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And why would she want to do that if Arjun is a good guy, smart, and hard worker?

it's not a condemnation of arjun, he's a cool dude

it's just that people better connect across shared cultural boundaries - this flies in the face of kumbaya mantras but it's a well researched and understood phenomenon that if any of you spent time anywhere living as foreigner would understand to be universally true across cultures

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homophily

i'd be willing to wager that this is the root cause of most anti immigrant sentiments in the us that are incorrectly and lazily labeled as products of racism - that it's in sally's own interest to not get the participation trophy in the long run

It wasn’t included in the hypothetical that Arjun is culturally different from Sally, nor that Arjun is more culturally different from Sally than Billybob. I think you’ll find homophilly also applies to cultural distinctions between rural and urban: it’s one of the most important difference in attitudes within the context of the US political divide.

it wasn't arjun, it was h1b arjun

details matter

growing up in bangalore vs baton rouge are both different from growing up in iowa - i'll concede that - but you're a cultist if you can't see any degree of difference between those

I never said I didn’t see a difference between the two. also h1b Arjun may have grown up in a cosmopolitan, international school, spent most of his life in Europe, or around other Indian elites who spent most of their life in Europe.

Oh but right I’m supposed to hear Indian name and automatically assume I have less in common with them culturally/intellectually than Cletus the misunderstood rural genius. I wonder who the rural genius prefers, his podunk rural neighbors or Arjun the h1b visa guy who has similar interests, talents, hard work, and intelligence and probably went to a Western school. Heck even if he likes his rural neighbors more than arjun, he might like arjun more than sally.

Plenty of the smartest people in China still end up leaving to the US/Europe. Not like in the 70s where it could have been impossible to advance in certain fields without leaving, but still happening to a leser degree. Thought the US seems hell bent on shooting itself in the foot on this.

you're doing a lot of heavy lifting here to argue silly semantics of a casual one off throwaway example

we didn't require george rr martinesque world building here for you to virtue signal

the key was h1b - the point was clear and grounded on the prior discussion that we wouldn't have companies declaring they couldn't function without h1b if we just had a better education system to recognize and train talent in the first place

but really h1b is more about locking in underpriced talent more than anything else - you could hire arjun who'll gladly work for 150k to replace a 450k a year engineer

It took me about 20 seconds of speculating to come up with counterexamples. You haven’t provided any data so your speculations are worthless to me. I work with a lot of Indian people and they are much more culturally similar to me than podunk rednecks.

The point isn’t to virtue signal, the point is I think you’re wrong and haven’t actually provided any data to establish your assertion, or a rationally compelling argument. Not everyone who disagrees with you is virtue signaling.

For sure, over the past 20 years my neighborhood has gone from predominantly white to predominantly Chinese immigrants from mainland China.

What I said was maybe a gross generalization but my understanding is that in China the distinction between private and state owned can be murky. Private companies may still be heavily influenced and beholden to the CCP even if they aren’t explicitly state owned.

I missed this classic. What a load of ****ing nonsense you talk. This isn't 1970, you know.

Jack Ma disappearing after criticizing the Chinese government happened like 5 years ago.

is that also going to be true for sally who is getting left behind?

Left behind by what? She’s far more likely to be left behind by AI automation than competition with a high-skilled immigrant.

But I do agree with your original point that identifying potentially skilled workers in rural areas is lacking. I just don’t think it has much to do with immigration, it has way more to do with education.

Jack's back baby

You make it sound like he disappeared from the face of the earth when in fact he moved to Tokyo. Obviously his treatment for dissent was very bad but why is that a case of someone having their life ruined because they didn't work for the state?

He did disappear from the face of the earth for months, lost half his net worth, was forced to give up control of his new company. New company was forced to “restructure” aka relinquish control to the government. All of this was part of a larger government crackdown on big tech. And this was in 2020 not 1970.

Jack is obviously okay and still super rich but the dude literally said that maybe it isnt such a good idea that all the wealth goes directly to the banks and that was too much - he didnt even say he looked like Winnie the Pooh.

I can still say my president looks like a literal orange **** stain and not have it affect my livelihood. Maybe we shouldn't have that freedom anymore. But if youre going to control a billion people in a country that is no longer ridden in poverty, youre going to have to handle a little dissent. Because nobody mattwr how authoritarian you want to be, youre not going to have the means to have everything the way you want it in a succesfull country.

It's not a given that if you say it often enough, loud enough and public enough that bad things won't happen to you in the future.

Right? And god forbid you say Charlie Kirk is a racist. (and not even celebrate his death in any way)

Sounds like we agree that leveraging power to target people for saying such things can lead to bad outcomes.

I mean I do. I’m not sure jalfrezi does. I’ve defended plenty of conservative free speech back when they were pretending to actually care about that.

Almost everyone in this world is a closet authoritarian dingbat. They just want to control their way.

Of course I defend free speech, up to the point at which violence is being incited.

WTF is going on in Puerto Vallarta it looks like the cartels are pissed