In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

NEW: Allstate CEO Tom Wilson says Americans need to overcome their "addiction of divisiveness" and "accept people's differences" following the terror attack in New Orleans. If only Shamsud Din Jabbar had heard this message two days ago! The comment was made at the start of the… pic.twitter.com/WDPWZhPrru — Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) January 2, 2025 One thing I'm hoping for is that the national mood will stop tolerating the ostentatious display of luxury beliefs. As of 2023 , Allstate CEO Tom Wilson collected $15 million in total compensation in 2022, down from $19.1 million in 2021. Citing the company’s proxy statement filed with the SEC, Crain’s Chicago Business reported that the decrease in compensation was largely due to the annual cash bonus paid for a single year’s operating performance, which came in at 58% of Wilson's target bonus. Since that target is three times his salary, which sat at nearly $1.4 million last year, the bonus ...

Hold up. An FBI Agent with a nose ring who can barely speak coherent English sentences told the media that a terrorist driving a truck with an ISIS flag killing 10 Americans is NOT a terrorist attack!?! Seriously. listen to this We need Kash Patel NOW! pic.twitter.com/v2sjeJ2bcH — Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) January 1, 2025 The tweets in response to this one on the thread definitely weren't unaninmously in agreement. Some didn't see anything wrong with a nose ring, while others thought an obvious grammatical error was OK, since she was clearly nervous or something. I've never been a public spokesman, but I'm broadly familiar with policies over statements to the press, and from what I see here, several things aren't quite right. First, any public statenment made to the press concerning an incident like this is normally drafted with some care and produced in writing to be approved up the chain of command. It can't be otherwise. As far as I can tell, this was...

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...