If you’re talking about India / China working for US firms, it’s supply and demand again.

It’s clearly not. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have a software guy left standing inside the US.

I interviewed with a shop in a University town that had a mean 6 month turnover rate for programmers

That’s just a bad business.

I can do what needs doing without AI.

More power to you.

“Donald Trump is acting like a Caribbean communist” is the only critique Florida liberals can fathom working on their conservative peers.

The state is an oroboros of fantasized resentments feeding into itself. There’s no voting your way out of that kind of delusion.

The practice is that over half of them move on to “other opportunities” within a couple of years, even if you give them good salary, benefits and working conditions.

In my experience (coming from O&G IT) there’s a somewhat tight knit circle of contractors and businesses tied to specific applications. And you just cycle through this network over time.

I’ve got a number of coworkers who are ex-contractors and a contractor lead who used to be my boss. We all work on the same software for the same company either directly or indirectly. You might move to command a higher salary, but you’re all leveraging the same accrued expertise.

If you cut off that circuit of employment, the quality of the project will not improve over time.

In the US they’re commanding $80k/yr because of supply and demand

You’ll need to explain why all the overseas contractors are getting paid so much less, in that case.

Again, we’re all working on the same projects for the same people with comparable skills. But I get paid 3x my Indian counterpart to be in the correct timezone and command enough fluent English language skills to deal with my bosses directly.

Case in point: starting salaries for engineers in the U.S. were around $30-40k/yr up until the .com boom, at which point software engineering capable college graduates ramped up to $70k/yr in less than a year, due to demand outstripping supply.

But then the boom busted and those salaries deflated down to the $50k range.

I had coworkers who would pin for the Y2K era, when they were making $200k in the mid 90s to do remedial code clean up. But that was a very shortly lived phenomen. All that work would have been outsourced overseas in the modern day.

Our codebase had plenty of janky nonsense before AI came around.

Speeding up the rate of coding and volume of code makes that problem much worse.

I’ve watched businesses lose clients - I even watched a client go bankrupt - from bad coding decisions.

In the past few months I have actually seen Anthropic/Claude’s code output improve significantly toward this goal.

If you can make it work, more power to you. But it’s a dangerous game I see a few other businesses executing without caution or comparable results.

Imagine sending the president of an allied nation a decked out 747 as a nine figure bribe, only for the president to greenlight airstrikes that killed some of your most senior diplomats.

I’ve never heard any Western journal ask how many Iranian women were killed during the Israeli airstrikes.

Google “Tom of Finland”

Would I be happy with new-hire code out of a $80K/yr headcount, did I have a choice?

If I get that same code, faster, for 1% of the cost?

The theory is that the new hire gets better over time as they learn the ins and outs of your business and your workplace style. And they’re commanding an $80k/year salary because they need to live in a country that demands an $80k/year cost of living, not because they’re generating $80k/year of value in a given pay period.

Maybe you get code a bit faster and even a bit cheaper (for now - those teaser rates never last long term). But who is going to be reviewing it in another five or ten years? Your best people will keep moving to other companies or retiring. Your worst people will stick around slapping the AI feed bar and stuffing your codebase with janky nonsense fewer and fewer people will know how to fix.

Long term, its a death sentence.

You know, its kinda crazy that everyone has conveniently forgotten Palestinians are Semites.

I have to wonder what happens the day the Ashkenazi sect of Judaism loses control of the country and more militant factions decide they aren’t pure enough. Will Jerry Seinfield still want to vacation in Tel Aviv?

Need him to clarify that statement by establishing his personal view of the Klan.

We looked at the code produced and determined that it’s of the quality of a new hire.

As someone who did new hire training for about five years, this is not what I’d call promising.

I was going to say… this is a bit like claiming “AI is sending 90% of emails”. Okay, but if its all spam, what are you bragging about?

Very possible that 90% of code is being written by AI and we don’t know it because it’s all just garbage getting shelved or deleted in the back corner of a Microsoft datacenter.

Political dorks love reading history. You’re not going to find an organization that’s devoid of them.

I’ll say that my Houston DSA is a lot more active in union organizing, candidate canvasing, and Palestine protest activism than some others. But if you’re allergic to the guy who wants to talk your ear off about the 1930s political scene… idk, man. It’s like moths to the flame. Left, right, and center - I’ve been through them all and everyone has their favorite stack of history books.

That’s the hard work of organization building.

I can say that lots of cities and universities have their own chapters of DSA. I try to be active in my own location (although its difficult to juggle fatherhood, a job, and volunteer work). But its still a very small group without a ton of money at its disposal.

Compared to TPUSA, which is hooked up to the firehose of reactionary billionaire wallets, its an uphill climb.

don’t i remember his conclusion was effectively, '…and that’s why monarchy is the best form of government?"

That’s reductive and misses much of the thesis of The Elements of Law or Leviathan. Hobbes definitely extols the virtue of a strong central government, but he mentions it in contrast to the feuding princedoms common to 17th century Europe. He (not unreasonably) critiques the democratic governments of the ancient world by noting their penchant for demagoguery and civil wars along the same lines.

But the argument is around which countries can most efficiently formulate and implement national policy. This isn’t a moral critique so much as a Machiavellian practical analysis.

for instance, the People With The Big Army changes pretty much every 4 years

The President changes every 4-8 years. The bureaucracy in the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, and the State Department are more static. US foreign policy hasn’t radically changed since Truman. Presidents routinely run up against professional career bureaucrats who slow roll, undermine, and neglect policies they oppose. The military itself has its own political inertia in that regard, and it isn’t something you can easily sway unless you’re ready to jettison large chunks of your experienced labor force.

if we could only figure out how to reach into the minds of all those soldiers, and an effective message to plant

Military bases are absolutely awash in AM Talk Radio, right-wing TV, and QAnon internet. It isn’t unusual to see a Douglas MacArthur or a Michael Flynn retire from the service to get involved in politics and expose how absolutely unhinged the upper ranks of the US military can get. Also, we’re apparently putting CTOs from tech companies into the officers’ corps now.

I think this is a solved problem from the right. You basically buy your way in with your trillions of dollars in media cartels and contractor kickbacks.

my opinion is that individuals comprise any hypothetical organized countervailing force

Individuals have to act in concert. They need to collaborate, coordinate their actions, and provide support to one another. It isn’t enough for a million people to wake up one morning and say “We’re not going to take it anymore” without any understanding of who their peers are or what they’re doing.

what I would like to see, perhaps I should just speak for myself- is other people taking the brave public first steps of actual resistance

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

The term has become an idiom describing a group of persons, each agreeing to perform an impossibly difficult task under the misapprehension that someone else will be chosen to run the risks and endure the hardship of actual accomplishment.

I think that not forming some sort of effective resistance constitutes complicity

To some degree, sure. But then you might as well say the same of Ukrainians living in occupied Russian territory. “Oh, you should have just fought harder” is more a cavalier one-liner than a political perspective.

I think we’re witnessing a certain amount of survivorship bias. The folks who are “complicit” are often just the people remaining after rebellious groups were quashed or driven away.

Palestinians are holed up into ghettos, everything in or out controlled and overwhelming indiscriminate force being applied at any provokation real or constructed by the state or their paramilitary settlers.

They’re farther down the rabbit hole than we are. But we’re all moving in the same direction.

‘South Park’ Episode Making Fun of Charlie Kirk Pulled From Comedy Central but Remains on Paramount+

shrug

It’s the kind of thing that’s worth doing regardless of the probability of success

I strongly disagree. What you’re proposing is either a toothless protest that gets a whole lot of people arrested, assaulted, and killed. Or a militant insurgency that gets even more people killed.

I also don’t think much of the comparison between palestine and america

ADL’s US-Israel Police Exchanges Militarize the Police

I mean, if you get a page from Hobbes, you’ll note that you’re not beholden to The Constitution, but you are beholden to the People With The Big Army.

Similarly, Locke notes that governance is implicitly voluntary. It works because we choose to abide by it. But individual dissents acting erratically won’t undermine the system. You need an organized countervailing force.

You need a real organized opposition government that does have the consent of the governed. It can’t just be Sovereign Citizens spouting legal gibberish.

You can withdraw your consent to be ruled and state officials can press their claims.

Then the question is “Who wins?”

I would ask the good people of Palestine how that goes.