Good summary of the H-1B situation by @sampeak.bsky.social

Toxicology principle that needs to be mainstream: The dose makes the poison. That’s true of everything. Water. Oxygen. Vitamin A. Vitamin D. Aspartame. Formaldehyde. A single pear contains 120 times MORE formaldehyde than what might be in a vaccine. 1/

To recap, Trump signed a proclamation saying that after midnight tonight, no one with an H-1B visa may enter the US unless they have paid $100,000. However, anonymous White House officials are saying it doesn't apply to people with current H-1B visas — yet there is NO official guidance! None!

Critical part of the President's new $100,000 charge for H1-B visas: The Administration can also offer a $100,000 discount to any person, company, or industry that it wants. Replacing rules with arbitrary discretion. Want visas? You know who to call and who to flatter.

Really depressing that the rule of law doesn’t matter. Trump announces something he has no legal authority to do, like imposing a fee on H-1B visas and the reaction is not “It’s awful that the President pretends he can do something he can’t” But rather “This could happen”

The Trump’s H1-B changes are a disaster. The arbitrary granting of exceptions is a recipe for graft and corruption. Applying $100k fee to people already holding visas is crazy. Trump is going to kill the tech industry in the US.

H1B holders are net job creators. Ending the H1B visa will not result in more hiring of Americans or hiring overseas, it will simply destroy jobs and fewer people will be hired. It is racism shooting itself in the foot as usual.

$100k surcharge on every H1B application. Solve for the equilibrium.

This is amazing.

Exactly. This is a de-facto ban on high skill immigration. The President does not have the authority to do this: Congress sets our visa policy, in law. The President does not have a sliver of a mandate to do this: large bipartisan majorities support high skill immigration. Lawless rampage.

i don’t think people on bluesky understand the severity of this situation. i woke up to literally hundreds of texts from friends and family thinking about either moving back home to india or applying to other countries for jobs. this includes me.

thinking about the $100k H-1b price, it disproportionately affects more junior people, in an environment where i think AI already is making it difficult to see value in junior roles it’s going to be a rough few years

The resistant how needs subtitles elk.zone/mastodon.soc...

I cannot describe how bad this is for tech companies. Not the $100K fee on *new* H1Bs, but that their software engineers currently abroad can be turned back (or detained?) at the border with ZERO notice! It brings uncertainty to running a business in the US. Plus (cont’d)

I don't know if you've ever been in the situation of working on a visa (or knew someone who did). Shit stressful as it is. Preventing you from traveling abroad, unless your employer pay a hundred thousand dollars, is fucked up. I hope I'm misinterpreting this. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

hey so if we are gonna make getting an H1-B impossible, then we are gonna have to mass-outsource to fill needed positions, and hey, aren't all those "business process outsourcing" companies overseas? What happened to RTO and the necessity we all be in the same building?

This would be the end of IT workers immigrating to the US Trump wants a $100,000 per worker tax on H1-B wapo.st/4nJSE26

WGA Statement on ABC’s Decision to Pull Jimmy Kimmel Live!

IT'S OFFICIAL: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York State, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and New York City have formed the Northeast Public Health Collaborative. The collaborative will issue their own vaccine recommendations and coordinate public health efforts.

After years of complaining about cancel culture, the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level by routinely threatening regulatory action against media companies unless they muzzle or fire reporters and commentators it doesn’t like.

FCC is no better than any other Censor Board now

I don’t know when it’s going to pop for a lot of normies that they are living under an authoritarian regime, but the cancellation of popular TV shows that make fun of the administration might do it www.vulture.com/article/abc-...

no price is too high to pay in this pointless war against lifesaving science!

I really enjoyed KPop Demon Hunters but I would very much like to read the Korea Office of Civil Aviation (KOCA) investigation into what happened to that private jet

Failure to ugly cry over a dead podcaster now a Federal offense.

The Department of Justice has removed a study showing that white supremacist and far-right violence “continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism” in the United States. 🔗 www.404media.co/doj-deletes-...

I knew most of the content of this article, but I didn't realize quite how deliberate it was that the families wouldn't be reunited.

The GOP nominee in a Virginia state House race this fall has dropped out. He says he lost his government contracting job and has no income, so he's had to take a job out of state & move away. That's... literally what Dems are campaigning on to win VA. www.princewilliamtimes.com/news/gop-nom...

Hahaha, a comic of mine was apparently a partial inspiration for this: www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHmX...

Senators Mark Warner, Tim Kaine Demand US Dept. of Education Release Federal Funding for NoVA Schools ("These successful schools are being penalized for complying with the binding rules set forth by federal courts through Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board") bluevirginia.us/2025/09/sena...

If you try to open a factory in the US, ICE will arrest your sales, marketing, engineering and management staff. By "Foreign Direct Investment" Trump meant tribute payable to his family. The American South used to be pro-business and became the car industry after Detroit fell apart. No more.

Well, I look at my feed and think - Europe needs to win that war in Ukraine or they're next and then Russia will resume its eastward expansion Empires must keep growing to stay alive. They're not productive. They can only consume resources stolen from the countries they conquer.

Existing #SMBC comics data compiled into convenient datasets I'm happy with how this turned out so far. TODO - Another round of OCR (anything better than tesseract?) - LLM OCR (Would that be expensive?) - Merge the ~4 datasets into one for convenience github.com/matthewdeanm...

The Trump administration knew that they could fire thousands of people, and by the time courts got around to issuing a ruling, it would be too late for any meaningful action to be taken. That's precisely what has happened. Now they'll keep doing it, because it works.

The Dept. of Education has pulled funding for programs in 8 states that support students with both hearing and vision loss. A staffer at one program says he was told the Trump admin. took issue with 2 words on the grant application: “transition" and “privilege": www.propublica.org/article/trum...

There are 7500 #smbc comics. If you click on the "Random" button, you will read 22,445 comics, in order to read 95% of the comics.

Someone should create a platform where these photos can be uploaded and geolocated, with captions, so we have a map of the abductions in one place.

Y'know that Guardian article which cited an anonymous friend of Tyler Robinson claiming he was the only "leftist" in his family? It just got updated after the "verified source" decided he couldn't remember his "relationship" with the accused shooter well enough to be quoted

The various SBMC datasets are not clean enough or not in a single file. So I need to be the next person to try to create the SMBC dataset. #SaturdayMorningBreakfastCereal #SMBC

read this study in April that the shingles vaccine reduces dementia risk by 20%. I booked my vaccine that day, just had my second dose today. shingles vaccine is *rough* & I've cleared the weekend for it. but even if it's just 3% lower dementia risk I'll take it. med.stanford.edu/news/all-new...

Check out the full book reviews and the affiliate links on Patreon! The post is open to all. www.patreon.com/posts/135704...

🧵 1/ What is this photograph? It's a custom-made mask fitted for a software engineer in northern Virginia who suffered third-degree burns on her face when the Tesla Model Y she was in crashed and caught on fire. A heroic crowd of bystanders could not open the doors

just a reminder that the snitch who ratted on Luigi never got paid. they will do anything to wiggle out of paying you, you will never get the money.

Dream unlocked: I'm publishing my first book! 🎉🎉🎉 It's called "Master Machine Learning with scikit-learn: A Practical Guide to Building Better Models with Python" Download the first 3 chapters right now: 👉 dataschool.kit.com/mlbook 👈 Thanks for your support 🙏

it's come to my attention that many of you are not familiar with the Turning Point diaper protest controversy, and it doesn't look like it'll be mentioned in any of the "remembering Charlie's legacy" pieces

NEW: We got access to Jeffrey Epstein’s personal Yahoo inbox — more than 18,000 emails. It shows Epstein’s world in his own words: an unfiltered look at how his operation worked, who enabled it, and how Ghislaine Maxwell stayed at the center of it all.

Emperor Palpatine was a human being with a family, and it would be rude to celebrate his demise. Shame on the rebellion.

We really need to get some concrete proof that these "federal agents" are actually more than just unlicensed bounty hunters or vigilantes. Thanks for this article @theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

Will his wife and children feel the same? 😔