I don’t blame Canada for making changes in trade agreements and domestic policies in response to the sudden betrayal by Trump’s America. But at the same time, the strategy in the article feels random. So China can sell cars in Canada and how does Canada’s car industry gain from that? Encouraging South Korean auto makers to build in Canada would make sense, except that they’d also face tariffs when selling to consumers in America right? What’s the market to which Canada would export cars? Or is the idea to simply gain in other industries and let the Canadian auto industry die out?
How could anyone look at the innocent face of that child and want to rip him way from his familiar life, family, and friends. Doing this is not just enforcing laws. It is a targeted act of brutality and evil. It’s meant to satisfy the ravenous appetite for racist, supremacist violence that the MAGA right has. And it is aiming to do so specifically in the case of a beautiful child to show they don’t care.
They are willing to do all of this and more. They are willing to violate the constitution with warrantless raids. They are willing to randomly detain citizens and release them without explanation. They are willing to lie to the public about what happened. They are willing to execute US citizens in broad daylight in front of witnesses and on video. The expansion of ICE to a 40,000+ agent force is a massive threat to democracy and stability of this country.
No one with a shred of decency should support the administration at this point.
They want us to move on? After Trump was mentioned over 5000 times in the files they released initially? After they dishonestly kept redacting the files until he’s not mentioned at all today? He was probably in there way more if we had a real release of the files without the dishonesty of the DOJ.
The files that we did see imply that Trump literally stuck his finger in little girls - with his daughter Ivanka and Elon Musk present! That he murdered or ordered the murder of girls. That he assaulted a 13 year old that didn’t perform oral sex to his satisfaction. With so many allegations, and his prior convictions, and numerous other accusations of sexual crimes, I personally believe he is guilty.
Let’s also not forget his entire ecosystem of sycophants and allies are in there. Musk was in there begging Epstein to have him over for the wildest party. Thiel is in there, repeatedly meeting shady Russian officials and is likely a Russian plant himself at this point. Bannon is in there. All these people kept associating with Epstein years after he was a convicted child sex offender.
Same on Twitter / X. Posts criticizing Musk or Trump or their friends like Thiel are suppressed. Many users report that those posts get far less views than their other posts, in a suspicious pattern. Musk probably had their real algorithm (that’s live) configured to amplify some views and suppress others.
> Posts criticizing Musk or Trump or their friends like Thiel are suppressed.
Same here too, for the record. At least for the past year. Not all, but very many.
People complain about it all the time, but any posts about it get deleted almost immediately by express mod decree.
I do understand that this latest 24 hours is a different level, but would not be surprised if censorship has dramatically escalated here recently also. We've no way to know.
I see your profile says you work in VC. Is the investment world also expanding to India? If not is this offshoring really a threat to America? Seems like the Bay Area still has the strongest network effects, even if it doesn’t make sense. So it seems like newer innovation would still happen there.
To a certain extent. For years now most founders in Cybersecurity, Enterprise SaaS, and DefenseTech in the US either have familial ties or immigrated from India, Israel, or CEE. Additionally, all the major VC funds have had India dedicated or Indian diaspora dedicated funds for almost 3 decades now.
Additonally, it's much easier to publicly list in India now that the IPO market is fixed, so we can move startups that aren't going to perform in the US to India where US$50M-$100M in revenue can justify an exit that is better than a PE buyout.
> Seems like the Bay Area still has the strongest network effects, even if it doesn’t make sense.
Absolutely. Hell, I live here too and it cannot be beat.
But founders and operators are largely either immigrants or the children of immigrants. Half of Bangalore and Tel Aviv is here right now raising capital, but all the core strategic roles (Product, Engineering) are increasingly only located in India, Israel, and CEE.
> is this offshoring really a threat to America
To America, no.
To Americans not working in a Tier 1 hub and aren't upskilling (ie. most losers on HN) absolutely.
Why pay $160K for Joe in Cary who's a bootcamp grad when I can hire Jamila who has an MSCS from UIUC and worked at Google MTV on an H1B and is now returning to Koramangla in order to work as a staff engineer for $90K?
That said, for American politicans services offshoring does not matter. It's a mostly blue voting industry with a vocal red minority largely living in a blue states or blue bubbles in red states. IC SWEs are not a vote bank for the GOP nor the DNC.
> I've yet to find a better way to instantly time-travel forward 12 hours
I find it very hard to use a computer in the cramped tables of the plane. And the person in front always ends up aggressively reclining only when I have a laptop out. Plus I feel bad that maybe my bright light is disturbing the people sleeping next to me.
I remember being a high paid techie getting 19 hours of paid work done between Melbourne and New York, on a laptop in economy (and a long layover in LAX due to a storm). It was fricking glorious, most productive day of my life.
Business class flights from Sydney to San Francisco cost A$6k, 6-10x as much as economy. Flights from Sydney to Europe are more like 3-4x (A$7k vs A$2k) but still ludicrously expensive. Good luck convincing your company to expense that for work trips, and most of us don't have SV salaries. Honestly, I still manage to get some work done on long flights, the more annoying thing is flights which don't have power outlets or WiFi.
If you are a point hacker you could spend the points on upgrades (which tend to give you better rates than buying base tickets) but then you're paying for a minor comfort improvement that you wouldn't pay for normally -- which is a textbook example of induced consumption and is playing into exactly how airlines want you to use points.
> He said the program has created income inequality because the annual median income for Indian-American families was more than $150,000 in 2023, higher than the median income for other racial groups. Median household income for all Americans was $82,690 in 2023, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
I love that the racists who attack the H1B program simultaneously complain that some racial groups earn more than their own white group, and also that the same racial groups are somehow just low cost labor meant to replace Americans. Their brains cannot acknowledge the most basic contradictions in their worldview.
Also the anti immigration “activist” this article casually mentions is absolutely deranged:
> Palasciano said he found it suspicious that there was a growing number of small businesses in Frisco owned by people of Indian origin employing Indian H-1B workers, especially in light of Paxton’s investigation.
> “There’s potential visa fraud here,” Palasciano said.
He literally sees a business employing nonwhites and thinks there is fraud. Textbook racist. His Twitter posts are even more unhinged and conspiratorial:
Are you looking for a yes/no answer, or for someone else to do the legwork for you?
I'll save you some time, the answer to you question is unequivocally: no. There are no other such archives for other religions or cultures. Just this one website.
There is a basic problem with some eastern texts, i.e. that many have not been translated into English. I was watching a video on Taoism recently, and a huge number of their scriptures are unavailable in English.
Given the borrowing of ideas, why then do modern Christians, including evangelicals, dismiss other cultures so aggressively? For example Greek and Roman beliefs in god are described as “pagan”, which is a negative term. And obviously evangelicals are very hostile to other faiths even today, whether it’s Buddhism or Islam or Hinduism or whatever.
> Given the borrowing of ideas, why then do modern Christians, including evangelicals, dismiss other cultures so aggressively?
That's really just an American thing. Americans have this concept of "manifest destiny" in their culture is the final one and it is their duty to spread it to the rest of the world. The American settlers have colonized the entire continent, but the spirit of Manifest Destiny still persists, just embodied in different forms.
For example, among evangelicals there is this paranoia of anything that might be considered pagan. Some will go even so far as to consider Christmas pagan. Meanwhile in the rest of the world it's perfectly accepted that Christianity has taken some local practices and re-dedicated them to Christ. This is not a concession to pagans to make Christianity more palatable for them (pagans are not stupid, they know it's a different religion). I can recommend the YouTube Channel "Jonathan Pageau", he used to talk a lot about this sort of stuff in his older videos.
It's not the only answer, but I would direct you to the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy.
Around a hundred, hundred and fifty years ago when our understanding of the universe had finally reached the point where it became obvious that (a) all of our creation stories were just stories and (b) we actually kind of knew the actual story now, everyone had a big crisis over how to deal with that.
The two options on the table where fundamentalism -- doubling down on Biblical literalism and faith -- and modernism, taking the Bible as more a spiritual message, adapting our understanding of it for the modern world.
Some churches went one way, others the other, but over the following century the fundamentalist churches have proven to be better at attracting, retaining and motivating their members.
There are still modernist churches, but the loudest Christians in America are almost all of the fundamentalist bent.
Those unable or unwilling to expend cognitive effort love black & white thinking & are also easily swayed by emotional manipulation.
It doesn't help that they attract power hungry sociopaths who seek to influence them for profit.
Of course, the only way I can think of to address this would be for the state to violate the first amendment & promote the concept that anyone who believes in Hell condemns themselves to Hell. (Matthew 7:1-2)
Because all ideas and all thought and all knowledge stem from Jesus and eventually will be used to worship HIM only but other gods are just made up distractions.
This is the profound underlying theology
It's even weirder than that, there's many ideas that might very easily be described as "pagan" except that they're entirely accepted as orthodox. For instance the entire notion of the Trinity is at its root a straightforward application of Neoplatonic philosophy, where the "One" Godhead exists as three lower "hypostases" (Greek) or "persons" (Latin). And much Stoic ethics was adopted directly within early Christianity.
To be entirely fair about it, the linkage may easily go back to the very time of Jesus in some important ways, seeing as many of Jesus's teachings were shared with the Essenes', and the Essenes in turn were quite knowledgeable about Greek/Hellenistic philosophy.
I have the same questions as you. I find many Hindu and Buddhist practices are compatible with Christianity. Eastern religion has different words than western religion for certain things, and concepts naturally get misunderstood, so I think Christians (in America at least) are somewhat afraid that by learning about eastern religion they will be worshiping a false God. The condemnation that comes with Christian groups unfortunately dissuades people from seeking the truth outside the church for fear of social exclusion.
It's important to realize that Christianity has its own mystically inclined, ascetic and/or meditative practices. There may even be a shared lineage going back to the very time of Jesus, seeing as the Essenes drew significant inspiration from the Greek Cynics, and the Cynics in turn (like other Hellenistic philosophies) from early Eastern sources that are reflected today in Hinduism and Buddhism. Some Stoic ascetic practices were definitely taken up in early Christianity and are now valued in a Christian context as "spiritual exercises".
>why then do modern Christians, including evangelicals, dismiss other cultures so aggressively?
The vast majority of modern Christians doesn't, the influences of Greek culture are readily apparent in the conceptual language of the New Testament, John most obviously when he turns Christ into the Logos. Culturally many pre-Christian practices have been incorporated into for example, Latin American Catholicism. You can literally see it in the architecture of churches.
American Evangelical Christianity is a bit of a different beast and best viewed as a nationalist program that brings particular American tendencies to bear on the religion rather than the other way around.
I’ve always seen American evangelism as a political movement first and a religious one second.
This impression has strengthened quite a bit in recent years as it’s become clear that political movements and politicians that are diametrically opposed to the teachings of Jesus are perfectly okay if they align on other more immediate secular political issues.
There’s always been a claim that the US is an outlier compared to other developed nations in terms of religiosity. I don’t really believe this anymore. I think we have a lot of politics with heavy religious veneer, but if you look only at sincere belief in the tenets of a faith I don’t think the US is much more religious than the UK for example.
> I think the religiosity of the US is an illusion.
I grew up in the Bible Belt around Baptists and Evangelicals and even a few Pentecostals. I assure you it isn't an illusion.
While there may be some outliers and grifters, particularly where religion intersects with politics (I doubt Trump believes in God half as much as Evangelicals believe in him) the vast majority of these people absolutely do believe what they say, and that they're right with God.
When I lived in the bible belt, I had a hilarious idea for a "student film" project on the life and times of Jesus. Stuff like using little-kids' floaties on his ankles to walk on water, accidentally raising an undead zombie, etc. My good friend told me he couldn't morally participate in the project.
We were 18 and he should have been able to laugh at a funny project but he saw it as insulting an important deity. What a sad and limited life organized religion constructed around him.
I also remember when my father started dating and he complained to me that he always made it clear that he was an atheist but then a few dates in the women would start talking about their faith and getting all Christy. I was incredulous and explained that it had always been that way since we moved there. He just wasn't divorced yet, so he didn't notice.
These people's lives are all about their faith. It's a fucking brain rot. It's a sickness and it greatly contributes to the misery of others.
I can understand your POV. My parents were atheists. Then, in college, it was just assumed everyone was one. So, I just accepted that as truth. I went on to read all the philosophy and religions. I always avoided Jesus though because honestly his name was a "bad word" in my crowd. Then, a few years ago I picked up the Gospel (nothing else) and decided to read it for informational purposes. And, it stuck with me. Then, I kept reading more and more, and realized that it was all cohesive and coherent. And, for years I tried to find flaws, but it was just too good and life changing and real.
What I mean is that for some people, the Gospel toggle some previously unknown bits in the brain that activates and transforms them. And, worship just becomes what they do. It's the freedom of it - they become unshackled. I really don't know how to describe it in a way that my previous atheist self would understand.
If you read about early christianity (which I did for 18months), you will see that the "gospel" is a mess.
If you couldn't find flaws, you are clearly biased. Even religious institutions have found flaws. The contradictions are so well published that you have to ignore them to not know about them,
I don't think you have any true knowledge of the history of your faith (said the atheist).
I can’t speak for your friend, but as a former atheist who brcame a Christian (albeit a very mediocre one) I feel like I can see both sides of this so perhaps I can offer a perspective that might help you understand each other better.
When I was an atheist, I assumed that anyone who didn’t care for the kinds of jokes you mentioned was worried that God would zap them with a lightning bolt.
Now I see it a little differently: if you see something as being of great importance, then it simply feels off / wrong / weird / missing the point to treat it as if it’s of little or no importance. In a word, it feels cringe. If such a project holds no allure for you, then you’re not missing much by sitting it out.
Not to harsh on your sense of humor, but I hope it might help to understand your friend better.
If an atheist has a weak explanation of religiosity, perhaps that atheist gets infected with religion.
It shouldn't come as great revelation, to an atheist, that to those infected with a mind virus it "feels cringe" when anything attacks the virus. That's its whole mechanism of action, its fangs. Besides, there's things like faith healing, and gospel churches, and the phrase "religious ecstacy", and all these other signs of the religious getting off on religion, so it should be obvious that they're defending something that feels precious, and are not merely terrorized.
However, if the atheist instead made a shallow assumption that religiosity is simple fear of a smiting bogeyman god, then it would come as a revelation that the religious are in fact having euphoric feelings, and this might be mistaken by the now ex-atheist for divine revelation of the way and the truth and the light, as the fangs sink in.
Using the "mind virus" language of the Right isn't helpful. We know it's a disease. They claim treating people with respect is a disease. Don't reinforce that.
What the fuck are you talking about? My mother didn't laugh at a joke because Jesus was in it. That's the kind of adherence that leads to hurting people because they disagree with you. Religion is stupid, it hurts people.
The craziest thing I’ve seen today are all the MAGA aligned people who DEFENDED the video before it was taken down. Influencers, Twitter users, and even the press secretary:
> White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt initially defended the video, which amplified false claims about the 2020 presidential election.
These are dangerous people who will defend any atrocity that the administration commits. Unbelievable.
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