Twitter/X and Substack accounts are up:
Twitter heavily censors new accounts. I will mainly use Twitter and Substack for posting links to the blog, as I find blogging to be a more effective medium for expressing ideas, although I may tweet replies.
The H-1B visa controversy is the biggest story now, overtaking Luigi Mangione, who on the 17th of December was charged in Brian Thompson’s murder.
Supporters of raising the H-1B cap are framing it as a matter of talent, or that failing to raise the cap hurts America’s competitiveness in losing top talent to foreign competitors. This is intellectually dishonest, as the H-1B program has never been about hiring top talent. Rather, that would be the much more exclusive O-1 visa. The implicit objective has always been about lowering labor costs, not hiring top talent.
Talent in the context of the technology industry is harder to quantify than in sports despite the comparison often being invoked. Athletes have specific roles and their success is easily and objectively quantifiable in points scored and other metrics. Tech talent is more subjective: is it coding, running a team, developing a product, doing research, starting a company? Many of these are more luck-based or affected by survivorship bias.
I don’t think tech salaries are too high; if anything, they are not high enough given how profitable many of these companies are. From my own experience, good coders are hard to find and worth their weight in gold. A team of competent coders is needed to quickly bring a mass-consumer product to market and fix bugs quickly as they arise. If something goes wrong in which millions or even billions of users are affected, like Gmail or Instagram outages, a team needs to be available to fix it ASAP. I wonder how much money is still being left on the table by employees.
In tracing when and how this story blew up, it started on December 22nd when Sriram Krishnan announced his role of “Senior Policy Advisor for AI at White House Office of Science and Technology Policy:”
🇺🇸 I'm honored to be able to serve our country and ensure continued American leadership in AI working closely with @DavidSacks.
Thank you @realDonaldTrump for this opportunity. pic.twitter.com/kw1n0IKK2a
— Sriram Krishnan (@sriramk) December 22, 2024
So much for ‘reducing government waste’ when new agencies and roles keep being created. The comments are positive and the story seemed to go nowhere initially.
Trump is smart when it comes to social media. He makes potentially controversial announcements on Truth Social, which is an echo chamber, whereas less controversial news or engagement-farming are posted on Twitter/X. He chose Truth Social for this reason, likely anticipating critcism had he posted it on Twitter. And had it stayed on Truth Social it would have been forgotten.
At this point, there is still the opportunity to save face, but on the 23rd David Sacks makes the fateful mistake of praising the choice. He probably thought nothing of it, but it didn’t go over so well. On the 24th, @nasescobar316 tweets “Did any of yall vote for this Indian to run America?” The tweet blows up, getting thousands of likes. Soon Elon gets involved and things rapidly go downhill from there.
This was an unforced error by Sacks, Musk, and Ramaswamy. Leave the defending to Trump. The job of an advisor is to advise, not to act as a spokesperson, especially now that the election is over. This was a combination of misreading the room and attempts at damage control making things worse.
Is this a crisis for Trump or Elon? Despite the dire framing by the media, not at all. Trump is not going to replace or disavow Elon or anyone else. Elon will remain popular when this blows over, after the inauguration, but probably sooner. Already, this is being eclipsed by Jimmy Carter’s death and the Boeing accident. People will remember that they are still anti-woke, which is what matters for the majority of supporters. The contention between labor and capital goes back centuries, similar to church vs. state. This is the latest manifestation of that, but within the right instead of between the right vs. the left.
Many people on Twitter are operating under the illusion that it’s still an election and that Trump needs ‘our’ support. What ‘we’ think no longer matters, as it’s out of our hands. This has always been the problem with representative democracy. An election is not an ultimatum on Trump–rather, you’re voting for electors in the hope that the values that are ascribed to Trump are enacted once in office. People read into trump as being anti-H1-b, when to the contrary he has always supported ‘more legal immigration’. This is yet another misreading of what people think trump represents vs. what he actually does by people who should know better.