Very, very few people are going to have a social network that does more than get a foot in the door.
Typically, referrals have positive impact like making sure your application gets looked at by a human and possibly tips a "maybe" into the candidate's favor for scheduling a phone screen or moving to the next round of interviews.
There are plenty of very talented people with large networks of former coworkers who will attest to their capabilities and give them referrals, who nonetheless are still struggling to find work.
Exactly what I was thinking. Most competent people should just need a way past the ATS filtering bullshit. You have zero ideas what you're being excluded on when you apply through a public application portal. For all you know, the automated system didn't like the font you chose for your resume. There is zero visibility into it and why you're not moving to next rounds. With a foot in the door introduction, you're at least past the thing filtering out 95%+ applicants and can have a better opportunity to actually demonstrate strengths and skills. Most people don't get that much.
Because some people said that Russia's invasion of Ukraine is bad, and that our political leaders should support Ukraine?
Might be time to turn off your devices and go touch some grass. It doesn't seem like you're in a good head space to be worrying about global politics right now.
It's a system that is vulnerable to fraud, which is why it's good to have regulators who go after fraudulent actors.
It's a perfectly fine system if the egg producers are using it genuinely, it's only a problem when they start submitting fraudulent bids to accomplish illegal market manipulation.
I'm an American who's not insulted by the parent comment, but am tired of your constant weirdly racist anti-immigration posts. Aren't you an immigrant or child of immigrants from Pakistan or India? I recognize your username but forget which exact unique form of hypocritical xenophobia you hold.
The US has benefited massively from having years of the best and brightest from all around the world come to the US to research medicine, engineering and science. It's not about the one guy who's CEO of some tech company, it's about the thousands of graduate students, post docs and researchers doing the actual work to move humanity forward one lab-rat or laser measurement or petri dish at a time.
The 20th century was full of authoritarians attacking the intelligencia. A nation of uneducated peasants is easier to control and exploit. History doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.
The US multination corporations have benefited massively. The common American shares a lower portion of the wealth than ever before. Wealthy foreigners are taking an outsized portion of higher learning seats, and driving up prices. Then they take the white collar jobs. This clearly is keeping downward pressure on the average American economically, more so for the disenfranchised.
With 0 immigration, even sending most of the white collar immigrants back, the US would still be the greatest nation on the planet, except the common American would enjoy more of the spoils. If these immigrants were so valuable, other the countries would be competing hand over fist to bring in as many as possible as quickly as possible, but they're not.
It’s precisely because I’m an immigrant that I chafe at the narcissism of immigrants who want to overstate our contribution to the U.S. as it exists today. The U.S. was already a fully formed, technologically advanced superpower by the time my family got here in 1989. Desis like me came here because our effort goes a thousand times farther within the system—constitutional, legal, cultural, etc.—that Americans created than it does in the countries we created. We shouldn’t be blowing smoke up our own asses and pretending that we had more to do with it than we did. It’s obnoxious, diminishes the contributions of others, and is contrary to our own interest, because it gives us a false sense of what made America into such a place that we were willing to leave our family behind to come here.
Yes, the U.S. benefited from key foreign talent acquisitions like bringing over German scientists after World War I. The 1952 H-1 Act and some ad hoc programs brought over college professors and people like that. But “mass skilled immigration” in the form of H-1B, OPT, etc., didn’t happen until the early 1990s. We should evaluate these programs on their own terms, not link them into some grandiose fictional narrative. Especially now where AI is going to displace many knowledge workers.
I think you're underselling the value in that time and place of the "just plain folks" who immigrated here — such as your family and, in earlier generations, mine.
My immigrant ancestors were farmers, ordinary workers, and small-business people. Not one of them had much education. But in the main they had reasonable shares of motivation, family orientation, and work ethic. They had the gumption to leave their various countries and come here where opportunities were greater — just as you said was the case for "desis like [you]."
My people filled a need when they came to the U.S. at various times in the 19th and 20th centuries. I imagine your people did the same. Sure, in purely-economic terms they didn't make the near-term contributions that their descendants have. But life isn't a snapshot, it's a movie.
> But in the main they had reasonable shares of motivation, family orientation, and work ethic.
People are motivated, family-oriented, and hard working everywhere. The farmers in my dad's village in Bangladesh certainly are all those things. But they labor within a society that taxes the productive and honest and periodically destroys any accumulated capital with chaos. An American applying that same labor produces a thousand times as much. The difference isn't the laborer, it's the machine against which he is laboring. That American system is the bequest of America's British and Dutch founders: Anglo law, social and political norms, and civic culture, and Anglo/Dutch views towards markets and commerce. The operating system of the country was largely in place by the early 19th century and it remains the thing most responsible for our present prosperity.
I don't say that to diminish immigrants. Because isn't even really a point about immigration. It's about correctly understanding the source of our own prosperity.
> That American system is the bequest of America's British and Dutch founders: Anglo law, social and political norms, and civic culture, and Anglo/Dutch views towards markets and commerce. ... It's about correctly understanding the source of our own prosperity.
Now you're overvalorizing what you refer to as Anglo social and political norms. Those norms weren't a monolith — neither were they an unalloyed good.
The Anglos in question famously included enslavers of kidnapped Africans, mainly but not exclusively in the American South. Our whole constitutional system was bastardized to keep those worthies on-side for ratification.
To be sure, the spectrum of Anglo norms included abolition, mainly in the North. But in the South, those norms also included secession and civil war to preserve enslavement as an economic and social system.
IIRC, the enslaver class were largely of English stock — although many white southerners were of Protestant Scots-Irish descent (e.g., John C. Calhoun), and some of Welsh (e.g., Jefferson Davis).
Now let's talk about immigrants' cultural contributions: The residents of some regions of Germany were no slouches commercially. In the U.S., they and Irish Catholics were largely anti-slavery. German immigrants especially were pro-Union; that led to violence against them during the Civil War by Confederates. [0]
(I don't know enough about Dutch contributions to say anything useful about them.)
Bottom line: Let's not fetishize the Anglo-Dutch origins of the American system. The finest crop seeds will be useless without decent soil, water, and light. Seeds don't provide those things. And as summarized above, in our case the seed was far from uniformly good.
I didn't say it was an "unalloyed good." I said that our prosperity is the product of that system. So are many of the bad things about America! Funnily enough, the immigrants who are eager to write themselves into the story of American prosperity never seem to want to take credit for all bad things about America...
I also think you're missing the forest for the trees. You can find many cultures that enslaved people. The Arabs were trading African and European slaves for a thousand years before Europeans showed up to booming slave markets Africans themselves had built. But you can't find any culture that undertook large-scale worldwide efforts to end slavery, or any one that killed hundreds of thousands of their co-ethnics to end slavery for other people. Are you aware of any other society that has done that?
> you're [sic] criticism overlooks the most important part.
I wasn't trying to present a balanced assessment of Anglo culture, which has clearly been a world leader in many, many respects. I was reacting to your seeming insistence — which appears to be getting more pronounced — that immigrants should embrace Anglo culture as superior to their own.
There are good- and bad elements in every culture. Cafeteria-style cultural mixing is how progress happens (modulo intellectual-property law).
> I was reacting to your seeming insistence — which appears to be getting more pronounced — that immigrants should embrace Anglo culture as superior to their own.
Of course they should: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/oWbNUcOenzU. I didn't know this was debatable. When people say "assimilate into American culture," they mean Anglo-American culture--like the Germans did.
Your theory that Americans can absorb the best elements from different cultures doesn't work in practice. For such evolutionary mechanisms to work, you need a fitness function that reflects which combinations are better. But people have an irrational sentimental attachment to their own culture and co-ethnics. They will stick with things that clearly don't perform rather than adopt things that clearly perform better.
Which circles back to my original point! That's why it's so important to understand why it is that our effort here in America goes so much farther than the same level of effort in our country run according to our cultural norms.
Did German Americans really assimilate? They speak english nowadays and love America but when you look at the norms of Americans it seems like there's more of a mix of the two than just 'anglo american' culture. How people spend their sunday, the drinking of beer, some American food, school system in many ways, parts of the military, some sports (bowling and gymnastics) and the whole sporting club culture (not just for the elite) one can't really say they became Anglo Americans especially in regions where you have many of them (e.g the midwest)
But the Amish are different because of a religion not shared by most German immigrants.
This difference in religion has a huge effect. We know that because the average Amish person is much farther away in culture from the average German living in Germany than the average non-German-ancestry American is.
I mean not really, but I'm using a relative scale. I count them because they're about as similar to Anglos as the Anglo subgroups (Yankees, Southerners, Appalachians) are to each other. Most importantly they have generic American identity--they don't specially identify with or have special affinity for other German Americans. In that respect they're more like Anglos and different from most of the immigrant groups that came after them.
Historically, assimilation into American culture tends to happen over two to three generations.
• One pair of my grandparents were immigrants. Grandpa built a business but to the end of his life his English was tough to understand. Grandma hardly spoke English at all. They lived in a neighborhood surrounded by other immigrants from their home country.
• Their kids — my mom and her siblings — grew up speaking English at school and with each other (apart from when they switched to cut us kids out of the conversation) but not with their parents.
• Their many grandkids — my generation — grew up speaking only English. AFAIK, only one of us knows any of our grandparents' language at all (she took it in school IIRC).
• I also speak neither German nor Irish Gaelic, the languages of my immigrant ancestors on my dad's side of the family. And for practical purposes my own kids speak only English. (My grandkids aren't yet old enough to talk.)
I've repeatedly seen the same phenomenon here in Texas. Example: I have nephews whose great-grandparents on the other side of the family were Mexican immigrants. My nephews speak zero Spanish (AFAIK) and are as American as anyone.
I've read that this is a widespread phenomenon among immigrants from every country.
So: Patience — assimilation into American culture will happen.
> Historically, assimilation into American culture tends to happen over two to three generations.
Here's a book with evidence of how that's not true. https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0BCKYZ1VY/geneexpre.... Americans with European ancestry display variations in attitudes that are still strongly correlated with those of their countries of origin.
> I've read that this is a widespread phenomenon among immigrants from every country.
People think "speaking English" and "wearing jeans" is assimilation. But that's superficial stuff. How many groups assimilated into WASP austerity or self-deprecation? Not very many. I live in Annapolis and it's trivially easy to tell the various European-American groups apart if more than a few of the same type are congregated together (e.g. church gatherings).
> How many groups assimilated into WASP austerity or self-deprecation?
1. Austerity and self-deprecation are hardly unique to "WASP culture" (quote unquote). I imagine you know South Asians, Blacks, Hispanics, East Asians, etc., who engage in those practices to a greater or lesser extent.
2. Among those who do practice austerity and self-deprecation, the extent and degree of the practice can vary with time and circumstances.
3. There's a deeper problem: When it comes to understanding why we human animals behave the way we do, we're much like the alchemists of old. In astronmomical terms, behavioral scientists are still working to get to the equivalent of Ptolemy. They've got a ways to go to reach the level even of Copernicus or Kepler, let alone Hubble and LeMaître.
Why aren't Small Government and Free Market Republicans more outraged at the current administration's betrayals of these core components of American conservativism?
The budget deficit is the largest in history, the federal government size has increased, taxes on imports (tariffs) have increased in politically manipulative ways and now the government is meddling with the market price of commodities.
Even if you don't care about Europe or democracy or pollution or foreign policy... this is still just bad capitalism and bad big-government manipulation preventing the free market from correctly solving problems and establishing an optimal price for goods.
> Why aren't Small Government and Free Market Republicans more outraged at the current administration's betrayals of these core components of American conservativism?
They were pushed out long ago, and mostly don't exist in any meaningful number. Even then, what could they do?
Perhaps you should take a moment to understand what people on the left actually mean, instead of taking memes as sources of truth.
For instance, "men can have babies" is a simple result of politeness and observable reality. Transgender people exist, and can become pregnant and have babies. The polite, sympathetic and decent thing to do when interacting with a transgender person is to use their preferred gender terms. This is true whether you're a small-government, live-and-let-live libertarian conservative (you live your life, I'll live mine) or a Christian values social conservative (Jesus spent his entire life around lepers, beggars and prostitutes and washed their feet as an act of love and compassion).
Combine those two facts 1) you've got a person who had a baby at one point in their life and 2) who should be referred to as a man today, and the result is you get a man who had a baby. Nothing left-wing or liberal about it, just basic civility and politeness to another person, which are values we should all embrace.
Everyone is aware that that is what the left "really means". You have not elucidated anything for anyone. A lot of people just disagree with your premise that the pregnant person should be, for any reason, called a man.
I simply don't consider "if you don't do this I will kill myself" to be an appropriate argument to make me do something. I don't accept moral culpability for that outcome. It is unfortunate for them that they cannot be what they want to be, but that does not put the onus on me to pretend they are that thing.
Society does not have an obligation to say falsehoods under duress. I think you'll probably agree with me for most other thought experiment examples I could come up with where people would need to collectively say what they don't believe lest the aggrieved party hurt themselves.
> I simply don't consider "if you don't do this I will kill myself" to be an appropriate argument to make me do something.
Woah, not even one sentence in, and you're already pretending to lack the ability to properly read my words. I genuinely have no idea how any form of productive conversation could be possible.
You are just proxying the quoted argument indirectly to make it sound less coercive, but the end result is the same: I should do something, and not be "stubborn", because it reduces risk of suicides, which is "sufficient reason". Whether the suicider is in the first or third person, or whether they are an individual or an aggregate statistic, is irrelevant.
- Society should do something because it reduces risk of suicide in this group
- I should do something because it reduces risk of suicide in this group <-- you are here
- I should do something because it reduces risk of suicide to this person
- I should do something because if I don't there's a high risk this person will kill themselves
- I should do something because if I don't this person credibly says they will kill themselves <-- my post
- I should do something because this person is truly mentally ill and if I don't they definitely will kill themselves
These are all the same argument. You are being disingenuous. Your post says that "'Suicide prevention' is a sufficient reason [to call a female a man]." What exactly were you implying then if not that I should do something because otherwise someone might kill themselves? You are uncomfortable with me clarifying your position in more direct verbiage; that is the insidiousness of your position: it only sounds nice when you ignore its implications.
As a rhetorical strategy, bringing suicide into an argument in a way that pressures the other person to comply has to be amongst the most contemptible forms of moral coercion.
Oh, why? Because it clearly shows the horrible consequences of decisions you align with?
Trans people have above-average suicide rates. Gender-affirming care is one of the only proven ways we can reduce these rates. If this makes you uncomfortable, consider that the issue might not be on my side.
Adult men have high suicide risk, due in large part to loneliness and low self esteem, but no one would suggest that women have an obligation to pretend all men they meet are sexy and desirable. Broadly, culture should not be manipulated by a small cohort holding themselves hostage. Coercive threats like "if you don't give me this job I will shoot myself" or "if you don't affirm Christ is our Savior I have a high chance of suicide btw" (or the third party proxied version like you posted) are not compatible with liberal society.
Not really in this case because the label given to these people is socially constructed. It's not 'reality' that they are or are not their proclaimed gender, just as it's not reality that they are or are not pretty. Saying that there is some objective reality of their prettiness or ugliness doesn't make much sense either way, in the same way.
It's my opinion that the words man and woman should refer to the biological sex, not the person's desired sex/gender, so I use the words in that way. Obviously some people feel strongly about using the words in the opposite way. That's okay, but I'm just not going to use them that way. Neither of us have a stronger claim to "observable reality", but I think I at least have a stronger claim to historical/traditional normalcy.
>It's my opinion that the words man and woman should refer to the biological sex, not the person's desired sex/gender, so I use the words in that way. Obviously some people feel strongly about using the words in the opposite way.
And it's other people's opinion that the word "bigot" refers to people who call transgender women men.
>but I think I at least have a stronger claim to historical/traditional normalcy.
Why on earth would you think appeal to tradition gives your opinion any legitimacy.
History is full of backwards thinking that seems insane in retrospect.
> And it's other people's opinion that the word "bigot" refers to people who call transgender women men.
That's fine, people can call me that if they want to
> History is full of backwards thinking that seems insane in retrospect.
Sure, and I'm not saying historicity makes me right, just that I didn't pull the opinion out of thin air like it's a crackpot theory; most people in the world today and throughout history agreed with me. I have essentially 0 Agreeableness in the big 5 so any argument about social pressure in present decade USA doesn't sway my opinion.
Historicity makes you wrong, too. Trans people have been culturally recognized for as long as there has been civilization. You didn't pull your crackpot opinion out of thin air, it was spoon fed to you.
To find cures for diseases faster, find new ways to produce useful chemicals, find ways to make crops resilient against changing climate, etc
> Isn't this one area you'd want extreme human intervention?
No? There are an essentially infinite number of potentially useful experiments that could be run that have no risk or downside. It's not like they're doing this in a BSL-4 lab mutating smallpox.
Then when I tried to log in to my Gmail account at my destination, it flagged it as a suspicious login attempt and wouldn't let me in without entering a code they texted to my American phone number, which meant I was locked out of my email for the duration of the trip.
Plus travel day realities often require your phone and accounts - plane tickets, Uber/Lyft, hotel reservations or updates from Airbnb with check-in instructions, door codes, etc.
It's a tremendous challenge and hassle for any regular person. We really just need to push back on the government overreach. It's tragic that half of the Trump voters proclaim to be "small government" and "Don't tread on me" but then tolerate things like this. There's certainly a bipartisan group of people opposed that are large enough to effect change if we work together.
I 100% agree that the best solution would be for the law to catch up and actually treat privacy as a human right. Until that time there are things which, while challenging and a hassle, do help.
I would use the same sim-card in the burner phone. Any attack by the government that they can do with your real sim card can also be done through phone number spoofing.
For email, use unique emails (things like booking+youremail@...) for reservations/bookings/tickets and have those forwarded to a second email account that you want to use during the trip. It is already good privacy hygiene to use unique emails for all types of registrations, and you will have more control when services eventually have a leak.
This is so trivially easy to bypass. If you're a service selling email addresses, just strip off the booking+ part and you have the "real" email address.
All my sign-up email addresses are via a catch-all email, so I can just give a service "[email protected]", or "[email protected]", so I there is no single "real" email address, and I get to track who exactly is selling my email address. So far I haven't had problems with anyone spamming "[email protected]".
They can bypass it, and as the user you can also use any other sign or character that you want. If you email is foo@ then you can use the letter x, as registrationxfoo@. A popular choice for a company email is first.lastname@, so you can use a . for it, or the - character. + is just what some program, like procmail and Sieve, will recognize without much trouble.
Using a a catch-all email with your own domain works also perfectly fine. Doesn't work as well if there is multiple email users of that domain.
It isn't that they tolerate it, it simply doesn't affect them, so they don't care. Besides, it affects many they dislike, so that's always a bonus.
Remember, when ultra-partisans, of most political ideologies, demand rights and freedoms, there's almost always an implied "for me and mine" in there. Exceptions to this are extraordinarily rare, even more so nowadays.
>It's tragic that half of the Trump voters proclaim to be "small government" and "Don't tread on me" but then tolerate things like this.
Let's be real. Those people don't travel. They've never left the country, and most have likely never left their state, or even their hometown. I know a person like this - they refuse to fly on a plane to go anywhere because they are not allowed to bring their gun on the plane - they are a real "don't tread on me" 2nd amendment/NRA type. And they will never vote for anyone but a Republican no matter how bad things get.
You can bring a gun on the plane, you just need to have it in a locked case, and it can’t be a TSA lock. You also have to declare it and open the case for inspection when checking it.
That isn't their deal. They want to bring their loaded gun on the plane with no restrictions, or they simply will not fly. Reason does not work with a person like this.
Well that’s unwise of them. I just wanted to clarify since some people don’t understand that you can fly with firearms. A lot of people who go to events like Defcon will pack a firearm as this prevents TSA from inspecting the bag without you present—at least that’s how it’s supposed to go, unless there’s a secret room where they have skilled lockpickers on standby.
They are an in-law of mine, yes I've spoken to them. They want to bring their loaded gun on a plane with no restrictions - that is literally why they refuse to fly on an plane. Good for the rest of us, I guess.
The linked site shows me two subscription options, $289/year or $29 every 4 weeks. Expensive latte.
The economics of online new seem challenging. Bloomberg is $399/year. Wall Street Journal is $715/year. NY Times is $390/year. Washington Post $140/year.
That's a couple thousand dollars a year, just to have a handful of mainstream news sites. Add in local or regional sites, or content focused on hobbies, niche interests, etc and a person is looking at a huge chunk of their income (keep in mind median individual income in USA is $40k) going to reading the news.
Perhaps the more accurate description would be that as a kid, you misunderstood descriptions that petroleum was from decayed organic material from long ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.
Typically, referrals have positive impact like making sure your application gets looked at by a human and possibly tips a "maybe" into the candidate's favor for scheduling a phone screen or moving to the next round of interviews.
There are plenty of very talented people with large networks of former coworkers who will attest to their capabilities and give them referrals, who nonetheless are still struggling to find work.
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