Posted on 12/28/2024 6:39:57 PM PST by conservative98
There’s a raging debate on X right now about H1B visas and Vivek Ramaswamy is getting slammed for suggesting American culture is bad and thus can’t product high level talent that top tech companies want.
Let’s start back from the beginning:
THE HILL – Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, co-chairs of President-elect Trump’s new “Department of Government Efficiency,” are defending the tech industry’s reliance on foreign-born engineers as the incoming Trump administration prepares to crack down on immigration.
Musk and Ramaswamy both pointed to a lack of engineers stateside.
“The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” Musk wrote in a Wednesday post on his social platform X.
When another user suggested the Tesla and SpaceX CEO was denying opportunities to Americans, Musk argued that the poster’s understanding of the situation was “upside-down and backwards.”
“OF COURSE my companies and I would prefer to hire Americans and we DO, as that is MUCH easier than going through the incredibly painful and slow work visa process,” the tech billionaire said. “HOWEVER, there is a dire shortage of extremely talented and motivated engineers in America.”
This is where Ramaswamy steps into it, blaming tv shows that promote ‘mediocrity’ on a culture that can’t product top talent:
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if we’re really serious about fixing the problem, we have to confront the TRUTH:
Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and likely longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.
A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.
A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers.
(Fact: I know *multiple* sets of immigrant parents in the 90s who actively limited how much their kids could watch those TV shows precisely because they promoted mediocrity…and their kids went on to become wildly successful STEM graduates).
More movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”
Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.
Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest.
“Normalcy” doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.
This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken from slumber before & we can do it again. Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.
That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence. I’m confident we can do it.
This didn’t go over well with everyone…
Even Nikki Haley chimed in, saying there is nothing wrong with American culture…
The press secretary for DeSantis also suggested the problem isn’t American culture, but mass immigration and quoted Governor DeSantis:
Vivek isn’t wrong that we have a problem with American culture but it’s not what he suggests. It isn’t TV shows and movies that produce mediocrity. No, this has a lot to do with the breakdown of the family, with the inability or unwillingness of parents to push their children to excel academically instead of endlessly playing video games or sitting in front of a TV. Also many of our schools have big problems producing excellence as well. But I think it all starts with the breakdown of the family, ie. fatherless children and single mothers working multiple jobs to make ends meet while their children are at home doing whatever they want. And this is a product of the Godless left.
But that being said, I don’t know how much that really plays into this problem of top-level talent. It may have some effect, but I also agree with fact that mass immigration is a big culprit, in that it provides the cheap labor that companies want. This is a battle we’ve been fighting for decades, not just against the left, but against the Chamber of Commerce types in the Republican party for decades who want the left’s version of immigration so they can reap the benefits of cheap labor.
Look, I have never disagreed with merit-based immigration, especially when it comes to top level talent. We want the best and the brightest no matter where they are from as long as they are willing to assimilate. But we want it on our terms.
Let me quote the Great Mark Levin from over a decade ago:
"And what do we the people want? We want our border secured. And let me go even further. Let me make it absolutely clear to every foreigner outside this country.
This country belongs to us; it doesn’t belong to you. It doesn’t belong to the 7 billion other people all over the world.
You see the way it’s supposed to work is we decide who gets to come here. We decide the standards. We decide the requirements. We want to know who you are. We want to know what you’re going to – (ready for this one?) – contribute to this society, not take from this society.
You see because I want to make it very very clear to the left, to the media and even some ‘Repubicans’ and even some TV and radio hosts.
There’s nothing compassionate about the downfall of America! There’s nothing compassionate about the hollowing out of our society! There’s nothing compassionate about bankrupting our children and grandchildren, destroying our school system, destroying local law enforcement and hospitals, what’s been built up over 200 years.
It’s one thing to export our viewpoints, our economic ideas, our governing ideas. But it’s quite another to import the views, the culture and the destitution of the third world. Because that is national suicide. And any thinking person who is not playing politics, who’s not a demagogue, who’s not a propagandist, any thinking person regardless of party, ethnicity, or anything else knows I’m right!
This isn’t about voting as far as I’m concerned. This isn’t about pandering to this group or that group as far as I’m concerned. This is about preserving what’s left of this Republic."
If these two foreigners come from cultures where education and hard work is superior to America’s, why weren’t their empires built in their native countries?
You’re not tall enough for the ride.
This is the typical hype hucksters use to get intellectually enferbled, easily manipulated people to blindly invest money.
Read up on what Musk said about the cost/lb to get stuff to orbit is still 1,000 (or was it 2,000) times too high to be viable.
That attitude could explain all the f’ed up marriages and relationships and ignored children that Elon has.
Now explain why you failed to credit Goddard in your America denigrating screed.
And why doesn’t culturally superior India have public sanitation? Maybe some of India’s glorifiers can explain the toilet and clean water practices of their high IQ homeland.
Because the US military and what became NASA built directly from Von Braun and his team, down to importing actual V2’s and building copies. They didnt go back to Goddard.
I have 45 years of experience working in a hospital with physicians from all over the world. I have seen how they interact with patients and there is a noticeable indifference that many, not all, physicians from India display towards their patients. They have even vocalized their disdain for their American patients. If you want me to be all woke about it, it isn’t going to happen.
India is not high IQ. Its rather low on the whole.
The point is that its got LOTS of people. If you apply selection to that many people you will still get lots of high IQ people. You may be pulling (guesstimating) the top 2% of the Indian pop, while to get a comparable US group you would only need to pull the top 5% (>IQ 125).
But 2% of India is still huge. Thats 28,000,000 people (not accounting for children, elderly, etc.)
I typed somewhere and was not clear.
The point was somewhat the issue of genetic vs environment.
The latter must be excluded to get the measurement. In the case of India and some of Latin America, pediatric diarrhea from bad water strongly damages IQ measurements because it tends to be permanent brain damage.
So India and Latin America must be measured only in the upper classes. This does not corrupt the measure via affluence increasing IQ (as proven by the identical twins raised apart apart study in households of differing affluence — they tend to score the same), because affluence doesn’t have much effect — but at an extreme low end, it will via pediatric diarrhea. It is described as affluence and poverty not being on the same spectrum.
So no, you’re not awarding tenured faculty positions at MIT to IQ 80 India imports. And you’re similarly not awarding IQ 80 India imports an H1B and have them get hired in preference at entry level over top US engineering school grads (who themselves tend to be Asian).
BTW no one seems to have noted that H1Bs are not free. They cost the employer several thousand dollars, paid to the Treasury.
Falcon is currently doing under 1000/lb $700?
Almost an order of magnitude under pre-SpaceX launch costs. Thats why a private company can launch 6-7,000 satellites and effectively take over space.
Starship is supposed to do under $100/lb. An order of magnitude under Falcon.
How tall are you anyway? Lets get you by that line there old man...
You didn’t even look for the quote.
I’m not reading until the very end
I asked my inside source.
Some of us notice that in 1959 NASA named their Space Flight Center after Goddard and not Von Braun
The reality is that don’t want to credit America. Why would you? It’s not your country and it pleases you to find ways to denigrate it as you take advantage of living here. One more negative that came with our destructive post 1965 immigration policy.
You pulled it out of your H1-B port then.
No, I used Wattsapp.
I think you nailed it. Vivek still has high school issues he has not gotten over.
Move ‘em on, head ‘em up, head ‘em up, move ‘em on
Move ‘em on, head ‘em up, rawhide
Yup, sure they were.
Ok, you are correct, entirely so.
I surrender. Von Braun and his Germans were useless and irrelevant and should have been tossed off the ship to drown in the Atlantic.
Its pointless to argue with a madman.
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