Tom Etter was in the top 0.00001% as I am not but I at least had the ability to find someone like him on very limited information. Elon Musk doesnât even have my ability in this regard. DKE effect is multidimensional and in some dimensions it counts more than in others. For instance, I may not be able to compete in The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression of Human Knowledge, but I at least was able to intuit the value of such a prize criterion in objectively selecting for âmeritâ â and not just in AGI, as the fusion prize legislation I spearheaded in 1992 evinces. As much as people crow about Indians winning spelling bs and various subjective-judgement âscience contestsâ, only one Indian has taken an increment in the Hutter Prize out of 5 such awards thus far â let alone come up with the prize criterion that has now been borne out by ânext token predictionâ as the foundation of foundation models.
Muskâs successes, like those of all businessmen, havenât been in the military realm but in the civil realm which are coddled by the military*. His ping-pongs between âanyone who wants to work hardâ and âonly the top 0.00001%â evince the kind of âunsure footingâ described by Dawkins (see above) â not some well thought out strategic or even tactical maneuver. The hubris of his militant stand is waving the red cape before Trumpâs military base and may result in calling his bluff by taking down his data center. This Greek tragedy has a pretty obvious structure: His most immediate dependence is on the occupation of the Westâs central nervous system by H-1b. The kind of heroic intellect it would take to face this squarely requires a military background of the kind the US hasnât seen since WW II when Princeton grads were still putting their lives at risk.
*Erik Prince (as well as John Robb) may be the exception here⌠which is why I follow his comments closely on X.
Add:
edit: more readable format
Itâs LCA data.
John Derbyshire weighs in on the âlegalâ immigration eruption on X:
From 2017 by Eric Weinstein
Added:
Hereâs a good article (h/t @CTLaw):
I restructured the data from this article in (what I think) better way with ChatGPT, but didnât double-check it:
Here is the updated spreadsheet with the companies, their approved H-1B petitions in 2024, official URLs, and the number of employees in the USA:
| Company | Approved Petitions | URL | Employees in USA | Global Employees |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon | 3,871 | https://www.amazon.com | 1,125,300 | 1,540,000 |
| Cognizant | 2,837 | https://www.cognizant.com | 41,000 | 351,500 |
| Infosys | 2,504 | https://www.infosys.com | N/A | 343,000 |
| Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) | 1,452 | https://www.tcs.com | N/A | 612,724 |
| IBM | 1,348 | https://www.ibm.com | 282,200 | 311,300 |
| Microsoft | 1,264 | https://www.microsoft.com | 122,000 | 221,000 |
| HCL America | 1,248 | https://www.hcltech.com | N/A | 225,944 |
| 1,058 | https://www.google.com | N/A | 190,234 | |
| Capgemini | 1,041 | https://www.capgemini.com | N/A | 358,400 |
| Meta Platforms | 920 | https://about.meta.com | N/A | 66,185 |
| Deloitte | 891 | https://www2.deloitte.com | N/A | 415,000 |
| Apple | 864 | https://www.apple.com | N/A | 164,000 |
| Intel | 851 | https://www.intel.com | N/A | 131,900 |
| Accenture | 833 | https://www.accenture.com | N/A | 738,000 |
| LTIMindtree | 798 | https://www.ltimindtree.com | N/A | 90,000 |
| Tesla | 742 | https://www.tesla.com | N/A | 127,855 |
| Ernst & Young (EY) | 741 | https://www.ey.com | N/A | 365,399 |
| Goldman Sachs | 678 | https://www.goldmansachs.com | N/A | 45,100 |
| Wipro | 609 | https://www.wipro.com | N/A | 231,671 |
| Walmart | 654 | https://www.walmart.com | N/A | 2,100,000 |
The global number kinda makes you think about how many high-tech USA jobs every one of those H1Bâs at Cognizant/Tata/Wipro moves to India!
You have to account for the fact that an âapprovedâ petition simply moves forward to the lottery, where the odds of actual visa issuance is ~ 10%.
Towards the end of Trumpâs first term, he got a final rule through (much legal resistance) that replaced the lottery with a simple sort by salary, with preference to higher salaries. The flooding of the lottery with low salary applications is what makes it possible for the H1-B system to be gamed for cheap foreign âskilledâ labor.
Biden withdrew the rule immediately.
My late colleague Randall J Burns proposed (on vdare) an auction* system that would in effect function as a tariff on imported labor.
Does Trump have enough sense to do this given all his talk of tariffs and how wonderful they are?
I seriously doubt it. The fundamental game being played by India is importation of its much more highly evolved rent seeking culture to lock into place the network effect monopolies that are centralizing the harvest of the Westâs technological creativity. Even the best of our ruling class such as Trump are chumps in their view.
* Another benefit of such an auction: Estimate the value of US residence. In that article about H-1b Randy looked into such things as Hindu dowry enhancements for green card possession, which can be quite substantial.
Sorting H1B applications to prefer the higher-salaried jobs is essentially an auction, where the basis is the buyerâs assessment of the applicants value to the US economy. (Of course Biden killed it.)
I would also remove the barrier to job changes, as long as the new job is equal or higher pay.
Since reading Olivia Murrayâs piece in Am Thinker today, I feel like this whole debate is polishing silver in a burning house. She says 1100 anchor babies are being born per day. Over 400,000/ year. And weâre paying for it. Unless we get rid of birthright citizenship we are headed for a brave new world: the Third World. GOD I hope Trump can end it.
This was one of my points. It isnât a priority relative to stopping the invasion, anchor babies, DEI and ESG, cleaning house on the bureaucracy.
I fear the visa issues will be used to kill any immigration reform.
Use the tech bros to get done what we agree on.
Look on the bright side! According to the US National Debt Clock, each of those anchor babies and their then-anchored parents owes $106, 802. Assuming there are both mother and father, that is over $300,000 debt they are assuming on our behalf. Throw in the grandparents and all the uncles & aunts that the late very-unlamented Teddie Kennedy wanted to come in, and we are starting to talk about real money.
Letâs not worry about anchor babies â or even illegal immigrants. Letâs just start to insist on them paying their share of the National Debt up-front in cash.
The problem with salary alone as auction substitute is the lack of price discovery of the value of US residency. A major factor that Burns was trying to bring to light was immigration policy dilution of the value of US citizenship to US citizens. If you have a price tag on that you can start to compare the net assets of the general population in conventional financial terms to the undercover erosion of that value by immigration. Note I said âstart.â when you take a population that is largely in the hole in terms of net worth due to centralization of wealth by the 16th amendment and then you admit that they actually have a hidden financial asset which gets them out of the hole to positive value you might be able to estimate the point at which violence could break out due to theft of that value by those benefiting from lower labor costs from immigration.
My gut says that will be moot if we actually achieve the immigration pace the American people are currently insisting on. My gut also says that my recommendation is currently politically possible as a baby step, considering that Trump actually did it once already.
The left, with the help of perfidious republicans, got us into this mess one ratchet click at a time. Fortunately, the ratchet click of mass amnesty hasnât occurred in the past couple decades, so the parts that are currently illegal can be backed out purely with enforcement. The legal mechanisms will need a focused reverse-ratchet campaign.
Since when has what the American people insisted on mattered? Is this a âdemocracyâ or what?
Something like 4 out of 5 Americans are opposed to Political Correctness. How often do 4 out of 5 Americans agree on anything? And yet we have been getting Wokeness crammed down our throats for years. Only about 10% of Americans think that Congress is worth as much as a tinkerâs damn, and yet CongressCritters sit there quite comfortably growing personally richer ⌠knowing that they are more likely to die in office than to be voted out.
I am fully supportive of your views on immigration matters, by the way. But it does not appear that our elected officials and our unelected bureaucrats care what We the People think.
NEW - Asylum seekers arriving in the Netherlands become a burden on the state for generations, a new study has found.
âThe negative contribution is especially large for asylum seekers from Africa and the Middle East,â say the authors.
This could be because:
a. People can be opposed to something, but it is not important enough swing their vote.
b. People are unaware of what their representative is voting for or against.
c. In this particular case I wonder if PC is driven by politics. I think they do behind the scene by funding stuff.
I think political correctness is driven by what Nassim Taleb called something like the tyranny of the minority. An insistent minority will drive issues. Ninety percent of the audience might enjoy a joke, but 10% will boo and cause a ruckus. Most people will not push back on the 10%.