Fixing the visa program is a thing that can be done to improve things across the board. Punishing individual companies that the executive "arbitrarily" chooses is dictator shit.
You can be a democratically elected dictator. A dictator is defined by the powers they possess, not by the process by which they obtained power.
There is an ongoing argument in the US that a person was elected, therefore everything they do after that has the blessing of the electorate. Funny thing though, the people don’t really have a crystal ball to see into the future how their elected official will decide betray the country in the name of a “mandate”.
Why would he suddenly act in any way that wasn't self interest when has yet to do so? Sorry but this guy is hands-down the most corrupt official in American history. The notion that we should assume he's ever doing anything for any reason besides his own corrupt benefit is total nonsense.
You still haven’t answered why you think the job of the President of the United States is protecting jobs for foreigners instead of protecting jobs for American workers.
Marketing for people still in the reality distortion field where these policies are coherent, constructive, or ultimately beneficial to our country.
These policies are cargo cult echos of what would have worked in the 1990's. Perot was right. But you can't simply put the toothpaste back in the tube, right? In the reality of the 2020's, these policies merely bring economic destruction and subsequent consolidation. It's the same exact class that ran the "free trade" con of the past thirty years, now on to their next ruse.
There is a reason Grump is called "nation builder" in China - that is where the creative part of creative destruction is happening.
This merely sounds like a way of absolving yourself of responsibility. It is also not the least bit constructive, if you actually care about our country.
And it is not really applicable to the crux of my point! The corporate class championed some actions, which are now resulting in more "consequences" that continue to benefit themselves? Who would have thought?!
And also, why is the refrain always "Obama, Obama, Obama" ? I didn't vote for that guy either.
You are stating an opinion. My point is that the administration is doing exactly what they were elected to do. This is what the people want.
This is better than the alternative: Kakala was promising you to protect the workers all the while being asleep at the wheel with millions of illegals across the border.
So your opinion, while interesting, is irrelevant. (Mine is too, FWIW). You just disagree with the electorate.
"You just disagree with the electorate" isn't a particularly novel insight when the overall point is that the electorate has made a large unforced error based on a siren song of feel good emotional populism. And while we can kind of detach and go "that's a herd of idiots for ya!", lifting that dynamic into the intellectual realm of discussion merely so you can continue gloating about the destruction isn't actually a logical argument, right?
I'm not particularly interested in engaging with your "Kakala ... illegals" security blanket. Harris was at least going to continue flying the plane (regardless of my not liking its destination), rather than being the gremlin on the wing bringing it down. That so many people voted gremlin just shows how out of touch and entitled we've become. Surprise, it's a long way down - enjoy the Chinese century that you're enthusiastically ushering in, I guess.
As the old saying goes: Don't blame me, I voted conservative.
Maybe you think Trump (34 counts of felony fraud for the purpose of concealing another crime, attempted election fraud, rampant insider trading, using the powers of his office to persecute political enemies, creating a secret police force to provoke riots, deploying the military against US cities, aggressive attempts to consolidate power in the executive, etc) is just a man of the people but clearly the CEOs didn’t think so or they wouldn’t have done all that embarrassing groveling at the whitehouse.
Several notable dictators came to power through elections or through the existing legal appointment process. Of course it's more common for a dictator to come to power through a revolution, military coup, or civil war, but the way a political figure originally came to hold their political position is not really relevant to determining whether they are a dictator.
While I agree with you, (1) this thread was started when someone argued that Trump isn't a dictator because he was democratically elected and (2) it's _extremely_ difficult to remove a US president from office--so hard that it has never happened.
Not quite. That guy was appointed chancellor by the President after his political party won the most seats (still a minority) in two parliamentary elections that year. He had in fact lost the presidential election earlier that same year against the incumbent who ended up appointing him chancellor.
> the way a political figure originally came to hold their political position is not really relevant to determining whether they are a dictator
True, but Trump is a dictator because why? Because you disagree with the 77,304,296 people who elected him? Because he cracks unfunny jokes about running for re-election? Because he's corrupt? We've had corrupt Presidents before, but a dictator to me is someone who won't leave office. We do have a precedent of, despite the Jan. 6 looney toons (that he encouraged) trying to stop it, and despite all his dumb baseless lawsuits, Trump hopping on the helicopter and handing over power as scheduled. To me, that's the clear dividing line between an egomaniacal clown and a dictator.
I don't agree with a LOT of his 'policies,' (honestly sometimes describing his whims as policies is overstating it) but I would say the specific one being discussed here is not one of those open-and-shut dumb ideas. There are plenty of unemployed software engineers right here in the U.S. right now, and any US businesses saying they need H1Bs for most of those roles are full of crap.
Trump is not really a dictator due to constraints outside his control, but he certainly behaves as if he wants to be one, and this is the result: it's hard for people to believe that policy moves (or whatever you want to call it) like this are being motivated by a real concern for American workers rather than personal pique or corruption, because not only have so many of his moves been transparently motivated by personal pique and/or corruption, but he's also been restructuring the government in plain view to enable his personal pique and corrupt interests to dictate policy.
The Anthropic thing is the same: we can argue until we're blue in the face about whether the designation as a supply chain risk is legitimate based on Anthropic's policies and actions, but Hegseth is such a vain, insecure clown that any decision like this is suspect.
In short, Trump may not have achieved his dream of dictatorship, but he runs the parts of the government he has control of like a dictator would, and this has done terrible damage to the federal government's legitimacy.
> this has done terrible damage to the federal government's legitimacy.
I think one of the core issues here is that reactionary media has been creating this exact kind of reputational/institutional damage for decades (cf Obama is going to take your <blank>). So reactionaries don't see the damage as a new thing, but just something more like "now it's finally happening to them too". Of course the reality is that the former was mostly corporate propaganda (based on some legitimate concerns, but propaganda nonetheless), while now Grump is actually destroying our institutions. Which, if seen, is further rationalized by things like "they were corrupt anyway". Of course this is decidedly not a "conservative" position, but they've been mainlining the kool aid for a long time.
I mean that, you're either saying he wasn't democratically elected, or that this move doesn't help domestic labor. The first is objectively false, and the second is covered in the most basic college economics courses.
Immigrants spend money and grow the market for goods produced by native-born Americans.
All these things are good for domestic labor. There is no reason to believe immigration is bad for American workers. Not everything is zero-sum, and that's basic economics.
This is all true and it's referring to immigration generally. This is a specific type of immigration so let's talk about that specific type and not every other type.
This is immigration to staff augmentation body shops that are doing $150k/yr programming jobs with the company taking 25% off the top. It's not "immigrants starting businesses," it's not "the economy overall" it's targeting immigration suppressing the wages of a specific sector.
Maybe. I haven't seen that proven. I can easily imagine that making the US technology sector function more efficiently leads to higher employment. The fact that the US is home to all of the big tech companies is a boon to American employees, and this form of immigration is a boon to the big tech companies.
> Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the narrow majority that limits on independent spending from corporations and other outside groups equate to limiting their speech and thus violate the First Amendment.
So basically corporate donation is corporate opinion is protected under the First Amendment
>> Democratically elected officials acting in the interest of domestic labor
> Can you really say this with a straight face about trump?
On this particular issue? Yes. On immigration and trade specially, Trump seems to be genuinely far more in tune with domestic labor than any president since Carter. It's a big reason why he was elected.
Since Reagan until Trump, the political class of both parties seemed quite happy to aggressively ignore the interests of domestic labor, in favor of ideology peddled by capital-aligned economists.
Has Microsoft done much toadying? I don't recall seeing their name appear in many of the articles about tech CEOs and companies debasing themselves at Trump's feet. I've seen plenty about brown-nosing from Apple and Facebook and Amazon and obviously Musk, but I don't remember seeing much about Microsoft. I wonder if that lack of ingratiation is part of why MS is being targeted here but the other large tech companies aren't? Or maybe I just missed it.
When you think about it, they're just dictators of their own companies. They're used to everyone doing as they say with little resistance. And of course, the first set of interests they're incentivized to look out for is their own through share grants.
They thought "hiring" a guy like them to be President would mean having a sympathetic ear for all sorts of issues that keep them from "unlocking value for shareholders", but forgot that sympathy has no place in business.
As for H1B, it's been abused and can be used to make the people in the US on that visa an indentured servant. There's definitely reforms that need to be made, and an interest in hiring people from the US that needs to be taken up, but as with all things, the guy doing it is too contemptible of a leader to look past.
You think tech ceos care? Come on, this is a great way to weaken labor across the industry. Threaten current immigrants with literal concentration camps, threaten Americans by condemning them to homelessness + death while massive attacks to welfare programs continue unabated.
What do you think happens when you lose your ability to provide for shelter or healthcare for yourself? Go talk to people that are now homeless because they lost their jobs.
Lay offs are a potential death sentence, there is a very real reason why suicides increases track nearly 1-to-1 with unemployment rates.
That's the dice roll you have in this country as a worker.
I'm not tracking how you think getting of this particular visa program "weakens labor" when what it will actually do is strengthen labor by decreasing labor supply and increasing individual bargaining power of workers.
Democratically elected officials acting in the interest of domestic labor <> tech CEOs burned by a dictator
Fixing the visa program is a thing that can be done to improve things across the board. Punishing individual companies that the executive "arbitrarily" chooses is dictator shit.
You can be a democratically elected dictator. A dictator is defined by the powers they possess, not by the process by which they obtained power.
There is an ongoing argument in the US that a person was elected, therefore everything they do after that has the blessing of the electorate. Funny thing though, the people don’t really have a crystal ball to see into the future how their elected official will decide betray the country in the name of a “mandate”.
Yeah, I think the parent may not be aware that Hitler was democratically elected.
It's genuinely crazy to think that anything Trump does is for any interest but his own
What is “his interest” in protecting American jobs?
Why would he suddenly act in any way that wasn't self interest when has yet to do so? Sorry but this guy is hands-down the most corrupt official in American history. The notion that we should assume he's ever doing anything for any reason besides his own corrupt benefit is total nonsense.
You still haven’t answered why you think the job of the President of the United States is protecting jobs for foreigners instead of protecting jobs for American workers.
I never said it was, why would I answer that?
Marketing for people still in the reality distortion field where these policies are coherent, constructive, or ultimately beneficial to our country.
These policies are cargo cult echos of what would have worked in the 1990's. Perot was right. But you can't simply put the toothpaste back in the tube, right? In the reality of the 2020's, these policies merely bring economic destruction and subsequent consolidation. It's the same exact class that ran the "free trade" con of the past thirty years, now on to their next ruse.
There is a reason Grump is called "nation builder" in China - that is where the creative part of creative destruction is happening.
Obama already told you that actions have consequences.
This merely sounds like a way of absolving yourself of responsibility. It is also not the least bit constructive, if you actually care about our country.
And it is not really applicable to the crux of my point! The corporate class championed some actions, which are now resulting in more "consequences" that continue to benefit themselves? Who would have thought?!
And also, why is the refrain always "Obama, Obama, Obama" ? I didn't vote for that guy either.
You are stating an opinion. My point is that the administration is doing exactly what they were elected to do. This is what the people want.
This is better than the alternative: Kakala was promising you to protect the workers all the while being asleep at the wheel with millions of illegals across the border.
So your opinion, while interesting, is irrelevant. (Mine is too, FWIW). You just disagree with the electorate.
"You just disagree with the electorate" isn't a particularly novel insight when the overall point is that the electorate has made a large unforced error based on a siren song of feel good emotional populism. And while we can kind of detach and go "that's a herd of idiots for ya!", lifting that dynamic into the intellectual realm of discussion merely so you can continue gloating about the destruction isn't actually a logical argument, right?
I'm not particularly interested in engaging with your "Kakala ... illegals" security blanket. Harris was at least going to continue flying the plane (regardless of my not liking its destination), rather than being the gremlin on the wing bringing it down. That so many people voted gremlin just shows how out of touch and entitled we've become. Surprise, it's a long way down - enjoy the Chinese century that you're enthusiastically ushering in, I guess.
As the old saying goes: Don't blame me, I voted conservative.
Maybe you think Trump (34 counts of felony fraud for the purpose of concealing another crime, attempted election fraud, rampant insider trading, using the powers of his office to persecute political enemies, creating a secret police force to provoke riots, deploying the military against US cities, aggressive attempts to consolidate power in the executive, etc) is just a man of the people but clearly the CEOs didn’t think so or they wouldn’t have done all that embarrassing groveling at the whitehouse.
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Unfortunately the democratically elected part is mostly true.
Several notable dictators came to power through elections or through the existing legal appointment process. Of course it's more common for a dictator to come to power through a revolution, military coup, or civil war, but the way a political figure originally came to hold their political position is not really relevant to determining whether they are a dictator.
The more rational distinction between a dictator and a non-dictator is not how they came to power but how they can be removed from power.
While I agree with you, (1) this thread was started when someone argued that Trump isn't a dictator because he was democratically elected and (2) it's _extremely_ difficult to remove a US president from office--so hard that it has never happened.
Not quite. That guy was appointed chancellor by the President after his political party won the most seats (still a minority) in two parliamentary elections that year. He had in fact lost the presidential election earlier that same year against the incumbent who ended up appointing him chancellor.
> the way a political figure originally came to hold their political position is not really relevant to determining whether they are a dictator
True, but Trump is a dictator because why? Because you disagree with the 77,304,296 people who elected him? Because he cracks unfunny jokes about running for re-election? Because he's corrupt? We've had corrupt Presidents before, but a dictator to me is someone who won't leave office. We do have a precedent of, despite the Jan. 6 looney toons (that he encouraged) trying to stop it, and despite all his dumb baseless lawsuits, Trump hopping on the helicopter and handing over power as scheduled. To me, that's the clear dividing line between an egomaniacal clown and a dictator.
I don't agree with a LOT of his 'policies,' (honestly sometimes describing his whims as policies is overstating it) but I would say the specific one being discussed here is not one of those open-and-shut dumb ideas. There are plenty of unemployed software engineers right here in the U.S. right now, and any US businesses saying they need H1Bs for most of those roles are full of crap.
Trump is not really a dictator due to constraints outside his control, but he certainly behaves as if he wants to be one, and this is the result: it's hard for people to believe that policy moves (or whatever you want to call it) like this are being motivated by a real concern for American workers rather than personal pique or corruption, because not only have so many of his moves been transparently motivated by personal pique and/or corruption, but he's also been restructuring the government in plain view to enable his personal pique and corrupt interests to dictate policy.
The Anthropic thing is the same: we can argue until we're blue in the face about whether the designation as a supply chain risk is legitimate based on Anthropic's policies and actions, but Hegseth is such a vain, insecure clown that any decision like this is suspect.
In short, Trump may not have achieved his dream of dictatorship, but he runs the parts of the government he has control of like a dictator would, and this has done terrible damage to the federal government's legitimacy.
> this has done terrible damage to the federal government's legitimacy.
I think one of the core issues here is that reactionary media has been creating this exact kind of reputational/institutional damage for decades (cf Obama is going to take your <blank>). So reactionaries don't see the damage as a new thing, but just something more like "now it's finally happening to them too". Of course the reality is that the former was mostly corporate propaganda (based on some legitimate concerns, but propaganda nonetheless), while now Grump is actually destroying our institutions. Which, if seen, is further rationalized by things like "they were corrupt anyway". Of course this is decidedly not a "conservative" position, but they've been mainlining the kool aid for a long time.
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Which part is incorrect?
I mean that, you're either saying he wasn't democratically elected, or that this move doesn't help domestic labor. The first is objectively false, and the second is covered in the most basic college economics courses.
>the second is covered in the most basic college economics courses.
You realize the courses don't stop at basic, right?
It is well-established that immigration (legal and otherwise) is good for the economy overall. Skilled immigrants are good for US businesses.
https://kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/permanent-residency-rule...
Immigrants start businesses at twice the rate of native-born Americans.
https://www.congress.gov/118/meeting/house/116727/documents/... (page 1, though the citation has gone down the memory hole)
Some immigrants are complementary to native-born American workers rather than being in competition.
https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/page-one-economics/2...
Immigrants spend money and grow the market for goods produced by native-born Americans.
All these things are good for domestic labor. There is no reason to believe immigration is bad for American workers. Not everything is zero-sum, and that's basic economics.
This is all true and it's referring to immigration generally. This is a specific type of immigration so let's talk about that specific type and not every other type.
This is immigration to staff augmentation body shops that are doing $150k/yr programming jobs with the company taking 25% off the top. It's not "immigrants starting businesses," it's not "the economy overall" it's targeting immigration suppressing the wages of a specific sector.
Maybe. I haven't seen that proven. I can easily imagine that making the US technology sector function more efficiently leads to higher employment. The fact that the US is home to all of the big tech companies is a boon to American employees, and this form of immigration is a boon to the big tech companies.
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If you zoom out it's closer to, "this is an outrage. My billionaires were supposed to buy that election!"
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereksaul/2024/10/30/kamala-har...
Yes and this is why the US is a oligarchy not an autocracy (yet)
Corporate political donations and opinions should be outlawed
What is a "corporate political opinion?"
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citi...
> Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the narrow majority that limits on independent spending from corporations and other outside groups equate to limiting their speech and thus violate the First Amendment.
So basically corporate donation is corporate opinion is protected under the First Amendment
Citizens United was an awful, anti-democratic decision, regardless of which side "your" billionaires are on.
>> Democratically elected officials acting in the interest of domestic labor
> Can you really say this with a straight face about trump?
On this particular issue? Yes. On immigration and trade specially, Trump seems to be genuinely far more in tune with domestic labor than any president since Carter. It's a big reason why he was elected.
Since Reagan until Trump, the political class of both parties seemed quite happy to aggressively ignore the interests of domestic labor, in favor of ideology peddled by capital-aligned economists.
Has Microsoft done much toadying? I don't recall seeing their name appear in many of the articles about tech CEOs and companies debasing themselves at Trump's feet. I've seen plenty about brown-nosing from Apple and Facebook and Amazon and obviously Musk, but I don't remember seeing much about Microsoft. I wonder if that lack of ingratiation is part of why MS is being targeted here but the other large tech companies aren't? Or maybe I just missed it.
Trump will award Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella the National Medal of Technology and Innovation at the White House today.
Brown nosing would be if Satya was awarding Trump the award
When you think about it, they're just dictators of their own companies. They're used to everyone doing as they say with little resistance. And of course, the first set of interests they're incentivized to look out for is their own through share grants.
They thought "hiring" a guy like them to be President would mean having a sympathetic ear for all sorts of issues that keep them from "unlocking value for shareholders", but forgot that sympathy has no place in business.
As for H1B, it's been abused and can be used to make the people in the US on that visa an indentured servant. There's definitely reforms that need to be made, and an interest in hiring people from the US that needs to be taken up, but as with all things, the guy doing it is too contemptible of a leader to look past.
You think tech ceos care? Come on, this is a great way to weaken labor across the industry. Threaten current immigrants with literal concentration camps, threaten Americans by condemning them to homelessness + death while massive attacks to welfare programs continue unabated.
The only ones who lose are the workers.
This is an insane comment. How does this "threaten Americans by condemning them to homelessness + death?"
What do you think happens when you lose your ability to provide for shelter or healthcare for yourself? Go talk to people that are now homeless because they lost their jobs.
Lay offs are a potential death sentence, there is a very real reason why suicides increases track nearly 1-to-1 with unemployment rates.
That's the dice roll you have in this country as a worker.
I'm not tracking how you think getting of this particular visa program "weakens labor" when what it will actually do is strengthen labor by decreasing labor supply and increasing individual bargaining power of workers.
TDS...