If H1B were really about skilled foreigners filling gaps that can't be filled otherwise, their salaries would be high relative to US citizens.

In a free market, your salary is proportional to how hard it is to replace you:

Push buttons like a trained seal? Peanuts.

Know where to place the the thousand dollar chalk mark? Mid six figures easy.

So what do H1Bs at Microsoft make?

If these links
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=h1b+...
are to be believed, kinda average for a software engineer. Maybe even a little low. Boston area under 160k.

Not the stereotypical monkey pushing a button, but not exactly top flight talent either.

You're right. Maybe not so much for us, but it certainly did much more to educate our adversaries not to fuck with us.

Yeah, I'm crying my fucking eyes out over here. Java is getting a dose of AI vulnerability apocalypse? Say it isn't so!

In other news, nobody gives a fuck and most of us hope Java and IBM dies in fire. Please take Red Hat with you and re-hire Pottering back from Microsoft and lock him in the center of the burning building.

The watermark is in the pseudorandom number generator that makes the words, genius. You can copy it in purple crayon and it will still show up if the text is long enough.

Unless they get some serious competition they can just up the price of their launches and close that revenue hole at their own leisure.

Alternatively they can shut down their production line tomorrow and reconstitute it next year. Because they own almlst all of it.

I wouldn't pit too much stock in prognosticating either way.

Government subsidized red pills...government government subsidized blue pills...government-mandated vascectomies...same thing.

And I have it on good authority that you can legally print all kinds of conspiracy theories in a newspaper's opinion section if in fine print you explicitly state that you're just expressing an opinion.

So a russian satellite sees the sun glinting off high altitude clouds over the US near a known missile silo and signals a missile launch alert. The duty officer says bullshit...no one starts ww3 with a single missile...must be a false alarm...and declines to push the big red button and start ww3 himself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The unilateral disarmers spin this story as a reason to unilaterally disarm. The guys who totally don't have all their eggs in the defense stocks basket spin this as a reason to build more and better launch warning satellites.

I spin this the way Heinlein spun it in Starship Troopers: if you build and deploy a widget on the battlefield, you damn well better train your people how to use it properly or all you've done is fielded a magic rock.

I'd say it's even more about other women than men at this point. A good example is women's nails. Men mostly just like "clean and well groomed". We don't care if they have a zillion charms and a custom airbrushed paint job: but other women do bigtime. So, when I see that on a woman I know who her main audience is. Doesn't mean they are lesbian, just means they are female-vs-female competitive. Not sure if that's good or bad, but pretty sure it's true.

My brother was kind of like that. He tried everything in his 20's and 30's and didn't get very far. The women who were interested were terrible and treated him terribly. He's short: about 5' 6" by girl-standards. So, they weren't having that shit. He did the dating apps and services, he grew some mildly social hobbies and met women but always ended up in the Beavis rant about never scoring.

Then he decided around 38 to go get some anabolic steroids (he did it legally via a sport's medicine doctor). Started lifting weights 5 days a week on his nights. His words were "In about a year I went from couldn't get a smile to needing a stick to fend them off." That seems to be the key in all the real life stories I've heard.

Women already know this. That's why they go straight to max on the fitness, makeup, and clothes fronts. They know men are just as superficial as they are.

Could certainly do with a bit more of a paddlin' around here. Just sayin

No, it looks that way to people who anyone with two brain cells, idiot.

Ahh, so your answer is "I don't want to live in a hellhole, but it doesn't serve my purposes to tell anyone that." Got it.

As most of your views come across as far Left and China is a Communist country (just ask them), why stay in a western country? You clearly sympathize and come across as an apologist. Why not move there if they have it all figured out ? North Korea is also a Communist state (just ask them). That also seems like another sunny Communist destination. What's stopping you?

Communism isn't democratic (ie.. with the masses/ThePeople in charge). They have politburos and committees (Soviets) made up of the most stridently communist elites. Any voting is purely pro-forma ceremony. In Democracy we allow the rich folks to use the media to control elections. They do so by getting hordes of folks to vote for material promises and produce wedge issues that pushes them into partisan behavior. Once that happens, it's very easy to control the outcomes of government. Freedom is generally the last thing a government wants to actually give you.

Incidentally, Communists and Marxists only viewed elections as a good thing if it resulted in the workers taking over. Lenin himself mocked the Second International view that the proletariat must first win a majority by universal suffrage, then take power, then organize socialism. He said that is “the height of stupidity or hypocrisy”: it substitutes elections under the old power for class struggle and revolution. The proletariat must first seize state power, then use that power to win the majority of working people. So, basically, after the Communists take over, everyone who sees how great things are will automatically want to vote for them. Let's just briefly acknowledge: it's never worked out like that and definitely didn't for Lenin, either.