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.

Wonder what the kickbacks looked like. Politicians are so cheap to buy these days.

Still an all time great game, too.

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.

There have been numerous instances of successful lawsuits against the government where someone’s freedom of speech was infringed upon.

For every singular success there’s been a thousand failures. And the long arc of history has bent towards censorship, particularly in the 21st century.

The purpose of “Freedom of speech” is to protect you from the government.

The courts do not protect your freedom to speak. They occasionally promise compensation years after you’ve had your speech quashed and your organization busted up. But the bar for the plaintiff is high and the cost of legal fees is crippling.

A news media company collaborating with the government is certainly immoral.

This isn’t about morality. A news company manager that acts at the behest of a government agency bureaucrat in exchange for financial compensation is an agent of the government. In the same way that a private security guard paid with public money is a cop.

You’re not free. Your oppression has been monetized.

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.

Yeah, because only one side cares about language and the words we use.

People across the political spectrum care. But views vary significantly around what words and language should be encouraged and what should be censored.

Nobody with an ounce of authority is actually against censorship of one degree or another. FFS, some of the biggest modern media censors are the wanna-be libertarian scalds of the Obama administration (Bari Weiss being an obvious example). Censorship is a method of shaping public perception and encouraging civil actions of one sort or another. The irony of Kirk’s death is that he repeatedly extolled the virtues of political violence only to eat shit when one of his own Groyper buddies went off the reservation. Hell, his final breath was expended snarkily deflecting the threat of mass shootings onto “gang violence”.

Anyone who says they don’t care about the political use of language is either nakedly naive or blowing smoke up your ass. And you can often tell one from the other by asking whether they’re old enough to buy their own beer.

Crowder is so far on the outs with the mainstream right-wing piggy bank that he would probably accept taking a bullet wound to recover his reputation.

Freedom of speech, protects you from your government (with some exceptions, often being, threats, incitement, disclosing classified information, and things of that nature), that’s it.

It doesn’t protect you from the government in any practical sense. Just ask Hewy Newton or Fred Hampton or MLK. Ask Mahmoud Khalil or the 25 pro-Palestinian demonstrators arrested just three weeks ago. Ask Tatiana Martinez, A Colombian TikTok influencer in Los Angeles was arrested by ICE agents during a live stream.

The FBI has had task forces dedicated to COINTELPRO since the 60s. Freedom of Speech in the US is entirely fictitious.

What we’re seeing in Mass Media is a trickle-down effect resulting from the US involvement in contracts to Tech Companies and large banks with ownership of private news outlets. Paramount settling a case over disparagement in a 60 Minutes interview with Trump for $16M came on the heels of an FCC decision about their merger with Skydance. The Bezos Post firing senior correspondents and staffing up with reactionary hacks comes as DOGE threatens a host of government contracts with Amazon’s primary moneymaker, Amazon Web Services. Bloomberg getting peppered with lawsuits in Trump-friendly courts is a secondary result of Mike’s feud with Trump on a national stage.

You are being wilfully ignorant if you refuse to draw a straight line between business sector firings of highly placed journalists and the parent companies of these media businesses cutting deals with the current administration.

My city already has its fair share of Confederate generals and reactionary land barons littering our parks and museums. He would certainly fit in.

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.