Sorry, no. Other countries don’t possess a monopoly on talent. We don’t hire basketball coaches from China because there’s plenty of fantastic coaches from America that are equally capable of doing the job. In fact, there’s a long line of fantastic American coaches who would love the opportunity to take that position and perform that work. It makes no sense to hire a Chinese coach for an American team when there’s plenty of Americans here who are ready, willing, and able to do that job. Your basketball program isn’t going to die because you think this one coach from China is the absolute best in the world and you can’t get him.

Kirk is a fictional character that never faces the real consequences of his actions.

OpenAI is a real company in the real world in which one company hacking another is considered a felony offense and normal people go to real life jail for breaking those laws.

I wrote that the amount wasn't enough to slow down H1b hiring. That presumes it's also not enough to stop it as well.

The point being that if the administration actually wants the fee to be effective at slowing down H1b hiring, they need to make it much higher.

No, if we're not going to eliminate the program, we should lean into the government money grab. Today, we give away these positions in a lottery. Instead, we should auction them off to the highest bidder. Let the free market run up the price of this limited good. Let companies compete for it.

The $103,265 fee is a slap on the wrist. It's not high enough to actually be effective at slowing down employers from using the program.

This is the attitude that causes people to die. Americans deal with hotter temperatures every summer. Texas gets over 40 C in the summer every day. Install AC and be done with the problem. No one needs to die from overheating!

European windows don't work well for portable ACs. One, they don't usually come with screens which are typical in the US to keep bugs out. Two, they open from a hinge on the side. So, you basically need a way to cover the whole window space if you open it at all.

Last time I checked, we don't live in 1850. Slavery is a distant memory. It was outlawed 160 years ago. Jim Crow and redlining have been illegal for over half a century. Any systemic racism going on today revolves around DEI, which damn near all corporate America follows.

I already told you I'm a progressive Dem. I'm not going to defend Trump and his administration's bullshit. The Dems were around long before DEI. Not all of us agree with that philosophy. Plenty of us disagree. Equality should never have been replaced with equity.

Today, the only systemic abuse of power that's done by organizations across the economy are ones using DEI to promote minorities over straight, white men.

And no, you're making the assumption that I'm a right-winger. I've been a solid blue Dem for over 20 years. I hate Trump and the Republicans far more than DEI. That said, I can't stand the woke far-left either. I'm hardly the lone Democrat who can't stand the woke leftists.

No, ensuring "people aren't hired over others just because they're white men" is called equality. That's the opposite of equity, which attempts to provide equal outcomes instead of equal opportunity. In practice, equity is implemented through preferential treatment of minorities over white people in areas such as hiring and promotion, especially over straight, white men. (BTW, that preferential hiring is illegal, but employers following DEI practices still do it.)

Sorry, no. DEI is systematic racism that blindly promotes minorities at the expense of white people, especially straight, white men.

If there's any fault in the death of Arday, it belongs with the people who promoted him unquestioningly despite his self-promotional claims that were increasingly ridiculous and factually dubious.

I say that as a progressive Democrat based in the US who long believed in MLK's dream that people "not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." DEI reverses that and judges people on the color of their skin, promoting minorities ahead of anyone else. DEI propelled Arday to such academic heights were he completely didn't belong due to his lack of academic merit.

The woke pushed DEI. That's a separate and distinct group from liberals and progressives, who never fully bought the DEI claims.

The claim isn't that they developed completely independently but from a not-yet-alive common ancestor: "We show that enzymatic metabolism in the universal common ancestor was incomplete, undergoing final assembly independently in the lineages leading to bacteria and archaea." (The science dot org article)

Before leaving, buy a cheap phone and load onto it:

• Photos of your passport's identity page
• Photos of your tickets
• A copy of any hotel reservations, etc.
• Credit card numbers and international phone numbers for your card company's service desk. NB: 1800 may not work internationally.
• A limited selection of other phone numbers you may need to call.
• A fairly new social media account connected to with friends and family.

While travelling, if the phone is ever out of your sight, assume it has had spyware installed.

On returning home, save your holiday photos and ditch this phone

Yes, for good reasons, China is moving away from dependency on Western tech, but I noticed that they really ramped up the low end RISC-V switch after the June/July 2025 changes to ARM licencing. China already had high performance Xiangshan RISC-V and LoongArch proprietary CPUs.