The silver lining(If you can call it that) of the latest slump in tech employment is that it has laid bare the reality of the tech oligarchs. Someone should set up a website to catalog this behaviour so that these corporations and leaders can't easily sweep this under the rug in the future.

Reply by Ben Franklin, when asked about what kind of govt the newly independent United States should have. The words seem particularly fitting in current times.

Isn't congress the elected, public oversight body? Or are you proposing that each and every employee of the federal govt be elected to prevent the horror of the 'career bureaucrat'?

He is unique in that he seems to have absolute control over the Republican base which makes all internal party checks fail. The rest is provided by a hyper polarized media landscape and a conservative supreme court majority that seems to be open to radical upheavals. The combination of all three has rendered the constitutional safe guards ineffective. In other words, we seem to have run into an edge case in the US constitution.

The supreme court won't change materially in the near future and likely the polarization will continue, but it's hard to image someone in the future with such an absolute grip on either party. So, hopefully a soft restart of the system in 2028 will be the last of this edge case for a while. That's the hope, anyway!

The two countries have far more in common shared interests than differences, so odds are things will drift back to normal in the future.

* Arbitrarily slapped high tariffs on all goods from Canada while exempting Russia and Belarus.

* Threatened to take over the country by force.

* Officially suspended the Permanent Joint Board on Defense between US and Canada because of criticism of US foreign policy by the Canadian PM

However, the big question this will leave for future immigrants is 'What if this current administration is the prototype for future Republican administrations?'

Also, classic factory unions are not the only kind possible. The SAG is a good example of a union representing (often) highly paid workers and primarily negotiates working conditions and a (low) floor on pay.

The fundamental reality is that except for a vanishingly small number, tech workers have zero leverage against employers individually.

The tech folks mistook a longish boom as evidence of their genius and skill. As long as demand outpaced supply of tech workers, the going was good. Once the tides turned, we're finding out the reality of where we stand with respect to the oligarchs.

And, of course you know this to be objectively true and hence can produce a valid source for your claim?

Scientific organizations like NASA would jump on a Mars Starship in a heartbeat, but how many missions will they want?

SpaceX is a corporation first and foremost, not a research org.

This trope needs to die. SpaceX has no plans to go to Mars. Elon meanwhile regularly says forward looking stuff to attempt to justify the lofty valuations of his companies. Let's just say there is a ... mixed track record on these proclamations (Full self driving, Hyperloop anyone?)

Aren't we still waiting for that?

Sure, if you're from say, Haiti, even the US will look very attractive, but the bar is pretty low there, wouldn't you say?

Sure, it's the largest by GDP, but how much of that GDP is filtering down to the regular people? Are Americans, on average happier and have better life outcomes than other developed nations?

No? https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/05/11/iran-war-russia-putin-t...

  > Data suggests that Moscow has already made billions of dollars of additional 
  > revenue from oil sales because of higher crude prices, as well as the fact 
  > that the United States temporarily rescinded sanctions on Russia to rein in 
  > global costs