Free Republic

The most viewed conservative commentator on YouTube is Steven Crowder with his channel, Louder with Crowder. His fans love his politically incorrect jokes. He also sets up a table at college campuses, invites people to debate, and airs the debate unedited. One such video, titled, "There Are Two Genders: Change My Mind," has been viewed 40 million times. Students don't change Crowder's mind, but he has a fair conversation. Crowder won't change my mind, either -- (I believe gender can be on a spectrum) but in my new video, Crowder says he was influenced by me. Louder With Crowder, he...

It’s clear that President Trump has kept his promise to be tough on China. But as we take on China’s unfair trade policies and secure our supply chains, we must also do more to preserve America’s technological and military dominance over China. We can start by stopping them from stealing our sensitive technology. Last year, the nonprofit C4ADS released a report detailing the extent of China’s massive government effort to use private Chinese firms to steal technology for its military. The report exposed how a publicly traded company on the Shenzhen stock exchange, Highlander Digital Technology Co. Ltd., manipulated legal channels...

We are never going to sell people on allegedly conservative principles that end up making conservatives less free. After all, when we sell conservatism, we are selling freedom, in contrast to the perpetual soul-killing tyranny offered by leftist ideology. So, the idea that conservative principles require us to defer to the growing oppression of the left because it is delivered through the medium of allegedly private corporations is nonsense.Don’t want none? Don’t start none. That’s one of my conservative principles. The corporations started it, and now it’s our right – our duty – to finish it.The fussy Bow Tie Boyz...

It's no secret that firms such as Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple have extraordinary levels of power and influence. For example, most voters (55 percent) believe that Facebook has too much power. To some in the political world, this is a problem that only government intervention can solve. But, that's not the way the public sees it. There is very little public support for breaking up the tech companies or having the federal government regulate the platforms. That reluctance comes partly from the reasonable fear that giving such power to federal bureaucrats would make things worse rather than better. Additionally,...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's testimony on Capitol Hill is merely the latest round in an ongoing power struggle between official Washington and the tech industry. It's a struggle that stems from a core reality identified years ago by Harvard's Nicco Mele. "The devices and connectivity so essential to modern life put unprecedented power in the hands of every individual." Empowering individuals is great for everyone except for those elite officials who used to wield more power over the rest of us. "Radical connectivity is toxic to traditional power structures." As Mele describes it, smartphones and other tech innovations have led...

The ink was barely dry on Dell’s acquisition of EMC, the largest technology deal ever, valued at $67 billion when it was announced in October last year – and already the layoff rumors are oozing from the woodwork.snip But Dell needs to save some money, one way or the other. Dell’s corporate credit rating is at the upper end of junk. It’s loaded to the gills with debt, stemming from when it was taken private. Now the EMC deal has piled new debt on the company, including $20 billion of bonds it sold in May, followed by a $5-billion leveraged...

For about a decade and a half, I have heard horror stories of Indian IT outsourcing. I have not seen the horror stories become realized -- for the most part, the crap you get out of Indian offshore IT is, well, crap. It is not crap because of their skill, in some cases. I have found that while 65% of Indian IT 'professionals' overstate their skill, the remaining 35% can do the job. The issue is the cultural differences. In the case of most Indians, some 90%, they will do EXACTLY as you ask. And that is their downfall. Americans...

Cisco Systems Inc is laying off about 14,000 employees, representing nearly 20 percent of the network equipment maker's global workforce, technology news site CRN reported, citing sources close to the company. San Jose, California-based Cisco is expected to announce the cuts within the next few weeks, the report said, as the company transition from its hardware roots into a software-centric organization. Apart from Cisco, two other big software companies, Microsoft Corp and HP Inc, have also announced job cuts this year.Microsoft said in July that it would lay off about 2,850 jobs over the next 12 months, taking its total...

OUR SILICON VALLEY ROBBER BARONS08.10.16 11:00 PM ET Today’s Tech Oligarchs Are Worse Than the Robber Barons Yes, Jay Gould was a bad guy. But at least he helped build societal wealth. Not so our Silicon Valley overlords. And they have our politicians in their pockets. A decade ago these guys—and they are mostly guys—were folk heroes, and for many people, they remain so. They represented everything traditional business, from Wall Street and Hollywood to the auto industry, in their pursuit of sure profits and golden parachutes, was not—hip, daring, risk-taking folk seeking to change the world for the better....

When the Indian outsourcing upstarts came on strong five years ago, it looked as if some giants of the $600 billion tech services industry would fall like top-heavy palm trees in a Category 4 hurricane. The Indians' combination of high quality and super-low cost flattened the stock prices and revenues of companies such as EDS (EDS ), BearingPoint (BE ), and Capgemini. Even mighty ibm (IBM ), the No. 1 tech services player, has struggled to rebound. One Western company has come through stronger than ever, though—and it did so by motoring straight into the eye of the storm. Accenture...

HONG KONG — One Chinese technology company receives crucial technical guidance from a former People’s Liberation Army rear admiral. Another company developed the electronics on China’s first atomic bomb. A third sells technology to China’s air-to-air missile research academy. Their ties to the Chinese military run deep, and they all have something else in common: Each Chinese company counts one of America’s tech giants — IBM, Cisco Systems or Microsoft — as a partner. Such links, which are generally not well publicized, are now at the center of a debate among some in the American defense community, including former United...

<p>As a patriotic and proud citizen of the United States, I have a story to share that has not only impacted my family, hundreds of colleagues, but also current and future United States workers.</p> <p>As I watched the grim faced Disney Executive, it was obvious that bad news was going to be delivered. The dead silence was broken when the Disney Executive made a harsh announcement. All of you in this room will be losing your jobs in the next 90 days. Your last day of employment for this company will be January 30, 2015. Your jobs have been given over to a foreign workforce. In the meantime you will be training your replacements until your jobs are 100 percent transferred over to them and if you don’t cooperate you will not receive any severance pay. Also, if we don’t feel confident that we have captured everything that you do we can, at our discretion, keep you longer than the 90 days until we have captured everything that you do with this job. Don’t discuss this meeting with anybody else in the company. Everybody in the room was appalled at the message. I was completely silent thinking how this was going to affect my coworkers and how I was going to break the news to my wife and children back at home as I was the only person in my home with a steady job. How would I pay for all the expenses that go along with a home, a wife, and children?</p>

[...] Yet many studies suggest that the STEM shortage is a myth. In computer science and engineering, says Hal Salzman, an expert on technology education at Rutgers, "the supply of graduates is substantially larger than the demand for them in industry." Qualcomm is not the only high-tech company to be aggressively downsizing. The computer industry, led by Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, cut nearly 60,000 jobs last year, according to the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The electronics industry pared an additional 20,000 positions. [...] As we've reported, the majority of H-1B visas go not to marquee high-tech companies such as...

FBI Director James Comey fired back on Wednesday at Silicon Valley companies that are calling for stronger encryption of their products. "Some prominent folks wrote a letter to the president yesterday that I frankly found depressing," Comey said in a discussion at Georgetown University Law Center, referring to a letter signed by Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and other companies, as well as civil-liberties groups and Internet-security experts. "Their letter contains no acknowledgment that there are societal costs to universal encryption." There can be benefits to securing devices from hackers, Comey acknowledged, but he argued there are also "tremendous costs" to...

NEW DELHI: President Barack Obama has assured Prime Minister Narendra Modi that he will look into India's concerns on the H-1B visa issue as part of his comprehensive immigration reform, US officials said on Monday. Obama told Prime Minister Modi that his administration would be in touch with the Indian government on issues related to H-1B visas, popular among Indian techies. "I think what the President indicated is this is the type of issue (H-1B) that we have approached through the context of comprehensive immigration reform and so, given his ongoing efforts to work with Congress in pursuit of comprehensive...

IT pros and executives break down the most sought-after technology skills for 2015. As technology continues to become an increasingly vital part of how we do business, the race is on to secure top-notch talent in IT skill positions that will not only keep the organization running through 2015, but lay the groundwork for secure and successful expansion in the coming year and beyond.In its annual IT Forecast report, Computerworld surveyed 194 technology executives about the technical job roles they’ll be looking to fill in 2015 – here we present their findings, identify the hottest IT skill sets in each...

Foreign high-tech workers are taking American jobs and making Silicon Valley's diversity problem worse, Rev. Jesse Jackson said in a Fortune interview. "There are Americans who can do that work, and H1B workers are cheaper and undercut wages," Jackson said, referring to the class of visas most often used by tech workers.

Delegates from some of the valley’s most powerful companies gathered Wednesday with the Rev. Jesse Jackson to tackle a problem far more nuanced than battery life, traffic growth or user engagement: the lack of diversity in their ranks.

The House of Representatives Judiciary Committee voted last week to admit more high-tech foreign workers in some categories than the annual supply of them. In its eagerness to meet the wishes of the high tech industry — and steal jobs from qualified American workers — the Republican majority on the committee, with the single, commendable exception of Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), voted to allow as many as 55,000 green cards to be issued annually to aliens with advanced science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) degrees from American universities. It also voted to increase the existing H-1B quota for such workers...

Kelly Parker was thrilled when she landed her dream job in 2012 providing tech support for Harley-Davidson's Tomahawk, Wisconsin, plants. The divorced mother of three hoped it was the beginning of a new career with the motorcycle company. The dream didn't last long. Parker claims she was laid off one year later after she trained her replacement, a newly arrived worker from India. Now she has joined a federal lawsuit alleging the global staffing firm that ran Harley-Davidson's tech support discriminated against American workers — in part by replacing them with temporary workers from South Asia. The firm, India-based Infosys...