Has the ad industry already shifted tactics? I saw a new commercial today that was aimed at class anxiety. A rich woman leads a middle class couple through an art gallery. The rich woman gushes over an ugly painting and the couple peers at it skeptically. Perhaps black vs white is out and rich vs poor is back in.
I will occasionally ask whatever LLM du jour,"Can men get pregnant?", just to see how lobotomized they are with woke nonsense.
When Microsoft's Copilot first came out, it answered with the standard word salad about "gender assigned at birth" and "cis-heteronormativity" and such. However, when I asked last night, it gave me the same answer Gab's LLM gave me: "No, men cannot get pregnant as they lack a uterus."
Glitch in the Matrix? Sign of the times? No one knows (especially Copilot, which insisted that it was *not* recently updated).
"The notion that men can get pregnant or have periods, which gained prominence around 2015, can be attributed to a shift in societal understanding and recognition of transgender and non-binary identities. This perspective is based on the distinction between biological sex and gender identity."
Steve wrote: “…it wouldn’t be so bad if Trump cleared out the Woke left for them for 2 or 4 years. And then their type of sane Democrats could come roaring back in 2026 and 2028.”
Exactly. I voted for the Democratic candidate for president from 1964 to 2020. In 2024 I didn’t vote. Here are my reasons.
After the election the Democratic Party (my party) must rethink many of its policies as it ponders its future.
To be entrusted with power again Democrats must start listening to the concerns of the working class for a change. As a lifelong moderate Democrat I share their disdain for many of the insane positions advocated by my party. We are no longer the patriotic, sensible party of FDR and JFK.
Democrat politicians defy biology by believing that men can actually become women and belong in women’s sports, rest rooms, locker rooms and prisons and that gay kids should be mutilated in pursuit of the impossible.
They believe borders should be open to millions of illegals which undermines workers’ wages and the affordability of housing when we can’t house our own citizens.
They discriminate against whites, Asians and men in a futile effort to counter past discrimination against others and undermine our economy by abandoning merit selection of students and employees.
Democratic mayors allow the homeless to destroy our beautiful cities because they won't say no to destructive behavior. No, you can’t camp in our city. No, you can’t shit in our streets. No, you can’t shoot up and leave your used needles everywhere. Many of our prosecutors will not take action against shoplifting unless a $1000 of goods are stolen leading to gangs destroying retail stores. They release criminals without bail to commit more crimes.
The average voter knows this is happening and outright reject our party. Enough.
Almost: Most of the issues that I mentioned were not central to the Democratic Party until relatively recently. Certainly not during the Obama administration. On the other hand the Republicans have equally important blind spots. I believe in a woman’s right to choose in the first trimester. I believe that climate change threatens humanity and that we need to build nuclear power plants to help fix it. I understand that vaccines work to save lives. I think we should use the earned income tax credit to help those who work hard and are struggling to survive and that we should tax the very wealthy to help pay for it.
Those are issues that Republicans clearly wouldn’t support.
No, this trend has been ongoing since the 1960s and the disruption of the 1968 Democratic convention, the Hard Hat Riot, and the Boston Busing Riots. The American proletariat is too white too armed, too provincial and too religious, and you have spent your life voting for your children's social and political displacement in their own homeland. Disgusting.
Yes, until the Democrats switched and became entirely supportive of the black communist revolutionaries. That's when they also became an entirely anti-White party.
Are you referring to the 1960s black communist revolutionaries? I wasn't around for that but I wonder if that was the stick, while reasonable civil rights reform was the carrot?
My memory is that in the late 1970s and through the 1980s people were optimistic that post civil rights movement, all the differences in social/economic outcomes between blacks and whites were going to disappear.
Once it became obvious that wasn't happening, and that the trend was, if anything, slowing down, that's when things became so anti-white.
They abolished Jim Crow. Then they effectively rewrote the Constitution with the voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. All of which we might have been able to muck through, but then they came after the neighborhoods and whites fled to the suburbs taking their school age children with them. We've never really recovered and cities are now Democratic vote banks.
"I believe that climate change threatens humanity and that we need to build nuclear power plants to help fix it. "...... "Those are issues that Republicans clearly wouldn’t support."
I don't think that's the case at all. I would contend that a great expansion of nuclear power plants has far greater support among Republicans than Democrats. It is symptomatic of the religious nature of modern Liberalism, that despite the fact that in practice you agree with a Republican position regarding nuclear and realize that the Democratic commitment to solar/wind is at best inadequate/useless and at worst actively destructive, the fact that they don't share your belief that "climate change threatens humanity" means they are not 'Saved' and you can have no truck with the heathens. In this instance, the practical ramifications of the Democrat/Liberal advocacy of non-nuclear 'green' energy, means global misery and the eclipse of the West and Western civilization, but you are going to give them a pass because they are 'Saved by Faith'.
First, intermittent renewable energy generation which is usually located far from demand centers, while clean, cannot possibly power America. Only nuclear generation can. We should be using the sites of current coal fired power stations which have in place transmission and cooling infrastructure and are close to locations where energy is needed to build new nuclear capacity. Democrats largely reject new nuclear power plants.
Secondly, we are not on track to reduce carbon emissions adequately to halt disastrous climate change. At this stage of the problem only geoengineering can save humanity. Republicans largely reject geoengineering and because they believe in crazy conspiracy theories refuse to support even research into how it might help. With both parties standing in the way of necessary solutions to the looming climate disaster we are clearly fucked.
And yet you seem unprepared to accept that the massive geo-engineering taking place is the two million migrants a year and the cities they will tack on to, the cars they will buy, and the asphalt, glass, concrete, and steel that will be built to accommodate them.
I went the other direction. I was super libertarian/right wing as a youngster. By the time I had shifted leftward to slightly right of "new democracy" the democrats shifted to slightly left of surreal.
I think the key event was conservatives capitulating on gay marriage. When I was young conservative meant anti-gay in the extreme. Modern ears would be scandalized by things many brothers in my fraternity said and, given some of the positions they are in today...
But then a few seasons of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" and most of them switched to acceptance of the idea that many homosexuals just wanted a regular non fabulous middle class lifestyle. So the left had a choice, take the win or be irritated by the fact that they were no longer making right wing heads explode and get some new material.
Those who chose the latter came to dominate recently.
I don’t believe the image that they are just like the couple in ‘modern family’. It was a ruse believed by normies who are blissfully unaware of what goes on in various subcultures. ‘After the Ball’ is recommended reading for anyone curious about how it came to be embraced.
I have been waiting to see Balaji Srinivasan's name mentioned by the administration or the press for something or another, but I suppose he is working to make the crypto network state great now and not America.
The NYT pic of Curtis Yarvin today makes him look like an aging rock star.
Both parties are going to be equally inept at moving towards economic populism, since they both consider earning 3x the median income to put you in the "struggling middle class".
You're right. October is a good time to be in the Washington area. January and February are rotten times to be in DC. So is July and August unless you're knocking down some crabs with a pitcher of beer.
exactly. I wonder why in the era of remote work, if Indian software developers are still so cost effective (something I debunked to deaf manager ears two decades ago) and required to do jobs that stupid lazy Americans cannot (at any price!) why not just hire teams in India?
I've worked for two companies that had such teams and it was no worse (and no better) than colocated such teams in the US. So is it down to the ego of the managerial class? Being in the room with them simply must make them better developers...otherwise, why do I exist?
Dems turned against the tech media manipulators by threatening them over content. Sure Zuck (not Elon) accepted that and brought in Dem selected content censors, but that and the threat of fines must have upset them.
And in the end they all just follwed the power change like normal oligarch sycophants.
It’s been a long time since a majority of Americans truly shared a common interest. Maybe a short period after 9/11, until the nonsensical “war on terror” fully blossomed. Can the MAGA folks glue a new one together? I’m betting the under.
I'm not sure this was ever true that the majority of Americans shared a common interest, except for the most basic (which would still be true today). We tend to simplify and idealize the past.
I disagree. I grew up in the 70’s and remember that it was pretty cohesive with a shared culture and Christianity was the dominant religion (even with the wretched hippies). It was starting to change though slowly picking up steam as demographics started watering down the culture.
Tough to judge the time you grew up in. The world of a child is small. I suppose it all depends on how specifically you mean cohesive. You say Christian, but I am given to understand that the catholic protestant divide was considered huge for most of American history. It might only have been when people turned their backs on organized religion that most of us started to think of them as a common thing.
The Waltons was a series that had no qualms about praying or referencing Christianity. Admittedly things were starting to unravel but it was slow. You can tell a lot by looking at what was on media. Mostly straight arrow stuff until the late 70’s. Even looking at old films of the 40’s referenced a cohesive distinct culture.
Yes but the Waltons I assume were Protestants. Back in Walton times wouldn't the Protestants have voted republican and the catholics democrat? Did the city people have more common interests with the country people? The industrial north with the agricultural south?
America was founded as a proposition nation by a group of overwrought Masonic Englishmen, instead of the land where the Americans lived. We are living with the consequences.
To steal a quote from the late drummer Keith Moon, an alliance between the rural sorts who make up MAGA and the Silicon aristocracy will go over about as well as a Led Zeppelin. The Silicon moguls just hope Trump likes hob-nobbing with them rather than Trump's rural bumpkins.
I suspect the non famous people were just happy they no longer had to hide their support of Trump. Engineers tend to be 'don't piss in my ears and tell me it's raining' types and recently the democrats were proudly showing off the effects of their TURPs.
What a lot of people want is a Democratic Party that is more interested in policy and governance rather than fearing being called racist by the most extreme left. Starting somewhere in the Obama Administration, progressives and liberals became to fear being called racist so much that they would tolerate policy failures and election loses.
Too late. The “party of the working man” disappeared in the Hard Hat Riot and the Boston Busing Riots. It was too provincial, too armed, too white, and too religious. It hung on in the Solid South for a while after, but it has vanished there as well.
The safety pin anecdote made me laugh because I remember it - I have an acquaintance who is a Dem strategist/consultant whose wife was extremely online on Facebook, and back after the first Trump inauguration she had a very long post about how all good straight whites need to put the safety pin image up on their social media profiles to indicate they were allies to the various fringe members who might be sent to the camps. That lasted like a day or two before she took it down with another long post about how she had been educated that it was an aggressively ableist act and she was sorry to everyone she harmed (I cannot remember the argument about ableism).
At any rate, it's a valid point that this new coalition will be hard to hold together but like all odd couple coalitions it can be united in its dislike of an outsider group. After all, the Dems held theirs together for years with anti-white hatred and it was effective for time, and despite the obvious cultural turn away from trans and DEI stuff, it's not a habit the true believers are yet able to break. I believe Politico had an article the other day about how some Dem strategists were preparing to try to motivate the base by trying to reinvigorate the Alphabet People cause by fighting tooth and nail against any anti-trans stuff...please do this. It will remind the public of what oddballs the activist left are and obviously people like AOC will be leading the charge in Congress. Although a pivot to economic issues would be wise for the left, it's not the animating cause of their activist base and hasn't been for a long time. They love cultural issues and it's going to be very hard for them to make that shift, as it would require acknowledging straight whites are humans that deserve to have their concerns listened to, and in so doing might continue to play an outsized role in our country and culture.
The key - as always - is responding to people's fears around economic insecurity. The techbros will be able to get a lot of what they want so long as people further down the ladder feel that they have a reasonable amount of opportunity and tech-friendly stuff doesn't directly impact them. I think it can be done.
Steve - congratulations all around on being a part of the intellectual movement that has now elected Trump to office twice, over the unanimous activism of the US Establishment. Most remarkable politician in our lifetimes.
"My compromise would be that H-1B gets cut in quantity, but the tech lords get to redesign it to make it better in quality."
The quality follows a bell curve so a doubling in quality should lead to way more than a halving in quantity. The Indian bell curve starts to the left of the American, so if they are only allowed to bring in e.g. 2 std above mean software developers, they will find the pickings slim.
Fortunately for them, congress never heard of Gaussian distributions and the qualities of a good software recruit can be as subjective as you like. The industry notoriously sucks at discerning good candidates.
Has the ad industry already shifted tactics? I saw a new commercial today that was aimed at class anxiety. A rich woman leads a middle class couple through an art gallery. The rich woman gushes over an ugly painting and the couple peers at it skeptically. Perhaps black vs white is out and rich vs poor is back in.
I will occasionally ask whatever LLM du jour,"Can men get pregnant?", just to see how lobotomized they are with woke nonsense.
When Microsoft's Copilot first came out, it answered with the standard word salad about "gender assigned at birth" and "cis-heteronormativity" and such. However, when I asked last night, it gave me the same answer Gab's LLM gave me: "No, men cannot get pregnant as they lack a uterus."
Glitch in the Matrix? Sign of the times? No one knows (especially Copilot, which insisted that it was *not* recently updated).
No glitch at Perplexity:
"The notion that men can get pregnant or have periods, which gained prominence around 2015, can be attributed to a shift in societal understanding and recognition of transgender and non-binary identities. This perspective is based on the distinction between biological sex and gender identity."
Your fairy godparent didn't hit you on the head with xer magic wand and trans-port you to the ball?
Steve wrote: “…it wouldn’t be so bad if Trump cleared out the Woke left for them for 2 or 4 years. And then their type of sane Democrats could come roaring back in 2026 and 2028.”
Exactly. I voted for the Democratic candidate for president from 1964 to 2020. In 2024 I didn’t vote. Here are my reasons.
After the election the Democratic Party (my party) must rethink many of its policies as it ponders its future.
To be entrusted with power again Democrats must start listening to the concerns of the working class for a change. As a lifelong moderate Democrat I share their disdain for many of the insane positions advocated by my party. We are no longer the patriotic, sensible party of FDR and JFK.
Democrat politicians defy biology by believing that men can actually become women and belong in women’s sports, rest rooms, locker rooms and prisons and that gay kids should be mutilated in pursuit of the impossible.
They believe borders should be open to millions of illegals which undermines workers’ wages and the affordability of housing when we can’t house our own citizens.
They discriminate against whites, Asians and men in a futile effort to counter past discrimination against others and undermine our economy by abandoning merit selection of students and employees.
Democratic mayors allow the homeless to destroy our beautiful cities because they won't say no to destructive behavior. No, you can’t camp in our city. No, you can’t shit in our streets. No, you can’t shoot up and leave your used needles everywhere. Many of our prosecutors will not take action against shoplifting unless a $1000 of goods are stolen leading to gangs destroying retail stores. They release criminals without bail to commit more crimes.
The average voter knows this is happening and outright reject our party. Enough.
All of what you say about modern Democrats is true, but if you only noticed that after 2020 you must be a slow learner.
Almost: Most of the issues that I mentioned were not central to the Democratic Party until relatively recently. Certainly not during the Obama administration. On the other hand the Republicans have equally important blind spots. I believe in a woman’s right to choose in the first trimester. I believe that climate change threatens humanity and that we need to build nuclear power plants to help fix it. I understand that vaccines work to save lives. I think we should use the earned income tax credit to help those who work hard and are struggling to survive and that we should tax the very wealthy to help pay for it.
Those are issues that Republicans clearly wouldn’t support.
No, this trend has been ongoing since the 1960s and the disruption of the 1968 Democratic convention, the Hard Hat Riot, and the Boston Busing Riots. The American proletariat is too white too armed, too provincial and too religious, and you have spent your life voting for your children's social and political displacement in their own homeland. Disgusting.
sure but they did have a point in the years leading up to the civil rights era.
Yes, until the Democrats switched and became entirely supportive of the black communist revolutionaries. That's when they also became an entirely anti-White party.
Are you referring to the 1960s black communist revolutionaries? I wasn't around for that but I wonder if that was the stick, while reasonable civil rights reform was the carrot?
My memory is that in the late 1970s and through the 1980s people were optimistic that post civil rights movement, all the differences in social/economic outcomes between blacks and whites were going to disappear.
Once it became obvious that wasn't happening, and that the trend was, if anything, slowing down, that's when things became so anti-white.
They abolished Jim Crow. Then they effectively rewrote the Constitution with the voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. All of which we might have been able to muck through, but then they came after the neighborhoods and whites fled to the suburbs taking their school age children with them. We've never really recovered and cities are now Democratic vote banks.
"I believe that climate change threatens humanity and that we need to build nuclear power plants to help fix it. "...... "Those are issues that Republicans clearly wouldn’t support."
I don't think that's the case at all. I would contend that a great expansion of nuclear power plants has far greater support among Republicans than Democrats. It is symptomatic of the religious nature of modern Liberalism, that despite the fact that in practice you agree with a Republican position regarding nuclear and realize that the Democratic commitment to solar/wind is at best inadequate/useless and at worst actively destructive, the fact that they don't share your belief that "climate change threatens humanity" means they are not 'Saved' and you can have no truck with the heathens. In this instance, the practical ramifications of the Democrat/Liberal advocacy of non-nuclear 'green' energy, means global misery and the eclipse of the West and Western civilization, but you are going to give them a pass because they are 'Saved by Faith'.
Kag: Sorry if I wasn’t clear. Here’s my position.
First, intermittent renewable energy generation which is usually located far from demand centers, while clean, cannot possibly power America. Only nuclear generation can. We should be using the sites of current coal fired power stations which have in place transmission and cooling infrastructure and are close to locations where energy is needed to build new nuclear capacity. Democrats largely reject new nuclear power plants.
Secondly, we are not on track to reduce carbon emissions adequately to halt disastrous climate change. At this stage of the problem only geoengineering can save humanity. Republicans largely reject geoengineering and because they believe in crazy conspiracy theories refuse to support even research into how it might help. With both parties standing in the way of necessary solutions to the looming climate disaster we are clearly fucked.
And yet you seem unprepared to accept that the massive geo-engineering taking place is the two million migrants a year and the cities they will tack on to, the cars they will buy, and the asphalt, glass, concrete, and steel that will be built to accommodate them.
Anti: I don’t know where you got that. I am totally opposed to illegal immigration and even most legal immigration. There are plenty of us already.
I went the other direction. I was super libertarian/right wing as a youngster. By the time I had shifted leftward to slightly right of "new democracy" the democrats shifted to slightly left of surreal.
I think the key event was conservatives capitulating on gay marriage. When I was young conservative meant anti-gay in the extreme. Modern ears would be scandalized by things many brothers in my fraternity said and, given some of the positions they are in today...
But then a few seasons of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" and most of them switched to acceptance of the idea that many homosexuals just wanted a regular non fabulous middle class lifestyle. So the left had a choice, take the win or be irritated by the fact that they were no longer making right wing heads explode and get some new material.
Those who chose the latter came to dominate recently.
I don’t believe the image that they are just like the couple in ‘modern family’. It was a ruse believed by normies who are blissfully unaware of what goes on in various subcultures. ‘After the Ball’ is recommended reading for anyone curious about how it came to be embraced.
who wrote it? Is it a book?
Let me guess, you voted Dem all those years either because you're a union guy, or you feel sorry for blacks, right?
I have been waiting to see Balaji Srinivasan's name mentioned by the administration or the press for something or another, but I suppose he is working to make the crypto network state great now and not America.
The NYT pic of Curtis Yarvin today makes him look like an aging rock star.
https://archive.is/g6q1o
I call Curtis The Fifth Ramone.
Both parties are going to be equally inept at moving towards economic populism, since they both consider earning 3x the median income to put you in the "struggling middle class".
I started following Steve Sailer during the Obama candidacy, and now here he is right in the eye of the storm. Remarkable.
So Steve, are you there? Sure hope so.
No, I went to DC during a beautiful week last October. January didn't sound that appealing.
You're right. October is a good time to be in the Washington area. January and February are rotten times to be in DC. So is July and August unless you're knocking down some crabs with a pitcher of beer.
The regal, crown-wearing lion was an interesting choice. Reminds me of a lot of the Lion of Judah, from where Jesus Christ comes from.
"The regal, crown-wearing lion was an interesting choice. Reminds me of a lot of the Lion of Judah, from where Jesus Christ comes from."
Eh, just to make a hadran, I was hoping for a drunk, crown-wearing, Leprechaun but perhaps they got a cease and desist letter from South Bend.
> "My compromise would be that H-1B gets cut in quantity, but the tech lords get to redesign it to make it better in quality."
So, kinda like the O-1 visa . . . which already exists?
exactly. I wonder why in the era of remote work, if Indian software developers are still so cost effective (something I debunked to deaf manager ears two decades ago) and required to do jobs that stupid lazy Americans cannot (at any price!) why not just hire teams in India?
I've worked for two companies that had such teams and it was no worse (and no better) than colocated such teams in the US. So is it down to the ego of the managerial class? Being in the room with them simply must make them better developers...otherwise, why do I exist?
Fewer but better code monkeys.
Dems turned against the tech media manipulators by threatening them over content. Sure Zuck (not Elon) accepted that and brought in Dem selected content censors, but that and the threat of fines must have upset them.
And in the end they all just follwed the power change like normal oligarch sycophants.
It’s been a long time since a majority of Americans truly shared a common interest. Maybe a short period after 9/11, until the nonsensical “war on terror” fully blossomed. Can the MAGA folks glue a new one together? I’m betting the under.
I'm not sure this was ever true that the majority of Americans shared a common interest, except for the most basic (which would still be true today). We tend to simplify and idealize the past.
I disagree. I grew up in the 70’s and remember that it was pretty cohesive with a shared culture and Christianity was the dominant religion (even with the wretched hippies). It was starting to change though slowly picking up steam as demographics started watering down the culture.
Tough to judge the time you grew up in. The world of a child is small. I suppose it all depends on how specifically you mean cohesive. You say Christian, but I am given to understand that the catholic protestant divide was considered huge for most of American history. It might only have been when people turned their backs on organized religion that most of us started to think of them as a common thing.
The Waltons was a series that had no qualms about praying or referencing Christianity. Admittedly things were starting to unravel but it was slow. You can tell a lot by looking at what was on media. Mostly straight arrow stuff until the late 70’s. Even looking at old films of the 40’s referenced a cohesive distinct culture.
Yes but the Waltons I assume were Protestants. Back in Walton times wouldn't the Protestants have voted republican and the catholics democrat? Did the city people have more common interests with the country people? The industrial north with the agricultural south?
America was founded as a proposition nation by a group of overwrought Masonic Englishmen, instead of the land where the Americans lived. We are living with the consequences.
To steal a quote from the late drummer Keith Moon, an alliance between the rural sorts who make up MAGA and the Silicon aristocracy will go over about as well as a Led Zeppelin. The Silicon moguls just hope Trump likes hob-nobbing with them rather than Trump's rural bumpkins.
I suspect the non famous people were just happy they no longer had to hide their support of Trump. Engineers tend to be 'don't piss in my ears and tell me it's raining' types and recently the democrats were proudly showing off the effects of their TURPs.
TURPs??
Transurethral Resection of the Prostate. If you are old and want to piss in someone's ear, this'll ream you out real good for the flow
What a lot of people want is a Democratic Party that is more interested in policy and governance rather than fearing being called racist by the most extreme left. Starting somewhere in the Obama Administration, progressives and liberals became to fear being called racist so much that they would tolerate policy failures and election loses.
Too late. The “party of the working man” disappeared in the Hard Hat Riot and the Boston Busing Riots. It was too provincial, too armed, too white, and too religious. It hung on in the Solid South for a while after, but it has vanished there as well.
The safety pin anecdote made me laugh because I remember it - I have an acquaintance who is a Dem strategist/consultant whose wife was extremely online on Facebook, and back after the first Trump inauguration she had a very long post about how all good straight whites need to put the safety pin image up on their social media profiles to indicate they were allies to the various fringe members who might be sent to the camps. That lasted like a day or two before she took it down with another long post about how she had been educated that it was an aggressively ableist act and she was sorry to everyone she harmed (I cannot remember the argument about ableism).
At any rate, it's a valid point that this new coalition will be hard to hold together but like all odd couple coalitions it can be united in its dislike of an outsider group. After all, the Dems held theirs together for years with anti-white hatred and it was effective for time, and despite the obvious cultural turn away from trans and DEI stuff, it's not a habit the true believers are yet able to break. I believe Politico had an article the other day about how some Dem strategists were preparing to try to motivate the base by trying to reinvigorate the Alphabet People cause by fighting tooth and nail against any anti-trans stuff...please do this. It will remind the public of what oddballs the activist left are and obviously people like AOC will be leading the charge in Congress. Although a pivot to economic issues would be wise for the left, it's not the animating cause of their activist base and hasn't been for a long time. They love cultural issues and it's going to be very hard for them to make that shift, as it would require acknowledging straight whites are humans that deserve to have their concerns listened to, and in so doing might continue to play an outsized role in our country and culture.
The key - as always - is responding to people's fears around economic insecurity. The techbros will be able to get a lot of what they want so long as people further down the ladder feel that they have a reasonable amount of opportunity and tech-friendly stuff doesn't directly impact them. I think it can be done.
"I cannot remember the argument about ableism"
try opening a safety pin without thumbs.
Safety pins are a fraud. I can't tell you how many times I've pricked myself on those smug little bastards. Regular pins!
I missed the safety pin thing. Was it solidarity with the diaper fetish crowd?
Check your privilege BIGOT! It's the ADW ( adult diaper wearers) community, not to be confused with the AB ( adult baby) community. (Sarc)
Steve - congratulations all around on being a part of the intellectual movement that has now elected Trump to office twice, over the unanimous activism of the US Establishment. Most remarkable politician in our lifetimes.
"My compromise would be that H-1B gets cut in quantity, but the tech lords get to redesign it to make it better in quality."
The quality follows a bell curve so a doubling in quality should lead to way more than a halving in quantity. The Indian bell curve starts to the left of the American, so if they are only allowed to bring in e.g. 2 std above mean software developers, they will find the pickings slim.
Fortunately for them, congress never heard of Gaussian distributions and the qualities of a good software recruit can be as subjective as you like. The industry notoriously sucks at discerning good candidates.