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So, why didn't the judge recuse himself from this case?

This is not a valid argument for judicial intimidation.

You mean, show up in a hoodie at the inauguration of the President? Even billionaires are not exempt from certain social mores.

Besides, suits, if tailored correctly, are perfectly functional garments, and I'm sure all the billionaires have Savile Row++ bespoke tailors.


It feels like a lot of people who joined the workforce after 2008-2010 are experiencing their first "tough times". It's natural to respond in this manner. But there is an important caveat: one must seek out good work and deliver in order to stay employable, and have access to good opportunities. Or, they must develop a good network and essentially hop from one job to another with the exact same set of people (this is much more common than you'd think). For the former, you still need to show up and go above and beyond every once in a while, so getting excited about work is still a prerequisite.


This is a weak argument. The US has a patchy K-12 system whose quality varies from abysmal to world-beating, depending on many factors. It has, indisputably, one of the world's best universities. Lots of people who have gone through the former but are also products of the latter. They can be very well educated, and do better than credentialed teachers (let's face it, the only difference is that; also a known fact that brighter, higher-IQ people do not gravitate toward K-12 teaching).


> rewrites your codebase from scratch

This almost never happens. It takes a long time and huge amounts of money to come up to parity, and in the meantime, the legacy org is earning money on the thing you're trying to rewrite.

It's more often the case that the technology landscape shifts dramatically helping a niche player (who has successfully saturated the niche) become mainstream or more feasible. Take, for example, Intel. Their CISC designs and higher power consumption is now being challenged by relatively simpler RISC and lower power designs. Or Nvidia with its GPUs. In both cases, it's the major shifts that have hurt Intel. No one can outcompete Intel in making server CPUs of old, if they are starting from scratch.

Take another example, this time, of a successful competitor (of sorts). Oracle vs Postgres. Same deal, except that Postgres is the successor of Ingres (which doesn't exist anymore), and was developed at Berkeley and was open-source (i.e., it relied upon the free contributions of a large number of developers). I doubt that another proprietary database has successfully challenged Oracle. Ask any Oracle DB user, and you will likely get the answer that other databases are a joke compared to what it offers.


Sheryl Sandberg does not have a technical background. A better analogy would be Eric Schmidt or Adam D'Angelo.


Eric Schmidt sure, but not D'Angelo, as D'Angelo was never a C-Suite who climbed the ladder but was one of the earliest employees at FB when it was being built.

At the C-Suite level - even at a deeply technical company like TSMC - the job is mostly investor relations and arbitrating between various business units internally, so while a technical background is nice to have, the business chops are more critical than technical chops.

Look at Hock Tan at Broadcom for example - he started out as a line level EE in the semiconductor space (Malaysia is THE packaging and testing hub for semiconductors), but he is notorious for being extremely dollar driven (I've heard him unironically say "Show me the money" a couple times).


> At the C-Suite level - even at a deeply technical company like TSMC - the job is mostly investor relations and arbitrating between various business units internally, so while a technical background is nice to have, the business chops are more critical than technical chops.

I think this is a problem, particularly for the major tech companies that produce tech as the end product. If you are purely a "business leader" then the continued growth and even existence of the company is in jeopardy. Isn't the part of the job you mentioned better done by the COO or CFO?


Article does not give a single specific example of a senior engineer laid off in order to hire a (cheaper and more pliant) junior engineer. Is that so hard to do? There is a claim that every department was affected, but again, no specifics. Were H-1Bs hired to replace people across departments, or were they hired in specific departments?

Looks like someone just decided to pick USCIS numbers in support of their argument that the intention is to reduce compensation and exploit workers, but failed to provide any substantive evidence, or even a cogent argument.


Oh, please.

Elon has literally been calling Americans lazy and explicitly calls out a desire for expanding H1B programs to replace American workers.

When he lays off thousands of workers and then requests over 2,000 H1Bs, it's simply bad faith to try to claim "Well, you can't prove the H1Bs are replacing the workers that got laid off!"

The Pyrrhonian Skeptic act of "WELL YOU DON'T KNOW FOR SURE" just makes you look foolish. It's obvious what's going on, and acting like you don't doesn't make you look smart.


Whether I am trying to look smart or not is irrelevant. The article fails to be convincing at even a most basic level. By your logic, no company that hires H-1Bs is free to do layoffs, including of people in auxiliary functions that do not call for high-skill, limited-supply workers, which is absurd.


Come off it already. Collect and examine the evidence:

- Elon says he wants to replace American workers with H1Bs

- Tesla lays off 15,000 people across all departments, including engineering

- Tesla applies for 2,405 H1Bs

Sure, we don't have a spreadsheet that says "Bob has been replaced by Raj", but pretending the dots don't connect is willful blindness. Acting like this is some wild coincidence isn't the clever gotcha you think it is.

Like...if I tell you, "My hobby is stealing catalytic converters", and the next day, several cars in my neighborhood are suddenly missing their CCs and a stack of CCs that match all the models of my neighbors' cars and have clearly been sawed off appears in my garage, it's gonna be pretty obvious what happened. Gonna have a hard time with the "It's all coincidental" defense.


I am as skeptical of Musk as the next guy but doesn’t everyone continue hiring at some reduced rate even after layoffs? It seems hard to believe that 2,400 people are going to do the work of 15,000, no matter how great their work ethic or how precarious their visa.


> Elon says he wants to replace American workers with H1Bs

Source?

So Tesla laid off 15,000 people. How many of them are US citizens? It applies 2,405 H-1B's for later hirings, sure, but that includes renewals and transfers. Is that number higher than the laid-off part? Nobody knows.


It expects readers to have common sense.


I'd like to know why it seems that there are so many people who work free PR for Elon Musk or his companies. Some netizens go above and beyond to contradict anything negative posted about him/them, to the extent of disregarding any factual information. What do people gain from being so contrary, or, so supportive of some guy?


If you'll indulge some conspiratorial thinking on my part:

In the past decade, powerful groups all over the world have realized the importance of presenting their viewpoint (read: propaganda) over social media. Numerous online "reputation management" firms have been born from the existing edifices of marketing and PR. People like Elon pay big money to have a combined-forces army of humans and bots pushing their views in every online venue imaginable. LLMs are the newest and most potent tool in their arsenal.

This is compounded by the genuine human users who, once they have been sufficiently propagandized, will start to participate in this effort unknowingly.


they might own tesla stock.


The article talks about (well, at least, opens with) instances where Courts have ordered that belongings be restored, but where cities have failed to do so. One example is that of a woman losing her husband's ashes.

I think it is callous to comment about how homeless people happen to be in possession of their belongings without at least reading the article. It is a fair comment, however, to ask if examples are cherrypicked to tug at the readers' heart strings, with an agenda in mind.

I do think this article uses numerous tricks to promote this agenda.

- Referring to residents as "housed residents", as if homeless people should be considered "residents" in neighborhoods they have no business being in, in the first place.

- Saying that people are _usually_ forced to move without any connections to housing or support, but then following up with the qualification "sometimes" in the next sentence.

- Citing an example of a lady whose daughter's picture was taken away, as well as her tent, during a cold winter, while not presenting the viewpoint of people who are affected by homelessness in their midst (people such as you). What about _their_ humanity?


> Referring to residents as "housed residents", as if homeless people should be considered "residents" in neighborhoods they have no business being in, in the first place.

Well, why not? Are they residents of anywhere? If not, do you see how easily that slides into not needing to provide services for them? Not considering them deserving of anything, in fact?

> while not presenting the viewpoint of people who are affected by homelessness in their midst

We mostly get this, in most articles and conversations on this subject. Read nearly any article about it and count quotes by homeless people vs anyone else. Try it in this comment section.

>And anyway what about their humanity?

When I see a homeless person I think god what has been done to them. Not look what they are doing to me.


> Well, why not? Are they residents of anywhere? If not, do you see how easily that slides into not needing to provide services for them? Not considering them deserving of anything, in fact?

They are not residents, period. They are vagrants, or transients. I do not agree that vagrants and transients lose property rights summarily, but the idea of calling them some type of "resident" is ridiculous.


A person homeless in the town they grew up in and never left is vagrant or transient?

Homeless people are not for the most part rootless drifters. They have family, churches, regular AA groups, doctors, in some cases jobs even. They are part of your community and as such how you relate to and treat them and yes even describe them reflects on you.


You seem to have the TV news version of homeless in mind.

The homeless ruining my city and many other major and mid size cities are literally drug addicts from all over the country and even world who sort of just shuffle around from one city to the next between jail visits


I have in mind the homeless people I personally know.


Genuine curiosity: How do you know?


It puzzles me too. But as the other commenter here has said, it appears to be a habit of the yuppies. If you are time-poor but cash-rich, I suppose this is a good solution. However, in my experience, people do not use their time saved by doing this in high-leverage activities!


Right, I'm just thinking these services wouldn't survive if the only people using them were the ones who could afford to vastly overpay for food.


This is already the case. American states have a lot of latitude in setting policy and governing themselves.


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