I want to see Taylor Swift to a worldwide negotiation with Tickemaster with public posting of the details, revenue numbers, per ticket tax, stadium cost, fees, etc. so that we can get a complete picture of just how deep this goes.
It's been reported that established musical acts make most of their money by touring and selling merchandise at the shows.
Everyone else is subsidizing large data centers.
The net effect of say 1000 jobs for a data center will most likely be offset by a higher energy price paid by everyone in the surrounding region.
Probably the same thing as how bring in a professional sports team, using government eminent domain to force people to sell land to the government, then building a government owned sports stadium, loss of property tax revenue results in a net tax increase on everyone and a free ride for the sports team owner.
The entire H1B program is to bring in workers for specialty occupations where there is no US citizen to be found.
The employer is required to "search" for a capable US worker for the position before a H1B visa can be granted.
From that perspective, since there is a critical shortage of US workers for the job, one approach would be to put a 100% federal salary tax paid by the company for the H1B visa to give them an economic incentive to search harder and train up a US worker instead of H1B.
What level of fact-checking requirement should be put on the newspaper and publishers in general for what should be factual data, a list of books, the birth date of presidents, etc. and other things which are not opinions?
Reading the article
Notice how they only refer to "workers" and never that 90% (USA and other countries) workplace fatalities are men.
They spend roughly a thousand words avoiding saying that men are most affected, men are most vulnerable, men are doing worse.
There are two types of narratives from politicans, the media, UN, WEF, NGOs:
- It's "women and girls most affected" if the statistics show it
- It's generic workers, generic people if the statistics show that men and boys are doing worse or negatively affected
Men are about 10 times more likely to die at work than women in the USA, EU, and third world countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.who.int/news/item/...
WHO, WMO issue new report and guidance to protect workers from increasing heat stress - 22 August 2025 Joint News Release
- The World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) have published a new joint report and guidance
- extreme heat on workers
- many workers who are
- manual workers
- vulnerable populations in developing countries, such as
- billions of
- the health and productivity of workers
- of heat stress on workers worldwide
- Protection of
- increasing risks for both outdoor and indoor workers.
- Focus on vulnerable populations with special attention given to middle-aged and older workers
- ensure maximum protection for workers worldwide.
- The report and technical guidance by WHO and WMO complement the findings of the recent International Labour Organization (ILO) reports which highlight that more than 2.4 billion workers are exposed to excessive heat globally, resulting in more than 22.85 million occupational injuries each year.
The downplaying, ignoring and reverting the narrative back to only favored demographic groups' issues are promoted is a large reason why there is a disconnect and declining marriage and birth rate.
School spending per capita has been increasing year over year for decades when adjusted for inflation.
Figure 2 from here - https://nces.ed.gov/programs/c...
In inflation adjusted dollars, there has been a 12.6% increase in per student spending in the USA over a 10 year period.
2010 spending per student $14,453
2021 spending per student $16,280
I suspect that much of this myth is that the 1960s space race and focus on education by the federal government and the post-man on the moon landing de-emphasis of "education spending as a cold-war winning strategy" as a government narrative, media narrative and political candidate narrative has been promoting this misconception.
More is being spent per student with worse results.
Maybe trying a different approach with spending the same money amount on education should be tried.
Even in the worst performing school districts, children from two parent households or father led single parent households have much higher academic achievement levels than single parent mother led households.
Teacher pay is in the middle and a much lesser issue with student academic achievement.
Policies that give incentives for families to be split, mothers to primarily receive the children, and a plethora of government subsidies giving incentives for that (man in the house rule, Title IV) are not helping.
Doing the status quo, the political agenda of promoting the institution and spending more money has been the focus since the 1960s. After 50+ years of government policies and programs that split families and the steady decline in academic achievement, spending even more money does not appear to be a solution.
Reallocating the money currently being spent should be the approach.
The real missing part of these news stories is how they bury the learning gap that boys at early grades, the most important ones, are well behind girls in reading and language. Conveniently, that is used to not have special reading, vocabulary and literacy programs for young boys in general and, in particular, for boys from single parent and/or minority households.
California data for 8 year old Grade 3 boys and girls
ELA - English Language Arts for grade 3 - 8 year olds
Level - girls - boys - (girls - boys)
Exceed - 25.31% - 21.22% - Girls more than 4% above boys
Meeting standards - 20.48% - 18.69% - Girls almost 2% above boys
Nearly meeting standards - 22.66% - 22.56% - about even
Standard not met - 31.55% - 37.52% - boys 6% below girls
Select year 2023-24, grade 3 - Student Group (Gender) - School type (all schools)
https://caaspp-elpac.ets.org/c...
No one wants to state that boys need help in general and systemically do worse in school at early grades through high-school because stating that would lead to questions of the correlation with single parent led versus two parent households and educational achievement.
Criticism of single parent household leadership and its correlation with low education levels, higher crime rates, higher drug use and increased social spending costs would go against decades spent on building reliable voting blocks.
Survey data like this needs to include a breakdown by family status:
- Single parent mother
- Single parent father
- Two parent unmarried
- Two parent married
And then breakdown by ethnicity of the parent(s), number of children, highest/lowest grade level of student, age of the parent(s), etc.
Isolating out a known area of discontent with schools, 12-17 year old boys from single parent households would be helpful.
What are the regulations / laws covering non-journalists employee or contractors doing the same thing, such as taking a document outside of the government building, which is unauthorized?
The treaty does not address (?) plastic dumping into the ocean.
The willful ignoring of this, with the repeated calls for others countries always to "take the first step (monetarily)" is not working.
https://www.visualcapitalist.c...
Plastic pollution in the ocean per 2023 by country
1 Philippines 356,371 metric tons
2 India 126,513
3 Malaysia 73,098
4 China 70,707
5 Indonesia 56,333
6 Myanmar 40,000
7 Brazil 37,799
8 Vietnam 28,221
9 Bangladesh 24,640
10 Thailand 22,806
Rest of the World 176,012
Total 1,012,500
I worked for a major tech company that is a household name. In my department of about 60 people, 52 were H1Bs. But, one of our on call rotations required US Citizenship since it dealt with a government client and required a security clearance. Because of this, eight of us had double on calls, and the ITAR one was more frequent. We did not get any kind of bonus for it so that kind of sucked.
The H1Bs got extra vacation in the fall, to go back to India for a month for some holiday that happens, they staggered it so not everyone left at once, though. They got the rest of the normal time off the rest of the year.
Around 2018 the company started doing this weird thing were they obviously tried to trim the US workers. They did things like, required a passport to continue working at the company. They claimed it was for an extra layer of background check. Only 45% or so of Americans have passports, but 100 percent of H1Bs do., so that was an easy low hanging fruit thing, You could apply for one, if you did it immediately, but it took awhile, and they held it against you that you did not already have one. I do not know why it helped a background check, BECAUSE they still could not work on ITAR.
If you work in a majority H1B department, if definitely feels weird sometimes, and like you were not always wanted.
That said, the workers themselves were mostly cool, although they lived in fear of losing their sponsorship, which I think is the bigger appeal to employers than their potentially lower salaries, if they are lower.
They definitely are more obedient and expect and demand less in (they will not balk at coming to the office) some ways, but expect and demand more in others, like vacation.
I was there for about 5 years and as time went on it felt like we were gradually more and more preferring the the Visa holding employees, and even the managers became more and more Indian.
Everybody and everything tries to work every angle to their advantage. That is the one constant in life. If a business spots an angle, they will use it. I guess we all will, but they seem to have more opportunities to do so.
"Religion is something left over from the infancy of our intelligence, it will fade away as we adopt reason and science as our guidelines." -- Bertrand Russell
