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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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For years I have heard on this forum and other places that Trump is an idiot who can't govern, doesn't know what to do to effect change, is to vain to do the right things, or won't simply because he doesn't really care. It's futile to vote for Trump. He doesnt know what he's doing. And I have been called unserious for believing in Donald Trump's excellence. Today I would like to start taking my victory lap:

https://x.com/awprokop/status/1881900975851708751?t=8OquEiW6cV89zAtXmm9kng&s=19

Trump is abolishing Affirmative Action in federal contracting. He is going to order the government to pressure private companies to end Affirmative Action. This directly benefits my career. This ends bad policy that is massively unpopular and is the kind of thing many people predicted Trump would never do. I voted this. I am thrilled!

I am doubling down on my prediction that Trump Era will be remembered as a Golden Age, will fundamentally reshape American history for the better, and will in fact be enjoyed even by thosr who have been most skeptical!

Who makes hiring decisions? HR. Who works in HR, almost exclusively (especially at major corporations)? Liberal white women.

This is like SCOTUS abolishing affirmative action in college admissions, literally meaningless so long as the same people are making admissions decisions.

This directly benefits my career.

If you work in tech, the number of black and Hispanic engineers is so low that the impact on your career will be very limited. Amusingly, the biggest beneficiaries of a full end to affirmative action in employment would be the kind of progressive white men who work in book publishing, media, advertising and humanities academia, but as I said, it’s not going to end, just happen unofficially.

And if I’m the management who already dislikes HR maybe I fire them and out source a portion of their work.

Fire them for what? Affirmative Action doesn't give private companies license to ignore Title VII. Any "affirmative Action Hires" you can find are likely going to be marginal cases where the resume was similar to a qualified non-minority candidate. The upshot is that any AA on the part of your HR department isn't going to be consequential to the point where it's worth laying off the majority of your HR department so you can pay them unemployment on top of the increased rates you're going to be paying an outside contractor to do the work. Not to mention the fact that this outside contractor isn't going to be as familiar with your company and it's policies as your existing staff. My firm outsources its billing to a third party firm and my boss has hour-long weekly Zoom meetings with them just to make sure they're doing what we need them to do. And this is a relatively small firm. In any event, let's not pretend you're going to give some company in India major say in hiring decisions.

Fire them because the vast majority of their actions actually reduce value. I think most of HR is bullshit and the very limited value add could easily be outsourced. This is just a signal that lawsuits will be easier to defend and therefore reduces the CYA of HR.