Elon is our friend currently: buying Twitter, supporting and giving money to Trump, moving to Texas, divesting out of California
Edit: I don’t mind giving work visa to Chinese engineers who already work for Tesla. There are worse scenarios from India.
Prediction if Trump wins: he will negotiate a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine.
Trump will ignore Germany and the other members who have not paid their 2 percent. Aid to Ukraine should not count towards the 2 percent membership fee.
He will tell Zelensky or his replacement that Ukraine will never join NATO.
A person I know in Latvia says the 2 percent contribution is not a written provision but a verbal agreement. I told him you are not a treaty lawyer and verbal agreements must be enforced. Every member is delinquent except for 5… 27 of 32 members do not pay their fair share
Thank you for that link, Mettelus. Lyn Alden is a highly perceptive lady – well worth following.
Her graph of US industrial production per capita is very interesting – a steady increase coming out of the Great Depression until about the year 2000, and then stagnation. I would hypothesize that the break actually started in the 1970s with the establishment of the EPA and the subsequent explosion in regulation. That started to throw sand in the economic gears – but there is a lot of ruin in a nation, and it took a quarter of a century for the impact to become apparent. Since then, we have had another quarter century of stagnation. Now today we find the US slipping down all the international comparisons, physically unable to make the consumer products we want or the medications we need.
Years ago, I worked for a very interesting gentleman whose thesis was that the human mind could not easily comprehend anything that happened too fast or too slow. His company was focused on using visualization technology to speed up fast processes and slow down lengthy processes so that they could be observed in a period of about 2 to 5 minutes … ideal for human comprehension.
If we could apply that technology to the US economy, it would be clear where we went wrong half a century ago. Sadly, there is no painless way of getting back on track. Yet continuing on the current path leads at best to Argentinian poverty & stagnation, and at worst to total collapse.
It was extraordinary innovative for nearly one hundred years. I don’t know what the count currently is but they had developed over 50,000 products. Granted many of these products are not significantly different from each other. But they have thousands of products that are significantly different. The last 15 or 20 not so good. Well let me clarify that. If Google is considered innovative, then 3M is still innovative.
Although economic impact and industrial production are directly relevant consequences, I maybe took this off the original post topic. I will start a new topic.
Lyn Alden has a venture fund for bitcoin related startups. She is prominent in the bitcoin community.
She wrote a book about the history of money.
Her newsletter is informative.
She has a background in engineering
We’re toast.
Maybe but we have not exhausted all options
You’re right, of course, but at this point, which options do you think have a snowball’s chance?
@Mettelus thinks it’s immigration. He knows the company and industry.
Immigrants are fine if they work and stay out of trouble and can read and write English
I like it for scanning the market overview box of metrics such as CPI and prime rate etc
No, it was a separate story in the news at around the same time:
My theory is that Johnson got hands-on information, but Vance was just getting the Russian disinformation about the state of Christianity in Ukraine.
Me too - that’s why I attached an organized transcript of Vance’s speech in my post.
You know, we are consistently falling into a leftist trap here with our use of language. The people coming across the southern border are NOT immigrating - they are invading. Now, surely, if we want to approach that number of actual immigrants, we could gear up and do it by creating an orderly process and expediting the ridiculous legal immigration process in existence. If we want massive immigration, that should be determined. We, as citizens, should decide and if yes, vet everyone entering. The feds should not be conducting stealth night flights of hundreds at a time to airports throughout the country. These are NOT IMMIGRANTS! Please stop calling them that.
I completely agree and I should have been clearer and more specific. Illegal immigration is a deal breaker. We need to close the Mexican border.
@Mettelus created a separate discussion about filling vacancies at his former employer in SD or MN. I don’t have a problem with H1B work visas as long as they don’t go to companies in California especially Silicon Valley and as long as the recipients are NOT computer programmers from India.
Here is the new discussion:
EDIT: I omitted NOT accidentally above
Are you serious? Do you not think that this will profoundly change the nature of society (and probably not for the better)? I guess we can expect a whole lot more of this then (cringe alert):
If this is the great American program now, I’m totally out—actually, I’ve been “out” for a while now, so I guess doesn’t matter. Bring on the H-1Bs!
I forgot to include NOT
Terrible mistake and accident
Work visas have been abused by Silicon Valley and India
What a difference a three-letter word can make! 
Hahaha…I experienced a moment of cognitive dissonance without the “not”…it wasn’t consistent with your previous comments. Balance has finally been restored to the force.
Thank you for recognizing that my initial mistake was inconsistent with my previous comments.
NOT consistent with my previous comments
lol
That Sikh prayer by Harmeet Dhillon was cringe… I’m surprised she agreed to it… I actually like Harmeet, she is a conservative lawyer who has represented covid dissidents and defended conservatives from left wing lawfare… Very disappointing
If she had simply recited it in English, I think it would have been acceptable. It was first giving it in another language that made it cringeworthy.
Personally, I think Emma Thompson did similar, but better.
In a bit of a feedback loop, one issue is in hiring managers. Not wanting to pay qualified US citizen managers, companies would write a discriminatory job requirement based on somehow being able to culturally relate to the lower level H1B employees. And then they hire a manager on an H1B. That manager then illegally discriminates in hiring lower level H1B candidates (either preferring that manager’s countryfolk, generally or, in the case of India, fellow caste members).