In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

After I posted yesterday, it dawned on me that I hadn't mentioned a major country that sends workers here via H1B or other, similar preferential programs, China. This is partly because the media discussions haven't mentioned it, either. But one thing this limits in the discussion is the extent to which the foreign workers' poor English limits their effectiveness. Workers from India are less of a problem, because the British colonial background made English a highly useful second language for the whole country that otherwise had different regional languages. As a result, a dialect called South Asian English is fully recognized, and it's understood fairly well by speakers of US English. This doesn't completely eliminate the problem, though, because, due to the US background, English is also commonly spoken in the Philippines, and while Filipino English is understandable to speakers of US English, South Asian English and Filipino English are less mutually intelli...

As I said yesterday, the people writing aboput H1B visas have never worked in tech, and they're getting basic things wrong. They start, for example, with this assumption : The H-1B visa is a non-immigrant visa that allows U.S. employers to hire foreign workers in specialty occupations requiring specialized knowledge and a bachelor’s degree or higher. These occupations often include fields like IT, engineering, mathematics, and medicine. But this glosses over important distinctions. In medicine, I'm assuming they want MDs or PhDs. In engineering or mathematics, they might want BSEEs, MS, or PhDs. But IT is a very different field. The people who work directly on the keyboard, programmers, operators, system engineers, webmasters, network specialists, program librarians, and the llke, often don't have any type of four-year or even two-year degree. So I keep asking the question, why do we claim to be scouring the world for the best and the brightest when the US-born ...

The current discussion of H1B visas gets everything wrong. Musk and Ramaswamy see the problem from Mahogany Row. The writers who cover it arem't tech workers, they're writers, in fact, bad ones. I spent a career in tech. Here's an example of what everyone gets wrong : For years, Breitbart News has chronicled the abuses against white-collar American professionals as a result of the H-1B visa program. There are about 650,000 H-1B visa foreign workers in the U.S. at any given moment. Americans are often laid off in the process and forced to train their foreign replacements, as highlighted by Breitbart News.'' Research published in the Journal of Business Ethics recently revealed that foreign H-1B visa workers are paid about 10 percent less than their American counterparts doing the same line of work. Analysis conducted in 2018 discovered that 71 percent of tech workers in Silicon Valley, California, are foreign-born, while the tech industry in the San F...

This year, we've been in and out of Ferdinand Lundberg's world of finpolity as outlined in his 1968 book The Rich and the Super-Rich , and which I summarized in this post . It turns out that, although Prescott Bush's wealth can be traced to his wife's father, George Herbert Walker. who was presidenr of the Harriman family investment bank, W A Harriman & Co, and Prescott himself became a managing partner of its successor, Brown Brothers Harriman, and was closely associated with Edward Harriman's sons, W Averell and E Roland, Prescott himself is never mentioned as a finpol in The Rich and the Super-Rich . This was almost certainly by design. According to Britannica , At least some portion of the Greenwich Bushes’ financial stability came by way of the largesse of the Walkers, who were ostentatious in their demonstrations of wealth, whereas Bush counseled his offspring to play down their wealth and instead advocated public service as a sort of nob...

Over the holidays, my wife and I added The Bourne Legacy , the fourth episode of the Hollywood franchise loosely based on Robert Ludlum novels, to our collection of DVDs. My fascination with the series was one of the reasons I started this blog, as I outlined in this early post : The original Ludlum novels appeared between 1980 and 1990, while the film trilogy we watched appeared between 2002 and 2007, long before Donald Trump was anything but a playboy billionaire and reality TV star. Yet the image of the CIA and its fictional director, Martin Marshall, is the one we have now, the one with the actual CIA director John Brennan, who in the public mind is fully capable of Martin Marshall's misdeeds and fully eligible for Marshall's implied fate, federal indictment for serious whatever. Did Martin Marshall go to Yale? You betcha. The MacGuffin of the Bourne franchise, the element that's necessary to the plot and the motivation of the characters, is a set of de...

The Washington Post, September 17, 2002 : When President Bush travels today to Andrew Jackson's hometown of Nashville, he may wish to stop by the Hermitage and lay a wreath at the grave of the Hero of New Orleans. More and more, Bush has been acting like the seventh president. Superficially, such a comparison is absurd. Jackson led a populist revolt against concentrated wealth in undoing the Bank of the United States; Bush is closely allied with corporate interests. I wouldn't say "absurd" so much as "obtuse". The writer, Dana Milbank, goes on, Jackson lost a disputed election in 1824 to the son of a former president; Bush, as son of a former president, won such a disputed election. Jackson was an uneducated war hero and father of the Democratic Party. Bush, of Andover, Yale, Harvard and the Texas National Guard, came to office in hopes of imitating McKinley, who defeated Jacksonian style populism in building the modern Republican Party a c...

Lindy Li is a puzzle. She's been highly visible in the press since the election, characterized as a Prominent Democratic National Committee powerhouse fundraiser who has turned on the party following Harris's November loss, spilling what purport to be insider secrets. I'm not sure about this at all. Matt Margolis echoes the received line at PJ Media : Democratic donor and operative Lindy Li hasn’t held back in her critiques of the party. For weeks, she’s been relentless, taking aim at Kamala Harris for squandering a billion dollars, criticizing her selection of Tim Walz, and calling out her embrace of radical positions. Li has even provided intriguing insider details about how Joe Biden was ultimately ousted, and what Pelosi and Obama really think of Kamala. Now, she’s dishing on Joe Biden’s mental decline. The reference to "what Pelosi and Obama really think of Kamala" carries a link to another Margolis story at PJ Media : In a candid interview w...