AI, Surveillance, And Curing What Ails Us

A lot of people, I think, get a lot wrong about security and AI. Twenty years ago, when I was briefly involved in the Dartmouth alumni trustee movement, I participated in online discussions among students and alumni that taught me a lot. I discovered that a major complaint among conservative students was that they had to swap electronic ID cards to get in and out of the dorm buildings. They felt this was a restriction on their freedom.

I had a career spent partly on the road, and I thought that electronic key cards in hotels were a major advance in traveler safety. Why would anyone object to something like this? Well, they didn't like the idea that someone could look up where they'd been and when they'd gone in and out.

I tried explaining that a record like that could actually be in their favor -- in an age of unsubstantiated rape accusations, for instance, it could prove you weren't in someone's dorm when they claimed you were. They still didn't like it, and I was beginning to get a feeling it was based on a sense of elite entitlement. I soon enough lost interest in the alumni trustee movement. Alumni trustees weren't going to fix the Ivy problem.

Sundance at Conservative Treehouse is raisimng what I think are related issues with the surveillance state, but his concerns are mostly reasonable.

The concern we have is about the “surveillance state” and the creations of the Silicon Valley tech bros that are building out tools that can easily be weaponized as the contracts with the U.S government are fulfilled. President Trump will not weaponize them, but the existing tools and the DHS track and trace enhancements being built by the tech team are threats to liberty.

. . . What we have researched with Elon Musk carries many of the same background datapoints and nuance. Musk takes popular positions to cover for some very un-MAGA proposals; the H1B issue is just one facet. Overall, a technological system of surveillance and control by a few tech oligarchs is well underway.

Sundance links to an article from last September about Musk's silent partner Larry Ellison, Billionaire Larry Ellison says a vast AI-fueled surveillance system can ensure 'citizens will be on their best behavior'. One thing the article gets wrong is that it assumes these things are in the future; in fact, they're here now.

Walking down a suburban neighborhood street already feels like a Ring doorbell panopticon.

But this is only the start of our surveillance dystopia, according to Larry Ellison, the billionaire cofounder of Oracle. He said AI will usher in a new era of surveillance that he gleefully said will ensure "citizens will be on their best behavior."

There's no future tense about it -- such systems are widely in operation, but why aren't we already on our best behavior? For instance in New Orleans:

The New Orleans Office of Homeland Security boldly protects communities by operating the city’s state-of-the-art, 24/7 Real-Time Crime Center (RTCC). This nerve center proactively monitors locations across the city using advanced technology to provide critical intelligence to first responders in real time.

Opened in 2017 as part of our agency’s $40 million Citywide Public Safety Improvement initiative, the RTCC stands on the cutting edge based on global security best practices for local, state and federal public safety leaders. Analysts access hundreds of CCTV and ShotSpotter feeds while coordinating response logistics down to exact addresses of incidents including crimes and quality of life issues.

Instead of a citizenry cringing in fear of Big Brother, we simply have an increasingly empowered lumpenproletariat, which the surveillance systems struggle to keep up with. A recent episode of the A&E show Homicide Squad New Orleans covers two random and seemingly unrelated street killings that police discovered were committed by a single perp.

Det. Walter Edmond responds to a homicide in Central City, where a young woman named Cayla Kelley has sustained multiple gunshot wounds and is found dead in the street. . . . Edmond is led to a primary suspect named Earl Simmons. Edmond collects surveillance footage that places Simmons at the crime scene with Cayla and issues an arrest warrant. A few days later, a ballistics match shows that the murder weapon that killed Cayla, killed another innocent victim named Eddie Matthews. This piece of evidence breathes new life into Det. Jameson Diesburg’s investigation, who once feared the case would go cold.

The New Orleans RTCC's role in making the footage of two separate shootings in two separate areas quickly available to the detectives was mentioned only in passing. Surveillance footage from traffic cameras, business and home security systems, and doorbell cams has become an important investigative tool. The broad ability of AI technology to consolidate access to such footage is already working to improve law enforcement capability.

The probolem is that right now,things are falling apart. Public spaces and public transit are unsafe. For instance,

Barriers to protect bus drivers have been installed on [Los Angeles] Metro's entire fleet, the transit agency said Tuesday.

The barriers are designed to protect drivers. In April, the Metro board approved an emergency procurement motion to accelerate the installation following an uptick in crime on the Los Angeles transit system, some of which targeted drivers.

. . . The completion of the barrier installation comes at the end of a year that saw several high-profile crimes involving Metro, including a bus hijacking in September in which a passenger was shot and killed. That bus was equipped with a safety barrier designed to prevent a hijacker from approaching the driver and taking control of the bus.

The deadly hijacking was about six months after another Metro bus was commandeered by an armed man in downtown Los Angeles. That bus collided with cars and eventually slammed into the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. The bus driver and a woman in a car struck by the bus were injured.

For now, we can only begin to infer the connection between illegal immigration and increased crime, which primarily affects low-income and minority populations. The public expectation is clearly that Trump will move quickly to reduce the rapidly expanding criminal class, and some form of enhanced data correlation will need to be used to identify aliens with criminal records, locate them, and remove them. I would say that by and large, these methods already exist; the issue is the political will to employ them. It appears this also exists now as well.

Sundance is correct in his assumption Trump won't weaponize these capabilities. In addition, the political process has already demonstrated that weaponizing these capabilities is unpopular. For now, I think the prospect of usimng AI-related capabilities to improve the current public environment outweighs the potential danger.

Trump Can't Take Office Soon Enough

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 amounted to $2.4 million.

Additionally, Wilson’s stock and options awards were at $11.2 million, increasing 6% from $10.6 million in 2021 and remaining at the board’s target level of 775% of salary.

So heck, we can be pretty sure he's got a bunch of expensive cars, a private jet, a vacation home in Aspen or Hawaii or wherever -- that's just routine, why flaunt those? Insead, flaunt your expensive beliefs!

Fans tuning into the Sugar Bowl were incensed by a statement made by Tom Wilson, the chairman, president and CEO of The Allstate Corporation, where he talked about Wednesday's terrorist attack moments before kickoff.

. . . 'Welcome to the Allstate Sugar Bowl,' Wilson's speech began. 'Wednesday, tragedy struck the New Orleans community. Our prayers are with the victims and their families.'

'We also need to be stronger together by overcoming an addiction to divisiveness and negativity. Join Allstate working in local communities all across America to amplify the positive, increase trust, and accept peoples imperfections and differences. Together we win.'

The reaction to that message was not well received in any medium, including on social media.

According to Zero Hedge:

Some questioned who exactly the comments were supposed to be aimed at given that the only ‘divisiveness’ and ‘negativity’ on display was that which motivated Jabbar to carry out his heinous attack.

. . . Allstate previously triumphed their advocacy for DEI policies in a year end report, boasting about how the company employed a declining number of white men.

I did some other searchi9ng on Tom Wilson, especially to see if anyone noticed his toupee. Yup. In 2020:

Tom Wilson wouldn't know a roof rating if it slapped his toupee off his head.

(A roof rating classifies roof construction for fire resistance, an insurance-related concept.) Or this:

Tom Wilson is old & very outdated. His thought process & ideas are antiques! Its not just TW it’s all the Sr leaders, VPs, directors. . . . Tom Wilson is an over paid, bad toupee having dinosaur!! Time for a change with new younger fresh minds!!!

The feeling seems to have been for some time that Wison is out of touch, and in areas outside his utterly conventional views on diversity. In any case, Allstate apparently felt the need to clarify, not a good sign:

To be clear, Allstate CEO Tom Wilson unequivocally condemns this heinous act of terrorism and violence in all forms. We stand with the families of the victims, their loved ones and the community of New Orleans. The reference to overcoming divisiveness and negativity reflects a broader commitment to fostering trust and positivity in communities across the nation.

It sounds, at least for now, as though his poaition at Allstate is secure -- but nobody at that level wants controversy. Allstate shouldn't have had to issue a non-clarifying clarification. This is starting to look like a corporate crisis approaching Bud Light's partnership with Dylan Mulvaney.

We'll have to see how Allstate manages it, if it does at all. The problem is that Allstate is already unpopular, and Wilson isn't an attractive figure.

"We Need Kash Patel NOW!:"

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 wasn't done in this case -- if nothinng else, the grammatical error should have been corrected up the chain. The woman who read the release might have been winging it, got nervous, and flubbed the line she was trying to read, but that's another problem.

Law enforcement agencies have a position called "public information officer" or PIO. This may be part-time, as-needed, but news organizations have that person in their Rolodex, and cops or agents on the street know to refer any inquiries from the press to the PIO. For a street officer or agent to try to wing it with a reporter would be a disciplinary issue. The PIO in turn is selected for his or her judgment, tact, and poise when information like this has to be released.

So first, the FBI's initial announcement had a grammatical error. It isn't so much a reflection on the individual agent, Alethea Duncan, as it is on her chain of command, which either didn't catch the error in the draft phase, or it put Duncan up without being confident in her poise under pressure. My sense is that the head of the FBI New Orleans field office should have made the announcement in any case, not a low-level agent.

The next problem is that the announcment said, flat out, “This is not a terrorist event", which was almnost imnmediately contradicted by the fact that the perp had an ISIS flag on his rented truck. This was definitely somethng that higher-ups who should have approved the statement would normally have caught. If they didn't know, they should have said they didn't know. Standard "can't confirm" wording is normally part of every senior bureaucrat's vocabulary.

Finally, the nose ring. I went searching the web for any guidance on whether the FBI has a policy on body piercings. The closest I came was a reddit thread, What are your guys’ department’s/agency’s rules on piercings/tattoos?

Wondering if I can hear specific examples beyond just it having to be professional. Especially hoping to hear from anybody at FBI/DEA/HSI/USMS. I’m assuming certain things aren’t allowed most places, like septum piercings, but wanted to know if anyone had any concrete examples of what was/wasn’t allowed.

As far as I can tell, nobody indentified thenselves as FBI in replying, likely out of prudence. A few identified themselves as Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) with answers like this:

If HSI has a tattoo policy then I've never seen it. I feel like most HSI agents have at least one tattoo, I definitely know some with hand and head/neck stuff going on but no face tattoos. Obviously tattoos showing affiliation with any hate group or gang would be a problem.

I think there are restrictions against certain piercings while in training but that's for safety reasons. Don't want someone's finger going through you gauge while rolling on the mat!

A "gauge" is a large, open piercing of the earlobe. It looks like the FBI doesn't much care if you have a nose ring or not, or maybe they'd even rather you have one. I discovered, though, that policy in local police departments is typically against any sort of facial piercing, for instance:

It is the policy of the Conway Police Department to present a professional image and appearance to the public. In order to maintain this professional image and appearance, restrictions will be placed on tattoos and body piercings.

. . . Members shall not wear any item of ornamentation in their nose, eyebrow, tongue or any other location of their body that is visible while functioning in a law enforcement capacity. Female members are authorized to wear earrings however, they will be limited to two (2) per ear.

This strikes me as entirely reasonable, even to the extent that a male officer is apparently not allowed to wear earrings. This particular department allows wedding rings, but others don't for safety reasons. I would think there would also be safety-based arguments against facial piercings, since officers do sometimes get into situations where perps will bite, scratch, gouge eyes, grab noses, ears, and so forth while being placed in custody, and facial piercings could exacerbate any potential injury.

Another post on the reddit thread above says,

I know an ATF agent with gauges that actually wears them and some HSI guys who have the piercings but never wear them so they closed up. I can't remember anyone with a septum piercing. I know an HSI agent with a tongue piercing.

I've never heard any positive comments about any of these piercings.

The best I can conclude is that well-run state and local law enforcement agencies have policies designed to project an image of professionalism, as well as concern for officer safety. For whatever reason, federal agencies don't seem to have equivalent policies, and it's now affecting their image of professionalism. The problem in the New Orleans case goes beyond the individual agent, Alethea Duncan. Her chain of command was responsible for the poorly worded statement with a clumsy grammatical error, and they should have had a designated PIO with more poise to give the properly worded and spproved text.

It does look like the FBI needs a purge, but it has to be at the upper levels.

H1B As Boondoggle

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 intelligible. This has presented practical problems for companies that want to outsource their programming to both Indian and Filipino contractors.

So we're beginning to move into corporate boondoggle territory. The CIO and the CEO can cook up a bright idea of laying off the US IT workers and outsourcing them to India and the Philippines, and it might look really good to the Board, but it turns out the Indians and the Filipinos can't understand each other, and the whole thing becomes unworkable -- except nobody is allowed to mention it, because racism.

If you add China to the mix, it's worse, because mainland China doesn't have a colonial legacy of English use, and Chinese learn it only in school from teachers who mostly haven't practiced it in an English-speaking country. A company that brings in Chinese H1B workers has a much bigger problem. The HR department has a good solution: don't mention it, because racism.

I worked for a company that for a time was a major IBM competitor. Their business model was to buy up software companies who were about to go under, and some of them even had the same business model before they themselves were about to go under, so they were already a big agglomeration of obsolescent and buggy products. That, after all, was why they'd been struggling in the first place.

We'll call this company Technical Associates, or TA. TA mostly rebranded the same products from the smaller comnpanies and simply sold each newly acquired product to its expanding customer base as a part of a bundled discount. You already have Product A -- we can now offer you our new Products B, C, D, and E, which you previously had to buy separately from these now-absorbed companies that have become TA, as a single, discounted package. Such a deal!

The problem was that all those companies that offered the old products were failing because those products were obsolescent and buggy. But TA, as a discount operator, wasn't going to put money into updating those products or fixing the bugs. On the other hand, they had to look like that's what they were doing, or the customers wouidn't buy what they were selling, the stuff (and for that matter, TA) had a bad reputation already.

Through various transfers and reorganizations, I wound up working for TA as a field rep or field engineer, that is, someone who went to the customer site and installed or troubleshot their products. There was a great deal of troubleshooting to do.

I was told by my bosses that the products did indeed have bugs, but the programmers who fixed the bugs had priorities, and I needed to be patient (in fact, they never fixed bugs at all). But my job was to go to the customer sites, listen to what the customer said, identify the problems, call in the bugs to the support center, and get a ticket number. This was in actuality an endless charade, but that's 90% of any job, right?

Both the programmers who suipposedly fixed the bugs and the support reps at the call center who took your call and gave you a ticket number were almost all H1B-type foreign workers, whatever their specific immigration status. The ones from Pakistan spoke the best English and seemed the most cooperative and sympathetic. The Chinese were a different story.

I was flying all over the country to visit customer sites. In one case, I'd been working all week on one stubborn problem and having a hard time getting the call center even to admit it was a problem. It was Friday afternoon, I had a plane to catch, and I was being stonewalled by a Chinese support rep who was slow-walking the whole procedure. "We not golng rush. We do all steps. You run test H37Z?" I began to realize it was to her advantage to speak bad English, that slowed things down even more.

I ran out of patience "By the way," I asked her. "How long have you been in the US? Why is your English still so bad?"

I was in a lot of trouble for that the following week, racist devil, hate Chinese people. But that wasn't the real problem. The poorly-spoken foreign reps at the call center were just a smokescreen to cover up for the fact that the company wasn't going to spend the money to fix the bugs. I began to understand a little better how complicated the whole H1B scenario is. The foreign workers aren't necessarily even there to save money, there are lots of other payoffs. If nothing else, they're simply there to make everything just a little more complicated and just a little harder to figure out. Musk and Ramaswamy can't be that naive.

After I left TA, some whistleblowers went to the SEC, and TA's CEO went to federal prison for securities fraud. I'm convinced the foreign workers made the scam just that little bit harder to detect.

I'm Still Confused

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 workers we hire for these same jobs don't even need a four-year degree? I've worked in IT departments with H1B visa colleagues from India, the Philippines, Israel, Russia, and probably elsewhere who worked interchangeably in jobs with US citizens without bachelors' degrees. (And the US workers all spoke understandable English.) One question in my mind is whether the H1B people even actually had bachelors' degrees, which goes to Elon Musk's admission over the weekend that the system as it exists is "broken", which is at least a step in the right direction.

But here is Roger L Simon, with degrees from Dartmouth and Yale, a detective novelist and political commentator with approximately zero tech experience -- I'm not even sure if he's ever worked in a cubicle environent -- weighing in on the subject:

The H1-B has been misused by a number—we don’t know exactly how many but we should—in order to clerk at the likes of 7-Elevens rather than perform complex scientific tasks for which domestic personnel were not available.

Further, companies have been using this as a source of cheap labor.

I have, however, heard this last contradicted by my own daughter who works in hiring for a major tech company that will be nameless for family protection. (I guarantee you would recognize it.) Her job is to recommend H1-B candidates from across the globe. She assures me her company saves no money from this (the ancillary costs are high) and only does it after exhausting domestic possibilities.

His daughter (Did she go to Skidmore? Wellesley? What was her major?) works for human resources, not IT, and she's full of the purest moonshine. She would never admit complicity in a system that even Musk now acknowledges is broken and corrupt, and indeed, human resources departments are among the chief culprits who've put us where we are -- don't the company DEI coordinators work just down the hall from his daughter? But unperturbed, he continues,

Writing this all down has convinced me this is indeed nothing but a kerfuffle of the most minor sort that has been taken up by the media ad nauseam in recent days.

We just need to make a few tweaks and it'll be fine. After all, Tesla, Wernher von Braun, Fermi, blah blah blah!

But far more importantly, do something about our educational system. That’s the sputtering dragonfly in the ointment. Then we will have plenty of qualified people domestically. The H1-B program at that point might even be phased out.

But isn't he missing another important point here? The US born workers who are filling the critical IT jobs don't have four-year degrees, they do just fine without them. The HR departments where his daughter works, on the other hand, are more picky about who gets promoted to higher-level jobs. Yeah, they probably still need four-year degrees like the people in HR have (what do you suppose their majors were, by the way?).

And why do we see story after story about four-year college enrollment declining? For instanace, in The Guardian earlier this month:

College enrollment is dropping at a “concerning” rate, according to new data.

Data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center shows enrollment of 18-year-old freshmen has dropped by 5% this fall semester. The data reflects enrollments reported for 1.4 million 18-year-old freshmen as of 31 October 2024.

The decline is most significant at both public and private, non-profit four-year colleges, which have seen a more than 6% decline in enrollment. For 46 states, Inside Higher Ed noted, the average drop was almost 7%.

The answer seems to be that people aren't seeing the value in a four-year degree. So why are we seeking out people from India,the Philippines, Russia, wherever, who supposedly have them, to do the same jobs that US workers without them do just fine? If they can't find enough US workers without four-year degrees to do jobs that don't need them, maybe, er, they could pay the US workers more and give them better conditions. I'm confused.

H1B vs 80-20

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 Francisco, Oakland, and Hayward area is made up of 50 percent foreign-born tech workers. Up to 99 percent of foreign H-1B visa workers imported by the top eight outsourcing firms arrive from India.

The piece gopes on to quote 2015 remarks from Trump:

“We graduate two times more Americans with STEM degrees each year than find STEM jobs, yet as much as two-thirds of entry-level hiring for IT jobs is accomplished through the H-1B program,” Trump wrote.

This conflates several issues. In my experience, US-born workers at the coding or other hands-on level in tech generally don't have four-year degrees, in STEM or anythng else. It's worth noting, though, that a requirement for an H1B visa is that the foreign applicant hold a bachelor's degree. I would say that employers over several decades have decided those aren't necessary, and outside of certain highly specialized areas, the degree they want is an MBA -- but that's not for coder-level workers.

All I can think is that the employers are also discounting the value of any bachelor's degree anywhere, or they're finding ways around the requirement.

So the image of H1B workers displacing US-born people with four-year degrees just isn't accurate, and the problem there is less a question of foreign workers displacing US-born ones with degrees than it's a question of the declining worth of a four-year degree. Four-year degrees aren't needed for the work the employers have available, and probably never have been.

Consider the level of skill carpenters, masons, draftsmen, and machinists have always had to demonstrate without four-year degrees. Hands-on tech jobs are at that level. The basic question goes to whether workers at that level can have a middle-class lifestyle. For much of the 20th century, they could, without four-year degrees. What we're beginning to see is the grand failure of the social experiment that expanded demand for a four-year degree.

On the other hand, the people who claim substituting workers from Asia who are paid less than US-born workers depresses wages overall have a real point. But added to that is that H1B visas are a form of indentured servitude, whereby a person was oblgated to work for an employer in exchange for passage to the colonies, which represented the potential for advancement in the new environment.

The servitude is enforced in this modern environment by the fact that under an H1B visa, if you lose your job, you lose your immigration status. Thus H1B workers have a powerful inducement to do things that US-born workers won't, including working unpaid overtime, putting up with workplace abuse, doing what they're told, and so forth -- and just as important, even if they display exceptional talent, they aren't a threat to mediocre bosses, since they're only in their jobs for six years and can be replaced when their visas expire.

This not only depresses wages for US-born workers, but it keeps their working conditions low, and it limits their ability to find new jobs if they're competing with other H1B workers in the job market.

But there's another factor involved, the so-called "80-20 rule", the intuitive observation that 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people. Given the indentured conditions of the H1B visa, those workers are almost guaranteed to be among the 20% of top performers --they have incentives to keep their jobs that US-born workers don't necesssarily have. A US-born worker can simply update the resume, tell the boss to go to hell, and find a new job. If an H1B worker quits, it's back to Bangalore.

And consider all the factors that let the 80% low peformers keep their jobs. DEI has been, and continues to be, a major factor. So is regression to the mean and the incentive among all workers, including the supervisors, to keep the curve low. Then there's sleeping with the boss. I don't think I ever worked in an office environment where this wasn't taking place, and not just a little bit. Consensual sleeping with the boss is a major unspoken problem.

So I can't really disagree with Elon and Vivek, looking at the situation from Mahogany Row, that H1B is a way around the 80-20 rule, but in doing that, it lowers working conditions for everyone. Remember that Henry Ford's great insight was that if he wanted to sell cars, he needed to make the workers who built them prosperous enough to buy them for themnselves.

There needs to be a major reform of incentives. In part, this won't take place until the Savior returneth; how the wicked proper is a subject for the psalmist. But the job is nevertheless to restore justice for the workers, and leaving H1B in its current state won't help.

Prescott Bush As Finpol

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 noblesse oblige.

By the early 1900s, following the example of the Rockefellers, the object of the finpolity was to keep a low profile and generally stay out of the news, not least to avoid assassins and kidnappers, but also just to stay clear of damaging publicity. I suspect that most of the families Lundberg identified in his various books would have preferred not to be mentioned and envied the Bushes -- by 1968, for instance, George Bush pere was simply an obscure Texas congressman. However, neither Prescott nor his son George completely avoided accusations of shadowy connections. According to Wikipedia,

In 1988, The Nation published an article alleging that [George H W] Bush worked as an operative of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the 1960s; Bush denied this claim.

In the 1930s, Prescott's name surfaced in connection with the so-called Business Plot or Wall Street Putsch, "a political conspiracy in 1933, in the United States, to overthrow the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and install Smedley Butler as dictator".

In July 2007, a BBC investigation reported that Prescott Bush, father of U.S. President George H. W. Bush and grandfather of then-president George W. Bush, was to have been a "key liaison" between the 1933 Business Plotters and the newly emerged Nazi regime in Germany, although this has been disputed by Jonathan Katz as a misconception caused by a clerical research error. According to Katz, "Prescott Bush was too involved with the actual Nazis to be involved with something that was so home grown as the Business Plot."

Nazis? According to Britannica, this involved Brown Brothers Harriman, Prescott's company:

BBH’s association with the German industrialist Fritz Thyssen, which continued even after the start of World War II, would taint its reputation. Similarly infamous was the Union Banking Corporation (UBC), a BBH asset managed by Bush that transferred funds, bonds, gold, coal, oil, and steel to Nazi Germany during its military buildup. In 1942 the U.S. government, under the Trading with the Enemy Act, seized UBC and other German-affiliated BBH assets, but Bush was never found guilty of a crime, and the affair would neither prevent Averell Harriman from becoming the Democratic governor of New York nor have lasting political ramifications for Bush or his progeny.

It's possible to make too much of this. Germany was a major part of the European economy, and all US companies had involvement there after Hitler came to power, much like they have stakes in China now. But I noted yesterday a passage in a New Yorker piece that also referred to Prescott's involvement in funding a project for the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA's predecessor. It's also difficult to tell when Prescott's connection with Averell Harriman began. He and Harriman were from the same social background, and both were at Yale in the 1910s, where both were also members of the Skull and Bones secret society. By the early 1920s, Prescott's father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, was president of the Harriman bank.

By the time of World War II, when Prescott was also at BBH, Harriman was heavily involved in Allied diplomacy and strategic planning as Roosevelt's emissary.

Harriman served as ambassador to the Soviet Union until January 1946. When he returned to the United States, he worked hard to get George Kennan's Long Telegram into wide distribution.[13] Kennan's analysis, which generally accorded with Harriman's, became the cornerstone of Truman's Cold War strategy of containment.

From April to October 1946, he was ambassador to Britain, but he was soon appointed to become United States Secretary of Commerce under President Harry S. Truman to replace Henry A. Wallace, a critic of Truman's foreign policies. In 1948, he was put in charge of the Marshall Plan. In Paris, he became friendly with the CIA agent Irving Brown, who organised anti-communist unions and organisations. Harriman was then sent to Tehran in July 1951 to mediate between Iran and Britain in the wake of the Iranian nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.

By this time, Harriman wasn't just involved in intelligence, he was driving intelligence at the policy level. By the early 1950s, both Harriman and Prescott Bush began to seek elective office. Harriman was elected Governor of New York as a Democrat in 1954 but was defeated for re-election by Nelson Rockefeller in 1958, one of many juxtapositions of finpol families in electoral competition. Prescott ran for the US Senate as a Republican in 1952 and won; he was re-elected in 1958 but declined to run again in 1964.

Business Insider quotes Jacob Weisberg's The Bush Tragedy (2008) in summing up Prescott Bush's political influence on George H W and Dubya:

His passion for politics, of course, trickled down to future generations of Bushes. Weisberg writes that, while George H.W. Bush never worked on any of his father's campaigns, he watched closely. He inherited his father's sense of duty.

"Prescott Bush established three essential myths that Bush men lived by," Weisberg writes. "The first is: I made it on my own. The second is: I'm not really rich. The third is: I'm running to serve my country."

But, in the spirit of Prescott Bush, this nevertheless leaves a great deal unsaid. How much was Prescott involvred in Averell Harriman's intelligence activities? How far was Prescott able to place his son George in CIA related activites? In particular, by the time George was named CIA Director in 1976, he'd had fairly minimal public involvement in intelligence -- he was a member of the US House from 1967-71; UN Ambassador from 1971-73; Chair of the Republican National Committee 1973-74; and Chief of the U.S. Liaison Office to the People's Republic of China 1974-75, prestigious jobs, but not necessarily a worker bee at the policy level.

What else had he been doing suddenly to become the chief spymaster?