The reality is many people come on temporary visas, as tourists, as students, etc., and overstay. This policy is some attempt to address flows of quasi-legal immigration.
It's unfortunate there's friction to the process, but it's by design. 15% of American citizens and permanent residents are foreign born, the highest it's been in 50+ years, so people are successfully making it through the process. Ideally we'd have better levers to (1) modulate the rate of immigration, (2) simplify the process of legal immigration, and (3) still somehow limiting illegal immigration, quasi-legal immigration, overstays, etc. This is not the ideal solution.
> it feels necessary to say: people who come here to contribute their skills and experience don't all come along on an H1-B/L1
Do people migrate to "contribute their skills" to a foreign country, or to improve their lives? Maybe I'm a cynic, but I suspect the vast majority of people throughout history have migrated to improve their lives, not to altruistically benefit a foreign country. And that's fine, that's normal. It's what motivates people, and the U.S. has a long history of being shaped by ambitious people, especially immigrants, who wanted to improve their lot in life.
> nor do they only come from white or european countries.
I don't know if that's necessary to be said, because who thinks that? In recent decades, 85%-90% of immigrants to the U.S. are not white. >90% if you include undocumented immigrants. The trajectory of America from a white majority to white minority country is fueling at least some of the immigration backlash today. But I think for most people, it's a feeling (right or wrong) that jobs becoming harder to find, houses are becoming harder to afford, and more and more people are competing for fewer resources.
> Do people migrate to "contribute their skills" to a foreign country, or to improve their lives?
I think the two are often linked.
> I don't know if that's necessary to be said, because who thinks that?
Effective January 21, 2026, the Department of State paused all visa issuance to immigrant visa applicants who are nationals of seventy-five countries. The overwhelming majority of the affected countries are not predominantly white and are not European.
Apparently there is no white genocide going on in SA [0], and in farm attacks the victims are quite often black.
Perhaps you can enlighten me on the Zimbabwe situation?
That said, I think the centuries of colonialism and slavery--of which whites in the US greatly benefited--makes this exclusion of immigrants from predominantly brown nations disgusting. Pulling up the ladder, even from some of those who built it for you.
Correct, and it is overall a positive impact. There is marginal increased competition for a limited number of professions, and a meaningful boost to local economies
I used to have a more naive libertarian view, but after the last decade, observing both my countries (US and Sweden), I agree that you need to keep the immigration at a level where they have to adapt to your existing culture, not the opposite.
That said, importing smart engineers and entrepreneurs from the world is so absurdly beneficial for the US that... I can't find words right now.
> have migrated to improve their lives, not to altruistically benefit a foreign country
These are not mutually exclusive. I want a better life, and I also have career ambition and skills that I'm willing to deploy in a place that will give me a better life in return.
Well…your motivation is not altruistic to the host country in that case, it’s selfish.
You want a better life, the country providing it is arbitrary as long as it accepts the currency that you can provide for that better life by your skill set.
If it was altruistic you would emigrate because you believe in the country you are emigrating to even if it meant your life was worse.
> your motivation is not altruistic to the host country in that case, it’s selfish
There is nothing wrong with that. I'm selfish, you're selfish, the government is selfish, everyone in the host country is selfish. It's human nature. We all want good lives. That's the reason a transactional economy exists. It's good for the country's GDP and overall economy to welcome outside talent, and that outside talent enjoys being rewarded for their contributions, and over time, their new place of residence becomes a part of their cultural identity. That's how things usually work.
Not everyone is a saint.
> If it was altruistic you would emigrate because you believe in the country you are emigrating to even if it meant your life was worse.
Reality check: 99% of people would take a better life over a worse life. And there's nothing wrong with that. The entire world is built with this as a base assumption.
Also, reality check: Life in the US kinda sucks unless you have a well-paying skilled job or a lot of money. In either case you'll be contributing to the economy.
I made no claim that selfishness is wrong or altruism is right. Nor did i make any claims as to what life is like in the US—so I don't need any “reality checks” about what your personal beliefs are about life in the US at specific income levels, it’s not relative here. Being poor in the US probably sucks compared to being rich in the US. I am also sure that you can say that about literally every country on this planet.
My comment was about why this was not a “it’s both” type of situation. So just own your motivation for what it is—you emigrate so you can get a better life in a new country than you can get in your old country. That’s honorable enough.
This policy is a further extension of this administration’s public, explicit and frequently repeated goal of ethnic cleansing. Acting like this is a rational policy response to any real problem is ridiculous.
Both the far right and far left throw around accusations of "ethnic cleansing." Both are ridiculous, but considering the U.S. population shifted from 85% white to 55% white in the last few decades, and even today most immigrants come from Mexico, India, China, etc., there really doesn't seem to be much evidence that we're actively trying to limit the flow of non-white people into America. Besides that, there are valid reasons why people want to limit or increase immigration that don't justify hysterical accusations of ethnic cleansing.
Ethic cleansing is something much worse when that race you are "cleansing" is already living there (Israel removing Palestinian from Gaza)
The accusations is just racism. The fact that Trump gave extra fast visas to white South Afrikaans makes you think that there were some racial reasoning there.
In the last decades the whole world is more global.
> The accusations is just racism. The fact that Trump gave extra fast visas to white South Afrikaans makes you think that there were some racial reasoning there.
What is wrong if white people want to help other white people escape persecution?
But if you only help based on the colour of the skin... That's a little bit racist.
Also, as far as I know there is not persecution in South Africa. Trump used photos from the wrong conflict. And there are really bad things happening in Africa... but not to white people
Also, whether Covid is to blame or not, all these layoffs (not just the Meta one) contradict some of the most common rationalizations I've seen for how AI won't destroy the labor market but rather expand it.
If there really is all this latent untapped need to drive a Jevron's effect software explosion that will keep developers employable, why would so many profitable companies be laying off so many workers into the transition?
I have an explanation (or rationalization, if you wish) for this.
The AI caused the developer productivity to increase (similar to other two big SW engineering productivity jumps - compilers and open source), which gives them more leverage over employers (capital). Things that you needed a small team to build (and thus more capital) you can now do in a single person.
In the long run, this will mean more software being written, possibly by even larger number of people (shift on the demand curve - as price of SW goes down demand increases). But before that happens, companies have a knee-jerk reaction to this as they're trying to take back control over developers, while assuming total amount of software will stay constant. Hence layoffs. But I think it's shortsighted, the companies will hurt themselves in the long run, because they will lay off people who could build them more products in the future. (They misunderstood - developers are not getting cheaper, it's the code that will.)
I see this view very often being pulled into the debate but demand is not only driven through a (low) cost. Demand obviously cannot grow infinitely so the actual question IMO is when and how do we reach the market saturation point.
First hypothesis is that ~all SWEs will remain employed (demand will proportionally rise with the lower cost of development).
Second hypothesis is some % of SWEs will loose their jobs - over-subscription of SWE roles (lower cost of development will drive the demand but not such that the market will be able to keep all those ~30M SWEs employed).
Third hypothesis is that we will see number of SWEs growing beyond ~30M - under-subscription of SWE roles (demand will be so high and development cost so low that we will enter the era of hyperinflation in software production).
At this point, I am inclined to believe that the second hypothesis is the most likely one.
Many companies really got bloated during COVID. From what I can see online, Meta doubled their number of employees between 2019 and 2022. How long does it take to correct from that amount of hiring?
Some of these companies have increased headcount since their post-COVID cuts.
Some of this has nothing to do with COVID boom numbers. Some are bailing water as fast as they can (Atlassian, et al), some are treading water and betting on future returns from AI (Block), etc.
It takes time to correct 10 years of ZIRP, plus COVID overhiring that doubled the headcount of those 10 years in just 2-3.
The jig was up when social media like Reddit and tiktok during the pandemic was full of posts with big tech workers gloating about getting hired for six figure salaries to sleep in and play video games at home while putting in 2 hours of work a week, obvious to anyone with two neurons to rub together that it was a too-good-to-be-true unsustainable bubble that's gonna pop and trigger a brutal reset on the job market.
Further reinforced with Elon firing 80% of Twitter and the website didn't stop working, reminding big tech CEOs that they can also start looking into trimming the overhiring fat in their back yard, with no operational loss.
Reinforce that with wall street rewarding mass layoff with share price going up, contrary to the pandemic rewards of shares going up with over hiring, and you have the perfect storm.
AI and the idea of it replacing jobs, has nothing to dow with this, it's just 10 years of ZIRP reawarding every unprofitable bullsit SaaS start-up, and 10 years of "just learn to code bro" where every shoeshine boy became a coder so now tech companies hiring are spoiled for choice.
Edit: Oh I forgot, add to that the increased of offshoring to places with cheaper labor thanks to the normalisation of remote work making it an even perfecter(is that a word?) storm on why an average programmer's labor has way less value.
> Further reinforced with Elon firing 80% of Twitter and the website didn't stop working, reminding big tech CEOs that they can also start looking into trimming the overhiring fat in their back yard, with no operational loss.
I would argue Twitter is in a worse state operationally, but either way it’s moot because one simply has to look at the company’s valuation since Musk took over to see things aren’t going well. Unless the goal is a very loud megaphone for conservative influencers and talking points, in which case things are going great.
X doesn't seem to be in any worse state operationally. The site's uptime is fine, and they've launched a ton of new features that were well received by the userbase. So: 80% fewer people, site remains operational, new feature launches have if anything accelerated. That is a success by any companies measure.
The left is now trying to rewrite history and claim the fall in valuation is because Musk took it over, but it's not. Twitter's valuation was already falling rapidly before Musk entered the game at all. Like many tech firms its price had a COVID surge. The valuations of multiple tech companies were fell sharply right as he was in the middle of the acquisition. The timing was unlucky and he overpaid. That's why he tried to back out of the deal and, if you remember, why the Twitter board went to court to force him to acquire the company against his will.
> There are other potential reasons why Mr Musk might want to pull out of the deal. The stock market price for large tech companies has fallen steeply in the last few months - did Musk offer too much?
The subsequent advertiser boycott says nothing about whether you can cut a company like Twitter by 80% and still have it function. That was caused by Musk publicly rejecting leftist claims as false. CEOs don't care about that because they can cut employees whilst claiming to be increasing diversity and the left will leave them alone.
>I would argue Twitter is in a worse state operationally
Is it because they lack coding manpower, or because Elon chased away all advertisers? Correlation != causation.
Bear in mind I was talking about functionality of the product, not corporate operation/valuation.
>Unless the goal is a very loud megaphone for conservative influencers and talking points, in which case things are going great.
Funny, I never heard the left complain about Twitter being a woke/democrat megaphone during the Jack Dorsey era. Or complain about the social media censorship during the Biden administration. Where were they back then?
They don't hate the propaganda megaphone, they hate not being the ones in charge of it.
>Is it because they lack coding manpower, or because Elon chased away all advertisers? Correlation != causation.
Didn’t say that.
> Bear in mind I was talking about functionality of the product, not corporate operation/valuation.
Didn’t say otherwise. In fact I made it a point to separate out the discussion of how it is functioning operationally from its valuation.
> Funny, I never heard the left complain about Twitter being a woke/democrat megaphone during the Jack Dorsey era.
And the right isn’t complaining about the current state. You also don’t know what I said about Twitter back then. I’m not accountable for whatever general idea you have concocted “the left.”
I am simply saying that it clearly is a megaphone for the right now. If you think it is even somewhat neutral and balanced now feel free to say so, but I would be surprised to hear that.
Sorry I didn't mean to paint you as "the left", I was speaking in general sense.
And that's why I said "They don't hate the propaganda megaphone, they hate not being the ones in charge of it.", meaning I don't think it's a partisan issue, and both sides are equally guilty.
Maybe so but Musk’s whole promise was more neutrality and openness, which he has handedly failed to bring about. Twitter censors worse and more explicitly than ever. And don’t even get me started on Grok/Grokopedia. Like Trump it’s “accurate” if it reflects his worldview - same reason he puts his thumb on the scale with Twitter.
I am progressive. I understand Twitter leaned left. But it leans way further right now as exerted from the top than it did the other direction.
Surprised it took this long. I feel bad for the employees, but I can’t remember the last success they had. Metaverse, VR, throwing absurd money at AI and for what?
Their last success was acquiring Instagram in 2012. Every new effort since then has been hemorrhaging money. They get away with it because they have two limitless money faucets in Facebook and Instagram, but their product strategy as a whole has been a disaster.
Meta ad spend increases 10% every year. Their products have had non stop continual successes for decades at this point. If fb and insta never changed and were solely relying on tailwind you could say they havent had any success, but this clearly is not true imo. Their family of apps have changed a lot, mostly for the worse imo, but it has led to massive increases in ad shows and spend per ad show.
They’ve gotten better at addiction-engineering. Like making super-cocaine, it’s not a good thing. Essentially they took a dubiously ethical business and ramped it into, “actively harmful to almost everyone”. Any reasonable country would ban half the ads that make it onto FB/Insta. FB themselves admit 10% of their ad traffic is literal scammers.
Sure, but youre just talking about semantics here. When Mark asks himself "have we been successful" your definition of success is irrelevant. If the lay offs were because of the company had no successes as the OP posits you have to reason from the decision makers definition of success.
there are plenty of amazingly lucrative businesses that do really well, like online casinos, tobacco companies, etc. that happily milk their users and don't bother with improving human condition. You can call that "successful product strategy" i guess, but to me that's still pretty repulsive. You can also call this hyperbole, but i really am very much repulsed at this: increasing addictiveness for the weak minds to extract more revenue.
We agree that the product is lucrative and the ethics are nonexistant.
> increasing addictiveness for the weak minds
This kind of statement is like saying only fools fall for spearphishing attacks. IME, there are lots of attacks on your attention, and it only takes one mistake.
If you have not been targeted yet, it's just a matter of time. For example, look around here at the Factorio users. "It's just a fun game." Ok, but how many hours a week are you spending on it? Looks like an addiction to me.
I know not everybody agrees with me, but when you are logging hundreds (thousands?) of hours on WoW, League, COD, ... it quacks like a duck.
> Their last success was acquiring Instagram in 2012.
WhatsApp can be dubbed a success as well, and Oculus wasn't a flop. And, what does that tell you about the company? They can only acquire and integrate products. Why? Because Leetcode (LC). Fk LC, Hard!!!
It would be incredible to think that Mark Zuckerberg genuinely thought their Metaverse/VR investment was going to be akin to Xerox's bayarea PARC campus (developer of modern networking / GUI &c). I guess both were ultimately profit-negative financial disasters.
Watching their demo video was the perfect encapsulation of "this was not made for users" I have ever seen. First of all the idea of hanging out in a digital world with Mark Zuckerberg is so bleak. I can't imagine a worse hang.
But other than that, it was all about working in a digital office, being advertised to, etc. They had this scene where one of Zuck's definitely-real friends is excited about "this new street art" on the digital wall that jumps off the wall and they interact with it. Imagine having popup ads that jump up at you when you're walking (gliding?) down the street!
Maybe the sycophantic behavior of AI models comes from rich people having them build to behave the same as their personal yes-men. A person accustomed to never hearing "no" won't like a machine that tells them off.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately… For years this has been said, and for most of us isn’t something we’ve been able to experience until recently. Yet, now we can see how chatbots have made sane folks lose their minds, by simply being too agreeable. I think it’s a grim look at what it’s like to be hyper wealthy. The odds that they’ve completely disassociated from reality, IMHO, have increased exponentially after seeing the effects on “normal” people. The only difference is us plebs, don’t have the resources to then bring our distorted view of reality to life.
I guess he had nothing to lose by making those big bets really.
He’s got one of the biggest free cash flow machines in the world, so he’d rather swing and miss than not swing and be left behind, given that with $200B top line, there is essentially no financial penalty for a swing and a miss.
It does look goofy to have made such a big gamble on something as stupid as
Metaverse in hindsight, though.
I do think he had a point. He should just have put it on the slow burner. Not throw billions at it against the steady stream of technological improvement.
I do think virtual interfaces will be a thing when the tech is ready. Not really ready player one style but more like what they have in the expanse for computer tech.
I am not huge fan of Meta but I wouldn't dismiss them quite so much. I think reels is probably doing pretty well, and despite being cringeworthy FB itself is still going very strong. There are a lot of behind the scenes AI work improving their ads.
There are absolutely a lot of high profile failures though, with the metaverse being #1 (along with the name change to boot!)
Mark Zuckerberg is no longer the kingmaker that he was during Facebook's peak, and he is desperately trying to create the next platform to be the one in power once again.
It would be sad if it wasn't so unbelievably destructive to everything it touches.
Wasn't it primarily acqui-hire? Meta's AI strategy is what exactly? The best time for them to release a Chat GPT clone was 2 years ago. The second best time is today.
Yeah strategy is weird. PyTorch and llama 1-3 were strong successes. Llama 4 was a dud but that happens sometimes. Google fumbles a few times before Gemini too. What I don’t get is why they didn’t prioritize those projects. They weren’t making money, but it was a solid start and a good way to get a foothold in the game. Instead they’ve gone balls deep in slop bullshit.
There seems to be slightly less comment spam and pig butchering fake profiles on Facebook lately so maybe that counts as a minor success? It might not look impressive from the outside but it's technically challenging and helps to keep the advertising revenue rolling in.
Some things that Meta shares or opensources is discrete but amazing. lz4 and zstd and Yann Collet's work. io_uring (don't know if Jens Axboe is still there). And the open timecard projects, and overall OCP work.
So who is the client? In all of the article’s photos of celebrities, they’re wearing Apple EarPods. Is Apple trying to convince people to buy their $19 EarPods instead of their $250 AirPods?
This assumes that people are switching from wireless to wired headphones organically, and the main assertion of the article (wired headphones are popular again) isn’t actually manufactured.
Although it’s possible Apple influenced the article, it makes no sense for them to push the “wired over wireless” narrative. AirPods are a $25B/year business with very high profit margins. EarPods are a tiny fraction of that, and it’s not worth manufacturing a narrative that undermines their successful AirPods business even for the chance of upselling.
I just left a similar comment about my local Fry’s in California. They replaced all the employees, who had been knowledgeable and helpful, with people who knew absolutely nothing about the products. I thought maybe it was just at our store, shame to hear it happened all over.
They replaced all the workers at our local Fry’s with people who knew nothing about the products, weren’t friendly, and often spoke little English. It was odd. I don’t know that it happened at all Fry’s our just ours.
But online shopping became so convenient, more and more of my purchases started going through Newegg and Amazon.
Crashing the economy? In the past year the S&P 500 rose 14%, unemployment is at 4.4%, and inflation is around 2.7%. There are many things to criticize Trump for but the economy has not actually crashed.
Trump ran on an explicit promise to bring down grocery prices on day 1.
Grocery prices have continued to climb.
Absolutely nothing he has done could remotely be said to be aimed at bringing them down.
He has also instituted massive attacks on the power of labor, and on the offices that report on things like the unemployment rate.
"The economy" is not just the stock market; unemployment numbers literally cannot be trusted coming from Trump's BLS; and an inflation of 2.7% is, in fact, fairly high (it's 35% higher than the "target" rate of 2%).
Yes, and also pushing identity politics down voters’ throats, selecting an inept candidate without a primary, their desperate attempts to buy votes with debt forgiveness, and opening the border, which escalated to a full-blown crisis leading into election season.
If we extrapolate Trump’s health today compared to where he was at just a year or two ago, I think Republicans will face the same dilemma the Democrats did soon. It will be interesting to see how they handle it.
It's unfortunate there's friction to the process, but it's by design. 15% of American citizens and permanent residents are foreign born, the highest it's been in 50+ years, so people are successfully making it through the process. Ideally we'd have better levers to (1) modulate the rate of immigration, (2) simplify the process of legal immigration, and (3) still somehow limiting illegal immigration, quasi-legal immigration, overstays, etc. This is not the ideal solution.
> it feels necessary to say: people who come here to contribute their skills and experience don't all come along on an H1-B/L1
Do people migrate to "contribute their skills" to a foreign country, or to improve their lives? Maybe I'm a cynic, but I suspect the vast majority of people throughout history have migrated to improve their lives, not to altruistically benefit a foreign country. And that's fine, that's normal. It's what motivates people, and the U.S. has a long history of being shaped by ambitious people, especially immigrants, who wanted to improve their lot in life.
> nor do they only come from white or european countries.
I don't know if that's necessary to be said, because who thinks that? In recent decades, 85%-90% of immigrants to the U.S. are not white. >90% if you include undocumented immigrants. The trajectory of America from a white majority to white minority country is fueling at least some of the immigration backlash today. But I think for most people, it's a feeling (right or wrong) that jobs becoming harder to find, houses are becoming harder to afford, and more and more people are competing for fewer resources.