If I remember correctly they linked it to breast cancer, causing all research and prescribing to basically disappear over night. It took 20 years before the study was revisited and the link dismissed.
This was also my plan; hang in there for the next kid, wait for the next vest, etc. ultimately daycare is expensive, healthcare is expensive… I’m still stuck 6 years later waiting to quit but something always comes up and there’s always another vest around the corner.
Well obviously. Vesting schedules are explicitly designed the way they are to keep people around. That's their entire purpose.
Retirement is inherently a choice to earn less lifetime money and pour that time into family and other things you like doing. Waiting for the next vesting cliff is inherently a choice to earn more money and spend less time on your family.
The cynical take is that with US companies expecting productivity increases via AI, they need to protect the US workers from competition via foreign labor. The current administration was voted in with an anti-immigration mandate so this is consistent. The practical reality is that you are not safe on any visa, it can be terminated arbitrarily by the state department and your recourse is likely expensive and timely.
The current admin does not understand that our lead comes from immigrants. Sorry, but most Americans are kind of mediocre academically.
I do not understand why the "American First" MAGA crowd can't get it through their thick skulls that everything nice they have, including our technological lead, is built by immigrants that are just smarter than they are.
This is just an ego problem I suspect. It bruises the ego of MAGA voters to realize that immigrants actually are smarter, they actually do get paid more (and not because they're "taking the jobs" but because they are actually more desirable.)
> The current admin does not understand that our lead comes from immigrants. Sorry, but most Americans are kind of mediocre academically.
> I do not understand why the "American First" MAGA crowd can't get it through their thick skulls that everything nice they have, including our technological lead, is built by immigrants that are just smarter than they are.
Which specific Americans are kind of mediocre academically? Which specific immigrants are smarter than the average American and are therefore responsible for the nice things about America?
Not all American citizens have the same level of intelligence, nor do all people attempting to or actually succeeding in immigrating to the US. To the extent that "everything nice" including technological development is grounded in the average level of intelligence of the people currently inhabiting a country (which I think is a substantial part of but not the entirety of the explanation), this doesn't necessarily imply that immigration which isn't specifically gated on the intelligence of individual immigrants will improve a country along this metric.
And in fact the US has a huge number of legal pathways for immigration (including some like "immigrating illegally, having a natural-born-citizen child on US soil, and having that child sponsor your legal immigration decades later) that have nothing at all to do with how intelligent a given immigrant is.
And of course, immigration itself changes how "mediocre academically" Americans are, by changing who Americans are - an immigrant might eventually become a citizen; or if they don't their children born on US soil will be.
Go to any top STEM PhD program and do a headcount. I don’t know what’s going on now thanks to this wave of xenophobia and funding cut madness, but back when I was in one (Princeton Physics, that was last decade), everywhere I go it was at least 50-50 in terms of international representation. You can also count the massive number of clearly foreign born faculty. It could not be more obvious.
Edit: And before you mention O-1 and friends for highly accomplished individuals (maybe that's not affected for now? Honestly have no idea), this kind of policy has wide ranging second order effects even if it doesn't affect top talent directly. Like I said I was U.S. educated myself, once I would encourage bright minds from elsewhere to pursue a higher education in the U.S., now I heavily advise them from even setting foot in the U.S.
> Go to any top STEM PhD program and do a headcount
Having done a STEM PhD, No. STEM PhDs are merely easily exploited labor by STEM departments. The PhDs and postdocs from foreign countries are typically a notch lower than the US PhDs and postdocs (especially the postdocs, because in many foreign countries you can do a 3 year PhD). It's just that most americans won't accept 100 hour workweeks in exchange for a $50k paycheck, and won't falsify the science to stay in pursuit of the next rung on the academic ladder.
But foreign PhD students and postdocs who are being paid partially in the legal right to reside in the US might well be willing to accept those conditions. Just as an H1B visa tech employee is willing to accept lower wages and less freedom to challenge their employer, or an illegal immigrant farm laborer is willing to accept those working conditions in return for not being in whatever country they illegally immigrated from.
Any justification at all for the US government to give a visa to someone - including student visas, including visas for postdocs doing ostensible research - will be gamed by people whose primary concern is access to the US. Demand for access to the US among the myriad peoples of the world is that strong.
Sounds like the bitter words of someone who got pushed out. I know the type, I’m no longer an academic myself. Sorry it didn’t work out for you, not sorry to claim that the overwhelming majority of the most important advancements are still made by people with PhDs, however many unsuccessful ones there are.
I did fine for myself. You're crazy or brainwashed if you don't think there's something wrong going on in the academe. I have long conversations with my friend (who is a professor at ASU) about it, I don't think he's blowing smoke up my ass.
I think there’s something very wrong with every single walk of society, and academia’s problems are far from the most grave. If I’m given the choice again, I take a rotten academia over fucking ad machines and quants that do no good / actively do harm in this world (both industries try to hire me and the likes of me) every time, even when I know I’m gonna leave at the end.
Ad machines and quants are bad. But fraudulent science is worth NEGATIVE, because good scientists burn out or don't get promoted because they spin their wheels trying to reproduce bad science (losing time on the ladder) and bad scientists who either make shit results themselves or don't speak up about bad science and "build" on top of it, they get promoted, and the rot rises to the top instead of the cream.
At least everyone knows that there's something icky about ads and quants, and good people like you reject the lucrative opportunities. Most people generally think that science can do no bad at any scale, and that just throwing money at the problem/good intentions are all you need. The enterprise of science has a truthseeking model that it needs to uphold in order to succeed at its advertised ends, and it's desperately becoming the exact opposite of what it should be, and nobody has reasonable remedies to fix it within the current system. If you have a suggestion on how to fix what we've gotten ourselves into, please , I'd love to hear it.
Most of these anti immigrant takes are ultimately sour grapes from people who were often rightfully left behind or economically downlifted by their lack of willingness to adapt to the changing world we are in.
Most of these who think that wasp Americans are harmed by high skilled immigrants are admitting that they can’t beat them. Pathetic slave morality which is life denying and ontologically damnable.
You’re full of shit. White American Ph.ds are on average a tier below foreign born ones. I just hired an intern based on AI research academic credentials and out of well over 300 applications I got 3 whole American citizens and they weren’t even in the top 10 in quality.
This is why most ivy Ph.d holders are some kind of Asian. Peter and Paul really are dumber than the alternative on average.
Why would an American smart enough to become a stem phd toil away for a decade in poverty under an abusive university system instead of becoming rich in tech?
If you mean “intelligent” Americans who work on fucking blood sucking ad tech or garbage financial engineering rather than pushing the boundaries of science and technology, sure.
The flow of students between China and the USA is effectively unidirectional and always has been. What insight do you have to suggest that this will change in the near future?
> Which specific Americans are kind of mediocre academically?
Most of them. We have normalized getting Bs and Cs in our schools. Our school curricula are mediocre, and our culture around education is as well. It is distinctly uncool to care about education here.
> Which specific immigrants are smarter than the average American and are therefore responsible for the nice things about America?
Most of our best doctors, scientists, and engineers are all immigrants. Look at the ethnic breakdown of top AI researchers at the top labs.
> which isn't specifically gated on the intelligence of individual immigrants will improve a country along this metric.
It's not just intelligence. Immigrants overall have more grit, more entrepreneurial spirit, and more ambition and willingness to succeed than median Americans. It takes a lot to uproot your life and attempt to make it elsewhere. The vast majority of immigrants I've met embody the American spirit far better than most born-and-raised Americans I've met.
> And in fact the US has a huge number of legal pathways for immigration
That we are making harder and needlessly painful, which will in turn reduce the amount of highly intelligent and capable immigrants we get as well.
> Most of them. We have normalized getting Bs and Cs in our schools. Our school curricula are mediocre, and our culture around education is as well. It is distinctly uncool to care about education here.
Would you agree that caring about school performance constitutes acting white? Would you agree that acting white is uncool? Less flippantly, how much of American culture around education is specifically driven by a desire to eliminate or avoid noticing conspicuous racial discrepancies in measured educational attainment?
> Most of our best doctors, scientists, and engineers are all immigrants. Look at the ethnic breakdown of top AI researchers at the top labs.
What is the specific ethnic breakdown of the set of people you consider to be top AI researchers at the top labs? How does this compare to 1) the current ethnic breakdown of the totality of the United States of America, and 2) what the ethnic breakdown of the United States of America would be under your preferred immigration policy.
> It's not just intelligence. Immigrants overall have more grit, more entrepreneurial spirit, and more ambition and willingness to succeed than median Americans. It takes a lot to uproot your life and attempt to make it elsewhere. The vast majority of immigrants I've met embody the American spirit far better than most born-and-raised Americans I've met.
What kinds of immigrants have you met, and not met? How many of them can you talk with in the language they are fluent in, in order to get an accurate sense of the degree to which they embody the American spirit?
> That we are making harder and needlessly painful, which will in turn reduce the amount of highly intelligent and capable immigrants we get as well.
That might be worth it, if those highly intelligent and capable immigrants would, once they are settled in the US, turn their capacity and intelligence towards making US immigration policy more open to less intelligent and capable immigrants (e.g. their less capable and intelligent family members, or just liberalizing immigration policy in general).
> Would you agree that caring about school performance constitutes acting white?
No, the opposite. In my experience immigrants care far more about getting good grades, whereas most multigenerational American students were happy with Bs or even Cs.
> What is the specific ethnic breakdown of the set of people you consider to be top AI researchers at the top labs? How does this compare to 1) the current ethnic breakdown of the totality of the United States of America, and 2) what the ethnic breakdown of the United States of America would be under your preferred immigration policy.
A lot more Asians. Very few Asians. A lot more Asians.
> What kinds of immigrants have you met, and not met? How many of them can you talk with in the language they are fluent in, in order to get an accurate sense of the degree to which they embody the American spirit?
Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Nigerian, Mexican, etc. So many.
The only ones not fluent in English were the Hispanic immigrants, but despite this they better embody the American spirit than most Americans. I don't need to be fluent in Spanish to see that (though mine is passable).
The skilled first and second generation American immigrants do extraordinarily well. Most of my second generation Asian peers are clearing mid 6 to low 7 figures in their 30s, many working on their own ventures or at bold startups. And my Hispanic landscaper that came here with nothing, now owns a business enough to pay him and his four employees.
Now compare this to the median multigenerational American - working a dead-end job, comparatively far less grit, ambition, and risk-taking, too comfortable so there is not as much a drive to be exceptional or prove themselves.
Which group do you think the Founding Fathers would say better reflects the American spirit? To me immigrants are clearly the better reflection of the best aspects of American culture.
> Which group do you think the Founding Fathers would say better reflects the American spirit? To me immigrants are clearly the better reflection of the best aspects of American culture.
United States Congress, “An act to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,” March 26, 1790:
> Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America, in Congress assembled, That any Alien being a free white person, who shall have resided within the limits and under the jurisdiction of the United States for the term of two years, may be admitted to become a citizen thereof on application to any common law Court of record in any one of the States wherein he shall have resided for the term of one year at least, and making proof to the satisfaction of such Court that he is a person of good character, and taking the oath or affirmation prescribed by law to support the Constitution of the United States, which Oath or Affirmation such Court shall administer, and the Clerk of such Court shall record such Application, and the proceedings thereon; and thereupon such person shall be considered as a Citizen of the United States.
Note: “free white person […] of good character”
US Constitution Preamble:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Private correspondence corroborates how the founders felt about these issues. They would not have seen things your way. You’re appealing to them as a disingenuous rhetorical technique to validate your own ill-conceived arguments, not because you actually know anything about who they were or what they thought.
It's a simple matter of math. The USA has less than 5% of the world's population. It's statistically impossible for that 5% to be the smartest 5% in the world. Therefore, if we want the smartest people in the world, we have to allow immigrants.
So your original comment was somewhat of a tangent. the point jedberg made is that it is in the interest of a country with a strong economic and academic base to welcome the smartest people from across the world, since it is unlikely that all the smartest people in the world are in the US.
Yes, but Jedberg makes it sound as though -- given that only a small fraction of the world's population lives in the USA -- the country has little chance of succeeding if it is to go without immigrants. I disagree, and an extreme example I could offer as a counterpoint is Japan: tiny population (relatively), yet outsized performance.
No? Not sure how you reached that conclusion. I'm just stating that the USA needs immigrants if we want to increase our median intelligence because we can't possibly have the smartest people in the world born here.
Why should immigration be kafkaesque? It is in the US interest to have a pipeline of smart, hard-working, innovative people come to this country. The US is/was in many ways a great country for them to come, but we are not the only international destination for such talent. Why would we want to put up such artificial barriers to entry, if we agree on the premises I laid out?
The purpose of this is to discourage legal immigration.
Someone immigrating is almost certainly less incompetent and lazy than the median American. Immigration requires uprooting your entire life, and it requires entrepreneurial spirit and grit. That's why many immigrant groups dramatically out-earn American-born citizens.
TBH most immigrants I've met better embody the American spirit than most Americans.
Do you consider it humanitarian to further weaken a nation where the average gdp per capita is less than $3000 and who are in no way a threat to us? In what way do the immigrants arriving from there improve America? Can you give a coherent argument? I can easily argue the opposite from statistics:
From Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) and Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey (ASEC CPS):
Of Haitian immigrants ages 25 to 64, 17.1 percent have not graduated from high school, 30.3 percent have only a high school degree, 30 percent have some college, and 22.6 percent have at least a college degree. This compares to 6.6 percent, 25.4 percent, 30.4 percent, and 37.6 percent for U.S.-born Americans. (2022 ACS)
Of households headed by Haitian immigrants, 52.7 percent use at least one major welfare program. For households headed by native-born Americans it is 28.4 percent.5 (2023 ASEC CPS)
So it’s clear that the previous immigration regime that allowed this was optimizing for something other than improving America or intentionally weakening rival countries.
Enough. Any more of this and we're banning the account. We don't care what your opinions are, but personal abuse is not allowed here, and just in the past three days your comments have included these phrases:
> Which nation state propaganda mill are you being paid from?
> You immigrant hating America First losers are going to weaken the country
> Not much more going on in that empty dome. Honestly the void your brain represents is kind of relaxing
> Fuck have you never even heard of the Jungle?
> You would be bitching and moaning just as much if Congress directly made these rules and regulations.
> You first, cultist
You've been here long enough and participated here enough that you know this is unacceptable. I don't want to ban you, but if you keep this up we have to assume that you want to be banned.
Asking basic questions about finances and job searches/security, perhaps? Do you have any original ideas or assertions to make, or do you only ask sealioning questions?
Obviously those smart people are going to go where they feel welcome, rather than climbing through obstacles designed purely for humiliation and malevolence.
The current American immigration process is not figure-out-able. As any immigration lawyer will tell you, there's strategies with higher or lower chances of success, but there's nothing at all like a roadmap which will definitely lead to permanent residency if you follow it well.
It’s a numbers game. Taking the best from the world talent pool is going to provide better results than from the much smaller American talent pool. Unless your country has more than a billion people, you need to look at world talent.
The US has to especially encourage immigration since we have gone out of our way to make the education system systemically broken. Our funnel is broken on purpose. Look at countries with strong showings in things like chess or running. Why is that? They encourage large populations of kids to participate, the larger the pool the more top performers.
> including our technological lead, is built by immigrants
That's my point to get the Constitution changed (Amendment #28) to allow an immigrant to run for POTUS. We love US more than natural-born citizens. Our interests are far more aligned with the betterment of the country than anyone else's.
Musk was (mostly) great until 2020; Something happened to him during the COVID timeframe.
I'd not want Musk, Thiel, or Palantir guy to run for POTUS. Probably, there should be a clause that if your net worth exceeds the threshold, you shouldn't be eligible to run until you donate all of it to the government, with no option to get it back ever. Some more clauses can be added as well.
Edit 1: I think another clause, maybe most important, a minimum one term public office service experience required only as a Senator, Rep, Governor, or a Mayor.
Oops, my bad, somehow I thought his parents naturalized before he was born.
Thanks for pointing this out; this helps the point I'm trying to make.
>I'd not want Musk, Thiel, or Palantir guy to run for POTUS. Probably, there should be a clause that if your net worth exceeds the threshold, you shouldn't be eligible to run until you donate all of it to the government, with no option to get it back ever. Some more clauses can be added as well.
Edit 1: I think another clause, maybe most important, a minimum one term public office service experience required only as a Senator, Rep, Governor, or a Mayor.
Can I vote for you and your proposals somewhere?
At this point, this reads like "I have a dream". But it's one worthy of trying to make a reality.
>Musk was (mostly) great until 2020;
Aside from running the Thai cave diver's life (and slandering him as a "pedo") for daring to rescue the children instead of letting them die waiting for Musk's non-existent submarine to rescue them.
That, and being generally known for working his employees to the bone.
And the whole "I need to spread my superior seed" conveyor belt approach to having children.
And the "420 funding secured" nonsense.
Oh, and the Hyperloop hype, which he did with the sole intent to kill high speed rail in California (which he succeeded in).
And the Boring Company scam.
And... nevermind, he was a known, not OK", great asshole before* he went full Nazi, but I can agree that he was "great" in comparison to what he's become.
>Something happened to him during the COVID timeframe.
Why would I want an immigrant smarter than me? If I have a 120 iq and he has a 130 iq then he is going to take my job. You really aren’t convincing me here.
You reasonably might not. We would though. Who prevails, the small-but-concentrated interest, or the vast-but-diffuse one? It's the central question of all public policy.
No they don’t. They want to work 40 hours a week, go on vacation twice a year, drive a couple of cars, have their wife stay home and raise the kids. All things possible 70 years ago but no longer possible.
Accountants and software developers do not in fact share a fate. I know it doesn't feel that way when you're commenting on HN, but there are whole lucrative professions that do not care at all what happens in ours.
The same decent at math, moderately ambitious people do well at both. Not 100% overlap but pretty large. If one side collapses the other side will get flooded.
Because without having the smartest people, the reigning superpower is totally, utterly, unequivocally fucked.
Power is a function of technological superiority. The moment you it stops attracting the smartest people, a country will fall behind on military and economic power.
I find it a bit hard to believe you actually think such a line of reasoning would be convincing. I think many MAGA voters in fact are aware that many of the immigrants are smarter than them, and hence they do the rational thing of trying to reduce competition. I don't understand why you wrote "taking the jobs" in quotes. That's exactly what's happening- superior immigrant applicants are taking jobs that would have been theirs.
This is a very racist comment, or atleast smells of xenophilia. "Americans are kind of mediocre academically". You can't use the term Americans are [all], followed by a blanket statement.
If that was about any other class of people it'd be downvoted to oblivion, but for some reason Americans and white can always be talked shit on.
This is the kind of shit US AMERICANS are talking about, this xenophilia bullshit that is infecting our nation.
I'm born and raised in the US. I don't think it's racist at all, it's just true.
Go to any high school and see how little American schoolchildren care about academics vs immigrant schoolchildren. Academic excellence being uncool is baked into American culture. You're a "nerd" if you do well and care. Getting a B is "good enough." And "C's get degrees." This mentality is plainly unacceptable in most immigrant cultures.
I took almost two dozen AP classes in my day. In each one, the concentration of immigrant groups was far higher than the rest of the school at large.
Expand this out to college. Look at the admissions for top colleges without affirmative action. How do their demographics compare to the rest of the country? - MIT, 47% Asian. Berkeley, 41% Asian. UCLA and Stanford, 27% Asian.
6% of the US population is Asian, and 75% is white, and these schools don't have affirmative action. If all groups were equally competitive, admissions would reflect demographics.
(Ethnicity here is a crude approximation for immigration recency. I am not saying one ethnic group is better than another - simply that children of immigrants excel.)
The same goes for top PhD programs, the highest paying STEM jobs, even C-suite positions at big tech.
I am American and when I say that we have a problem where most Americans do not give a fuck about education, I am not being racist, I am just pointing out the truth. Over decades, our culture has bred an anti-intellectual attitude, one that prioritizes being cool and sociable over getting shit done. This is the antithesis of progress and ambition. It is great for sitting around and demanding handouts.
Immigrants more closely approximate the culture the founding fathers intended for the US. They uproot their lives to build something great. They get off their asses, do exceptionally well, and are carrying the nation on their backs. The rest of our culture could learn from them, instead of blaming our problems on them and turning them away.
You didn't actually read the comment, you're just angry because you saw some stats. The ethnicity is a simple proxy for immigration, something you'd have seen if you actually read the comment. Also: Why do Trump supporters always devolve into one-line quips instead of engaging with the argument?
Our lead does not come from immigrants. The American people, who are a distinct people, have shown time and again a potential for great things.
Even if it were true, there are wider effects of immigration that you must consider. The purpose of life isn't to increase GDP. It reflects poorly on you that you must cast your opponents as being stupid and spiteful. Could it be that MAGA voters are humans with real motivations and rationales?
Because Literally everyone else in the US is an immigrant. Or are you referring to the Spanish that settled the west? The French in the far south? The Italians and Jews that populated New York? The British and Africans?
I’m painting in broad strokes, but to say “the American People” as if it’s somehow distinct from immigrants is just ladder pulling.
> Because Literally everyone else in the US is an immigrant
I'm not American, but this conversation happens a lot in Canada where I'm from too
I was born in Canada, in a Canadian hospital. I've never had any other home than this country.
I'm descended from immigrants, but I am not an immigrant. I'm not considered indigenous either, that's a whole other type of person.
What a strange thing, to be from a place but have many people say "it's not your place, it's stolen" as if I had a say in that. If I went anywhere else, I would be an immigrant there.
The point is your parents, or their parents, were immigrants. But those very same people we are now trying to restrict from coming here.
Meaning, if we time travel and apply these restrictions, you yourself would have never been a citizen. In fact, you probably wouldn't even exist. Do you see the problem?
That, my friend, is ladder pulling. When you destroy the very conditions that allow you to thrive.
The entire world has been settled and resettled. You can't let past conquests stop you from having a country, laws and borders or all countrys would be illegitimate.
>The point is your parents, or their parents, were immigrants.
Or my parents, parents, parents, parents, parents, parents were... And if they came here for a better life, obviously there was some mind virus that was going on in their home country that forced them to leave in search of a better life. Don't try and bring that mind virus here if you had to immigrate here to escape it.
The US in particular has always been made up of immigrants. I don't know how it works for canada. But for the US, that's always been the case. We're a country by immigrants, for immigrants. An American identity is not one of skin color or race. To suggest otherwise is not just a ahistorical, it's anti-American.
There is no mind virus. People wish to rewrite history to fuel their own delusions. They don't require enforcement around immigration, they require medication and perhaps a history lesson or two.
Measured as a percentage of population, we have more immigration now than we did in the 1890's peak. Given our drastically larger population, this is a problem.
Suicidal empathy mixed with this 'idea that america is illegitimate' cause we are a 'nation of immigrants', and we 'took land from the natives' is quite frankly retarded. And i can use the word retarded because i mean it in the literal since, "a verb meaning to slow down, delay, or impede a process."
Holy shit, we've gone form 4.5% of the pop and 10M to 14.5% to 50M?(!)in 40 years since 1970? Isn't that alarming? we are at the same level of immigration as the potato famine?
Also, check the definition of that chart... We have far more "illegal immigration" today than we did back in 1890. So.... egg zack ly. Don't you think that's a big problem considering our current size? I'm all for 'some' immigration, but the level we are at today is totally unsustainable when we have an absolute homeless epidemic in all of our cities?
Holy shit, we've gone form 4.5% of the pop and 10M to 14.5% to 50M?(!)in 40 years since 1970?
You (the UsofA) have returned to 1860-1920 levels, yes.
Isn't that alarming?
No.
We have far more "illegal immigration" today than we did back in 1890.
But the same level of immigration ... the problem lies with classification and stalled paperwork pipelines.
Don't you think that's a big problem considering our current size?
The US has increased in size with the addition of Alaska and Hawaii in 1959, but still appears to have room for people.
I'm all for 'some' immigration, but the level we are at today is totally unsustainable when we have an absolute homeless epidemic in all of our cities?
Is that a statement of fact, an opinion, or a question?
Are you certain that all US cities have "an absolute homeless epidemic"?
Au contraire, the actual suicide is blowing up our economy just to stick it to some brown people. Make no mistake, dumping tens of billions of dollars into ICE and supporting a man with the fiscal responsibility of a rock will not help the American economy.
It is truly astounding to me what lengths Republicans will go to to "win". Well, you've won. When are things going to get better? I'm waiting.
The point is that people who immigrate to USA and Canada will have descendants who will be just like you. Only difference will be their skin color (maybe).
Is Kash Patel any different from Americans who have lived here for generations? Is Rishi Sunak any different from the people who lived in Britain from generations?
It sure is odd! This is something that the educated descendants of colonizers just have to grapple with. I imagine it's still less difficult than being born as someone lacking the systemic privileges.
Certainly if 8,000[1] years ago a tribe walked across and settled, and then 7,000 years ago another group walked across and set up camp next to the descendants of that first tribe who had been there a thousand years, the second group were actually immigrants, right?
And how do we sort it out now, millennia after those various groups arrived, after all that DNA has been mixed together?
My point is just that it's silly to label any race or group "immigrant" or "native" based on what movements we guess from their skin color that their ancestors may have made millennia or centuries ago, or even what their parents did. Yes, I'm very in favor of birthright citizenship, even if people have "anchor babies" in bad faith the baby didn't have any say in it. And no one else of any color had any say in being born in America either.
[1] please substitute correct numbers -- they don't matter
I don't know. I do know that, as far as America is concerned, "native" doesn't include the colonizers who showed up 200 years ago when the land was already settled.
Land can only be nonviolently settled exactly once. The arrangement of who had what land 400 years ago when many European-Americans' ancestors started to arrive was merely the then-current state shaped by centuries of violent bloodshed (or "colonization") between one Native tribe and another Native tribe.
I'm saying that pre-colonial-age America was not a place where each tribe came in, found their own piece of virgin land, and lived in peace and harmony. They were not any different than the homo sapiens on other continents, which is to say, smart, determined, and willing to kill outsiders to improve their own tribe's chances of survival.
The only reason of course that they are viewed so sympathetically today is the tragedy of their near-complete destruction, which can be explained very thoroughly by their incredibly bad luck of having almost no domesticable native animals, and their not having gotten Iron Age technology. But in the end their destruction was mostly due to disease, traceable to early Spanish contact, which had absolutely decimated North American societies before almost any human Europeans had set foot on the mainland.[1] Europeans indeed did lots of bad things to those peoples, but I argue this is less proof that "Europeans are uniquely mean" and more proof that humans are brutal when they come into conflict over scarce resources and will press whatever advantages they have, whether it's large numbers of braves with obsidian arrowheads or muskets.
> "According to Keeley, among the indigenous peoples of the Americas, only 13% did not engage in wars with their neighbors at least once per year. The natives' pre-Columbian ancient practice of using human scalps as trophies is well documented. Iroquois routinely slowly tortured to death captured enemy warriors (see Captives in American Indian Wars for details)."
You can excuse or justify the genocide of native people by European colonizers any way you want, although it baffles me why so many people want to. But it doesn't matter, they still don't get to call themselves native.
I think it's pretty clear these are shorthand terms for the issues with systemic bias in our modern society.
Pre-colonial North America was certainly not some idyllic pacifist utopia as people like to fetishize. However, any previous ethno-political disputes between those nations is irrelevant compared to the very recent history of the last 200 years.
The genocide of Native Americans in the 19th century happened under the unbroken chain of authority of our current government.
Go on thinking that, but it really won't help the Democrats win if they persist in this attitude. Voters are just looking at what's on offer from both parties, and one party's platform has been judged to be both hostile to their interests and also actively scorns them as people. The other is mostly hostile to their interests and is super corrupt, but it cuts taxes[1] and doesn't belittle them.
The Democrats squeaked out one miraculous win buoyed by the incompetence of Trump's band of corrupt idiots in the early COVID days. But now merely pointing out how incompetent and corrupt Trump is stopped working, as we saw in 2024. Do Democrats have anything left in the playbook besides derision and scorn toward those outside their tent? We will soon see, I guess.
[1] I know the talking points say that the tax cuts "only benefit the rich" but I'm far from a 1%er and can tell you that I'm paying way more taxes in a blue state than I would be in a red state, and also the OBBB improved things for me. Voters in those blue states can see their tax bills and the one thing Democrats can't say is that they don't put a huge tax burden on those who work.
I can only speak to 1 scenario but state tax was higher in CA than in TX, but property tax was higher in TX. TX had wild utility bills (top minds in CA are working on this though).
> The current administration was voted in with an anti-immigration mandate
Given that they’re underwater for approval rating on immigration it seems both you and they have misread the room. Most people’s objections have to do with immigrants who are violent criminals that are going around neighborhoods hunting for cats and dogs to eat. This is what their campaign was highlighting as a problem. They have not been cracking down specifically on those immigrants. For this, they have no mandate.
>Most people’s objections have to do with immigrants who are violent criminals that are going around neighborhoods hunting for cats and dogs to eat. This is what their campaign was highlighting as a problem. They have not been cracking down specifically on those immigrants.
There never were "violent criminals that are going around neighborhoods hunting for cats and dogs to eat." That was a baseless, racist caricature and it's unfortunate that anyone took it seriously.
And we all still remember "the wall," and Trump complaining about immigration from "shithole countries" like Haiti (versus Norway and Sweden, gee I wonder what the qualifying factor is there) and how Mexico was sending drug dealers and rapists across the border. The immigration policy of this administration has always been that immigrants (specifically any non-white immigrants) are an existential danger to American culture and safety. You don't try to wall off your entire southern border because you think the problem is a minority of bad actors. The DHS doesn't deploy white nationalist anti-immigrant propaganda[0,1] because it's just concerned about a criminal element.
And they didn't misread the room. Trumpism is first and foremost a white nationalist nativist movement. People wanted the wall. They wanted immigration stopped. "The immigrants were taking our jobs." "Muslims can't assimilate into civilized society." "Europe is basically a war zone because of all of the Muslims and low-IQ sub-Saharan Africans." These are all things Trump supporters have been saying for years and that the American right has been saying since at least 9/11. "Borders, Language Culture" as Michael Savage used to say. It's all been out in the open.
White Christian conservatives still support Trump's immigration policies by a wide margin. He speaks to the people he intends to speak to. I don't know why so many Black people and Latinos signed up for the "Leopards eating your face" party thinking the leopards wouldn't eat their face, but that's on them. But pretending Trump doesn't have a mandate to purge the country of immigrants is just naive - that is the only mandate he actually has.
> "You don't try to wall off your entire southern border because you think the problem is a minority of bad actors."
I would challenge this. If you do believe that there are violent criminals coming through the porous border, whether it's 1% of the illegal immigrants or 100% of them, trying to seal the border off is not irrational. I'm not endorsing the physical wall itself, as I know a ton of illegal migrants are just overstaying visas, and I've heard of ladders and tunnels.
I think what's really compelling, and what the Left can't seem to relate to, is this: Everyone serious does believe the true fact that illegal immigrants have a lower rate of committing crimes than the overall population. But people who are victimized by those crimes have a valid point that those crimes are still incremental crimes - meaning that if we already had 1000 people in $BORDER_STATE who are going to commit violent crimes, letting in 1000 more people, even if only 10 of them (1%) are violent criminals, gives us 1,010 violent criminals. That's more crime than we had before. It's not like we get to trade in 10 of our own criminals for 10 immigrant ones.
Making no effort to control who comes here is irresponsible, because of course if there's a country that doesn't even try to vet you, and would feel guilty making you leave, of course criminals would be excited to go there.
In absolute terms yes, but you're forgetting that you are also increasing the victim population, so the per-capita rate is still going to drop!
Assuming criminals more-or-less randomly choose their victims, the number of immigrant criminals hitting native victims is more than offset by native criminals now hitting immigrant victims instead of native ones.
>If you do believe that there are violent criminals coming through the porous border, whether it's 1% of the illegal immigrants or 100% of them, trying to seal the border off is not irrational.
Yes it is. Building a 1900 mile long wall with moats and barbed wire and armed guards ordered to shoot on sight across an entire continent because a fraction of illegal immigrants might be violent criminals is the definition of irrational.
Particularly when the same could be said of the border with Canada but no one is concerned about that at all.
> I'm not endorsing the physical wall itself, as I know a ton of illegal migrants are just overstaying visas, and I've heard of ladders and tunnels.
But Trump was talking about a physical wall. And a physical wall is what Trump supporters voted for.
>Making no effort to control who comes here is irresponsible, because of course if there's a country that doesn't even try to vet you, and would feel guilty making you leave, of course criminals would be excited to go there.
No one is talking about making no effort to control who comes here, that's another right-wing conspiracy point not based in reality. There is a vast degree of possibility between "doing nothing" and "building a wall and sending ICE to kidnap people and shoot them in the streets." There is a degree of vetting which is reasonable and responsible and this is not it. This is paranoia and fear born of racism.
Strangely, his current approval ratings on immigration policy is only about 37%. There appears to be a wide gap between what people thought they were voting for a year and a half ago, and what they are seeing now.
I think there's a wide gap between the consequences they expected and the consequences they got. I also think Trump acting like a buffoon and the Epstein thing affect the way people interpret his policies. If he and his administration weren't so overtly racist about it, they could get away with a lot of what they're doing and maintain broad popular support.
"The Epstein thing" is an interesting way to refer to an overt pedophile protection racket. And "buffoon" feels a bit short of "malignant narcissist with dementia taking bribes and starting catastrophic wars", yeah?
Trump has -20% to -25% net approval depending on the poll, and his approval rating on immigration is -10 to -15%. Clearly people do not like any of this in practice even though they might have liked it in theory.
I mean, the issue is that a large number H1B folks have vital skills for the US economy and that even just 20% of those leaving would mean every single big tech company would be in immense trouble
> even just 20% of those leaving would mean every single big tech company would be in immense trouble
I'm not so sure.
I think it would play out like this:
1. 20% H1Bs leave; 2. Those migrants are now in countries of origin, looking for work; 3. Many of the big US tech companies will already have offices in those countries, and those that don't can make new offices if they wanted to; 4. many, but likely not all, of those employees are now working for the same employer (or close enough), just in a different jurisdiction; 5. as none of these employees are physically in US hotspots, all the other stuff that happened in those hotspots because of big tech pay, suffers, conversely all the stuff which was suppressed because of those wages may (possibly) return; 6. two of the things that go down are the number of people transitioning from temporary visa to citizenship, and the available talent pool for the local-to-those-places startup and VC scenes.
If you just got massively screwed over by them (having upended your entire life in hope of getting a better future, then having that rugpulled), why would you get another job at that company with significantly worse contract terms?
Considering the rest of the world is reacting to the US setting itself on fire by finally stimulating local tech, why not just join one of the local alternatives instead?
Perhaps. But I think the blame would go to Washington DC rather than the employers.
For this in particular:
> why would you get another job at that company with significantly worse contract terms?
Even if it is worse on paper (and it won't even be worse if the big tech companies do struggle to retain talent), it is likely to still be better than local companies offer.
Those same tech companies are laying off a lot of people right now. Maybe the skills of the H1B folks they employ aren't actually all that vital to the American economy.
Certainly a lot of them do. It's also true that having a large portion of them leave will just mean that the company will have to replace them with someone who will require a higher wage, and won't have any issue leaving if the workplace culture degrades.
Unfortunately the benefit of TLA+ is the act of modeling your system painstakingly. The actual checker helps confirm your hypothesis, etc. But skipping the modeling and outsourcing it is not ideal. I’ve always struggled reasoning about models my team mates wrote, and will often have to mentally go through the process of arriving at the same abstractions/invariants etc before I can understand it.
Agreed. To quote Leslie Lamport, "the hardest part of TLA+ is learning to think abstractly."
There's always a moment, usually annoyingly late in the process, where I realize I've been massively overthinking everything or solving the wrong problem. Time is an essential an ingredient. Clear thinking is extremely hard.
LLMs are definitely useful along the way, but the thinking is the spiritually fulfilling part.
People are arguing about the role of these HFTs being a net good etc. They’re missing the point, these bright kids are trading something more profound- a sense of purpose, a higher calling or passion- to simply run adversarial arbitrage and pump their egos up with puzzles.
I’m in big tech and use AI extensively, namely to do the same amount of output but in 1-2 hours a day. Been spending a ton of time on my side projects though.
The higher velocity ends up bottlenecking on actual product decisions, deployments, testing etc. Before AI was generally blocked on the design approval, PR cycles, flaking tests etc. AI just helps me endure the pain of legacy code easier.
In my own personal projects I’m flying with AI. I know what I’m doing, I know how I would implement the code. Now I can just save the labor of typing the boilerplate.
Seems like a lot of energy dissecting C-suite news clippings. The reality is that no one cares about alignment and it’s only controversial for the naive or the dramatic among us.
Claude is useful for software engineers. It’ll be useful until something is better-enough and then we’ll all move on to that.
Most folks are using both Claude/Codex together anyways, undermining the idea that Anthropics corporate strategy mattered in the market.
This was always my least favorite part about being a software engineer (and the downfall of many): being a software engineer has become an identity crutch for many. I’ve see so many kids whose whole identity is being good at computers; they go through middle/high school, college getting affirmations about their value and intelligence. Then they get out of Stanford, Berkeley and show up to the feature treadmill that must keep moving but is weighed down by the 10000 short cuts made by the people who came before.
They burn out, or worse become toxic, because their shallow identity led them down the path to being a “Real” engineer and at the end of the day we’re not actually participating in any sort of real value creation beyond attention monetization.
The mystique wears off quickly and they don’t have real hobbies or interests, they basically talk about RSU packages at lunch and the latest tweets etc. I used to joke privately because almost every time we had lunch they spent most of the time discussing the optimal path to walk.
It’s unique in some way- you can’t be a good doctor or lawyer in middle school and the value system is geared towards maximizing paychecks and working in big tech. Once the reality sets in that you’re going to be doing sprint planning + standups for the next 20-30 years it can be a weird shock.
My first job was at a FANG and I lasted about 2 years- I remember riding the escalator in and seeing how miserable everyone looked on my first day. As an eager junior I reached out to the principal engineer in my org for mentoring, asking him what I could do to be better, faster. He told me: “go find a wife and don’t worry about work- you’ve got a long time left”.
At one point I looked at the senior guy running sprint planning and realized I didn’t want to be him. I bought a 1 way ticket and put in my 2 weeks. Went on to backpack around for a year then ended up at a startup where I made a bunch of friends working on real problems.
Is the stakes and the ownership. 5 people in a coffee shop working on a 0-1 problem is a lot more stimulating than 90 people on a team shipping incremental updates to a legacy system.
My hot take: reviewing code is boring, harder than writing code, and less fun (no dopamine loop). People don’t want to do it, they want to build whatever they’re tasked with. Making reviewing code easier (human in the loop etc) is probably a big rock for the new developer paradigm.
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