Category Archives: Technology

UPDATED (10/22/019): Homeless In Seattle, Part 2: Tech Sucks The Soul Out Of The City

Business, IMMIGRATION, Labor, Regulation, Technology

NEW COLUMN IS “Homeless In Seattle, Part 2: Tech Sucks The Soul Out Of The City.” It’s on Townhall.com, WND.COM and The Unz Review.

An excerpt:

Trust the late Anthony Bourdain, the Kerouac of cooking, to blurt out the truth when nobody else would.

Following his Jack Kerouac wanderlust, Bourdain had arrived in Seattle to spotlight the manner in which high-tech was changing the city, draining it of its character and of the many quirky characters that made Seattle what it was. 

“Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Expedia, and Amazon are the big dogs in town,” mused  Bourdain. “A flood of them—tech industry workers, mostly male, derisively referred to as tech boys or tech bros—is rapidly changing the DNA of the city, rewiring it to satisfy their own newly-empowered nerdly appetites.”

That the “tech boys” “are so dull,” as members of a Seattle band say—and sing—in no way assuages their heated effect on the housing market. A street artist called “John Criscitello … told Bourdain how the high-tech influx has driven up housing costs and forced artists [like himself] out of the neighborhood.”

Yes, Big Tech is exacerbating homelessness in Seattle and the surrounds. While correlation is not causation, the ongoing and never-ending, annual importation of a sizable feudal elite from China and India must be factored in the homelessness equation.

“Buoyed by the city’s thriving technology industry, Seattle has consistently been the hottest housing market in the nation.” Commensurate with the explosion in the number of Seattle neighborhoods in which homes cost $1 million has been an explosion in the region’s homeless population.

“Households must earn about $140,000 a year to afford mortgage payments – nearly double the city’s typical income,” but on par with the “average base pay” of a software engineer in the Seattle, WA area. …

…   “Unabashed liberal” outfits like the Economist, the Brooking Institute and the Seattle Times blame inadequate supply for the housing crisis, ignoring the demand side of the supply-and-demand housing equation whereby, “Big Tech is permitted to petition The State for permission to import The World at a price heavily subsidized by the disenfranchised American taxpayer. Through government immigration policies, a ceaseless demand for housing has been generated.”  (See “Homeless In Seattle, Part 1.”) ….

… READ ON. NEW COLUMN, “Homeless In Seattle, Part 2: Tech Sucks The Soul Out Of The City,” is on Townhall.com, WND.COM and The Unz Review.

* Image courtesy of The Unz Review.

UPDATED (10/22/019):

Indian Graduates Green-Lighted To Take Middle-Class Jobs From American Graduates

IMMIGRATION, Labor, Outsourcing, Republicans, Technology

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) has always been a slithering political snake of the worse kind.

In the Washington Examiner, the sanctimonious Lee writes that, “People are always our greatest resource and should be our first priority. It’s social capital, embedded in our relationships, that can provide the best meaning, care, and support in people’s lives, at every stage of life. …”

Then he turns around, and, joined by Sen. David Perdue (R-GA), authors a Bill that’ll

allow investors and their companies to reward many more Indian graduates who agree to take the college graduate jobs needed by young American graduates. The reward is the grant of 120,000 invaluable green cards — up from roughly 20,000 today — to the Indian outsourcing workers and their families.

The so-called “Fairness for High Skilled Immigrants Act” [every outlet reports a different Bill title] will be

a huge economic hit to the roughly 800,000 Americans who are graduating in 2019 with degrees in health care, science, engineering, accounting, business, software, math, or architecture.

Also Via Breitbart:

The giveaway is in a House bill, HR.1044, and a matching Senate bill, S.368. Both bills end the country caps, provide fast-track green cards to roughly 300,000 Indian H-1B contract workers, and both expand the reward for more Indians to become contract workers in the United States — and neither bill offers any significant benefits to Trump’s agenda or Americans.

The liars in Congress give their Bill an Orwellian name: “Bill to Strengthen American Workforce, Reduce Visa Backlog for High-Skilled Immigrants.”

The Daily Caller calls the disenfranchising of American graduates a “big revamp”:

The proposed legislation has the chance to be the biggest revamp of America’s immigration system since the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, but is getting little if any attention from the press due to the impeachment drama currently unfolding on Capitol Hill.

* Image courtesy of ID 29261524 © Ivelinr| Dreamstime.com

NEW COLUMN: Homeless In Seattle, Part 1: High-Tech Harm The Homeless

Business, Economy, Globalism, IMMIGRATION, Labor, Technology

NEW COLUMN is “Homeless In Seattle, Part 1: High-Tech & The Homeless.” It is currently on Townhall.com , The Unz Review and WND.com.

To expatiate on the subject of homelessness in Seattle, Tucker Carlson regularly invites on his Fox News show a Republican liberal who broadcasts out of Seattle.

Aside from a pastiche of liberal ideas, Sleepy in Seattle has nothing remotely perceptive or probative to say about homelessness in the Emerald City. Eventually, this young know-nothing will read this column and parrot it back to Tucker.

Then, perhaps, will Carlson’s viewers stop being gulled by Big Tech and the other multinationals who are exacerbating the problem of homelessness in Washington State.

For these stateless corporations are the major importers, into King County and the surrounds, of a high-tech, feudal elite that compounds the homeless quagmire.

If anything, the corporations who straddle the globe rely on immigration ignoramuses to perpetuate the single-cause theory of homelessness: addiction or mental illness.

However, even if drug addiction and mental illness are seen as necessary in causing homelessness, they are seldom sufficient. Substance abuse and mental anguish can, in themselves, be the consequence of other exogenous, existential and intractable circumstances.

Like being priced out of your homeland’s housing market. For good.

Big Tech must be quite pleased to see homelessness attributed exclusively, by the usual cast on TV, to addiction and mental illness—when, in fact, homelessness is driven, primarily, by the systematic and permanent eviction from the housing market of vulnerable, working-class people.

In truth, our country is consigning its economically weakest members to the homeless encampment, through the never-ending importation of a high-rolling, high-tech elite, which, in turn, artificially inflates the price of housing. In perpetuity.

According to the Seattle Times, “fewer than 50 percent of people without homes are addicts.” “There are more families with children than chronically homeless people” in the encampments.

Underlying homelessness are factors such as “loss of a job,” “eviction,” medical bills and foreclosure, the last of which “destroys credit ratings, making former homeowners no longer eligible for loans or, in many cases, rentals.” Forever.

“We must no longer allow politicians, policy influencers and the media to get away with the laziness of conflating substance abuse and homelessness,” inveighs Lola E. Peters.

Peters, a local writer, is correct. Alas, while implicating the tech-driven population explosion in our state’s housing crisis, Ms. Peters frames the unrelenting influx from China and India as an organic, natural, made-in-America population explosion. …

 

… READ THE REST. NEW COLUMN, “Homeless In Seattle, Part 1: High-Tech & The Homeless,” is currently on Townhall.com, The Unz Review and WND.com.

NEW COLUMN: The Anatomy of A Twitter Blocking — My Own

Business, Free Speech, Ilana Mercer, Technology

NEW COLUMN IS “The Anatomy of A Twitter Blocking — My Own.” It’s on WND.COM and The Unz Review.

An excerpt:

TWICE HAVE the censors at Twitter kicked me off their anything-but-neutral platform.

When these arbiters of right and wrong periodically block my Twitter account, visitors to the site will be greeted with a stark warning:

“Caution. This account is temporary restricted.” The snowflakes will be forewarned of “some unusual activity on the account. Do you still want to view it?” Naturally, the worded choice offered—to view or not to view—ultimately doesn’t exist. I am told that when you click to avail yourself of the “choice,” my account is nowhere to be seen. Once blocked, you’re invisible.

The visual that assaults the eye is this one:

The screen shot was taken by a friend. For, when sent to the Twitter doghouse, one is typically barred from accessing Twitter at all, except for fleetingly seeing the notice, “Your account has been locked.”

… READ THE REST on WND.COM and The Unz Review.