Over the past few days, X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, has been the scene of a fairly intense discussion between guys like Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and others who are in favor of "high skill" immigration in the form of a massive increase in H1B visas that allow the hiring of foreign workers and a large number of devoted Trump fans who see H1B visas as a way corporate America has of replacing American workers with what amounts to chattel labor. //

Regardless of my view on the subject (and I do see H1B visas as a way for businesses to depress wages and create a captive and compliant workforce), I admire Musk's willingness to duke it out with all comers. That is something that would have been impossible with Jack Dorsey's Twitter.

Vivek Ramaswamy, though, [hit] a nerve. He believes that Americans are not culturally adapted to working in the tech field.

Vivek Ramaswamy @VivekGRamaswamy
·
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:

Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.

A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.
...
That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence. I’m confident we can do it.
11:02 AM · Dec 26, 2024 //

Rachel Bovard @rachelbovard
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According to Census Bureau data, the US has more than 2x as many American workers with STEM degrees as there are STEM jobs. And many of the STEM jobs that do exist go to foreigners, because our immigration system allows them to legally be paid less.

But sure, it’s the tv shows.

Vivek Ramaswamy @VivekGRamaswamy
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if…
1:40 PM · Dec 26, 2024

Rep. Mike Collins @RepMikeCollins
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The United States graduates over half a million STEM students per year. If there is an issue in the tech workforce, then we need to address it at the educational level, not import a problem away.
4:04 PM · Dec 26, 2024. //

On the one hand, Musk and Ramaswamy are right. The US must make it easier for top-shelf talent to come to America. That isn't a problem for major tech players like Google, Meta, etc., because their brand draws the best, and the work environment doesn't tolerate mediocrity. On the other hand, there is no doubt that run-of-the-mill H1Bs are not superior to American workers. Their competitive advantage is that they are cheap and don't cause labor problems.

As much as we don't like to hear it, Ramaswamy has a point about the culture we're developing. One of the responses to his critique was this. //

TheLastRefuge @TheLastRefuge2
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Dear, @VivekGRamaswamy, my counter take..... 😇

Several years ago, Florida Power and Light won the prestigious international Edward Demming Award for excellence in multi-platform engineering, efficiency superiority and total quality in the process of energy management.

You see, the reviewers couldn’t actually quantify the reason why the Florida-based energy company was so successful. In response the FPL field leadership laughed, took out magic markers and wrote on the back of their hard hats: “WE’RE NOT GOOD, WE’RE RUCKY.”

A few years later, every single Kuwaiti oil field was blown up by Saddam Hussein. Global analysts and think-tanks proclaimed it would take 5 years to cap them all off and restart the Kuwait oil pumping industry. Well, the Kuwaiti’s and Saudi’s called Texans, who had them all capped and back in working order in 6 months.

We are a nation that knows how to get shit done.

A few more years pass, and the Northern Chile mine workers were trapped two miles underground. The eyes of the world began to tear as the word spread. Most began to whisper no one could save them. Who did they call for help? A bunch of hick miners from USA coal country who went down there, worked on the fly, engineered the rescue equipment on site, and saved every one of them.

Yup, that’s our America. Ingenuity born from freedom. //

The problem is we are no longer the America that produced the guys who put out the Kuwaiti oil field fires and rescued Chilean miners. We are a nation that has permitted its primary and secondary education system to be dumbed down to the lowest conceivable denominator and made a high school diploma a participation trophy...and we're trying to do that to our university systems. We don't care about performance or standards, and our traditional work ethic is probably an artifact of white supremacy. //

NightTwister
14 hours ago
What a huge pile of crap. They want to import "engineers" from other countries because they can pay them half the going wage. They're mostly entry-level capable, and companies no longer care if they can actually do the work. For the most part they can't innovate, so they're used for repeatable work. They live 4-5 to a home, and send most of their money back home. This is not an "America First" strategy.

When Trump was in last time he increased the minimum H1B visa salary to $120K. When Biden changed it to $60K which it was before, they flooded in again. Raise the minimum to $150K and you'll suddenly see there are plenty of Americans available for these jobs.

On 2023-10-16, Marc Andreessen, (creator of Mosaic, the first graphical Web browser, co-founder of Netscape, and general partner of superstar venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz) published a 5200 word document, “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto 6”, proclaiming technology as the root of all human progress since our species emerged from the forager lifestyle and absolutely essential to the achievement of the human destiny now and in the future, here on Earth and onward to the stars. //

I agree with just about everything in this manifesto (can you guess my lone quibble?). I wish I’d written it. I wish I wrote so well. This is well worth your time to read and digest. We are engaged in a struggle for the future. Andreessen clearly identifies the enemy.

“We just had a midair,” the pilot of the Hawker is heard saying in an audio recording posted on LiveATC.net, which shares live and archived recordings of air traffic control radio transmissions.

Someone in the control tower responds by saying, “Say what?”

“You guys cleared somebody to take off or land, and we hit them on a departure,” the Hawker pilot says.

The recent accident in Houston is just the latest noteworthy instance in what a major New York Times investigation this summer determined to be “an alarming pattern of safety lapses and near misses in the skies and on the runways in the USA.” According to internal records of the Federal Aviation Agency, the Times reported that these safety lapses and near misses occurred as a “result of human error.” The Times report further revealed that “runway incursions” of the sort described above have nearly doubled, from 987 to 1732, despite the widespread proliferation of advanced technologies. //

While the disturbing decline in aviation safety is complex and multifaceted, we identified two major contributing factors that have received scant media attention. The first such factor is the likely contribution of disastrous COVID-era policies to the staffing shortage of many air traffic control rooms. The second factor is that aggressive affirmative action policies implemented during the Obama administration have resulted in a catastrophic collapse in the quality of controllers. In short, COVID policies have gutted the quantity of air traffic controllers, and diversity policies have gutted the quality of air traffic controllers, creating unprecedented danger for the aviation industry. //

The implications of these findings reach far beyond the scope of aviation, as important as this industry is. Rather, the collapse of the aviation industry must be understood in the context of a broader collapse in our ability to maintain the infrastructure of a First World society. This is a major and significant trend that we highlighted years ago in our coverage of the repeated failures of Texas’ electric power grid.

Buying cobalt doesn't make US firms liable for abuses in DR Congo, court rules. //

Apple and other major tech companies don't have to compensate victims of forced child labor that provided cobalt for the lithium-ion batteries used in many electronic devices, a US appeals court ruled. The lawsuit filed by former miners from the Democratic Republic of the Congo alleged that Apple, Alphabet, Dell, Microsoft, and Tesla violated a trafficking law that makes it illegal to participate in a "venture" that engages in forced labor.

"The plaintiffs allege the technology companies participated in a venture with their cobalt suppliers by purchasing the metal through the global supply chain," the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit noted in its ruling issued yesterday.

A US District Court previously dismissed the lawsuit, and a panel of three appeals court judges unanimously affirmed the dismissal yesterday. "Purchasing an unspecified amount of cobalt through the global supply chain is not 'participation in a venture' within the meaning of the TVPRA [Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008]," the ruling said. "We therefore affirm the district court's dismissal of the complaint." //

The plaintiffs' argument was a little more nuanced that, arguing not that buying cobalt in and of itself is the problem, but that these tech firms are demanding so much cobalt and at such cutthroat prices that they're inducing the mining companies into employing children to meet demand and margins because that's the only way they can satisfy the demand at the prices paid.

Legally it's still probably the "correct" outcome, but morally it's pretty hard not to find some fault with these incredibly profitable tech companies pretty knowingly using their market muscle to drive these sorts of atrocities. They could do better if they wanted to.