Tesla boss Elon Musk has said H-1B visas were being “gamed” by “some outsourcing companies”, but the solution was stopping the abuse and not dismantling the system.
Roughly 70% of these visas – that allow US companies to hire skilled foreign workers – are used by Indian citizens working in sectors like technology and medicine.
In September, US President Donald Trump added a $100,000 (£74,000) fee for applicants to the H-1B visa programme, sparking anxiety among Indian workers and employers.
Musk was speaking to Indian entrepreneur Nikhil Kamath on his podcast, released on Sunday evening, and also touched on a range of other issues from tariffs to immigration.
During the conversation Musk maintained that America has “long benefitted” from talented Indian migrant workers, but acknowledged concerns about the “misuse” of the H-1B visa programme.
H-1B visas are given out through a lottery, and outsourcing and staffing firms have often been accused of manipulating the system using tactics such as submitting multiple entries for the same worker, or using the visa to hire low-cost contract workers rather than for specialty occupations.
“We need to stop the gaming of the system,” Musk said.
The biggest way Indians game the system is what I call the “My Cousin Sanjay” problem.
“Hey, we need to get my cousin Sanjay from Pune into the country. He knows Sharepoint, so let’s write a job opening so narrowly tailored that only he can meet the requirement, then we can open a visa rec for him.” So they’ll write a rec that says that Sharepoint and ability to speak Marathi are hard requirements. So the thousands of Americans who know Sharepoint are never given a chance to get the job.
“But I’m certainly not in the school of thought that we should shut down the H-1B programme…which some on the Right are. I think they don’t realise that that would actually be very bad.”
Multiple things can be true at the same time:
There are excellent, highly skilled, highly educated foreign employees out there who can help America’s economy grow, people with Masters and Doctorates in engineering, computer science, mathematics, nuclear physics, medical degrees, etc. It’s generally a net benefit to get those people in American jobs.
A lot of the Indian workers being brought over are not the most highly skilled or education, they’re someone who has relative or friend already over here willing to lie on the visa forms to enable chain migration.
For highly skilled tech work that can be done anywhere in the world with the Internet, it’s more economically advantageous to employ them in the U.S. than abroad.
Many Indians are going to be harder workers than Americans for a number of reasons, some economic, some cultural. Having one or two of those guys on, say, a 30 man team, is probably going to be a net benefit.
But working harder than Americans is is only a secondary concerns, as most company’s only want H-1Bs because they’re cheaper than Americans.
And companies prefer H-1Bs to green card holders because they’re only a few steps above indentured servants. One reason Indians work such longer hours is they’re scared of their visas being cancelled. It’s frequently an abusive relationship.
You have too many Indians (or Chinese) on your team and you risk group-think, especially since so many come from a kiss-up, kick-down culture. You need crazy Americans (and, more specifically, crazy American men) there to tell a manager when their ideas are lousy and why. Indians will rarely do that for a superior.
Indians are starting to dominate not just temporary employees, but temporary and contract firms, and some people headhunting for American jobs are still in India. Also, anyone with an Indian accent for a company from New Jersey is overwhelmingly likely to be useless.
I’m old fashioned enough to think that American jobs should go to Americans unless there’s a really compelling reason otherwise.
If we’re still importing employees, better we import them from India (or anyplace else in the non-Jihadi Anglosphere) than Somalia or Haiti.
According to data released this month by a think tank, H-1B visa approvals for Indian outsourcing companies have fallen to the lowest level in a decade.
In this financial year, the top seven Indian companies had only 4,573 H-1B petitions approved for initial employment, a 70% drop from 2015 and 37% fewer than 2024, according to the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP).
Trump’s policies “could lead to higher denial rates and other problems for employers”, the NFAP report warned.
Oh no, they’ll have to pay market rates to hire Americans!
I think the $100,000 via application fee should kill most (but not all) the abuses. Another reform could be to set a minimum threshold of a $150,000 salary for an H-1B job, which will probably price Cousin Sanjay out of the market. And more scrutiny from the three agencies involved in the H-1B process (Departments of Labor, Homeland Security and State) should help cut down the chain migration problem.
As an American who’s been out of work for a goodly portion of the last two years despite hundreds of job applications, I’ve got to say that not letting Elon Musk have as many grindcore Indian visa employees as he wants strikes me as a more than acceptable price for reforming the process.
In a self-described “Most Autistic Episode Ever,” Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons joins Brandon Herrera, Cody Garrett (AKA Donut Operator) and Eli Cuevas (AKA Eli Doubletap) on their Unsubscribe podcast.
A whole lot of extremely deep gun-geeking ensues.
It’s 2.5 hours of wide-ranging firearms discussion, so I’m not going to cover all of it. But topics discussed include gyrojet pistols, the difficulties of finding ammo for rare guns, how the patent process works, how Star Wars turned various real guns (including rare prototypes) into on-screen props, restoring de-milled machine guns, how headspacing works, World War I guns, etc.
It’s a real buffet of interesting tidbits on a variety of different gun subjects, and I commend it to your attention.
Edited to Add: Here’s McCollum’s latest Kickstarter, Forged in Snow, about Finnish firearms, which has four days left to go. I won’t be buying it, because it’s a bit pricey and superfluous to my needs, but if it’s your thing, go for it.
Paxton’s office says the participation agreement would give the CSC “practically limitless power” over member schools, going far beyond the enforcement role envisioned under the House v. NCAA settlement that created the commission.
The agreement would require universities to:
Accept CSC’s authority to impose fines, penalties, and other sanctions with almost no meaningful right to appeal.
Waive their right to challenge CSC enforcement decisions in court and instead submit disputes to an arbitration system built around the House settlement.
Automatically comply with any additional policies the CSC adopts in the future, even if those rules are issued without prior notice.
Is this a commission contract or a Microsoft license agreement?
Paxton calls the arrangement a “power grab” that undermines the integrity of college sports by centralizing enforcement authority in an unaccountable body while pushing legal and financial risk onto public universities.
One of Paxton’s central objections mirrors concerns raised by Texas Tech University’s general counsel in an internal memo.
The CSC agreement includes a “nonassistance” provision that would:
Bar schools from cooperating with any lawsuit or legal action brought by their home state’s attorney general against the CSC.
Trigger major penalties—such as loss of conference revenue and postseason eligibility—if a school “assists” its state AG in such litigation.
If you’re demanding non-cooperation with legal authorities, I’ve got to think your agreement is unenforceable from the git go.
For Texas public institutions, Paxton notes, the agreement is not just bad policy—it may be illegal.
Among the issues his office and Texas Tech’s memo highlight:
Texas law restricts state entities from entering binding arbitration, yet the CSC agreement would require public universities to funnel disputes into a private arbitration process and waive jury trial rights.
Vague, open-ended fines and penalties could be treated as “unknown debt of the state,” which Bentley has warned would violate Texas law on state obligations.
The document’s structure appears to bind universities to future CSC rules that may conflict with Texas statutes and constitutional provisions, creating ongoing legal exposure.
Because of these conflicts, Paxton’s letter argues that Texas universities may be legally unable to sign as written, even if they otherwise support the House settlement and revenue-sharing framework.
The problem, of course, is that the well-meaning reforms designed to do away with traditional big college solutions to the problems of recruiting “student athletes” (bags of Kuggerands and lightly-used sports cars), namely the transfer portal, has taken control out of the hands of traditional power schools and put it into the hands of those same student athletes, and That Simply Will Not Do.
Given the history of college athletics, the only thing we can assume about the current “reforms” is that they shall soon require even more radical adjustments necessitating even more expensive “reforms”…
Greetings, and welcome to a rare Saturday LinkSwarm! This week: The Supreme Court stays the injunction against the Texas redistricting map, a bunch of Twitter fakes exposed, Trump drops the boom on Somali illegal alien scumbags,
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito issued an administrative stay of Tuesday’s ruling by an El Paso panel of federal judges that rendered the new congressional map passed by Texas Republicans this summer unusable for the 2026 midterm election.
The order restored the new map, pending consideration of the appeal by the State of Texas, and directed the Democratic-aligned parties to submit their response by Monday.
Snip.
The ruling drew a particularly pointed dissent from Judge Jerry Smith, the lone dissenter on the panel, who asserted that the motivation behind the redraw was clearly partisan gain — a position that sits outside the jurisdiction of the court.
Following that ruling, Attorney General Ken Paxton appealed the ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday, asking for an administrative stay — which Alito granted.
“Compounding the harm, the district court entered its sweeping injunction far too late in the day — ten days after Texas’s candidate filing period had already opened. The injunction changes the boundaries of all but one of the State’s 38 congressional districts, enjoining Texas from using its duly enacted 2025 map and resurrecting the repealed 2021 map,” Texas wrote in its appeal.
“The chaos caused by such an injunction is obvious: campaigning had already begun, candidates had already gathered signatures and filed applications to appear on the ballot under the 2025 map, and early voting for the March 3, 2026, primary was only 91 days away. The lateness of the district court’s injunction (issued 38 days after the hearing) alone warrants a stay.”
As things stand, Texas Republicans’ map is back in effect while the U.S. Supreme Court considers the case in expedited fashion.
Texas’ candidate filing deadline is December 8, 2025.
Twitter/X turns on locations and it turns out a lot of “American” account pushing that “GOP civil war”` nonsense were foreign psyops.
There are thousands of accounts like this. Many of them explicitly claim to be American or Western, but are run by random people in Asia and Africa to sow chaos and get clicks.
BREAKING – Waves of Democrat influencers are being exposed as foreigners under X’s new location update, including leftist X agitator Alex Cole, who claimed he voted for Kamala but has now been revealed to be Canadian. pic.twitter.com/3LrAsYCiMw
Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is supposed to be used in extreme cases of humanitarian need for short terms (usually for 6, 12, or 18 months), allowing foreign refugees a safe haven in America.
As deportation efforts have ramped up, however, the American public has learned that some foreigners have remained in the country on TPS for decades. Some politicians and businesses have purposely imported large numbers of foreigners into small American towns, such as Haitians in Ohio and Pennsylvania, as cheap labor to replace Americans.
President Donald Trump’s initiative to eliminate government waste and fraud through a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has quietly disbanded with a full 8 months still left on its charter.
Earlier this month when Reuters asked Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor about the status of DOGE, Kupor replied, “That doesn’t exist.”
Representative Tim Burchett (R-TN) said that Elon Musk, who headed up the DOGE effort, was pushed out Washington D.C. because he was getting too close to exposing corrupt officials who are enriching themselves through dark money non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
Burchett told Benny Johnson, “NGO money pours into Washington and ends up in politicians’ pockets as dark money.”
DOGE had made dramatic impact on the federal government during the early months of Trump’s second term, shrinking the size of federal agencies and cutting their budgets or revealing astonishing amounts of questionable money flowing through NGO coffers.
Sound like a good reason to continue the work, not abandon it…
All that “don’t obey illegal orders” nonsense Democrats are regurgitating? Yeah, it’s Soros-funded, “Sponsored by Win Without War, a progressive advocacy group,” which in turn is funded by Soros’ Open Society Foundations.
Marjorie Taylor Greene resigned from congress. As in the NFL, there’s always someone that has to “set the edge,” and MTG was the person who did that in the Trump era.
What the hell? Is China committing war crimes in Philippines coastal waters?
The Philippine Navy recently caught Chinese Fishing Militia putting Cyanide in the water near the BRP Sierra Madre at the Second Thomas Shoal.
The incident that was recorded on camera demonstrates the brutality & destruction meted out by the Chinese Fishing Militia inside… pic.twitter.com/L7NCI0UIik
The apparent reason Armata failed is this: sanctions.
But there’s more to the story, too. In fact, several interlocking factors account for the T-14’s failure to materialize as intended.
Let’s first look at costs and priorities: the unit cost of the T-14 was estimated at several million dollars – far higher than Russia had budgeted for.
The increase in cost meant that it couldn’t actually be sustained at scale. And, faced with heavy losses in Ukraine and urgent demands to ramp up numbers, Moscow opted to modernize its legacy platforms, such as the T-90, rather than invest in an expensive and unproven system. A tough choice, but a logical one.
The domestic production line for the T-14 never actually achieved accurate serial output, in large part thanks to sanctions and industrial bottlenecks.
There was no assembly line. Yes, really: every vehicle was hand-built like a luxury car. Sanctions and supply-chain constraints further hindered the manufacture of key components and high-end electronics required for the platform.
But even if Russia had been able to assemble more of the tanks before the sanctions really kicked in, it might not have changed the reality on the battlefield. Even when the war in Ukraine created a burning need for armored vehicles, Russia hesitated to commit T-14 units to the frontline for one worrying reason: they were vulnerable.
With the rise of automated systems, drone warfare, and long-range combat, those tanks may have proven as vulnerable as older units – and losing tanks built pre-sanctions would mean replacing them with older tanks.
That wouldn’t have made sense.
For more than a decade, the T-14 Armata has embodied Russia’s ambition to leap ahead of the West in tank design and warfare.
But it failed.
The usual lefty sorts are trying to raise Maryland’s minimum wage to $25. Virginia’s minimum wage will be $12.77 in 2026. Which state will businesses choose?
Brown County Judge Shane Britton was suspended from office without pay on Tuesday, one day after he was arrested on multiple charges that included allegations he assaulted a female prosecutor and interfered with the prosecution of a family violence case.
According to indictments handed down by a grand jury last week, Britton has been charged with three felonies: tampering with a witness in a family violence case, assault of a public servant, and tampering with a government document.
To understand the difference, it helps to look at what each chip was originally built to do. A GPU is a “general-purpose” parallel processor, while a TPU is a “domain-specific” architecture.
The GPUs were designed for graphics. They excel at parallel processing (doing many things at once), which is great for AI. However, because they are designed to handle everything from video game textures to scientific simulations, they carry “architectural baggage.” They spend significant energy and chip area on complex tasks like caching, branch prediction, and managing independent threads.
A TPU, on the other hand, strips away all that baggage. It has no hardware for rasterization or texture mapping. Instead, it uses a unique architecture called a Systolic Array.
The “Systolic Array” is the key differentiator. In a standard CPU or GPU, the chip moves data back and forth between the memory and the computing units for every calculation. This constant shuffling creates a bottleneck (the Von Neumann bottleneck).
In a TPU’s systolic array, data flows through the chip like blood through a heart (hence “systolic”).
It loads data (weights) once.
It passes inputs through a massive grid of multipliers.
The data is passed directly to the next unit in the array without writing back to memory.
What this means, in essence, is that a TPU, because of its systolic array, drastically reduces the number of memory reads and writes required from HBM. As a result, the TPU can spend its cycles computing rather than waiting for data.
Google’s new TPU design, also called Ironwood also addressed some of the key areas where a TPU was lacking:
They enhanced the SparseCore for efficiently handling large embeddings (good for recommendation systems and LLMs)
It increased HBM capacity and bandwidth (up to 192 GB per chip). For a better understanding, Nvidia’s Blackwell B200 has 192GB per chip, while Blackwell Ultra, also known as the B300, has 288 GB per chip.
Improved the Inter-Chip Interconnect (ICI) for linking thousands of chips into massive clusters, also called TPU Pods (needed for AI training as well as some time test compute inference workloads). When it comes to ICI, it is important to note that it is very performant with a Peak Bandwidth of 1.2 TB/s vs Blackwell NVLink 5 at 1.8 TB/s. But Google’s ICI, together with its specialized compiler and software stack, still delivers superior performance on some specific AI tasks.
The key thing to understand is that because the TPU doesn’t need to decode complex instructions or constantly access memory, it can deliver significantly higher Operations Per Joule.
“TPU v6 is 60-65% more efficient than GPUs.”
Austin’s APL bookstore Recycled Reads will be closing in January and the stock distributed to individual library sales shelves. I doubt I’ll be visiting various library branches to book scout. Maybe they should go back to the book sale events they used to hold.
Since I know many of you will be shopping on Black Friday, here’s A.) Listing some basic prepping and cold weather gear, and B.) Providing possible gifts or purchases for items I approve of.
I’ve included Amazon links, but for some items (like batteries), Sam’s or Lowes tends to offer better prices. But a lot of these do seem to have Black Friday savings prices.
The Basics
Here are some all-purpose tools everyone should already have, listed here for completeness sake.
First aid kit: There are a lot of different makes and models of these, and I think Sam’s offers a kit that’s a bit cheaper than this one. Has a little bit of everything. A good thing to keep in your car for emergencies.
Smoke alarm: Everyone should already have these, but if you don’t, or want more, this has a silence button so you can put it in your kitchen. These seem to be made in Mexico, but First Alert also makes stuff in China, so caveat emptor.
Carbon Monoxide detector. Doesn’t say, but I suspect it’s another item made in China. There are some combination carbon monoxide/smoke detectors, but I think you want to avoid the possibility of a single point of failure. You also need to replace these about every ten years anyway.
Fire Extinguisher: Every home should have at least one, and make sure it’s not expired. This is what I have (I think it’s made in Mexico), but fortunately I’ve never had to use it.
Water leak detector: A lot of people don’t have these, but I consider them essential basic gear, as they can save you hundreds or thousands of dollars in water damage, and I’ve had mine do that at least twice. My water leak detectors are nothing special, just cheap Chinese crap. Usual made in China caveats apply, but it’s very simple tech (two parallel wires on the exterior that water closes the circuit and sets off when wet). The above link goes to a 5-pack of the brand I have, because I recommend putting one behind every toilet, under every sink you use, under your water heater, and next to your washing machine (I’ve had mine start rocking for an unbalanced load that pulled the drain hose loose). However, that 5-pack has gotten pricey, so here’s an even cheaper five pack from another manufacturer (also made in China) that I have no experience with, but it currently has a 4.6 rating on Amazon.
Speaking of plunging toilets, I imagine everyone already has a plunger, but if you don’t, here’s one, and you might consider one for each bathroom, or at least each floor. Also, the black bell shaped ones are a lot more effective than the small old red ones.
Speaking of things everyone should already have more of, everyone needs flashlights. This Goreit flashlight seems bright, cheap, and gets pretty good reviews. The highest rated flashlight on Amazon is the Streamlight 75458 Stinger DS, which is fairly pricey. I assume it’s brighter and with a longer life, and maybe you have a use case that justifies the cost. And speaking of ridiculous lights I have no use case for…
The IMALENT MS18 is evidently so insanely bright that it has its own cooling fan. Here’s a video of how insane it is. And if you have flashlights, chances are you’ll also need…
Batteries. D-Cells are still used in a lot of things, and you’re going to want, at a minimum, enough to reload every flashlight twice, which should be enough to get you through a couple of evenings of power outages. Check your flashlights every six months when you check your smoke and CO detectors. Speaking of which, those and the water leak detectors take 9 volt batteries, and you want enough around to be able to change out every battery in your detectors as needed. Those links go to Duracells, which I’ve been pretty happy with.
Car jump starter: Much better than jumper cables, and can save you money when you have a dead battery, or because it’s just not cranking in the cold.
Gas And Water Emergency Shut Off Tool. The Orbit 26097 provides a water shutoff valve, a gas shutoff valve, manhole cover lift tool, and a rubberized grip. You need one of these for the same reason you need a water leak detector, i.e. it will greatly limit damage before the plumber gets there.
Sawyer Products Water Filtration System: If you’ve ever been under a water boil notice, the Sawyer system is Good Enough to get you through, even if it is a slight pain to fill and squeeze the bag enough times for my dogs and I to drink (but still less of a pain that boiling water and waiting for it to cool).
Duct tape is useful to have year-round, but especially during an emergency, to patch a small leak or keep something together until the emergency is over and you can replace it. Link goes to 3M all-weather duct tape, which is better than the generic stuff for outside tasks, like sealing around the edge of a faucet cover.
12 pack LED Tea Lights. This is a strange one. These mimic flickering candlelight, and I bought them for Halloween decorations, for which they worked well enough. I think they’re just bright enough and cheap enough for a few use cases around the house in an extended power outage. You can probably (just barely) read with them by holding them right next to the page, but I think they would be most useful for providing acceptable light in places like bathrooms, at the top and bottom of dark stairways, on dining tables, etc.
Cold Weather
Here are some specific prep items for cold weather:
O’Keeffe’s Working Hands cream: I walk my dogs 2-3 times a day pretty much every single day of the year, and I found my hands getting cracked and raw in the cold, even through gloves. O’Keeffe’s Working Hands fixed the problem. I frequently give this stuff out as Christmas gifts.
Carmex lip balm. A small, cheap jar that solves the chapped lips problem in winter. I know some people prefer Chapstick, but to me the main result of using Chapstick is that 30 minutes later you fell a need to use more Chapstick.
De-icing spray. You can stand there for 15 minutes ineffectually scraping your frozen windows like William H. Macy in Fargo, or you can keep a bottle of this in your trunk.
Non-Prep “Stuff You Might Need”
Here are things I’ve bought I’m happy with.
Have trouble getting to sleep at night? Have you tried Melatonin? All I can say is that it works for me (sometimes boosted with generic Acetaminophen PM, which you can buy cheap at Sam’s).
I’d been having trouble finding plain white T-shirts soft enough to sleep in, but these work really well.
Silicone oven mitts: I bought these after seeing my cousin use these at a previous Thanksgiving, and they work great and don’t seem to wear out as quickly as cloth mitts do.
Speaking of 1970s TV detectives, we’ve been working our way through the complete Rockford Files, and the set is a pretty good value for the money, if you don’t mind the paper sleeves.
If you like offbeat science fiction and fantasy, you might try this two volume Avram Davidson set, set up as print-on-demand books from the Avram Davidson society. At 100 stories, it’s a lot of bang for your buck.
Do you collect Arkham House books? Probably a long shot for this blog, but if so, Don Herron and John D. Haefele’s Arkham House Ephemera: The Classic Years 1937 —1973: A Pictorial History & Guide For Collectors might be for you. A POD book, this is just what the title says, a pictorial history of Arkham House ephemera (catalogs, review slips, etc.) issued from the press’s founding up through 1973. The book is actually useful even if you don’t collect ephemera, as the full catalogs show when books went out of print and how much they were going for, etc.
I know I should be better at offering up Amazon offerings to rake in the filthy lucre, but I don’t tend to buy books and DVDs/Blu-rays from them. Mostly the things I buy from Amazon are vitamins and dog treats, which aren’t exactly exciting link fodder…
Blue cities in Texas seem to have at least two general categories of fraud going on: voting fraud to keep Democrats in power no matter what, and old fashioned kickback/graft/featherbedding fraud to keep the money flowing to lefty NGOs and party activists. Now two separate initiatives are taking aim at both these problems in different blue locales.
Harris County could face state oversight of its voter roll maintenance if an investigation confirms that voters are registering at post office boxes.
Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson announced Tuesday that she had received a complaint alleging Harris County’s voter registrar is allowing voters to register using post office box addresses instead of physical residence addresses as required by law.
Nelson said her office will begin “an immediate investigation.”
“If we find reason to believe the Harris County Elections Office is failing to protect voter rolls or is not operating in the good faith Texans deserve, we will not hesitate to take the next step toward state oversight,” she added.
The complaint was submitted on November 18 by State Sen. Paul Bettencourt (R–Houston), who is a former Harris County voter registrar.
Bettencourt authored legislation in 2021 that excluded commercial post office boxes as voter registration addresses and set procedures for voter registrars to confirm voters’ residences.
He also authored the 2023 legislation that allows the secretary of state to assume administrative oversight of Harris County’s elections or voter registration if an investigation reveals “a recurring pattern of problems.”
It’s impressive how many years Bettencourt has been lining up this bank-shot.
According to a notification letter sent Monday to Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector and Voter Registrar Annette Ramirez, “The complaint alleges a recurring pattern of problems related to the failure to conduct voter registration list maintenance activities.”
The letter also notes that state funding for voter registration could be withheld if Ramirez fails to perform required duties related to confirming residential addresses.
Ramirez has 30 days to respond.
if Nelson does succeed in putting Houston’s voter rolls under heavy manners, I’m willing to bet money that the P.O. box problem is far from the only way Harris County Democrats are breaking the law.
A bipartisan advocacy group that helped defeat Austin’s “Proposition Q” tax hike proposal now hopes to force the city to undergo periodic third-party financial audits to examine spending and efficiency, and analyze policies affecting affordability for residents.
The nonpartisan Save Austin Now PAC launched a petition effort last week to amend the city’s charter to include an “Independent Affordability & Efficiency Initiative” (IAEI), which would mandate the hiring of an independent and experienced entity through a competitive bid process.
The auditing agency would then be tasked with analyzing the spending, performance, and outcomes of all city departments and contractors, in order to identify opportunities to streamline and optimize staffing and management structure and identify fraud, waste, abuse, and conflicts of interest. The IAEI analysis would also include examination of how city policy, such as tax rates, affects resident affordability.
Attorney and former Travis County Judge Bill Aleshire drafted the charter amendment language and told The Texan that under Proposition Q, which would have raised the property tax rate by 20 percent largely to increase services for the homeless, the city’s leaders had not considered the burden placed on taxpayers.
“I think their focus has been on people who are receiving the tax money, but not nearly enough on those who are paying the tax money,” said Aleshire. “Hopefully this will bring that perspective back.”
Aleshire said much of the proposed Austin charter amendment language is drawn from the recent efficiency study completed for the City of Houston last year.
Houston’s efficiency study, completed by Ernst & Young LLP, found duplicative contracts, inconsistent vendor practices, and an outdated management structure under which about 40 percent of city “managers” supervised three or fewer employees. As a result of the study, the city cut spending to reduce a projected deficit and avoid imposing new property tax increases this year.
Under Save Austin Now’s charter proposal, Austin would also establish metrics for measuring the outcomes of programs and policies, something Aleshire notes is absent from the city auditor’s analysis.
“Governments all the time are measuring how many widgets they’re making. Almost never will you find an audit that says as a result of making these widgets how has it impacted the community,” said Aleshire. “It’s not just the work you’re doing, what is the impact of that work?”
The proposed charter amendment would require the city to hire an auditor within 120 days and then complete an audit within one year of the contract. Subsequent audits would be completed every five years, but at least one year before the city could place a voter-approved tax rate increase on the ballot.
What both these proposals have in common is that both blue dots might finally be getting some long-overdue adult supervision.
If you’re a long time incumbent, you’re not supposed to be running in third place in a three man race, especially after you’ve dumped a whole lot of money into the race, yet that’s exactly the position John Cornyn finds himself in.
A new poll of likely Republican primary voters shows U.S. Sen. John Cornyn’s support continuing to decline ahead of the 2026 Texas GOP primary, with Cornyn now falling into third place in a three-way matchup.
The poll, conducted November 21–22 by Stratus Intelligence, surveyed 857 likely Republican primary voters in Texas. It found Attorney General Ken Paxton leading with 36 percent, followed by U.S. Rep. Wesley Hunt at 26 percent, and Cornyn at 25 percent. Fourteen percent of voters remain undecided.
The first caveat is that 857 likely voters is a fairly small sample for a state as large as Texas. I’ve seen smaller, but generally you want to see something at least in the 1,500-2,000 range. The second caveat is that I’m not seeing the crosstabs here. There are a bit fewer shenanigans to pull if you’re actually only polling Republicans, but I still want to see the crosstabs.
The third caveat is that all the other usual poll concerns apply.
Cornyn’s favorability rating has also declined. The survey shows him at 35 percent favorable and 51 percent unfavorable, with 28 percent of respondents holding a “very unfavorable” view of the incumbent senator.
In hypothetical head-to-head matchups, Paxton leads Cornyn 51 percent to 34 percent, while Hunt leads Cornyn 52 percent to 29 percent. The memo accompanying the poll states that Cornyn has spent more than $40 million on advertising and campaign activity this year but that his numbers have not improved.
$40 million to make yourself less popular? That’s some mighty fine campaign management there, Lou.
Early TV advertising is the perpetual fool’s gold of political campaigns, as it rarely moves the needle, especially for incumbents. Thus far I have not received a single direct mail flyer from any of the three Republican senate candidates (though I have received four from AG candidate Mayes Middleton).
The polling also explored President Donald Trump’s potential influence. In a scenario where Trump endorses Cornyn, Paxton still leads 44 percent to 41 percent. By contrast, if Trump endorses Hunt, Hunt leads Paxton 51 percent to 31 percent.
Interesting.
Small poll samples aside, it reinforces the existing impression of Cornyn: A long-time incumbent who’s worn out his welcome with Republican primary voters,
Pirate’s Cove has some nice coverage of a Washington Post story I don’t feel like trying to wrest from behind the paywall. The upshot is that illegal alien deportations are actually affecting country clubs.
My heart bleeds.
Border Patrol’s Charlotte sting reaches into country clubs, upscale shops
The gourmet pasta shop surrounded by million-dollar Colonials might not be the most obvious spot for clues about how hundreds of U.S. Border Patrol officers have swept across this city in recent days.
Pasta & Provisions, a longtime local favorite in the Myers Park neighborhood, is more popular among well-to-do bankers who populate the city’s soaring financial office buildings than with the working-class immigrants who flocked here to help build that skyline. There is little Spanish spoken outside the shop’s kitchen.
But as armed federal agents in unmarked SUVs poured into North Carolina’s largest city, the store was not immune from the Trump administration’s targeted immigration enforcement operation that launched Nov. 15. (snip)
The effect on George’s business is emblematic of how the Border Patrol operation has rippled across the lines of race and class that have long divided this city, spilling into tony neighborhoods where many residents gave little thought to how President Donald Trump’s deportation push would affect them.
It’s a real shame that the Elites won’t have all these folks to cook for them and wash the dishes
As authorities have searched for them, federal officers have raided a local country club, stopped by at least two hospitals and been spotted on highways and roads across Mecklenburg County, which includes Charlotte. (snip)
Not that one.
Pockets of the city’s Eastside, typically filled with fruit vendors and tamale stands, were noticeably empty. So were construction sites in the “wedge,” the triangle-shaped section of Charlotte with the highest concentration of White and affluent residents.
Snip.
The reach of federal operations into upscale neighborhoods was exemplified by reports that Border Patrol agents had entered the Myers Park Country Club, an invitation-only, century-old institution with opulent grounds that include an 18-hole golf course and an Olympic-size pool.
It seems that WaPo thought the most natural way to elicit sympathy from their overwhelmingly liberal, overwhelmingly affluent and overwhelmingly white readership was to note that Trump’s illegal alien crackdown would directly impact the quality of service at country clubs. You can’t possible expect to replace Enrique with a 20-year old white guy who doesn’t know how to properly make a Mojito, now can you?
Won’t someone please, please think of the country clubs?
Reporting from Ukraine says that Russian tank producer Uralvagonzavod has instituted “mass layoffs.”
“Russia’s main tank manufacturer, Uralvagonzavod, has announced layoffs of roughly ten percent of its workforce and a freeze on new hires until February, with some internal divisions reportedly losing up to half their staff.” 10% seems oversold for “mass layoffs,” but any layoffs from such a vital defense contractor suggests things are indeed breaking inside Russia’s overheated and over-stressed war economy.
“The cuts go far beyond administrative reshuffling, as insiders cite a combination of crippling factors: sanctions that block imports of Western optics and fire-control systems, exhaustion of stored spare parts, and delayed state payments for ongoing contracts. The company is already behind on deliveries of T-90M and T-72B3 tanks, with workshop activity down by nearly 33% compared to last winter. It’s a chain reaction: without foreign components, upgrades stall; without upgrades, contracts shrink; and without new contracts, entire divisions begin to shut down.”
“The consequences reach far beyond one factory, as Uralvagonzavod, builds and repairs most of Russia’s main battle tanks, including the T-90M and T-72 series that form nearly 80 percent of its active armored fleet. Even a modest ten percent reduction in staff could mean 25 to 30 fewer tanks repaired or produced each month, enough to reduce frontline availability by hundreds over a single year. The reported 50 percent layoffs in some divisions would push output back to pre-war levels, erasing two years of industrial mobilization. Russia has already been losing armored vehicles faster than it can replace them. What is changing now is that they lose the ability to rebuild reserves for massed assaults altogether.”
“The layoffs also highlight a problem at the core of Russia’s war economy, as Moscow is short nearly 5 million workers across key sectors, according to official estimates, and defense plants are among the hardest hit. Skilled welders, machinists, and engineers have been drafted or have fled abroad, while those who remain are aging and overworked, with Russia not having enough to fill the heightened demand. Entire industrial regions from Nizhny Tagil to Ufa now offer 40 to 60 percent wage bonuses and still fail to fill vacancies. The fact that Uralvagonzavod is cutting jobs instead of hoarding them shows the problem is not labor, but resources: a major red flag, as it signals that Russia’s production system is running out of both money and metal.”
“The same pattern is emerging elsewhere, as in Tula and Bryansk, small-arms and component plants have halted production several days each week due to missing parts and unpaid contracts. Workers in Izhevsk report wage delays of up to two months. Ammunition factories in the Urals, which had been running 24-hour shifts, are now cutting back to two. Even the aerospace sector, long prioritized for funding, is postponing engine deliveries for drones and cruise missiles because of alloy shortages. The once-overheated war economy is visibly cooling, showing what happens when political ambition outruns industrial capacity.”
“Overall, the layoffs at Uralvagonzavod are not just an economic footnote; they are a warning sign that Russia’s industrial war machine is reaching its limits. What began as a mobilization boom is turning into a contraction driven by exhaustion, shortages, and overextension. For Ukraine and its partners, this is a strategic opening; a weakened Russian industry cannot sustain a prolonged war of attrition.”
Along the same lines, Covert Cabal, looking at satellite imagery, reports that Russia is drawing down the stocks of their most ancient T-72 tanks.
‘
“Before the war began, the T72 family was by far the largest stock of any other type of tank in storage. Today, it’s down from the pre-war 2,700 to just over 600, less than 500 of which even have a viable chance of being restored. But what is a lot more interesting is the massive decline in recent months of the oldest T72 variants.” Namely T-72 Urals and T-72As.
“They’ve brought almost twice as many of these old T72s out than any other type of tank this year.”
“Russia in less than a year has removed over 450 of them, about half. And realistically, today it’s probably much higher as we couldn’t find newer imagery of some bases than 4 months old.”
Both bases the Russian use to store old T-72s show significant numbers of them removed.
“Our last count leaves just 188 newer T72Bs and just 141 of all types of T80s remaining in storage. That’s down from the roughly 1,500 of each in storage before the war began. And those that do remain are generally in worse condition. Only a small fraction of those might ever be made viable again.”
“There are several smaller plants, but the one major one we focus on is UVZ.” AKA Uralvagonzavod.
“The number of tanks seen outside over the years has never been more than 100 until this summer. In an image we got from the 4th of November 2025. There now sits 482 tanks out front. Something never seen before. And there’s likely even more inside. Not all these are the old T72s. There are some slightly newer T72Bs along with some T90s. So all evidence points to Russia beginning a major revamp and long-term project of restoring and upgrading these old tanks that will take many years. The problem is after this they really have very little left.”
So we’re left with a mystery: At the same time Uralvagonzavod has a multi-year backlog of tanks to repairs and refurbish, they’re laying employees off. It’s hard to understand why.
Unless, of course, they’ve ceased new tank production entirely…
I was watching this Dave Rubin clip of Bill Maher talking about why capitalism is superior to socialism. All of which is true, but he got something mostly wrong that I want to talk about, including the interesting truth he didn’t quite elucidate.
Here’s the quote I wanted to zero in on: “In 1990, Venezuela was wealthier than Poland. But then Poland, finally free of Soviet style economics, went all in on capitalism. And now their economy is as big as Japan and people there have high wages, low inflation, cars, vacations, homes. Meanwhile, Venezuela traded capitalism for Hugo Chavez’s socialism for the 21st century, which turned out to be like socialism in the last century or any century, a mess. It turned one of Latin America’s richest countries into one of its poorest.”
Emphasis added. And everything else Maher said is correct. But Poland does not have an economy as big as Japan.
According to Statista, the size of Japan’s 2025 economy is $4.186 trillion, while that of Poland is $979 billion. In terms of sheer size, Poland’s economy isn’t nearly as big as Japan’s, mainly because Japan has roughly three times Poland’s population.
I think what Maher meant to say is that Poland’s standard of living, as measured by per capita GDP, is now on par with Japan. Here’s a piece from National Review:
2026 — the year Poland’s GDP per capita is projected to surpass Japan’s, according to data from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.
Poland, a Soviet-dominated communist state until 1989, is expected by next year to have higher economic output per person than Japan. For perspective, according to the World Bank (all of these numbers are adjusted for inflation and purchasing power between countries), Poland’s GDP per capita was $12,810 in 1990. That was roughly the same as Brazil’s and over $4,000 behind Mexico’s. Japan’s was almost three times higher, at $35,306. In 2023, the most recent year with available data, Japan’s was $45,949 and Poland’s was less than $2,500 behind, at $43,585. A gap of over $30,000 per person, gone in one generation. According to the IMF, Japan’s economy slightly contracted in 2024, and projected growth is around 1 percent in 2025 and 2026. Poland grew at nearly 3 percent in 2024, and projected growth is greater than 3 percent in 2025 and 2026. Why have you heard little about this decades-long and ongoing economic success story? Probably because it wasn’t the result of industrial policy or some other government plan. Under the guidance of economist Leszek Balcerowicz, Poland went all in on free markets during its transition to democracy. It has averaged annual GDP growth of about 4 percent per year since 1990, blowing right past the “middle-income trap” and joining the ranks of the great developed economies such as Japan. As late as the early 1990s, it was still fashionable to believe that Japan was going to inherit the earth as a result of its industrial policy. Imagine explaining to someone then that in your lifetime the average Pole would become wealthier than the average Japanese. Be skeptical of industrial policies, and never underestimate the power of markets.
Other figures show Japan a bit farther ahead, but Poland’s per capita GDP is clearly now in the same neighborhood as Japan’s, thanks to decades of capitalist growth in Poland, and dropping population and ineffective Keynesian stimulus (AKA “Abenomics”) in Japan.
Although Habitual Linecrosser likes to call Poland “Little European Texas,” economically it’s closer to the state of Georgia, while Texas’ economy is closer in size to that of Italy (the eighth largest economy in the world).
So Maher’s statistic was wrong, but his implication was correct: By abandoning communism for capitalism, Poland has made remarkable strides, and is now a modern, wealthy, productive nation.
