Jones (not making this up). The real threat to on the fence republicans is not the base primarying you if you don't agree with them, it's with Elon and his fat stacks of cash primarying you if you don't agree with him (God Musk is amazing!).

Interesting. What's even more interesting is that her support stems from owning a construction company and understanding how hard it is to find employees, which suggests that she'd be willing to extend immigration beyond the H-1B level to find employees. If there's actually this much consensus on the issue then I'm optimistic we can reach some kind of deal where we make it easy enough for people with job prospects to get work permits, expand the numbers for those, crack down hard on illegal immigration, close the asylum loophole, and declare the whole problem solved so we can move on to other things. Democrats get increased immigration, Republicans get crackdowns and mass deportation. Everyone wins. Except people that don't like immigrants altogether, but Trump can always point to the "great big door" he talked about during his first campaign.

Yep, that's probably the best solution we can get on the issue: Much easier to legally come to the US (ideally as difficult as immigrating to Australia or NZ or the UK) if you have a specialized skill there is a shortage of and can get an employer to sponsor you while anyone who tries cutting in line and jumping the border gets summarily booted out.

A country the size of the US can easily handle an average yearly load of 500k skilled immigrants (over all visa types) + their dependents.

if you have a specialized skill there is a shortage of

This turns gobs of power over to whoever gets to decide that there is a "shortage" of something. Moreover, it avoids asking important questions like, "Why is there a shortage? What are the barriers that are preventing the market from clearing? Can we get rid of them?" Of course, the answer to those questions depends on things like whether you use the domestic supply curve only or the world supply curve (which will have different equilibrium prices/quantities)... and again, it is almost certain that the real power will be who gets to decide to implicitly use one or the other for deciding whether there is a "shortage" in any particular industry. Obviously, folks like Elon want to use the world supply curve for determining that there's a "shortage" of tech workers, while the unions will want to use the domestic supply curve to claim that there is no "shortage" in their industry.

It's still ambiguous. Trump, Vance, and Musk themselves have signaled some capitulation on the issue. But both sides are declaring victory.

I think we'll see some H1B reform that will be attributed to this debate, but it won't be radical enough for the anti-immigration wing to claim an unambiguous victory. But as of right now the dust hasn't really settled.

Yeah that kinda feels like the "nothing ever happens" position, which I'm always tempted to take. Since it seems right most of the time.

Tim Dillon truly is great. Here is one of his all times greatest if you haven't heard it: https://youtube.com/watch?v=U1jPKVQ09-M

Just in the realm of comedians being oddly excellent political commentators, here is Sam Hyde's thing from today: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Hcsm1B8Z8d4

I'm careful to say this since so many have said this before and been wrong that it's become a meme at this point, but this may be an indication of the breaking point between Trump and the traditional MAGA base. From his emergence in 2015 to roughly 2022, this was pretty much all he had. There were some moderates who voted for him in 2016 but turned away from him rather quickly. There were also traditional Republicans who opposed him up to the point that his nomination became inevitable and then backed him out of necessity, but in this case it was clear who was driving the car. Every once in a while he'd allow himself to be talked into doing something that was unpopular with his base but he had no qualms about throwing the responsible party under the bus when this became apparent (hence all the high-profile firings).

This seems different. Elon, Vivek, JD Vance, RFK, Joe Rogan, and the like aren't the MAGA base, and they don't represent the MAGA base. The pro Trump posters on The Motte don't represent the MAGA base. The left spent years trying to tar Trump as a racist, and while those smears weren't exactly fair, they tapped into an underlying truth that those charged with defending Trump couldn't admit: The MAGA base isn't exactly the most enlightened on racial issues. What I mean by this is that they don't bother trying to hide their opinions on things beyond the most basic kind of justifications. Here's a quote from the Pittsburgh NPR affiliate about a local community with a large Hatian population:

“I'm not racist,” she said. “But I came down Fallowfield [Avenue] a couple of months ago. There it was like on a Saturday or Sunday evening, real nice out. Everybody was on the streets walking. I probably counted 40 people walking from one end of Fallowfield to this end of Fallowfield. Not one white person.”

These people don't interact with Indians here on H-B1 visas for software companies; they interact with Indians who own convenience stores. they could care less about sophisticated arguments surrounding immigration because "they shouldn't be here". The only thing they offer as an argument besides dislike of foreigners is that they take American jobs. When someone like Vivek says that these H-1Bs are necessary because of "American mediocrity", the true MAGA folks don't nod in agreement. They blame Democrats; it's the liberal world where schools only teach Critical Race Theory and pronouns rather than The Three Rs, where coaches hand out participation trophies, where people don't smack their kids anymore. The solution to this problem isn't importing Asians or Asian culture but returning to traditional American culture. So if you're a Vivek Ramaswany or an Elon Musk and you can't find any Americans you want to employ then that's just too fucking bad. These jobs should be going to Americans, period.

I don't know much about Laura Loomer, but her criticisms are spot-on. The MAGA base didn't vote for Trump so they could hear horseshit excuses about how actually we really need to import people from India and give them high paying jobs. These are people who buy $70,000 trucks that get 15 mpg and then complain about the price of gas. They don't want to hear about how a multi-billionaire like Elon needs their tax dollars to subsidize his line of electric cars because he'll save us all from the global warming non-problem. The base, who has been there from the beginning, is right to question why a guy who seems hell bent on draining the swamp and dismantling the deep state is being unduly influenced by people who supported the opposition until recently.

There are two reasons I give this a better chance of causing a real split than previous controversies. First, immigration is a core issue. Trump has in the past taken positions contrary to the traditional conservative base on a number of issues, but he had the cover of not having taken positions on them. And he was able to split the baby on abortion. Here, he's made an unequivocal statement that runs contrary to his supporters' expectations on a core campaign issue. The second reason is that he's taking Elon Musk's side over that of his base. Elon gave Trump's PAC a lot of money and now expects, and is getting, influence in return. The fact that a non-American billionaire who supported Biden and Clinton can get that kind of influence just from writing a check, and use the influence to get Trump to waver on immigration, can't possibly sit well. And then there's the fact that Trump clearly came down on the side of Musk when he could have just stayed out of the whole thing. I could be wrong. This whole thing could blow over (H-1B visas are unlikely to become a major policy point), Trump could have an unrelated falling out with Musk, etc. But this seems to give greater odds of Trump's MAGA downfall than anything we've seen thus far.

It’s not just Trump’s core base that’s unhappy about mass immigration. No one likes suddenly having ten times more competition to get a job. The only reason most liberals were ok with immigration was that the people coming in weren’t the type that were going to compete with college educated urbanites. That’s why there’s so much vitriol about Indians: it isn’t really anything about Indians in particular. It’s just that this is the first major demographic of immigrants that can compete for white collar jobs. Judging from the discourse on this site, Silicon Valley people aren’t any happier about it than factory workers in the Midwest were. Sure they may keep quiet about it in public, but privately they are pretty upset.

There’s all kinds of people in America who are not otherwise very racist, but who will just straightforwardly say they don’t like Indians. I think it being Indians has something to do with it.

I agree, and the only way I am able to really explain it is that there is the strain of, what is in America, very low class behavior, by ostensibly white collar PMCs. The first is trash. Littering is something low class people do in America. Whether it is a black or Mexican neighborhood in the inner city just throwing backs and bottles on the ground when there is a perfectly good trash can on the corner, or a guy with 5 broken lawnmowers in his front yard out in the sticks. Thats low class. But well paid Indians tend to do something similar, but different. I've noticed it in neighborhoods, but also workplaces. It does feel more uniquely foreign to have 3 Indians in an office than 3 Koreans. This is also mirrored in the business world, my dad was very active with small businesses, he would deal with a lot of ethnicities as a result. For whatever reason, Indians and Arabs have the worst reputation as attempting to cheat on a deal.

I have had success in dealing with 2G Canadian Indians on small-time work for hire contracts in this regard by kind of... not being a huge racist and saying things like "don't fuck me around bro" -- but yeah, it's definitely noticeable. I wonder whether it doesn't trickle down to employee-type relationships in the sense of trying to make the most of things for oneself no matter what being an aspect of the national character?

There is also the fact that a substantial number of Indians (nowhere near all, but quite a few) have a very strong, very unpleasant body odor. I've read that it comes from frequently eating curry.

I agree, and the only way I am able to really explain it is that there is the strain of, what is in America, very low class behavior, by ostensibly white collar PMCs.

I think i know what you mean, while no means universal there is definitely an attitude particular to upper sec indians where they seem to think that they are somehow "above" common courtesy or having to clean up after themselves. There seems to be this attitude that using "pleases and thank-yous" when speaking to serving staff lowers ones own status through the implication of equality. Ditto picking up your own trash instead of having a servant do it for you.

Of course the result is that when Brahmins find themselves in a more courtesy oriented environment such as Japan, Korea, or portions of the US, behavior like being rude to servers and leaving a mess for others to clean up immediately codes as "low class" and no amount of appeals to your Brahman ancestry is going to change that. If anything the Shudras and Dalits come across as more desireable neighbors because unlike the thier "high caste" bretheren they are at least polite.

According to the 2021 Canadian Census, over a quarter of Canada's population (pemanent residents and citizens) are first generation immigrants. Based on immigration trends, that number is likely at or approaching a third as of 2025. Mind you, this number does not include immigrants who are on "temporary" visas.

Utter insanity.

You're not allowed to just straight up say I don't want MENA immigration, so they go for the anti-woman and anti-gay angle to make it acceptable. What they really want to say is they don't want Arabs period, and that is an indirect way of saying that.

Well, the reason they don't want Muslims is because of those things you mentioned (and more)

Eastern Euros who don't like gays and Latin Americans with machismo seem relatively uncontroversial in Europe.

They don't tend to protest outside schools that teach about homosexuality or express favour for Sharia Law, among other things.

Ok, the MAGA base doesn’t really care that much about h1b software engineers- although dislike of Indians is very widespread among working class Americans- this is a fight between tech-adjacent DR twitterati and not DR tech twitterati. Your typical MAGA voter is retired or works in a field that is more likely to compete with immigrants from Latin America.

And he was able to split the baby on abortion.

Pun intended?

I think this is far too much credit to maga base and how plugged in they are. From my interactions with my most trumpy relatives it will be a combination of being completely uninformed and disconnected on the h1-b debate, agreeing with whatever trumps stance is anyway, and denying whatever of trumps positions that contradicts their own convictions are true.

But to your credit, yes trump has taken a side pretty clearly here:

https://x.com/DMichaelTripi/status/1874287613156487440

Still I am quicker to believe that MAGA will just finish their transformation into yankee centrists and give up on opposing immigration before they will abandon trump. I don’t understand why, but this is what any other historic issue has been as well (with the exception of the jab which they just #3 above and deny the dissonance)

The MAGA base isn't exactly the most enlightened on racial issues

Is that true though? They might not be the most educated, but I feel like they have more direct, lived experience dealing with people of other races than most liberals do. Working class folks deal with Mexican migrant workers, Middle class folks deal with Indian H1B office workers, and southerners deal with black people in their community. The typical liberal either lives in a snow-white suburb, or in a city where the cost of living is so high that it effectively outlaws anyone who isn't very exceptional. They can live a fantasy of "all humans are the same, race is only skin deep" because they never have to actually interact with racial issues in their normal lives. For a working class person, race is very real and very important.

Yeah, that's why our views on race are less 'enlightened'.

There's something not right here, I hear familiar bells of dissonance. I notice I am confused.

Opposition to immigration is the principal impetus for the right. Not just the American right, opposition is the common view among the native peoples of all western nations. The belief of what to do isn't uniform, but "Too many, greatly reduce" is dominant. Musk shows an awareness of this, he's also shown an awareness of the discussions of the deep online right apropos "You have said the actual truth." He should know. Consider also his loudly backing AfD, a party that can be defined by its opposition to immigration.

If Musk believes all humans are fungible economic units, how does he turn right? If his shift as has been supposed by many including myself was about viewing the left as a threat, how does he not view the right as a graver threat for their anti-immigrant sentiment extending to close the tap on his source of engineers? How does he ever buy Twitter? Or, after buying it, carrying out the lifting of bans, diving into the discourse of the right, and seeing there "No we mean literally all of them are going back," realize what he's courted, renege and cut a deal? The media would need maybe two weeks of news cycles and his image would be rehabilitated for the normie masses while in the background he received the necessary assurances of allowing him to continue his corporate administration as he sees fit. But there again, if how he wants to manage his corporations by his ostensibly aggressive prioritization of foreign labor, why does he ever consider the left a bigger problem than the right?

I had more and I cut it down and now I've again written more than I think I need because I'm pretty sure all of you reading this knows all of these points. What I run into is that for the last few years for Musk, though really it seems it's been basically all of his career, people have bet against him, for the absurdity of his ideas, for supposed incompetence, for ignorance, more lately for him being "evil", and they've lost every time. This must be stressed enough, they have lost every single time. Or at least every single time it's mattered. So I look at him and wonder, how does he believe the FEU view? He's not evil, stupid or incompetent. Did he just not know what's actually happening?

People are complex but plenty of times it is the mundane or contradictory explanation rather than the fun/schizo/5D chess theory. I'm probably grasping at nonexistent straws, as I so often do. Sure, he believes in this one area of hyper-pure tabula rasa egalitarianism, despite living a life of evidence against it. Sure, he holds the root ideal that underlies the California approach to homelessness and crime, not to mention trans advocacy, he's just not extrapolated one more step to shake it off.

Still I think a possible explanation for his response is this: he believed talent came from India because he had convincing, not necessarily good and certainly not great, but convincing enough reasons to believe it did. In a very short period of time he has since discovered those hiring for his corporations have prioritized Indians because they are Indians, have praised and promoted along Indians because they are Indians, and may be benefiting in appearances from work done primarily by not Indians, all while repeatedly rejecting superior talent because they are not Indian. And so he has struggled, in recognizing his mistake and perhaps in rationalizing against a roiling blood rage at not simply being taken for a fool, but taken in such a way that it is a direct attack on his life's work of getting off the rock and making humans an interplanetary species.

I don't know. Again I'm grasping at straws in seeking fantastic explanation over the simple and probable one. But, and I'm paraphrasing what Sam Hyde said in his video, if this is a real belief for him, not something from a lack of knowledge and understanding but something he won't get past, he's not the man we all hope he is, and he will lose.

Two things:

  1. A big part of why Elon turned to the right was that liberals used to adore him. Then they all woke up on the wrong side of the bed one morning, decided he was the devil, and that he needed to be socially and economically lynched. I still have no idea why, it’s like Joe Rogan, they just seem to have caught some kind of mind virus and they all hate him now. So a lot of Elon’s move to the right is survival instinct and not necessarily agreement with policy.
  2. I’m pretty sure Elon likes hiring H1-B Indians because they are reasonably competent but much cheaper than domestic workers. He dresses it up in a lot of pretty language to cover that up, but that’s the truth. Like a lot of business titans through the years, he ruthlessly optimizes costs wherever possible. Don’t use six dots of glue on the barrel when five could suffice. I doubt Indians have affected his plans to get off the rock, since H1-B visa holders can’t work at Space-X. It’s a government and military contractor so there are heavy security restrictions on foreign nationals from any country working there. The Indians mostly work at Tesla.

Then they all woke up on the wrong side of the bed one morning, decided he was the devil, and that he needed to be socially and economically lynched.

It wasn't this sudden.

There was always a considerable amount of resentment against Elon Musk on the far-left because of his South African background. But the first brick in the anti-Elon wall was his intense opposition to COVID lockdowns -- this allied him with the right almost immediately on an issue of intense salience. Then, he bought Twitter, with the intent of reducing its censorship of conservatives. In other words, he conquered territory the left considered neutral and made it conservative (because opposing conservatism is "about human rights, which aren't political"). This instantly made him a pariah.

Him actually allying with Trump was just the last brick -- but those two issues massively turned the left against him.

Eh, I thought the real backlash always started with those kids trapped in the cave and him calling that ex-pat diver a pedophile over being told that his submersible idea was bad. It wasn't exactly partisan, but I think that was the beginning of the polarization.

Plus, also, I think people were looking for anything to make Elon and Tesla's fanboys shut up, and it just escalated from there.

So a lot of Elon’s move to the right is survival instinct and not necessarily agreement with policy.

This makes his recent move very baffling. If he alienates the MAGA base enough to piss off Trump he is going to be left in the wind with no real allies and a lot of enemies.

He's at least theoretically a software dev at heart -- which means I'd be pretty surprised if he hadn't Noticed (tm) that some people contribute less than zero to a group project and developed a dislike for these guys. Particularly considering his (apparently) ruthless behaviour at companies that he owns.

I'm kinda skeptical that he actually wants to hire a bunch of H1-Bs at his current companies -- he seems to be notoriously competence focused, and surely industry savvy?

IDK what to predict, but wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing just kind of goes away?

Elon got out of the coding business before the first great bulk of outsourcing and insourcing. So he probably hasn't personally dealt with the "best and the brightest". I'd be all for Elon bringing in any engineer he had to supervise, PERSONALLY. I doubt he could stand these bozos any more than I can.

However, I reject anything that stinks of "if only Comrade Stalin knew". While I am tempted to make an exception for Elon, I won't. He knows. He's probably fired some of these people who were taking up space at Twitter. If he wants more of them it's because he sees some advantage in having them here.

Elon got out of the coding business before the first great bulk of outsourcing and insourcing.

Meh, even if all he ever did was a group project at Waterloo, he's surely familiar with the phenomenon -- IDK if he has some secret plan where cheap shitty devs are useful to him personally, but it seems kind of counter to my impression of how he runs his businesses.

I’m pretty sure Elon likes hiring H1-B Indians because they are reasonably competent but much cheaper than domestic workers. He dresses it up in a lot of pretty language to cover that up, but that’s the truth. Like a lot of business titans through the years, he ruthlessly optimizes costs wherever possible. Don’t use six dots of glue on the barrel when five could suffice. I doubt Indians have affected his plans to get off the rock, since H1-B visa holders can’t work at Space-X. It’s a government and military contractor so there are heavy security restrictions on foreign nationals from any country working there. The Indians mostly work at Tesla.

One thing that is ignored in this debate is the petrodollar. The US prints money like crazy but keeps the dollar high by pretty much forcing the world to buy American dollars. Don't participate in the American racket and end up like Iran. This means that there are too many dollars and the prices in the US have shot through the moon. The US has become an excessively expensive country with an economy based on finance, insurance and real estate.

This kind of worked when the US was technologically vastly superior to the rest of the world and could force people in other countries to trade bananas and oil for Ford cars. As the rest of the world has been catching up in terms of tech, it is harder for the US to compete when housing prices are multiple times higher in Seattle compared to China or Poland.

American engineers with 100k of student debt, living in mediocre million dollar Seattle homes with 2000 dollar a month medical insurance for their family and who need two cars for their house hold simply can't compete on a global market. There aren't that many technologies that the US is that far ahead that the American company can charge an absurd premium.

The US doesn't seem to want to give up on the empire business so the result is to not lower costs but to press living standards down. Silicon valley real estate has to keep being at an inflated price but US companies can't pay 150 dollars an hour for mediocre web developers for their website when companies in other parts of the world pay 20.

Elon also has a child who went trans and I'm sure that helped his turn to the right.

If Musk believes all humans are fungible economic units, how does he turn right?

Even setting aside every issue besides immigration, it is possible to believe importing "top 0.1%" skilled engineers is a net-positive without believing that importing masses of economic 'refugees' and illegal immigrants is. Masses of migrants (and their descendants) are a tremendous net-drain on the government budget and societal resources, commit more crime, etc. while small groups of elite immigrants would not be. "People who want to immigrate" is a category that selects for people living in bad countries, and since one of the most common reasons for countries to be bad is the average intelligence/etc. of the people who live there this selects for bad immigrants, but "people who are allowed to immigrate" can be selective in the opposite direction. This just doesn't seem difficult to understand if you actually read him describing his own beliefs and don't strawman it as him supporting the current H-1B system.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1873187030785769964

?? I don’t support an open immigration policy at all. I support a highly selective immigration policy.

Immigration should be limited to those who will obviously contribute far more than they take.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1872374103983759835

Maybe this is a helpful clarification: I am referring to bringing in via legal immigration the top ~0.1% of engineering talent as being essential for America to keep winning.

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1873191959441084531

Easily fixed by raising the minimum salary significantly and adding a yearly cost for maintaining the H1B, making it materially more expensive to hire from overseas than domestically.

I’ve been very clear that the program is broken and needs major reform.

This just doesn't seem difficult to understand if you actually read him describing his own beliefs and don't strawman it as him supporting the current H-1B system.

The issue I'm having is that the current H-1B system is does not stop at importing the top ~0.1% of engineering talent, and originally he was talking about expanding it even more. As an Elon-skeptic I don't really trust him, and I see his post-pushback justifications as damage control, but even taking them at face value, he just badly mishandled the entire conversation around the issue.

The issue I'm having is that the current H-1B system is does not stop at importing the top ~0.1% of engineering talent, and originally he was talking about expanding it even more.

It's a lottery system, it rejects "0.1% engineers" even as it lets in lower-skill immigrants so long as the lower-skill immigrants are above the minimum threshold. It could instead do something like auction off the slots to the highest bidder or hand them out in order to the highest wages offered and it would become dramatically more selective even if it expanded. I don't know what reforms if any the Trump administration will actually pursue, but they're not incompatible goals.

It could instead

Right, so maybe it's not the greatest idea to tell people who are against it in it's present form, and don't like the idea of expanding it, to fuck themselves in the face?

I mean, we are talking about a guy who called a rescue diver a pedophile for not taking his offer of assistance (that might not have worked).

Let's look at that Pew poll.

Overwhelmingly support deportation, overwhelmingly oppose "maintaining a diverse immigrant population," majority oppose "illegals gaining citizenship by marrying Americans," basically split on refugees, slight support for "filling labor shortages," supporting international students staying, and mostly supporting more "high skilled immigrants."

They support these things in the plain text, though that's not what's meant by the poll-makers. Let's update the poll to address the literacy issue on the topic by asking honest questions.

"Should we let literally anyone into this country who claims to be a refugee?"

I wonder how that one would do, because that's pretty much our current policy for people trying to get into this country except, just an example, white South Africans.

"Should we allow immigrants to fill labor shortages, even where 'labor shortages' include 'Indian hiring managers who will only hire other Indians' and 'employers who don't want to pay American citizens a living wage'?"

Something tells me that won't do so hot.

"Should universities be allowed to admit international students with worse applications than the American citizens whose spots they took? Should those students be allowed to then stay in the country?"

Might be a bit suspect.

"Admitting more high-skilled immigrants, and by 'high-skilled' we mean literally any foreigner with the equivalent of a bachelor's degree."

Probably a "let's not."

You take a poll question as indicative because for whatever reason you want or need it to be, but these are each a pinnacle motte and bailey. What a conservative thinks by "legal immigration" is not in any measure what the left has actually pursued, in America and in Europe. They are open to the idea of an easing of the rigorous legal process that culminates in naturalization because they still have the idealistic and decades-exploited view, but the essence of their opposition that can be seen through their view of mass illegal presence in this country would be applied exactly if informed on what people like the writers of this poll mean when they say "legal immigration." Because what the left means when they say that, after the examples above, includes but is by no means limited to something so bereft of effort as a rubber stamp on 20,000 Haitians dropped in Ohio or a group of young male "refugees" crossing the Mediterranean on an NGO-provided boat. (Both examples of the majority-opposed.)

They're "legal." Uh great, they think, so "legal" doesn't mean anything.


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