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Do you believe that children are more impressionable than adults? There is a community of detrans people who talk openly about how they became trans because they were influenced by peers and authority figures in their lives.

Go read some threads on the detrans subreddit.


Maybe we shouldn't hide the information then, so they can make their own decisions. Imagine blocking all the information about "am I actually trans or just peer pressured?" but not blocking the peer pressure.

You forgot to mention the US soldiers who were killed and also the girls school that we did a double tap strike on.

i.e. they blew up a school with kids in it, then when people went in to try and rescue the survivors they struck the school again to kill the rescuers.

https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2026/3/12/who-bombed-the-...

It's amazing how you people are so okay with killing children. It will not be forgotten.


'Okay' with taking down the mullahs and IRGC is an understatement.

If the Americans or Israelis were sending a squadron of John Wayne Gacy clones to murder children, I would be against that.

I would be disgusted with people who oppose this war if I thought they understood what they are opposing.


>Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby

Every expert on this topic is saying the same thing. This entire conflict (and the war in Iraq was also) has been for Israel and at the hand of the Israel lobby.

Miriam Adelson, Sheldon Adelson, Larry Elison (who has conveniently taken control of the TikTok algorithm and banned the phrase "#freepalestine" through his connection with Trump) have donated hundreds of millions for this exact outcome.


We have hit the cap for H1B's every year and we will always do so until we get rid of the program. Cheap labor will always be in demand.

A 100k one-time fee is nothing for big employers. That's 25k/year for 4 years, and if you realize that H1B's can't easily leave their job it's obviously worth it.

Compare hiring an H1B that is stuck at their job, to an American who can leave at any time. You can pay the H1B a lower wage to compensate for the fee you paid to get them into the role. 25k/year for 4 years is worth it for not only the reduced churn that comes with training a new person, but also you don't have to pay any of the incentives that come with getting a new employee into the role like sign-on bonuses, wage bumps, benefits etc.


There's an X account which just posts universities hiring H1B's for ~half of what it would normally cost to hire people. An 80k/yr senior software developer will always be in demand, especially if the team is already predominantly non-american

Universities typically are in the public sector side of the equation... and the public sector doesn't pay any non-administrative role the Big Tech rate.

Pulling up my alma mater... https://www.openthebooks.com/wisconsin-state-employees/?Year...

The various roles that you'll find for software developers: Sr Is Specialist, Is Tech Srv Cons/Adm, Sr Inform Proc Conslt, Sr Systems Programmer

And you can pull up the pay scale at https://hr.wisc.edu/standard-job-descriptions/?job_group=Inf...

$80k/y isn't "we're paying H1-B half of what the going rate is" but rather "the state legislature has set this pay scale and we're paying everyone that amount" ... And many times, H-1B visas aren't eligible to work in those roles.


> Universities typically are in the public sector side of the equation... and the public sector doesn't pay any non-administrative role the Big Tech rate.

There's absolutely no reason government couldn't pay competitive rates for software engineers. They do it for doctors and administrators of state-owned medical centers. Not to mention football coaches

https://openpayrolls.com/justin-wilcox-146812860


It's only a little bit lower than salaries for non-Big Tech that are in the area. Again, for Madison compare it to https://www.levels.fyi/companies/american-family-insurance/s...

Trying to make state government competitive with Big Tech salaries (especially in states that aren't California) would not go over well with voters.

While private sector deals with layoffs and uncertainty, the public sector has things like "budget not good this year? Two weeks unpaid vacation for everyone" - https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/code/executive_orders/2003_... ... 401k matching? How about a fully funded pension instead. https://reason.org/commentary/the-wisconsin-retirement-syste...

Football coaches are revenue generating for universities... software developers at universities not so much. Doctors are licensed professionals that have a decade of schooling... software developers frequently reject licensure and celebrate their lack of a formal education.


Exactly. The fact that H1B's get paid less than Americans across the board is all you really need to know about the issue. There IS no reasonable counter argument.

It's supposedly a program for importing the best and brightest talent that doesn't exist in the US but somehow those best and brightest people get paid LESS than their American counterparts? It was never about the best and brightest it was always about bringing in cheap labor that can't leave.

Sadly I don't think we'll ever fix it either, right leaning industrialists support it because they benefit from cheap labor, and the left leaning politicians get to continue importing people who overwhelmingly vote for them. As usual the loser in the equation is the middle class American worker.


How many H1B visa holders become citizens eligible to vote for those "left leaning politicians?"

I don't think having an H1B helps you accelerate your citizenship application in anyway, and for many countries the wait for legal citizenship is decades long.


The ones who get citizenship and their children.

Just look at the data for how people vote by demographic group (race).

Nonwhite groups overwhelmingly vote blue, H1B's are overwhelmingly nonwhite. This is not controversial.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voting-patte...

https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/aoodm8/how_the_...


You didn't answer the question at all. Getting an H1B visa is merely the first step in a very long process towards citizenship. Decades long. For example, if you're from India and you get an H1B, it'll be roughly a decade before you can get a green card. From then you have a mandatory 5 year waiting period before naturalization. And this assumes a normal, functioning immigration process; something we definitely don't have in the US.

This can be sped up if they marry a US citizen, speeding up the process quite a bit, but it will still be several years. Now their children would be citizens, but that's another 18 years before they can vote. Politicians aren't known for playing the long game...


>Politicians aren't known for playing the long game

There are plenty of politicians who have played the long game, also political parties take actions on longer time scales than individual politicians. Stances that politicians take on issues often come down from the party anyway. Many politicians don't care about many issues, but they vote based on their party's stance. The blue party is staffed with all types of people, many of whom will live to reap the benefits of changed demographics.

Heck many politicians are still in office 18 years later! Look at Nancy Pelosi, she was in office for 38 years. That's multiple batches of anchor babies.

It's not that long of an investment. We have seen this entire country go from 99% white in most places to below 50% in most places, in ONE generation and that change is clearly visible in national elections.


Ah the Great Replacement Theory rears its head on HN. I think Godwin would be proud...

I mean just look at the data, it's a story that tells itself. One party does indeed benefit from increasing diversity and they are also the party that coincidentally spends a lot of time working on initiatives to increase diversity.

It seems that you are using the term "Great Replacement" as a tactic to dismiss the argument and all the data by which it is supported because you have no real counter argument.

I also did say that the other side benefits from importing cheap labor. Which is why both parties seem to do very little to slow immigration no matter which is in power, despite overwhelming demand from their constituents to slow immigration.


> The fact that H1B's get paid less than Americans across the board is all you really need to know about the issue.

Except this is literally false. Every single study I’ve seen that claims this has no real evidence - just speculation without knowing the details of the jobs or the people being hired, based on their own self-serving false comparisons to make dubious claims that similar jobs are paid differently.

Since you said “across the board”, do you think Google or Amazon pay a software engineer at the starting level differently based on immigration status? No, they don’t. Literally every manager at big tech could tell you this confidently.


I have worked at Apple for a decade, H1B's absolutely do get paid less. We have many H1B's that literally just sit around and push buttons and file bug reports, and barely know how to code. Some of them can't code at all. Ofc some of them are good engineers, but they are not even in the majority.

There is plenty of data to back this up.

>A total of 60% of all H-1B jobs are assigned wage levels that are well below the local median wage.

https://www.epi.org/press/a-majority-of-migrant-workers-empl...


The EPI report is one of the commonly cited baseless reports. Dig in a level beyond their press claims and you’ll find no real method behind it that justifies their claims, because they have no actual way to compare one worker to another to know they’re equivalent and comparable for the purpose of compensation.

As for your claims about Apple - I am guessing you aren’t a manager and don’t know about how their pay scale works. I’m not doubting your claims about the quality of some workers - although I bet you’ll find plenty of non immigrant people not doing work as well. But I know the claim on pay is wrong, once you adjust for performance ratings and levels.


We have moved far-away from the notion of a factory work who's labour can easily be traced to the output.

I think in general we have to question what work one does - not in a negative way - I think its healthy to do so. Standard economic models and thinking are pretty dated and don't really reflect reality as the world of work evolves.


> Cheap labor will always be in demand.

H1Bs are not cheap labor. They’re almost always pricier than the alternative to the company. This is a myth that is ultimately rooted in racism more than facts. Most of the top H1B filers - big tech companies in particular - pay literally identically for the same job. They have fixed pay structures internally, in part because if you don’t, you could face discrimination lawsuits - but mostly to just not lose the competition for talent.

But the cost to the company isn’t the cost of the pay anyways. It’s also the cost in lost time of the H1B process, the fees you pay as part of the process, the costs of law firms you have to hire, the cost of time delays, the risk of the immigration process not working out. Those work out to a lot more value than 25K/year.

An H1B is also not stuck in their job - you can transfer H1Bs.


I do not see how the facts you present call into question the basic logic that as you increase the availability of a commodity, say labour, you anticipate its price to diminish. All of the immigrant workers could be better-compensated and more productive than all of the American workers, and still their presence could drive the price of labour for native workers in that sector down. E.g., if there is a shortage of repairmen certified to fix some medical equipment, introducing a glut of new repairmen who are even more productive will fail to reduce the compensation of the incumbents only in exceptional circumstances.

People applying for H1B visas are getting partially compensated in the right to legally reside in the US rather than in money. The right to legally reside in the US is something that a lot of foreigners want badly, and are willing to accept otherwise-poor compensation for; and by definition it is not something you can pay an American citizen with.

Why is the company getting to pay their employee with that legal-residence-value and therefore get a discount on compensation?

The cleaner approach is the immigrant has to pay that value in visa expenses, taxes, or something else; while the company should have to pay market rate for the position.


This is real, we will not comply with authoritarian laws that nobody voted for. Seriously.

You should have a look through the lawbooks for more laws to not comply with. Do the carrying a duck across state lines one next. Maybe a Linux distro that pumps your own gas.

They did a double tap strike on a girls school.

i.e. they blew up a school with kids in it, then when people went in to try and rescue the survivors they struck the school again to kill the rescuers.

https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/news/2026/3/12/who-bombed-the-...

Our leadership obviously does not care at all about civilian lives.


>federalizing who can vote

Almost every single democracy in the world requires proof that you are eligible to vote. 80% of Americans agree with the idea as well.

https://wisconsinwatch.org/2026/02/voter-id-americans-suppor...


So let's have a national ID, given to all citizens.

Unfortunately the party calling most strongly for proving eligibility absolutely hates that idea.


And that national ID has to be free, and available to people who cannot appear at federal offices during business hours without losing what sparse wages they get...

You could just watch the movement of tankers and jets to the middle east on flight trackers. It was extremely easy to see this coming.

Note: the owner of the Atlantic has ties to Epstein and Israel. They are extremely biased on anything to do with this war in Iran.


No idea why you're being downvoted, there is a mountain of evidence that this is the case. We are doing this because of Israel.

Marco Rubio said outright we went in because of Israel. Just watch Trump's speeches, he literally talks about the power of the Israel lobby and hopes he is doing a good job for them. Netanyahu has visited Trump 7 times in the last year, each visit has been leading up to this move. Trump's biggest mega donors are Israeli dual citizens with strong ties to their home country. Miriam Adelson, Sheldon Adelson, Larry Elison (who has conveniently taken control of the TikTok algorithm and banned the phrase "#freepalestine" through his connection with Trump) have donated hundreds of millions for this exact outcome. These donors have direct ties to the Israeli government.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10/13/who-is-miriam-adel...

There is very little evidence that the strikes are being driven by oil, in fact oil is the perfect excuse to use as cover. It was the exact same thing with the Iraq war. Iraq and Iran were the two largest threats to Israel, we went into Iraq to regime change them and now we are finishing the job with Iran. Now there are no threats to Israel's expansion to the rest of the middle east. The ruling party (Likud) supports the Greater Israel project, which aims to expand Israel's borders to Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Israel


I'm assuming that it's assumed that I'm slagging on Israel for some irrational hate -- I'm not. I'm commenting based upon reports that I've seen (effectively what you're referred to), not on ideology or feellings.

Thanks for having my back! I think of HN as a community of intelligent people and it's always disappointing to be reminded that that alone is no guarantee of healthy discourse.


Looking back at this, I’m confused why my comment was a reply to yours. I suspect I used the reply link on the wrong comment.

Obviously has nothing to do with oil companies or oil, this is a war on behalf of Israel. Netanyahu visited Trump 6 times in the past year. Prominent Zionists and Israelis inside the US have been agitating for the US to do this for years, especially since Trump took office last year.


Wars are almost always about commerce, history has shown that. Ideology is used to back the motive publicly, but the reason for involvement is almost always trade or commerce. This case could be different, but it is not obvious to me that this case is any different. A simple example is WW1 where the US was forced to back the UK because of their large debt to US banks, despite them still being a colonist power at the time.


You are implying that Trump is rational and/or the interests of his administration align with those of the country?


I am making no implications of Trump, very on purpose to keep this in point (it's hard), but explicitly stating that the policies of the United States are based on capitalism and always have been, while the narrative given and received is that of humanitarianism, which in my opinion is a side effect only. In this case hopefully a positive one, hence my concern for the reckless nature of the war (let's just call it what it is, not just an attack or military action).


There is no evidence this strike has anything to do with oil, our leadership is not even saying that we will be involved with the changes on the ground. Oil prices are extremely low and have been so for a while now, domestic production is huge and we just claimed Venezuela's for ourselves as well. We have plenty of oil and again, there is just no evidence that this is motivated in any way by oil.

It is purely because Iran is a rival and check on Israel. Most of the US oligarchy has strong ties to Israel and they have made huge donations to Trump so that he would do this for them. Take a look at Miriam Adelson, Sheldon Adelson, Larry Elison, Ronald Lauder. These are mega donors who have been agitating for regime change in Iran from the very beginning. Go watch the speeches that Trump has given IN Israel, this has been their aim the entire time.

This conflict is extremely religious in nature, a huge contingent of Christians in the US believe that Israel ruling the middle east out of Jerusalem means that the end times will arrive sooner. Similarly a large contingent of Jews believe that their Messiah will return when they control the middle east.

Watch the Tucker interviews with Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee, many of these people are true believers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Israel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zionism

>A 2017 LifeWay poll conducted in United States found that 80% of evangelical Christians believed that the creation of Israel in 1948 was a fulfillment of biblical prophecy that would bring about Christ's return and more than 50% of Evangelical Christians believed that they support Israel because it is important for fulfilling the prophecy.


Yes, and the price of oil has gone up 10% last I saw. United states domestic oil sells at the same price. Maybe not planned, but a reality. On the flip side the possibility this affect the global economy, which includes the US, more negatively is probably true also.


Again though, you are presenting 0 evidence that these strikes have anything to do with oil. Meanwhile there's a mountain of evidence that this has everything to do with Israel and its ambition to dominate the region.


I am a student of history and am offering the observations I see in regards to that. Your points are valid too and the narrative around the war. Another validation of my point. Neither of us know the true motives, but history has shown the side the United States chooses is the one that benefits trade th most, not a moral decision. This is my only point.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/03/03/business/iran...


I believe Netanyahu has visited 7 times now at this point. In a single year.


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