So far this week.
Oil Companies price gouging
The meat industry is colluding in price gouging.
You see, these crooks want that pandemic money; they got the taste for blood.
They need to start arresting these people.
🧵 1/ America’s tech workforce is being erased in real time.
New federal data show H-1B, OPT, and H-4 visas now capture 82 % of all new U.S. tech jobs—while American citizens face layoffs, wage collapse, and foreclosure.
Look, I'm seeing this from the inside, and am admittedly biased towards our president (and my friend), but there's a lot of crazy stuff on social media, so I wanted to address some things directly on the Iran issue:
First, POTUS has been amazingly consistent, over 10 years, that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon. Over the last few months, he encouraged his foreign policy team to reach a deal with the Iranians to accomplish this goal. The president has made clear that Iran cannot have uranium enrichment. And he said repeatedly that this would happen one of two ways--the easy way or the "other" way.
Second, I've seen a lot of confusion over the issue of "civilian nuclear power" and "uranium enrichment." These are distinct issues. Iran could have civilian nuclear power without enrichment, but Iran rejected that. Meanwhile, they've enriched uranium far above the level necessary for any civilian purpose. They've been found in violation of their non-proliferation obligations by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is hardly a rightwing organization.
It's one thing to want civilian nuclear energy. It's another thing to demand sophisticated enrichment capacity. And it's still another to cling to enrichment while simultaneously violating basic non-proliferation obligations and enriching right to the point of weapons-grade uranium.
I have yet to see a single good argument for why Iran needed to enrich uranium well above the threshold for civilian use. I've yet to see a single good argument for why Iran was justified in violating its non-proliferation obligations. I've yet to see a single good pushback against the IAEA's findings.
Meanwhile, the president has shown remarkable restraint in keeping our military's focus on protecting our troops and protecting our citizens.
He may decide he needs to take further action to end Iranian enrichment. That decision ultimately belongs to the president. And of course, people are right to be worried about foreign entanglement after the last 25 years of idiotic foreign policy.
But I believe the president has earned some trust on this issue. And having seen this up close and personal, I can assure you that he is only interested in using the American military to accomplish the American people's goals. Whatever he does, that is his focus.
We broke every possible social contract for young people, unprecedented wealth transfer from young to old, devalued the currency, made home prices insane, education debt crazy and now for the lulz we're automating all the entry level white collar work. Just incredible
You have to understand that hundreds if not thousands of parasitic NGO offices are located in and around DC.
And all of the people staffing them are staring at the abyss of not being able to pay their bills with our confiscated earnings.
The irony of Vivek's post is that his wrong analysis of how American culture is broken illustrates in itself how American culture is broken.
I mean, how out-of-touch must one be to think people will embrace a vision where childhood must be optimized for corporate success, with less sleepovers, hanging out and fun (what he calls "mediocrity") in favor of shareholder-value-maximizing "excellence"?
Especially when addressing Americans who have seen their lives destroyed en-masse by the same corporate priorities that produced this vision of "excellence". The average American family isn't choosing between math tutoring and sleepovers - they're choosing between paying for basic necessities while both parents work multiple jobs.
His examples unwittingly prove the opposite of his point: shows that he describes as corrupting American culture (Friends, Boy Meets World, Family Matters, etc.) celebrate friendship, family, and community values - exactly what the US has lost in their rush to optimize everything for economic output and create an hyperindividualistic and consumerist society. That's probably why they're popular: they reflect a lost world that people aspire to go back to.
He mentions China as the motivating factor here, because apparently the solution to avoid having their "asses handed to us by China" is more capitalism, treating people even more like cogs who must compete in "the global market for technical talent."
That doesn't only betray a misunderstanding of what Americans want but also of China. China themselves largely hate the extreme competitiveness of their system: the people hate it and the government hates it, they all want to move away from it (hence the government banning the tutoring industry). And in any case this isn't what made China rise - China rose with a largely uneducated population, as mass university-level education is a very recent phenomenon there.
No, I'm convinced that China, at a very fundamental level, rose so unprecedentedly fast for the very reason that it is one of the very few countries in the world which culture wasn't completely denaturalized by the sort of neoliberal dystopia that Vivek seems to idealize. In China's socialist system the market doesn't trump all, individualism doesn't reign supreme and, at a broader level, they still stay faithful to many of the ancestral values that have sustained their civilization for thousands of years. That's the culture that underpins it all and makes it work, not the fact that Chinese kids do too much homework.
All in all, this is what makes this debate so revealing: Vivek, in trying to diagnose America's problems, has instead unwittingly illustrated them. The belief that every human activity must be justified by its contribution to GDP, that collective bonds are mere distractions from the pursuit of "excellence," and that the solution to the problems created by predatory capitalism is, somehow, more predatory capitalism.
There seems to be some confusion on the H1B debate...as the tech bros are being KNOWINGLY deceptive.
The tech bros argue that H1Bs are essential because we need the best and brightest the world has to offer in order to keep up with technology.
This is a false narrative.
There is already a program called the O-1 Visa that is for individuals with "extraordinary ability or achievement." There is currently no annual cap on these visas.
What they want to increase is the H-1B Visa, which is for "specialized labor".
The debate isn't about bringing the best and brightest. It's about being able to import more tech workers that are willing to work for cheaper.
PROFITS.
Stop downplaying the importance of this, dudes.
- No, it's not a 'nuke'
- Yes, each of these individually (there were 6 groups of this) are designed to be equipped with one
- No, Ukraine doesn't have the capability to shoot that down
- Yes, it's an escalation
- No, it didn't do a lot of damage
- Yes, it was a message
- No, nuclear war isn't tomorrow (IMO)
- Yes, nuclear war is a threat that got closer
- No, I don't think it deters NATO (overall)
- Yes, I think it should warrant a re-evaluation of NATO end-goals (this should be regularly occurring anyway)
- No, I don't think Ukraine should stop fighting if they don't want to (would you?)
Downplaying the importance of the message from Russia is naive. Allowing Russia to willy-nilly continue to escalate while the world cowers in carefully crafted fear also can't happen.
The reason this video bothers people so much is that alot of men in white collar work have to suffer through dreadful, stressful corporate jobs to make a living, which in turn subsidizes the non productive roles like whatever these women do.
A population decline in a mostly homogeneous nation is not Armageddon for that nation. There is a bumpy transitional period where certain jobs won't be filled, but over time, the need for those jobs is no longer there. Inevitably, housing prices lower and, things tend to head back towards homeostasis.
The argument to fix the issue with immigration is destructive and based on the idea that all that matters is GDP. If the birthrate lowers, it will inevitably normalize again and continue on a standard path of ebb and flow. We aren't talking about endangered animals being hunted for their horns or small tribes. I'm speaking of large-scale populations. If your plan is to "fix" this problem through immigration, the native birthrate will still decline while replacing the natives with foreigners. This is how you lose the nation.
The idea that a nation is simply it's land and borders is absurd. The nation is the people within those borders.
A surge in immigration has made the U.S. economy more competitive by preventing wages from rising more than they otherwise would have, the head of the International Monetary Fund has said
Remarkable video from El Salvador.
Nayib Bukele gathers every single official in the executive branch of his government and then announces a surprise.
He asks the Attorney General to investigate all of them for bribery.
It's really weird how little people actually know about interpersonal violence, weapons, and firearms.
You see stuff like this circulating all the time, especially among the "Abolish Police!" crowd.
So, let's talk a little bit about how violence actually works.
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