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PaperclipPerfector  28d ago (text post)   26216 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024

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I feel like a certain part of the debate is circling around the conflation of 'high paid' roles, 'productive' roles and 'socially valuable' roles. Indian H1Bs, to me, have an odd spot in which the Indian American success stories that come to mind are the Satya Nadellas, the Parag Agrawals. Custodian elite bureaucrats who are incredible at 'playing the game' of office politics, but relatively few narratives of actual personal innovation and development.

The narrative coming down to arguments around international competitiveness and the 'best of the best' feels silly when a large chunk of the roles that are filled by the imports are managerial within developed businesses or the creation of further dashboards to track clickthrough rates on advertising. This is hardly Werner Von Braun developing rocket science

I feel like a certain part of the debate is circling around the conflation of 'high paid' roles, 'productive' roles and 'socially valuable' roles.

Agreed, as @Stellula suggests above there seems to be a semantic bait-and-switch going on. What's being sold is something like Operation Paperclip or the Rockefeller Foundation's Assistance to Refugee Scholars program that brought figures like Werner Von Braun, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Alexander Solzenhitzen to the US. What we're actually getting in practice, is a bunch of minimally competent third-worlders who are, to all appearances, contemptuous of Western norms/values, and more concerned with extracting value than producing it, and who's only observable contribution to the community is diluting the supply and thus lowering the wages of native-born code-monkeys, medical professionals, finance bros, Et Al.

I consider myself reasonably "Based and MAGA-Pilled" and I am totally onboard with the former, while being deeply opposed to the latter.

I'd sooner accept a 100 immigrants from Central America or Sub-Saharan Africa who sincerely love baseball, apple pie, and everything else American over a single immigrant like @BurdensomeCount as even "low human captital" is of greater value than negative human capital.

Just want to endorse the second part of what you said. It’s probably some of my Catholicism leaking through here, but I am explicitly not a white nationalist. I am an “American nationalist”. We’re a Christian country, we like guns and big trucks and big tits and bikinis and apple pie and baseball and chicken wings and bigass rockets and we consider the moon our sovereign territory. We hate the government, are naturally suspicious of authority.

That has all led to the most prosperous, most badass nation on earth and if you want to be an American you can, but when you get here you need to assimilate, and part of that means having a near-contempt for the country you fled. I don’t want to hear you talking about your ex girlfriend old country for 3-4 generations.

Maybe that’s a good analogy. Imagine you meet a girl in an abusive relationship with a loser guy. You fall in love with her and help her move from the slums to a giant mansion on the coast.

Now imagine she refuses to be seen in public with you, goes to her exes house for holidays, and talks to you about having dual citizenship a polyamorous relationship with her ex, who she also keeps sending remittances money to. Now imagine she also wants to talk about your toxic masculinity (which saved her) and the problematic nature of your wealth.

Yeah no thanks. We’re down to marry the super models (Werner Von Braun), but not so much the cheating gold digger.

I get the impression that you and I agree on much and would get along quite well offline. That or we would bicker endlessly like siblings. ;-)

For my part, I have always been partial to Teddy Roosevelt's bit about "Hyphenated Americans".

Maybe we already know each other but are behind seven boxxies alt accounts and won’t ever know it.

I once found out I'd lived in the same house as a motter thanks to his description of the insane landlord. It's more likely than you think with how filtered we are by irl interests and professions.

everything else American over a single immigrant like @BurdensomeCount as even "low human captital" is of greater value than negative human capital.

Sir, I demand satisfaction! Even if you think I am negative value to society (naturally I disagree) at the very least you must grant that the magnitude if not the sign of my contributions is leagues and bounds beyond that your average sub-Saharan African is capable of.

The average human being, even if they try their damnedest, is not capable of making a big impact on society either way, positive or negative (discounting of course banal crap like shooting the person they got minor beef with, but that doesn't count because even here they are merely channeling the destructive power of a far greater force than themselves); true perniciousness is firmly beyond their capabilities.

Even if you think I am a net negative (which is your prerogative) you must admit that the extent of my negativeness is extraordinary- that is, I am not like them in any way at all beyond the superficial.

EDIT: I must also add that the job I am working in at the moment is one that's completely borders agnostic. Functionally I'm already taking a job away from an American if you're the sort of person who thinks in those terms, except that right now the US is getting precisely $0 in taxes from me. Giving me a free green card (not that I'd accept it, US has very onerous tax policies on their worldwide income for permanent residents living anywhere in the world) and welcoming me to the US is basically free money for you with no downside.

Have you considered that people don't like having new neighbors who openly look down their noses at them?

Sir, I demand satisfaction!

Pistols or Swords? If the latter we might actually be able to make that happen. I plan to be at Pennsic 51 (Schedule Permitting), bearing the banner of The Outlands on behalf of Cariadoc. Look for the knight in white, black, and gold with a sausage pierced by a sword on his shield. The Poleaxe/Bill is also an option, as is the Spear.

at the very least you must grant that the magnitude if not the sign of my contributions is leagues and bounds beyond that your average sub-Saharan African is capable of.

No i do not, because little or no gain is still preferable to a "loss" of any magnitude.

To be clear I don't "think" you are "a net negative value to society". I am taking your own statements about your relationship with your host country at face value and drawing what, to me, seem like obvious conclusions.

Finally, if the job you're working is borders agnostic, why immigrate? if the answer, is "superior quality of life" why can't you just shut up and be grateful instead of sneering at your hosts?

Given what a replacement-level CEO did to Microsoft, Satya Nadella's value-over-replacement is in the low trillions of dollars, not counting the consumer surplus generated by Microsoft products mostly ceasing to suck.

Mature companies with P/E ratios north of 20 (which includes all the US tech megastars) are being priced on the basis that the business will outlive the current leadership. Not Boeinging a successful mature business is extraordinarily valuable, and apparently harder than it looks given that Bill Gates' chosen successor couldn't.

Yeah but once you're in charge of such a large organism it's just as much macroeconomic trends and the work of 1000s of random cogs than it is straight up 'Guy A is a great CEO since company did well, Guy B is bad CEO since company did poorly' when they're likely unable to meaningfully steer the ship. My personal experience with Indian skilled immigrants is that the main advantage they have over other groups is being superduper willing and proficient at 'playing the corporate game'. Aggressively gaming KPIs, driving to tick every box and get every possible ingroup referral when applying for roles and generally showing a great savvy at the game of bureaucracy. I was kind of amazed in University seeing how my overseas Indian friends would go about applying for graduateships/internships versus people from other cultures, in how it was systematized and how collaborative a front there seemed to be even from Indians of vastly different geographic origins.

Like corporate entryism is mostly bullshit fugazi busywork for HR so I'm not against the hustle, but I think that relentless targeting of the rules of engagement is the main reason for Indian success as immigrants. Moreso than 'brilliance at the task at hand' and like should it particularly offend me that some person who is a 9.5/10 at leetcode and resume optimization but a 6/10 coder gets the Google graduateship over a 7/10 coder who didn't ruthlessly squeeze out every edge to get their butt on the seat when the job's likely to be pointless floundering busywork anyways?

consumer surplus generated by Microsoft products mostly ceasing to suck.

This is such a tremendous lie I can't take the rest of your post seriously. Was this meant as sarcasm or a joke?

Microsoft products mostly ceasing to suck.

Are you out of your damned mind? My experience with every Microsoft product I use has gotten worse to the point where I'm planning on quitting Windows after support for Windows 10 finally ends in only a year.

I mean, lets start with Windows 10. They keep randomly pushing ads into my default experience. Windows updates will constantly start shoving ads into my start menu, lock screen, etc, that I then I have to look up how to turn off. Basic fucking shit like "Solitaire" has been turned into some Games as a Service crap they expect me to pay a monthly fee for in order to skip ads. On solitaire!! Windows 10 was the start of Microsoft pushing updates that, oops, brick your fucking computer. Our bad.

And good god, when it comes to my work, where I'm also locked into a Microsoft ecosystem, to this day nobody knows the correct settings for IIS to keep a web application running instead of going to sleep. I have to keep an instance of Docker running on Windows Server, but every time there is a Windows Update it somehow manages to fucking break "Boot Docker on Startup" and I have to run around figuring out some new goofy script or workaround to make it happen.

It is unfathomable to me that anybody can claim Microsoft's products have gotten better for the user since Satya took over. It's been downhill in a truly unprecedented manner, with unreliable software that is constantly shoving ads into every visible surface. It's enough that I'd rather go back to Win9X, rebooting my computer every day because it was so unstable, versus dealing with the cavalcade of forced advertising and things breaking out from under me that modern Windows represents.

I've decided to ditch Windows at home rather than move to Win11. What's your preferred OS?

I wish I knew. I'm still fence sitting myself. Unless a compelling argument presents itself, I'm likely to default to Ubuntu.

That's where I am. Though I made it as far as downloading the Mint iso a couple weeks ago.

One part of the old user experience you seem to be forgetting is the part where you plunk down the equivalent of between $250 and $450 in today's money every few years just to have an updated system. And pay $100 for web browsing software. And pay, pay, pay for every little thing that didn't come preinstalled on your $5,000 computer. The days when giving away something for free was enough to prompt an antitrust lawsuit.

That was because computer hardware was improving at a rapid pace in the days of the Internet Explorer anti-trust suit. Nowadays, there's more freeware (free as in speech and beer!), most PC games worth playing can still be run on hardware from a decade-plus ago, and some of the code monkeys competing with the H1Bs being discussed in this thread sometimes pop out a very useful piece of open-source programming that might solve some need you have.

Wait, how do you get all this stuff? I lobotomized my copy of 10 with powershell when I first got it, and set it up to look just like XP. I'd go fucking nuclear if I ever saw an ad in my operating system.

I don't recall every one, but the latest was they added "Weather and More" as a widget to my pristine lock screen. The "and more" is ads. Nonstop obnoxious ass ads. I had to find just the right submenu in Settings to remove it. Which brings me to another gripe. I can't fucking believe how the settings are still scattered across a Windows 8/10/11 style "Settings" menu and a Win9x/2k/xp "Control Panel" menu.

Even without "best of the best" arguments, countries with >1B people are bound to have some mass of brilliant individuals. Same goes for China too.

I can say also that having seen excellent management in tech and mediocre/mixed management, the value-add from not driving things into the ground is massive. You're perhaps right on upside, but Satya or Sundar could vaporize hundreds of billions with a few bad decisions. The VORCEO is probably dominated by the downside.

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