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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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My personal issue with a lot of the 'high skilled immigrant' discourse is that a huge chunk of high-paid positions in the modern economy are essentially vapor atop vast flows of rent-seeking. I've done pretty well out of the tech economy personally, but there's massive chunks of jobs which don't really have much of an objective function.

This is further exacerbated when you import from certain countries where there's a cultural understanding of intense gaming of KPIs and little-to-no interest in actually 'building' anything. I have sympathy from the people from those countries, as their internal political economy means it's very hard to get ahead in a vast sea of standardized tests and affirmative action, but it's on them to go remake their country into somewhere nice to be instead of needfully KPI-maxing into high ranks of the Western Celestial Bureaucracy in companies that essentially just exist. Most of these jobs could be adequately performed by a local, or a flow chart.