How does someone with such a shitty personality and dress sense get so smug?

Lots and lots of money.

If I looked and acted like him I would want to punch myself in the face

He has top of the line security details to do that for him.

Not just swing states. Texas and Florida elections are going to be extremely unpleasant this coming cycle.

A big part of it is selection bias. 46% of Latino voters != 46% of Latino residents, by a long shot.

The Latinos that have the right to vote tend to be wealthier, more educated and professionalized, and more inclined towards the “Law & Order” and “Anti-Communist” political rhetoric of the Republican Party than their undocumented or unregistered peers. Add to that, during the 1980s and 90s, you had a lot of post-USSR collapse Latin American refugees fleeing countries like Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua that no longer had Soviet support. Those that could legally move to the US typically worked for big American businesses (oil companies, most notably) with their own Reagan/Bush era conservative socio-economic attitudes. Pile in that a lot of these migrant communities have a vested interest in the Republican Party as a tool of patronage - Cubans in Florida have accrued all sorts of special legal privileges precisely because the GOP sees them as a staunch, loyal voting block. And then right-wing press in these communities fuels the anti-communist (and anti-LGBTQ, anti-Black/East Asia, anti-Liberal) politics.

So you’re really whittling down the pool of Latinos who get to become legal citizens, the Latinos who get to register to vote, the Latinos who are invited to join the upper class and eventually participate in local/state/national politics, the Latinos who get to participate in national network journalism, and the Latinos who are rich enough to serve as patrons for the next political class.

Eventually, everyone looks like some combination of Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Jeff Bezos.

Back in the 90s, California’s coastline was an absolute cesspool. The degradation destroyed coastal property values, magnified a number of natural disasters, and depleted critical fishing stocks and other agricultural reserves.

The state hasn’t done an amazing job of fixing any of that (go check out True Detective Season 2 to get an artistic taste of the ugliness that is Vernon California or just pickup a book/tune into one of the many podcasts that have covered Leonis C. Malburg). But they’ve at least curbed the worst impulses of the Reaganite Era.

I do wonder if states like Ohio or Texas or Florida will ever see their economies undermined by the pollution and illegal dumping and horrifying mining and agricultural practices to the point where they finally have to implement their own statewide environmental initiatives. Or if this is something reserved to the World’s 7th Largest Economy.

I’m more annoyed by losing the “Block Community” button when a sub’s admin blocks me.

If companies stop reporting quarterly, then all of the bad news is going to come all at once at the end of the of most companies fiscal year in the fall.

Also, it isn’t as though they won’t have internal reports. And given the deplorable state of the SEC, I have to assume this would lead to some wild insider trading in between annual releases.

If people had insider knowledge, well that’s a yearly wealth transfer from your 401k to the 1%.

It’s arguably worse than that. People passing around unregulated reports under the table can still lie to one another with abandon. So the black market for inside info is ripe for fraud and scams which can’t even be prosecuted normally, because its not information anyone has to report out to a public commission.

If I want to come in and release the “Double Super Secret Real Microsoft Numbers” and spread it around, I can effectively manipulate the price of the stock based on how many people I can dupe into believing my phony figures.

If you’re talking about India / China working for US firms, it’s supply and demand again.

It’s clearly not. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have a software guy left standing inside the US.

I interviewed with a shop in a University town that had a mean 6 month turnover rate for programmers

That’s just a bad business.

I can do what needs doing without AI.

More power to you.

“Donald Trump is acting like a Caribbean communist” is the only critique Florida liberals can fathom working on their conservative peers.

The state is an oroboros of fantasized resentments feeding into itself. There’s no voting your way out of that kind of delusion.

The practice is that over half of them move on to “other opportunities” within a couple of years, even if you give them good salary, benefits and working conditions.

In my experience (coming from O&G IT) there’s a somewhat tight knit circle of contractors and businesses tied to specific applications. And you just cycle through this network over time.

I’ve got a number of coworkers who are ex-contractors and a contractor lead who used to be my boss. We all work on the same software for the same company either directly or indirectly. You might move to command a higher salary, but you’re all leveraging the same accrued expertise.

If you cut off that circuit of employment, the quality of the project will not improve over time.

In the US they’re commanding $80k/yr because of supply and demand

You’ll need to explain why all the overseas contractors are getting paid so much less, in that case.

Again, we’re all working on the same projects for the same people with comparable skills. But I get paid 3x my Indian counterpart to be in the correct timezone and command enough fluent English language skills to deal with my bosses directly.

Case in point: starting salaries for engineers in the U.S. were around $30-40k/yr up until the .com boom, at which point software engineering capable college graduates ramped up to $70k/yr in less than a year, due to demand outstripping supply.

But then the boom busted and those salaries deflated down to the $50k range.

I had coworkers who would pin for the Y2K era, when they were making $200k in the mid 90s to do remedial code clean up. But that was a very shortly lived phenomen. All that work would have been outsourced overseas in the modern day.

Our codebase had plenty of janky nonsense before AI came around.

Speeding up the rate of coding and volume of code makes that problem much worse.

I’ve watched businesses lose clients - I even watched a client go bankrupt - from bad coding decisions.

In the past few months I have actually seen Anthropic/Claude’s code output improve significantly toward this goal.

If you can make it work, more power to you. But it’s a dangerous game I see a few other businesses executing without caution or comparable results.

Imagine sending the president of an allied nation a decked out 747 as a nine figure bribe, only for the president to greenlight airstrikes that killed some of your most senior diplomats.

I’ve never heard any Western journal ask how many Iranian women were killed during the Israeli airstrikes.

Would I be happy with new-hire code out of a $80K/yr headcount, did I have a choice?

If I get that same code, faster, for 1% of the cost?

The theory is that the new hire gets better over time as they learn the ins and outs of your business and your workplace style. And they’re commanding an $80k/year salary because they need to live in a country that demands an $80k/year cost of living, not because they’re generating $80k/year of value in a given pay period.

Maybe you get code a bit faster and even a bit cheaper (for now - those teaser rates never last long term). But who is going to be reviewing it in another five or ten years? Your best people will keep moving to other companies or retiring. Your worst people will stick around slapping the AI feed bar and stuffing your codebase with janky nonsense fewer and fewer people will know how to fix.

Long term, its a death sentence.

You know, its kinda crazy that everyone has conveniently forgotten Palestinians are Semites.

I have to wonder what happens the day the Ashkenazi sect of Judaism loses control of the country and more militant factions decide they aren’t pure enough. Will Jerry Seinfield still want to vacation in Tel Aviv?

Need him to clarify that statement by establishing his personal view of the Klan.

We looked at the code produced and determined that it’s of the quality of a new hire.

As someone who did new hire training for about five years, this is not what I’d call promising.

I was going to say… this is a bit like claiming “AI is sending 90% of emails”. Okay, but if its all spam, what are you bragging about?

Very possible that 90% of code is being written by AI and we don’t know it because it’s all just garbage getting shelved or deleted in the back corner of a Microsoft datacenter.

Political dorks love reading history. You’re not going to find an organization that’s devoid of them.

I’ll say that my Houston DSA is a lot more active in union organizing, candidate canvasing, and Palestine protest activism than some others. But if you’re allergic to the guy who wants to talk your ear off about the 1930s political scene… idk, man. It’s like moths to the flame. Left, right, and center - I’ve been through them all and everyone has their favorite stack of history books.

That’s the hard work of organization building.

I can say that lots of cities and universities have their own chapters of DSA. I try to be active in my own location (although its difficult to juggle fatherhood, a job, and volunteer work). But its still a very small group without a ton of money at its disposal.

Compared to TPUSA, which is hooked up to the firehose of reactionary billionaire wallets, its an uphill climb.

Imagine if JK Rowling would do that last bit for us.