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Adham Bishr's avatar

Excellent article!

I was raised in the Bay and remember how miserable the Asian kids were, being goaded into having to be better than everyone else in the community. A failure if they didn't get into Berkeley or UCLA, successful only if they got into the Ivies or Stanford. That's why I find the argument over colleges childish. Grind culture made people miserable and that's nothing new - read JS Mill's autobiography for a wonderful example of this.

Ultimately, I've turned against a pure meritocracy as the correct solution for society (see The Tyranny of Merit or The Meritocracy Trap). I wish SV would pull more from the humanities to see the deeper meanings of what education can do for a person rather than turn people into as you so politely put it "zombie test takers".

We should be welcoming to any who want to come here and work hard. I think American culture has always been much more fluid than other nations' making natives more insecure than I think other nations are about matters like these. Sriram sounds like an intelligent and thoughtful person (I've listened to a few of his podcasts) and the idea of someone like that choosing to go into public service should be celebrated.

Zero-sum thinking is ultimately counterproductive but sadly that has been how the MAGA types think of anything now. See Richard Hanania's thoughts here -https://www.richardhanania.com/p/nietzschean-chuds-and-the-indian

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Leslie Sacha's avatar

Family experience: Very well educated high tech/engineering white male honors graduate from prestigious eastern high tech college still can't get a job.

On local training...HA! Seattle schools, land of Bill Gates Foundation didn't offer coding or tech training at any level of school for years (and probably still doesn't). You had to send your students to private lessons. Seattle Schools were trying to do away with honors programs; high tech tiger moms offset that bent. Except the drop out rate was about 30% with the academic level acheived by students who lack tiger moms and highly educated helicopter tech parents is far closer to illiteracy than excellence. The federal programs supposedly intented to foster educational equilvalence (the dreaded IEP program) has resulted in way too many dumbed down academic programs so horrible that way too many low income and/or minority students graduate (or drop out) without even basic reading, writing and math skills. Basically these students get diplomas with F grades. Personal family horror stories available on request.

DEI is rampant and still the new bible in this left wing culture. Seattle area over wrought with its too many multi-billionaire tech moguls supports two large extemely wealthy immigrant areas (cites of Bellevue-Chinese & Sammamish-Indian) remniscent of the British protective cultural isolationism seen in Hong Kong. Sigh. if only they could avoid being tainted with local indigenous culture it would be great. Families and offspring of formerly mostly solid middle class Seattle (comprised of mostly white residents) find it increasingly difficult to afford to remain in the areas. In contrast to the wealthy east side, the Seattle south end has all the refugee poor immigrant from middle east, Africa, and other far away places, many on public assistance. They too are not happy at all with local culture of previous 50-100 years.

Left wing Seattle remains elitist and completely infaturated with "multi-culturism". Stuck in an insane worship of "diversity" and thick with a not-too subtle, anti-white anti working class bias, it seems the left wing governing goal for "diversity" is to make sure the area mirrors world population percentages where whites comprise only about 11% of global population. If all of this wasn't so derogatory and condescending toward traditional American culture of the last century and such a wokeland hell, this still would be a pleasant place to live.

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