I'm exhausted and I'm seeing different stuff in my notifications and wondering about some things.
I don't agree with Trump's attack on birthright citizenship though I think I understand the line of reasoning.
Currently, there are more than a thousand people a day flooding over our southern border. It's a lot and I think it's reasonable to be concerned.
They do that because they hope for a better life for themselves and their children. And birthright citizenship is part of the draw.
You can work the fields or whatever and even if you are here illegally, your children will be citizens. I once knew a doctor whose parents had worked the fields, so some of them do get the American dream out of it, something most Americans no longer seem to get or even dream of.
But we are going to run into a problem in that our current system relies on immigrants -- often illegal immigrants -- to bring in the harvest. Most Americans won't take those jobs and that is potentially a very serious problem where people begin starving because we successfully kept out the illegal immigrants.
Personally, I would like to see work visas that allow people from south of the border to come here and work the fields or construction etc for more money than they make at home for part of the year and then go home again.
Some folks don't want to live here. They only want to work here and have to sneak in and out to do it while risking arrest for being here to take jobs most Americans won't take. It's an amazingly stupid broken system.
Trump is making a mistake to attack tribal peoples and try to say they aren't American citizens. Unless you want to say their reservations are separate nation states entirely, trying to deny Natives American citizenship is a big problem that will bite you in the ass.
They have no place else to go. Making them illegals in the land in which they were born is asking for trouble unnecessarily.
Ending DEI.
I don't really have a problem with that. I think most DEI programs are likely poorly done and likely creating more problems than they solve, much like most programs intended to "help the homeless" require homelessness to persist to justify their existence so they are frequently programs that help you survive another day but don't really help you get off the street.
Jobs should hire people qualified to do the work and having other criteria for the job, like a particular percentage need to be a certain gender or skin color, tends to actively foster the hiring of people less qualified.
I am well aware of the potential to abuse that and claim you aren't really a white supremacist Nazi asshole motherfucker son of a bitch that should be given your much desired ticket to Mars yesterday and not our problem that it lacks breathable atmosphere and five star restaurants.
But all systems have potential for abuse and choosing metrics like skin color over competence for who to hire is a recipe for a failing economy.
Trump's tagline -- Make America Great Again -- implicitly seeks to strengthen the economy.
I don't know how to really solve this problem but I don't feel that hamstringing productivity is the way we should be doing it.
I've spent a lot of years trying to figure out how a woman breaks into the old boys club on merit and I don't have the answer. I've been more tolerated than most women in a particular male dominated space but men clearly use that space to make money and I have been actively mocked and derided for talking about my inability to do the same.
What I have learned is most "minorities" don't want to hear anything about finding some other answer. They don't want to hear that there are any reasons for their exclusion other than "the gatekeepers are racist, misogynistic, homophobic assholes!"
I believe that things like the casting couch are alive and well. And I believe that women who take that deal won't admit to it because it harms their professional reputation and with good reason:
You weren't hired because of your actual qualifications.
I think Jessica Livingston, one of the TWO primary founders of the multibillion dollar VC fund YC, lacks the business acumen most founders have.
I think she was hoping to marry well and her boyfriend decided to start a company designed around her strengths. She has called YC "an accidental success" which suggests to me she has NO CLUE how hard her husband with a PhD worked at making it a success and she would not be qualified to found a company without him doing a zillion things she doesn't know how to do and doesn't think matter.
So I don't know how women actually really break the glass ceiling because a lot of well paid women make good money primarily based on sex appeal -- models, actresses -- and it tends to NOT lead to real power. And money tends to grow out of power, not the other way around.
Are there exceptions?
I assume so but I also think that what the public hears and believes is frequently largely a facade and not the secret sauce for how things happen.
I believe that because Paul Graham was the face of YC for years and the business is designed around Jessica Livingston's strengths but wouldn't exist at all without Paul Graham's business acumen and HIM saying "Let's start a business." She had no business aspirations.
And I spent YEARS trying to figure out how in the hell a pretty young woman was one of four co-founders and dated one of them without this turning into a company-killing issue where three guys were fighting over which one of them gets the girl instead of focusing on MAKING MONEY. And the answer ultimately turned out to be "She didn't."
She was dating Paul BEFORE they founded YC and YC grows out of that fact, not the other way around. Then he invited his two co-founders from Viaweb to join them part time, but YC was really primarily "their baby" and they were already sleeping together.
That's a long tangent but deal with it because YC is a rare example I can discuss in public of a woman sleeping her way into success and it actually worked -- she got rich -- but I'm certain that to this day Paul Graham is the primary power broker behind YC and Jessica Livingston likely could not do what he did and start a SECOND successful business without him.
Melinda Gates HAD a career and then married well. Bill Gates is the co-founder of Microsoft and she's some former employee who "got her MRS" as they used to say about college women going to school primarily to marry well, not to pursue a career in earnest.
My experience has been that MOST men do NOT want to talk to me overly much UNLESS they are hoping it will lead to romance, whether illicit or above board, and my feeling is this closes a lot of doors for me through no fault of my own simply because I'm a woman.
I think the world NEEDS to solve this problem and few people are really trying to figure out how. Most people want the DEI answer: Just hire us! Nevermind we aren't really competent and once hired will fail to gain that competency because our paycheck and title convince us we're qualified.
I've seen women, people of color and gays start VC funds for their favorite demographic and loudly complain about not getting adequate funding "due to prejudice."
In every case, the VC fund was their FIRST business. They had no actual experience MAKING MONEY and yet they wanted to believe prejudice was why they couldn't get funding and their lack of funding was WHY the businesses they were ADVISING on how to make money weren't taking off.
I've been CELIBATE for medical reasons for roughly two decades and dirt poor the entire time. I don't know what in the hell I have to do to convince people I'm not talking to them to pursue a romantic relationship and I'm actually trying to figure out how to support my damn self, BUT I'm also convinced a lot of women are not interested in solving that problem and men have good reason to not trust women generally and to assume she will be happy to marry well if given the opportunity and give up her career, so he doesn't want to take the risk that people will think they are having an affair etc etc.
It's a hard problem to solve and I'm not sure it's solvable. I'm also extremely concerned that THIS issue and our idiotic ineffectual attempts to address it are the single biggest threat to humanity and why our cultures are falling apart, our health is falling apart etc.
We need answers for how single women, LGBTQ folks and people of color adequately support themselves without some rich white man being the person paying their bills as his wife, dish on the side, children or servants. And we need those answers to also NOT be a form of charity with the polite euphemism of diversity hire.
We need that so we actually have a healthy productive economy that makes food, homes, clothes, etc. We don't currently have that. We have rising homelessness, grown kids living with mom and dad who can't afford to move out and an extremely broken so-called health care system.
Which brings me to the next item: Trump's current media blackout for health organizations.
I have a lot of criticisms of the American health system and mostly don't participate in that system, so I'm not as freaked out as most people seem to be. But unless he's got some secret ace up his sleeve, I don't see where this is likely to lead to anything good.
And that's exactly why most people are having a fit: Because it's the norm for people to try to simply STOP things they don't like WITHOUT replacing them with something BETTER.
I was homeless for years and people routinely bitch about things like payday loans and predatory lending and how they victimize poor people. Their answer is ALWAYS "We should take away these shitty options entirely so they have NONE at all!" and NEVER "I have a better solution for poor people."
Last, I'm pro death penalty. Some people aren't fixable and I see zero reason to warehouse them for life at taxpayer expense.
That is all.