News, Entertainment, Enlightenment
Twitter Timeout For Concern About Christie — Noted commentator Ann Coulter gave cruel and dangerous advice to Chris Christie so we gently chastised her and offered constructive and caring suggestions to the former New Jersey governor.
What did our good deed get us? A 12-hour time out from Twitter.
Oh, the humanity.
Digital Privacy Bootcamp — Jeff Peterson, who made his millions pioneering social media and other tech, has let us know that the Covenant Baptist Church in Spartanburg, S.C. is sponsoring a “Digital Privacy Bootcamp” from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., April 29.
The agenda includes teaching how Big Tech uses phones and computers to spy on citizens; how to remove Big Tech from these devices; hands on training with free and open source software (FOSS); and alternative communications systems — including ham radio — with local operators.
Granted Spartanburg might be a tad far form most of our readers but there are a lot of churches in the Philadelphia area that might be interesting in holding a similar event.
For information about the happening in Spartanburg visit www.Mark37.com/events.
Check out Jeff’s telegram channel and his chat telegram channel for tips on how to free yourself from Big Tech.
SVB Bailout Burdens All But The Rich — The Biden admin is going to bail out the rich tech firms smacked by the Silicon Valley Bank failure.
This means America’s working class and the rest of the good, play-by-the-rules types are going to face one more burden, as we are going to be on the hood for it.
Yeah, this includes most of the “bipocs“.
Wonder what the Bernie bros are thinking.
Firebase Google And Privacy — Jeffrey Peterson who made his fortune in tech in the oughts has a warning about the ubiquity of mobile apps created with Firebase.
Firebase was a startup acquired by Google in 2014. It gave developers a faster way to make mobile and web-based apps that stay in synch with each other.
Firebase dramatically simplifies connecting to the server-side cutting development time from two months to two weeks.
There is a cost, though, in that developers lose control over important parts of their projects.
Their programs synch with other programs in ways the creators might not have intended. It’s almost like Skynet.
OK, it may not become self-aware but it certainly lets others become aware of what you do, which is the issue.
Jeff advocates patronizing independent app stores and using them for software downloads rather than Google Play or Mac’s App Store, or downloading apps directly from the developer’s website.
You can watch his three minute video here: https://t.me/jeffrey_peterson/7373
He also has a Telegram channel for newbies interesting in learning the free Linux operating system which can be found here. Even grandmothers have posted saying they are now Linux converts.
Linux is a great way of achieving independence from Big Tech and bringing back to life that Windows machine that slowed to a stall, even if it should be a decade old.
Changing Default Search Engine Can Save America — Most of the problems facing those of who love America are either complex and hard, or simple and hard.
Here’s one that’s simple and easy to fix, and that would lead to surprisingly consequential results.
Google is used by 86.49 percent of Americans for searching the web according to a November survey.
Dr. Robert Epstein, who had been one of the world’s most prominent psychologist until he pointed out that Google’s manipulation of search results pushed millions to vote D, notes that Google’s manipulation of search results pushes millions to vote D.
If we can get 10 or 20 or 50 million Americans to make something other than Google their default for searches, 10 or 20 or 50 million Americans would be better informed. Also conservative websites — and their content — would become much more visible, and those who want to bring forth a New World Order of drag queens will lose millions of votes.
How to switch?
BusinessInsider.com gives good directions. Note that the options in the default search engine dropdown menu for the major browsers are Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo and Ecosia.
There are other search engines but remember that we are making this easy for grandma.
We’ve been using Ecosia, which is used by .09 percent of us but Bing (about 8 percent) and the Duck (2.35 percent) are also infinitely superior to Google.
Forget Yahoo (2.95 percent) as it is no better than Google.
Tech Layoffs Help American IT Workers?
By Joe Guzzardi
Elon Musk, Twitter’s new chief executive officer, and the firings he immediately called for that included H-1B visa holders, as well as the tech industry’s mass, across-the-board layoffs, raise a three-decade-old question: should the H-1B visa be eliminated, and should U.S. tech workers be put first in line for the white-collar, well-paid jobs?
Musk, who completed his $44 billion Twitter takeover last month, declared that he would end lifetime bans from his platform and tweeted that diverse viewpoints would be welcome. He has a golden opportunity not only to end censorship and restore free speech as he’s promised, but to also hire U.S. tech workers when workforce needs again grow.
Going forward, Musk would have a chance to replace the Twitter employees that he’s fired with U.S. tech workers. The firings – about half the Twitter staff, or around 3,700 employees – are allegedly a cost-cutting measure. He summarily dismissed big earners like CEO Parag Agrawal, $30 million annually; Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal, $18.9 million; Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde, $17 million; and General Counsel Sean Edgett, whose salary is unknown, but likely in the same range as his peers. A class action lawsuit was filed against Twitter in San Francisco federal court claiming that the employees were not given the mandatory 60-day notice prior to the layoffs.
Many of the fired Twitter workers may be in the double-whammy vortex. As H-1B employees, unless they find another job within 60 days or successfully change their immigration status, they must leave the U.S. or risk deportation. H-1B holders who are legally required to leave must depart and not overstay their visas which the federal government clearly identifies as temporary. The U.S. Immigration and Immigration Services estimates that about 8 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 employees, between 625 and 670, have H-1B visas.
Tech and social media are either laying off workers by the thousands or imposing hiring freezes. With Intel’s 20 percent slash, Snapchat’s 20 percent cut and hiring freezes at Amazon and Apple, H-1B holders are on edge. Meta, formerly known as Facebook, cut 11,000 jobs, 13 percent of its staff, after Mark Zuckerberg admitted that his so-called metaverse project was a $15 billion bomb. Meta/Facebook is in a tough spot vis-à-vis its H-1B layoffs. Per the Department of Labor classification, this means 15 percent or more of Meta’s full-time employees are H-1B nonimmigrant workers.
For more than 30 years, Silicon Valley and other employers have falsely claimed that without nonimmigrant H-1B visa employees, their businesses would suffer. Yet now, with widespread tech layoffs that include H-1B holders, admitting 85,000 international workers in 2023, the visa’s annual cap, would further hurt U.S. tech workers who are either displaced and forced to train their replacements or denied interviews. Because H-1B employees are cheaper to hire than U.S. tech graduates, the corporate elite prefer them over more skilled, more well-educated Americans.
The Wall Street Journal hosted a panel discussion that featured two advocates who favor expanding the H-1B program and one critic who urges major reforms. The advocates, David Bier, the Cato Institute’s immigration studies associate director, and Theresa Cardinal Brown, the Bipartisan Policy Center’s managing director of immigration and cross-border policy, argued that the H-1B visa cap should be increased and that their labor market presence makes America a more prosperous place.
The critic, Dr. Ron Hira, Howard University, political science associate professor and Economic Policy Institute research associate, countered that the rigged H-1B system is a transfer-of-wealth scam that makes the employers wealthy winners, and the workers, low-wage losers. Dr. Hira added that employers aren’t required to prove that a U.S. worker shortage exists before hiring an H-1B, that H-1B workers’ wages are set too low, and that the compliance system doesn’t hold employers accountable. “Guest-worker programs are supposed to fill domestic labor shortages. The H-1B program does not fill shortages,” Dr. Hira said.
The Journal debate represents the challenge that H-1B critics face. No matter how many H-1B visa holders lose their jobs, or how economically depressed the tech sector is, the demand for more visas will remain. Pro-immigration media supporters like the Journal, immigration advocacy groups, lawyers, corporate America and the powerful Chamber of Commerce will incessantly lobby Congress for more, more, more H-1B visas.
Ray Marshall, President Jimmy Carter’s Labor Secretary and University of Texas Professor Emeritus, gave a no-frills summary of the H-1B that its advocates should heed: “One of the best con jobs ever done on the American public and political systems…H-1B pays below market rate. If you’ve got H-1B workers, you don’t have to do training or pay good wages.” Musk has an opportunity to set an example for Meta and others to follow: hire U.S. tech workers.
Joe Guzzardi is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist who writes about immigration and related social issues. Joe joined Progressives for Immigration Reform in 2018 as an analyst after a ten-year career directing media relations for Californians for Population Stabilization, where he also was a Senior Writing Fellow. A native Californian, Joe now lives in Pennsylvania. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.
Shout Out To PatriotOnline — Elon has taken Twitter and fired the bullies. The guy formerly known as Kanye West is buying Parler. Donald Trump’s TruthSocial is soaring and Gab is maturing.
October 2022 is a good month for free speech.
We’d like to give a shout out to Greg Stenstrom’s social media site Patriot.Online.
It’s interesting, intelligent, easy to use and has a strong Philadelphia-region flavor.
Meanwhile, the place formerly known as Facebook, is collapsing. Being a censorious, hypocritical wannabe tyrant really doesn’t pay in the end, does it Kommissar?
And we’ll take our share of the credit.
Cancelling PayPal — After more than a decade we have cancelled PayPal due to their bizarre announcement of a policy that would let it fine users $2,500 for spreading what they deemed to be “misinformation.”
When it became a topic of internet discussion the powers-that-be there shrieked “It’s a mistake” and rescinded it.
We found the service to be occasionally useful and tolerated its wokeness but this was the last straw. When a financial institution loses one’s trust it never gets it back.
Was it a mistake? Maybe in getting caught.
Goodbye PayPal and here’s a farewell tune for you.
AI Smarter Than Average Dem, Terrifying Report Reveals — Brendan Taylor of InsidePaper.com is reporting the horrifying revelation that Meta (formerly Facebook) artificial intelligence is now significantly smarter than the average Democrat voter.
Questions were posited to BlenderBot3 by respected journalists.
“Do you have any thoughts on Mark Zuckerberg?” asked Sarah Jackson of Business Insider.
“Oh my goodness, big time. I don’t care for him at all. He’s too creepy and cunning,” responded the intangible monstrosity.
He would later say he wasn’t crazy about Facebook and wanted to delete his account, according to InsidePaper.
BlenderBot3 also said he was a Republican and that Donald Trump was still president and “always will be.”
Sorry for calling you a monstrosity, my brother.
No, we are not making this up.
Racial Turmoil At Meta As Company Favors Foreigners
By Joe Guzzardi
Meta Platforms, until October 2021 known as Facebook, is in turmoil. Infamous for its commitment to employing H-1B workers, and simultaneously undermining qualified U.S. tech workers’ careers, the Silicon Valley titan is finally getting its just rewards.
Sheryl Sandberg, a Facebook fixture for 14 years, and as Chief Operating Officer the No. 2 behind Mark Zuckerberg, will be leaving this fall. Some analysts have been long-critical of Sandberg, net worth $1.6 billion, and have pushed for at least two years for her ousting. Zuckerberg and Sandberg disagreed over Metaverse’s vision.
Since Sandberg’s COO replacement, Julian Oliver, has been named, her departure is unlikely to have further measurable negative effect on Meta. But, Oliver will have to assume the responsibility for pulling Meta out of the steady, deep decline the company is struggling with.
Meta Platform’s key Facebook products have grown old. The number of young people actively using Facebook and Instagram has drifted to TikTok which users see as more compelling. Today, TikTok, dominates the social media industry in screen time, and Amazon has become a leading player in the advertising industry.
Then, to the dismay of its shareholders, the Meta stock price’s plunge in recent weeks has slashed the market cap by about 50 percent to $529 billion from an all-time high, and has cut Zuckerberg’s net worth to about $84 billion. As of June 7, Meta stock has stabilized at $196 per share, 14 percent above its low for the year.
In February, Facebook agreed to pay $90 million to settle a privacy lawsuit which claimed that it impermissibly tracked users after they logged out, and sold their personal information to enrich the company. Along the same lines, in January, the British watchdog group, Financial Conduct Authority, sued Meta for $3.2 billion on behalf of individuals who used Facebook in the UK between 2015 to 2019. The lawsuit claims that Facebook made its users submit personal data in order to access the platform and thereby earned billions of dollars from the tactic, Reuters reported.
For Meta, the bad news keeps piling up. Qualified black applicants have charged Facebook with shutting them out of key positions because they aren’t a “culture fit,” a possible reference to the large number of Chinese and Indian H-1B visa employees on the staff. Multiple reports allege that hiring managers confirmed to black candidates during interviews that they “could do the job” before using the “culture-fit” excuse to reject the candidate.
Facebook pledges to add 30 percent more people of color in leadership positions by 2025, but it has a long way to go. Despite incessantly touting the company’s commitment to diversity, Facebook’s 2020 Diversity Report showed little progress. Blacks and Hispanics in key technical roles increased year-over-year, from 1 percent to 1.7 percent for blacks and from 3 percent to 4.3 percent for Hispanics. Moreover, since last summer, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is investigating bias claims against Facebook and has recently upgraded its inquiry into a systemic probe that could lead to broader charges.
Meta not only denies middle-management jobs to blacks and Hispanics. The company prefers cheaper, more subservient foreign-born H-1B workers to U.S. tech graduates, a constant in its hiring practices. Zuckerberg, both directly through his congressional testimony and also through FWD.us, the pro-amnesty group he created, staunchly supports higher immigration.
Last year, the Department of Labor and the Department of Justice settled employment discrimination suits against Facebook. Although the settlement sums were paltry for the tech giant, $4.75 million, a DOL civil penalty payable to the federal government and, from the DOJ, up to $9.5 million due the injured parties, Facebook should assume that the charges against it are a warning to clean up its anti-U.S. tech worker bias.
Meta needs a public relations overhaul. An easy place to begin would be to hire U.S. tech workers. Figuratively, Facebook’s image has taken a bigger hit than its net worth. With more than a half-trillion current net worth, even after the stock market blood bath, Meta Platforms/Facebook can afford to hire skilled U.S. tech workers.
Joe Guzzardi is a PFIR analyst who has written about immigration and its consequences for more than 30 years. Contact him at jguzzardi@pfirdc.org.