WISD $170K Bid for Summerbridge
The Waxahachie Independent School District has a bid properly before it requesting $170K for a product called Summerbridge. This is a product that is supposed to help children retain what they had learned in school between grades. My letter to the school board and superintendent detail my feelings on the matter. This is all part of a $2M honeypot for “products.” My feelings are deeply negative for several reasons.
First and foremost, the bureaucrats are always complaining that teachers cannot be paid a sufficient wage. This is poppycock; if we have money for useless products, we have money for teachers. Secondly, the administration’s wages are bloated. Again, and again, and again, no bureaucrat in the State of TX should make more than the Governor. One cannot convince me otherwise. The Governor’s salary is about $173K; WISD has loads of folks making more than that!
The most important and striking reason for my negativity is that the products always push to parents what we pay the school district to do. They give students take home, over the summer work rather than providing the supports necessary to provide adequate instruction for students. Most people either have no degree or a useless degree - most parents are unequipped to teach their children chemistry, physics, calculus, and music.
Currently, we have the RINO, Greg Abbott, asking us if we want out money back so we can leave the public education system. That is EXACTLY what his version of school choice is asking. My issue is I have no counterargument. When our public schools would rather tell parents “here is a backpack full of shit you cannot understand, teach it to your child over the summer”, Abbott’s plan to give us our money back seems like a ray of sunshine in comparison.
WISD needs to do better than this if it wants to prove that public education and those who work within the system have our children’s best interests at heart.
Apple’s $95M Settlement
This Apple Settlement illustrates the reason why big tech keeps steamrolling through the proletariat. $95M for a privacy dispute affecting nearly every Apple user?! That's a joke, especially given the affected must make a claim to collect. History shows that, on average, about 8% of claims for such lawsuits are filed.
Even if, by some miracle, 100% of claims are filed, $95M is less than the rounding error on Apple's taxes. Apple's market cap is something over $3T. They don't care about $95M; it's a drop in the bucket. This settlement is nonsense and lacks any punitive touch. Plaintiffs contended that Apple could be liable for $1.5B if the matter went to trial. I believe even $1.5B is marginal compared to what the ad damnum should be.
When an impoverished man steals a loaf of bread to feed his family, he can face up to 25 years in prison, while Tim Cook can go into your home and invade your privacy for over a decade with impunity. There need to be real penalties for misuse of data and abuse of access. These data and access are given freely under the auspices of reasonable custodianship. When a breach of that trust occurs, the penalties should be severe.
If you read the End User License Agreement (EULA) for any software-based tech product, you will see page-after-page of legalese protecting the developer and distributor. You will see little-to-nothing protecting the user. The fix is simple: add a clause saying something substantially of the form “In the event of a data or privacy breach, the collective users of the software will be entitled to 5% of the average of the vendor’s last 3 years of revenue”. That’s real skin in the game.
For Apple, we would have ‘22, ‘23, ‘24 revenues of $394B, $383B, $391B. This would give us a payout of about $19.4B for a breach of trust such as this. I think this is acceptable, and if it is contractually obligated through EULA, the Court proceedings after a breach would be simplified. If there are no real consequences, the behaviour does not end. By putting a de facto price tag (such as $95M) on such a breach, we are letting companies of sufficient size know they can do whatever they want with limited issue.
We are smarter and stronger than this, America. Stand up and fight.
Black History Month
A lot has been said since President Trump’s Administration announced they would not fully endorse Black History Month as the Federal Government has done in the past. I have been in the trenches talking and chatting with We, the People, on the subject. My position is that I don’t really care for a Federal admission of any group, race, or creed. The government is not my daddy; it is not there to make me feel warm and fuzzies. The Government exists to shut up and stay out of the way until We, the People, as a whole, require protection.
A fellow black man I respect greatly posted this nonsense image, and I was compelled to respond.
To wit, I stated:
“People who could not walk got around just fine before DEI. Furthermore, Blacks were a strong and capable people before DEI. Just read some Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington (both born as slaves) and compare it to your standard white college graduate's writing today. There were plenty of persons who did big things hundreds of years before DEI was even a thought. The first Black elected to office I believe was Wentworth Cheswell. This was before, during and after the founding of the nation; he rode information missions during the same period as Paul Revere and was even a Judge. We were not to be fucked with before DEI; we won't be anything to fuck with now that it is gone. Stay strong, stay Black, stay above the noise!“
The ongoing effort to rewrite history to make it seem as though blacks, women, the handicapped, mentally infirm, and otherwise “othered” persons had nothing to do with building this great nation is a Leftist move I cannot tolerate.
The first thing Leftists do each and every time they attempt to take over a nation is rewrite history to divide the masses. Instead of bringing us all together based on our similarities, the Left continues to pull us apart because of our differences. Another such angle is the Morgan Freeman angle on the matter. Years ago, Mr. Freeman had a discussion with Mike Wallace about Black History Month and how he was against the very idea of it.
When Wallace asked, “How are we going to get rid of racism?” Mr. Freeman responded with, “Stop talking about it. I’m going to stop calling you a white man, and I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man.” There is a lot of power in these statements. We speak truth into race; it is an oversimplification of biology. For example, we say “blacks have a higher rate of hypertension than whites” because it is a lot simpler and easier to understand than “differences in ionic transport mechanisms, the renal epithelial sodium channel, the renin-angiotensin-aldosterone system, and vasoactive substances can cause some to be at heightened risk for hypertension.“ The second is gibberish to the layperson, but it provides a basis for the medical industry to solve problems.
This is very similar to the “Black History Month” debate. Having a black history month is easy. It says, “Look at me! I am specifically calling out that blacks have history!” People understand this, it gives certain types of folks the warm and fuzzies. It is convenient but not useful. Having black history month; however, like stating “blacks have a higher rate of hypertension than whites,” hides the reasons for the disparities and provides no basis for a people correcting those disparities. Talking about race - forcing actions and discussion around race - causes a perpetuation of racism. We can only move forward, by teaching the fullness and richness of all history and solving real socioeconomic problems. We cannot move forward by whining about mere phenotype expression.
Anti Family Bills
A multitude of anti-family bills have been filed in the legislature. We must fight the assault on family at every turn. My response to a few especially egregious bills is linked here.
A brief summary of the bills, their sponsors, and content are:
AI in the Legislature
This session, the Honorable Congressperson Giovanni Capriglione introduces HB 1709 (TLO, PDF as of this writing) relating to AI and its governance in Texas. A notable and formidable force within Texas politics, Kathy Ponce, asked for my thoughts on the bill. I have written a point-by-point response.
H1B Visas
The United States Visa system affects my everyday life. I am a bona fide Tech Bro who deals with personnel throughout the globe. The recent comments from Mr. Ramaswamy have sparked a great debate regarding these Visas, and if the system is failing or meeting its mark. I intend to characterize how this operates in industry today herein.
What is it?
An H1B Visa is defined under 8 USC 1101. It must be noted that the program in part has been held unconstitutional (Quito-Guachichulca v. Garland, 122 F.4th 732 (8th Cir. 2024)), but this is not directly on point for the current discussion. The jist is that a person who works in a “specialty occupation” and is coming “temporarily” to the US can be granted a special Visa to work in that “specialty occupation,” given no US citizen is available to fill the position. It really is that simple at a high level. However, things do get tricky in practice.
We will take on, in no particular order, “specialty occupation”, “temporarily”, and “no US citizen is available”.
How special does a “specialty occupation” need to be?
This is complicated. It is defined in 8 USC 1184(i). The quick and dirty is that a person works in a specialty occupation if the field is a “body of highly specialized knowledge” and the jobs require “a bachelor's or higher degree”. There is also a separate requirement for occupations that require full State licensure, but I do not work in such a field, so I will leave the treatment of that to someone more qualified.
Here is where all the loopholes can come in and industries can exploit foreign workers for cheap labour. The definition of “body of highly specialized knowledge” is, from what I can tell, equivalent to “most of Congress’ eyes gloss over when the topic is broached”. There is no board of experts determining this for each job that requests it. Believe me, if there were such a board, there would be few positions meeting the mark in tech. The same goes for requiring a degree. Any HR rep can put “Bachelor’s degree on higher required” on a job description without actually checking resumes for those credentials. This gives the appearance of college degree level employment when it could really be performed by any random person you pick up off the street and put through an 8-week training. Again, since Congress cannot discern the difficulty or education level of a position, they fail to properly review any such case.
The answer to the query would then be: “The specialty occupation need not be very special”. In tech we see this a lot. Tech is lousy with a Visa headcount that could be filled by Americans. What gives?
How are there no US Citizens available?
People work very hard in America. This is shown by the minimal amount of vacation time we take in aggregate when compared to other similarly situated nations. The hard work appears to be the first thing that immigrants pick up on, and they perform well. There are certain positions that are very highly specialized for which there are more seats than Americans qualified to fill them. We can move directly past these for the purpose of this discussion because the debate does not center around these workers. There are other situations where the system is abused.
There exists a litany of what I refer to as meat-market consultancies: companies that find random persons in a bad position, put them through minimal training (nothing like a degree program), and sell their time in the US for bottom dollar. These companies usually charge somewhere between $30 and $80 per hour for their people and give the worker around 1/4 or 1/3 of the take with little or no benefits at all. They have teams of attorneys and compliance officers to navigate the ever-shifting Visa landscape. All the client company needs to do is keep paying the meat-market and a steady flow of workers comes through the doors. The business model is nearly all up-side.
Given the nature of the business, couldn’t the huge number of Americans graduating from code boot camps and online coding institutes fill the need? After all, the Visa program requires that no US citizen be able to fill the position, correct? Yes, and no. The client corporations know the going rate for the work they need done; they undervalue the work making it hard to find US candidates. Further, the actual work positions at the meat-markets are so low-paid that someone can literally do almost anything else and still make the same amount: why do a harder job for the same pay? We have three conflating issues:
There are not enough Americans to fill positions at the top; positions for which the meat-market workers are woefully underqualified. This protects Americans in high-paying positions.
The jobs at the middle and bottom are so undervalued that Americans do not need to take them to make the same amount of money.
The jobs at the bottom are filled by the meat-market, there is no need to publicize they exist, so Americans rarely know they can be applied for.
Since the lower-education jobs that pay the same as low-to-mid-tier tech jobs cannot be filled by Visa holders (not specialized; not degree-bound) Americans can work those and leave a hole in the tech industry. Further, because the meat-market workers are not qualified to work at the top, the pay for those jobs has to be competitive. The tech wealth gap is an increasingly widening proposition as a result of the terribly constructed, nonsense-backed Visa program. The way things are, people at the top get better and more secure in our positions while the less-qualified workers get squeezed into a tighter, and tighter market rife with underpayment and hardship. People have freedom in this nation; we cannot force tech degree holders to take low-paying jobs they do not want. Finally, since the jobs are rarely publicized, it is very difficult for an American to find out about them ahead of the meat-markets that have connections at the highest level in every major corporation.
If this is for temporary employment, how can it be that bad?
Temporary is only defined once in the section and it has nothing to do with the working Visas of which we speak. In that case it is defined as no more than 15 months; otherwise, it is undefined. First and foremost, H1B visas are “nonimmigrant” visas. The definition of nonimmigrant is well-defined (…using as many words as possible…) in 8 USC 1101, but the short version for this very specific purpose is someone who has a residence abroad that he or she “has no intention of abandoning”.
For an H1B worker, an employer must fill out an I-129 Petition. On the Petition, there is an item “dates of intended employment“ which the employer must fill in. The end date is required. There is no limit to the number of renewals one can seek, assuming the paperwork is filled out properly and timely. This is quite possibly the worst definition of “temporary” with respect to human factors I have ever read. Effectively, as long as the employer (remember from the section above: usually a meat-market) continues to renew the paperwork and the foreign residence is maintained, the Visa holder is considered temporary.
What’s more is they are not immigrants, so they are not subject to the same practice and policy that governs immigrants. This is not necessarily a bad thing; it is to protect everyone involved, including the employer. The problems arise when this is all taken together:
Congress with their heads in the clouds
Meat-market style exploitation
Low-skill work plenty of Americans can do
So-called temporary Visas with unlimited renewals
We have created a system ripe for exploitation and refuse to fix it. The Left doesn’t want to change how easy it is to get here, even if the exploitation is so much in our faces. The Right wants to shut some of these systems down and rebuild, which would leave us with unfilled positions of national security interest (imagine a world where we lost some of our top tech talent and allowed China to replace us as the dominant technology power).
What can be done?
This is simple (not easy, just simple). If we enforced the “specialty occupation” and “need for a bachelor’s degree or better” clauses, this could be mostly solved. Of course, no system of humans can be perfect, but perfection is not the goal: reasonableness is the goal. As a pilot, we could take 10,000 unemployed Americans, put them through code boot camps, and employ them in these easy tech jobs. This would prove the H1B system is being exploited to provide cheap unskilled labor, not impossible-to-find specialty labor. If true, we could drive out of businesses numerous exploitative companies, reduce the unemployment rate, and give much-needed relief to many who are trying their hardest to get their foot in the door but just cannot work it out. The cost of such a program would be in the low millions.
To be clear, the positions that I claim are being taken by and through exploitative H1B programs would give unskilled Americans access to jobs that pay from $30K-$70K yearly and provide full benefits. This would represent a significant improvement in many of their lives. I am not referring to the jobs that are truly highly-skilled and specialized for which the pay is in the top 5%.
Further, we would free up the current low-level H1B holders in their home nations and provide multi-national opportunities for American-based companies. We need to ensure our companies have global offices for the US to remain a global power—we can’t do that without a global workforce. All that’s left is to make some common-sense adjustments to the process, and we could be off to the races.