Any time that money is spent in a richer-than-average state, e.g., via a federal handout to Harvard University or a Medicare/Medicaid purchase of pharma from California or New Jersey, America’s income inequality level is increased (and it’s already “a public health crisis” according to Stanford and “obscene” according to our best lawmaker).
We have tremendous inequality among U.S. states. Household income in California was $95,500 in 2023 dollars (Wokipedia) while Texas households enjoyed only $75,800 in income and in Mississippi the median household income was only $54,000. Who works to redress this inequality? Not the federal government, which keeps spending taxpayer money in the richest states, either directly (grants to universities, student loan subsidies, tuition subsidies) or indirectly (pharma and health care purchases).
But let’s consider Elon Musk. He has moved at least four companies from richer-than-average California to poorer-than-average Texas: Tesla, X, SpaceX, and The Boring Company. Is there anyone else alive who can be said to have done as much to reduce inequality among the states? If not, we must anoint Elon Musk as America’s Greatest Social Justice Warrior.
BBC:
The company is also getting an injection of $17.3m (£13.4m) from the Texas government to develop the site, a grant that officials say is expected to create more than 400 jobs and $280m in capital investment in Bastrop.
Although I can’t blame Elon for taking the state’s money, that last bit is upsetting to me as a 14th Amendment Equal Protection purist. Why is it acceptable for a government (state, in this case) to favor one business with tax breaks while hitting smaller and less-connected businesses with the full force of taxation. I would like to see all of these state programs eliminated so that 2-person company is on a more level playing field with a 2,000-person company.
All the manufactured homes look like housing for his domestic partners. He had to move a lot of jobs back to CA because the labor force doesn’t exist in TX.
“the labor force doesn’t exist in TX”
The “labor force” comes almost exclusively from India (72/73 in the 2009 PISA; ashamed to participate ever since) via F-1 OPT, F-1 CPT, H-4 EAD, and H-1B. If they can fly from India to California, why can’t they be flown from California to Texas?
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1875288289433055317.html
OK, here goes my mega-thread on H1B. This is my experience not only as a tech worker, but as a leader of large engineering teams. I work in at a large and well-known Silicon Valley tech company, and have been here for over 10 years. I’m tagging a bunch of people in hopes that people read and understand the magnitude and cause of the problem. @loganclarkhall @NeilMunroDC @elonmusk @anntensity @RyanGirdusky @amandalouise416 @njhochman @johnddavidson @schuttsm @truthteller_x1 @UnfiltdTruth @MrsDoubtFireSF @Aethelleas @AuronMacintyre @JackPosobiec @AnnCoulter @NumbersUSA @MarkSKrikorian
First of all, the scale of this problem. When I go to work, in Silicon Valley, it’s rare I see any Americans at all. Everyone, literally, is Indian, with a smattering of Chinese. Just recently I was at a meeting of all director and above leaders for my product, and I was the only one (of about 25) who was not Indian male. Picking a random senior director of engineering at random from our corporate directory, who is Indian, he has 36 US-based employees. Of them 2 are American, 2 are Chinese, the rest Indian. All of his bosses up to the CEO are Indian. This is not an outlier. This is a typical director and I could pick virtually any in our engineering org and see the same thing. If you walk into our San Jose cafeteria at lunch time, you’d think you’d been magically transported to Bangalore. You would see almost nobody but Indians. This stands in stark opposition to Elon’s absurd claim that it is “insanely hard” to migrate here. 1/9
We do have a large number of contractors from the body shops. However, my own team and the teams I work with are all full-time employees (FTEs.) These FTEs are not paid less than Americans. Their pay is based on title, grade, and location. A grade 5 H1B software engineer in San Jose is on a pay scale which is identical to a grade 5 American software engineer in San Jose. In fact, these H1Bs are paid more. They received relocation costs of around $25k to come to the US. They get thousands of dollars a year in visa expedite feeds, and legal fees paid by our company to Fragomen, the evil immigration law firm. They get a minimum one month of undocumented PTO to “work from India” each year. While they are “working from India” they are off-line and not working, thus it is PTO. I don’t get that month. They are also given huge bonuses compared to Americans. When we assign bonuses each year, we assign a percentage of their target bonus to give. A high performer can get more than his contracted bonus if I assign, say, 120%. (This is common, and we usually get extra budget.) I have assigned mediocre employees low bonuses only to see my Indian bosses override and assign much higher bonuses. One of my mediocre employees got 200% from the Indian execs, double his contracted bonus. I’ve never, ever (ever!) in 10 years seen an American assigned 200%. And yet it’s happened with multiple Indian employees, and it’s generally dictated by execs for their favorites. 2/9
Why are these people employed by the company when they are more expensive? There are a couple reasons. First, whenever we lose an employee in America we are told to backfill in India, because it is a fraction of the cost. Then, when the Indian employee is trained up on our products and processes, he asks to be moved to the US. I have never approved a relocation, but my Indian bosses insist on it. These relos happen on either L1 or just an H1B. Because we refuse to backfill Americans with Americans, we have created a pipeline of Indians into America. This also means there is a large cadre of foreign workers in the US trained on our products, and it is becoming hard to find non-foreign workers who are. The other reason is that the Indian mafia that runs our company practices invidious discrimination against Americans.
The Indians favor their own. As a hiring manager, I’ve been sent resumes many times by Indian colleagues of friends, always, in 10 years, ALWAYS for other Indians. When I tried to source a diverse candidate pool for a recent requisition, and was about to hire a diverse (i.e., non-Indian) candidate, my Indian exec pulled the budget from me. Meanwhile, another Indian leader in my organization had a req at the same grade level and closed it immediately by hiring an Indian buddy. As is always the case, the buddy had no expertise in the product or technology domain. They will hire Indians with no expertise and train them up, but never Americans. 3/9
Hallway conversations are always in Hindi. I have raised this to the executive level twice in director-and-above meetings. In both cases the execs (Indian) asked the team to speak in English. Literally the next day, my colleagues were speaking Hindi in front of me. Indians tend to only invite other Indians to meetings. They exclude those of us who are not Indian. (This is not just my personal experience, I’ve confirmed it with many other Americans). Then, when it comes time for performance reviews, your Indian boss will tell you that you are not “participating”. Indians are hyper-aggressive and rude, and if you come from a culture that values politeness, they will run all over you and then tell your boss you are not aggressive enough. Meanwhile, meetings run by Indians are catastrophic shouting matches which demonstrate the worst decision-making I’ve ever seen.
I had stellar performance reviews working under the handful of American bosses we have. I had a variety of company awards and recognitions. When I was finally transferred to an Indian boss, everything was taken away. My team was divided up and re-assigned to Indian managers, and I was given negative reviews for the first time in my life. 4/9
There are also a number of US universities that are participating in the scam. Our own company established a program to train people up in our technologies at a state university in the middle of nowhere in the midwest. Hey, we’re training Americans, that’s a good thing, right? In actuality, the professor running the program was Indian and used the program as a vehicle to bring in Indians on F1 visas. I’ve met dozens of graduates of his program, and every single one, without exception, was from India. 5/9
The idea that we are recruiting the top talent from other countries is absurd. We’ve seen product quality deteriorate rapidly. The foreign-born workers are incapable of writing clear or consistent documentation. Our release product contains spelling and grammatical errors in the user interface consistent with those Indians make. Our American customers are constantly complaining, our market share is plummeting, and yet we continue to hire more of this “top .1%”. The Indians certainly have enough education to code and do other technical tasks, but do so in a slipshod manner. They do only their own job, and don’t coordinate well with other teams. When we point out problems, they revert to the default mode of those reared in India—defensiveness. They refuse to admit there is any problem, and the more they are challenged and their shoddy work pointed out, the more they yell and scream. There is no introspection, no ability to learn from one’s faults. 6/9
In the time I have worked here I have met with the FBI, the CIA (although they use another name), the Army, the Navy, and many other major US government agencies. They all use our products in their critical infrastructure, and they select our company because we are “American”. We may be headquartered here, but virtually nobody building these products is actually American. I would point out that while Indians are by far the largest group of foreigners—and I would rank India as an economic enemy—China is the runner up. Chinese nationals are a significant portion of the H1B workforce. I also happen to notice that the Chinese I work with spend a lot of time “searching” internal web sites and are very useful for having documentation on all sorts of projects within the company. If I need confidential documentation on a product I’m not working on, I always ask a Chinese co-worker and they will have it. My previous company found an advanced persistent threat in its code. That is, the Chinese who were building our infrastructure product had infected it with hidden code that could be triggered by China. If we were to go to war with China, they would pull the plug on our computer systems and networks immediately, since they built much of them. Recent attacks like Salt Typhoon show this weakness, yet nobody every talks about the issue of H1Bs and foreigners building the products of companies that were explicitly called out as compromised. 7/9
Meanwhile, my white working class suburb is rapidly being taken over by foreigners, primarily Indians. In a just a few years, we went from 80% white to 40%, the difference being made up of Indians. Every house sells to Indians now. They have banned beef at neighborhood parties, and cricket is now taught at neighborhood schools. When I moved here, 10 years ago, I was surrounded by American neighbors. Now, when I walk outside, all I see is women in saris and men with third-eyes. They are not friendly at all, despite what Scott Adams says. They have moved in and rapidly displaced customs and culture that has been built here for decades, with their own. The whole neighborhood now reeks of curry. Other towns face similar fates. Growing up in the Bay Area, I knew many people from Fremont. They had names like Doug and Dave and Mike. Now, you’d be out of place in Fremont without a name like Ashish or Kumar. The city is entirely Indian. The new film “Didi” showcases the fact that Fremont has been taken over—the cast is non-American. The people who built these places have been displaced from their own homes, and are no longer treated as welcome here. 8/9
The Wall Street Journal editors probably don’t know any of this, as they sit in their nice homes in rich parts of Virginia or the Hamptons or wherever they live writing editorials in support of H1B. Elon Musk certainly knows better. Elon’s HQ was until recently in Fremont. Driving around he would have seen this. He knows the tech industry and what these companies look like. That makes Elon a bald-faced liar when he says it is “insanely hard” to migrate here. He knows that’s patently false.
The complete displacement of one people by another has many names. Colonization is a good one. Invasion is another. The H1B program is turning large swaths of America into suburbs of Uttar Pradesh. These people who are coming over do not care about you, about America, or about our history or customs. They just want to take over. They want your kids replaced by their kids. They want your culture replaced by their eight-armed gods. If we don’t do something drastic now, it will be too late. This means: ending birthright citizenship, cancelling H1B, rolling back green cards for Indian citizens, and sending people back to their home country. Go make India great again. That’s your home. This is mine.
And people are less willing to move for a job than they used to be.
Faucain Bargain, that is probably the single most scary post that I have seen on this blog. Unfortunately, I think the current administration will not help any more than the previous administration. Nobody in politics on the left or the right understands the complexities of supply chains and manufacturing, to get them to understand the complexities of AI, software and cloud services does not care about tariffs would be impossible. The oligarchs in silicon valley currently in power also do not understand because their profit depends on not understanding the problem. The right will force the H1Bs in the name of profits and the left will force the H1Bs in the name of diversity. No wonder most young males are siting baked on a couch playing video games. I am also seeing similar changes on a smaller scale in the tech workforce in Canada. We are living at the end of society as we know it and neither the right or the left will be able to do anything about it.
@Faucain Bargain, your story sounds far worse compared to my experience at my Big Company. On my team, nearly 80% of the team are based in India, and only about 10% truly demonstrate strong coding skills. Many cut corners, and when they hit roadblocks, they tend to remain stuck unless someone steps in to guide them — from the U.S. team. They often lack the ability to troubleshoot independently or write code with long-term maintainability in mind.
Code readability is another major issue. In my view, reading good code should feel like reading a well-written book, clear, and engaging. Sloppy, unclear code is like bad storytelling, it doesn’t hold up. And to top it off, test coverage is frequently ignored. Furthermore, running existing, before delivery, to make sure there is no regression, is usually skipped.
Lastly, there’s an odd emphasis on job titles, some take pride in titles they have not earned through their skill set or performance and will look down on those below them, big time!
@George A, I agree with your assessment about the relative incompetence of people whose country of origin is arguably the worst shithole on earth, if not in history, but what difference does it make now that Indians are in leadership hiring and promoting exclusively Indians irrespective of quality?
@FB: “When I go to work, in Silicon Valley, it’s rare I see any Americans at all. Everyone, literally, is Indian, with a smattering of Chinese.”
In my graduate Computer Science courses, thirty years ago at the University of FL, I was nearly always the only American-born student. One time, on the first day of class, a female Indian classmate asked me where I was from (I’m presuming, she was thinking somewhere in Europe). She seemed surprised when I answered, “America!”
Over a period of several decades, I spent a lot of time working in India and traveling in India and I have always found Indians to be polite, aggressive, yes, cunning, yes, but polite. I forgive some of the rough edges since they come from a difficult place and need to adapt to their environment. My guess is that after a generation or two here they will become quite American. I have also found that the Indians, at least the ones one is most likely to come in contact with, are more comfortable with English than Hindi and in fact more than half the country does not even speak Hindi – while about 200m Indians are fluent or native English speakers, second largest contingent outside of the US.
@jdc: You speak of “a generation or two.” You do realize that due to mass immigration WON’T BE A NEXT GENERATION OF ‘LEGACY’ NORTH AMERICANS: the CDC is reporting record low fertility in the US, and Canada is at 1.26 (1.00 in BC) as joyfully reported by {Akshay Kulkarni }:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/canada-lowest-ever-fertility-rate-1.7338374
So why would Indians (who don’t even assimilate among themselves due to culture & caste) become “quite American” if there are no legacy Americans to assimilate to? Are you comfortable with that outcome?
Should Elon Musk get an award for reducing inequality? Yes!
Not to mention he helped lay off thousands of highly paid DC bureaucrats (per capita income in DC is $250k, higher than any state), so their pay can stay in everyday America.
Being colonized and displaced is not fun. The majority of Toronto and area population is foreign born. Multiculturalism policies have eliminated Canadian culture through sheer numbers. And now we’ve elected everyone’s favorite globalist banker, Carney, as PM! P
Jan, sounds like Toronto (and Canada generally) has truly become a “shithole” country (using choice word from Faucian Bargain above). And from my perspective here in the U.S., it’s always been sort of a shithole (brutal socialist policies, essentially two mandated languages, and on and on…). Seems like the only province with any common sense is Alberta, where 20% of the population wants to join the U.S. as the 51st state (as per recent poll)!!
Jan, we feel your pain! Make Canadastan Great Again! Best of luck.
The following is an example of wrongthink:
Deport them ALL.
Cut the cord. No more internet connection. Toll that shit to hell. NUKE INDIA AND PAKISTAN AND IRAN if they get uppity.
Yo!!! Kristallnacht those redbeards the next time they look crosseyed.
they won’t wanna leave fast enough. Curries and towelheads too. Yo. You dotheads glom on citations 40 to one like she’s a norwegian tourist in Calcutta. And the last names usually are similar too!..
Oh yeah, you guya are brilliant mister dothead — everyone is always happy to hear that useless clipped polite as death tone — the one that says you are more monkey than human.
Uh Oh!!! HATE SPEECH!!! ADOLPH HITER. Gujurrait GOOGLE UBER ALLES!!!
DE-INDEX!!!!!
Oh, and the curries? Gone, gone, gone with the wind. Sorry, JD, but if you want to see your wife again it won’t be in America.
End Wrongthink.