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Does cold calling still works? I get so many spam calls that unknown numbers just go directly to voicemail that I check every other week or so. Pretty much everyone around me does the same. I do not remember when I got last legitimate call - it's all spam now.

The link you have is about business debt - that's likely much more collectable than CC debt.

> You're going to get demolished if you start bouncing gambling debt on a credit card.

If you do not have assets or high income, you can just ignore debt and it will drop off you credit report after 7 years. They can try to sue you (unlikely for <$5k debts) and then try to garnish wages (max 25% of aftertax income) but many states outright prohibit garnishment for consumer debts (like Texas) or limit it (like CA - just show that you have high living expenses to avoid garnishment).

Overall much better options that kneecaps.

If done at scale, you will get complaints/chargebacks that will trigger an audit followed by fines and/or account closure. Banks and underwriters have standard procedures in place to catch this.

>BAM would have become the successor to all liabilities upon taking over the store (in the U.S., at least).

Not necessarily and highly depended on how it was structured and state law. It's possible that BAM only took over entity and then all liabilities stays with the same entity (that was bankrupted later). Another option it was only asset sale without liabilities, etc.

It's game theory. You start developing nukes and risk US bombing you to stone age while killing your personally. But the moment you develop nukes, US will likely leave you alone. Choices.

That math breaks down if you have kids and need 4bdrm house commutable distance to work in good school district - prohibitively expensive in Bay Area and affordable on engineer salary in most tier 2 cities. If you do not have kids, Bay Area clearly wins, especially if you are ok with studio/1bdrm.

Most petitions are filed over the summer, so the numbers so far in this financial year are not super relevant to anything. You will see a spike pretty soon after petitions for lottery winners this year are filed.

Every year US absorbs 120k+ H1B+L1+OPT new visa holders. Considering there are 1.9M software engineers, market has to grow by 5% every year just to stand still. Add US graduates and you are talking about 10% growth required just to maintain employment. It's not realistic long term.

Congress/president should pause H1B visas or hike up fee to 200-500K so that only truly exceptional talent are allowed in. Right now it's just give away to corporations that are laying off people by tens of thousands.

Do not mistake leadership and regular people. Afghanistan president Ghani handed over sovereignty to US too but Afghans disagreed. I am confident that there is significant minority in Kuwait wishing for Iran victory. As a datapoint, there were videos from Bahrain with people cheering for Iranian rockets hitting American bases.

Iraq right now is in roughly the same position as it was when Saddam Hussein was there but in the meantime a few million people died and the country went through a pretty traumatic period.

Not really. I expect with AI and increased productivity allure of outsourcing will diminish. You want super productive engineers to be close to product and customers.

Besides if you are looking for work there is very little difference between foreigner on H1B taking the role and role being outsourced to India. Either way you do not have the job.

Lots of people laid off by Block are on H1B Visas. With transfer they have 60 days to find new role. If they could not find new job in 60 days, they "fake" transfer to "bodyshop" company while they are looking for real work so status does not lapse.

With transfer you have 4k people looking and eligible for new role. With no H1B transfer, less people are looking for work and citizens and green card holders have higher chance to land roles in a few companies still hiring.

If we unionize, will I still be paid $500k with four years of experience?

Right now is exactly the time when we need to pause issuing new or transferring existing H1B/L1/other work visas for least a year until we know full impact of AI on economy and employment.

Coca Cola stopped officially selling in Russia but Coca Cola products are widely available due to grey import from other countries (it's present in literally every store - though prices are higher than for local brands).

Coca Cola actually have to run ads to stay relevant. War in Ukraine provided nice experiment - Coca Cola stopped all advertisement in Russia in 2022 and results are in.

- Feb–Mar 2022 (before full production/marketing stoppage): RosIndex reported that 94.3% knew the Coca-Cola brand.

- 2023 (roughly a year after global brands stopped producing in Russia): 88.6% of consumers knew the Coca-Cola brand.

5.7% drop in recognition in one year translates to billions of losses if scaled to US market. So yes, Coca Cola has to constantly run ads.

Money are stolen electronically every day - we do not know how to build secure systems. Considering the stakes for national elections (civil war or government instability) good enough is not good enough.

I agree with you on local elections - electronic voting is good enough for town or even state level elections. The stakes are dramatically lower.

Just use Amnezia VPN - it can masquerade as https.

Given the relatively low inflation in 2025, I’m skeptical of the claim that consumers bore 96% of the tariff burden. With CPI inflation at 2.7% and roughly $18,000 in goods consumption per person in US, total price increase in goods work out to ~160B. A $200 billion increase in customs revenues would exceed the total price increases attributable to inflation - which makes little sense if 96% of that was paid by consumers. Essentially tariffs did not increase inflation in any meaningful sense which means that somebody else paid the bill - not consumers.

At the time it was not clear that GLP-1 solves obesity problem so effectively - many drugs suppress hunger (eg amphetamines), it's just that GLP-1 works long term and does not have significant side effects. Hard to predict without hindsight.

Insulin is injectable so GLP-1 was thought to be at best marginal improvement over already existing protocol - so likely profitable product but not excessively so. Company has limited resources so decisions on cuts have to be made and some of those decisions are naturally wrong - drugs are unpredictable.

On regret - they missed on 30B+ of profits so of cause they regret it.

30% of NYC public school students are functionally illiterate in high school. There is zero chance you will be able to teach them analog clock in a day and forget about an hour.

This comes down to realism versus wishful thinking. In the real world, force is used to resolve geopolitical problems - as we’re seeing in Venezuela now and saw previously in Iraq, Serbia, Grenada and countless other countries with US. The alternative is pretending that every country can act however it wants without repercussions. Ukraine deliberately instigated conflict with hope that Russia does not react militarily instead of playing both sides like Kazakhstan, etc.

On no one was out to attack Russia - that's probably true today but Ukraine and broader Eastern Europe realignment is more of 50-100 years project and nobody knows what happens in 20-30 years. US is on a brink of invading Venezuela and blockade is already borderline act of war (that was casus belly for US declaring war on Germany in WW1) so it's not like NATO/US are some peaceful paradise.

And on “not formally planning to”: Ukraine literally wrote its intention to join NATO into its constitution. That doesn’t get more formal than that.

Main reason normal people do not use public transport is this attitude and police giving up on enforcing basic public order on transport. Personally I am voting against any public transport funding until all homeless/druggies are kicked off public transport (even if they are willing to pay). You have to pass certain very low behavior bar to use public transport (no intoxication, no aggression to other passengers, no smell, no shouting random things).

It's not rocket science and other countries figured out how to do it.

Scale of the country matters. If Argentina (or any other small to medium size country) require extra work, businesses can just walk away - size of market does not justify extra efforts. Bet is that US market size is big enough that no global business can afford to walk away. At 20% of global GDP, US markets is also big enough to make scaled production feasible.

While tariffs on coffee do not incentivize coffee growing in US they do two things that are very beneficial for US economy

1) People replace coffee with hot cider, infusion tea or some other local substitute good.

2) Tariff on coffee as set up by Trump incentivize coffee producing countries to buy US goods whether it’s oil or cars to make trade balance more equal.

The only question is the scale of above but tariff on coffee is unquestionably help US producers.

Let’s be real - nobody is moving R&D to Pakistan, Sri Lanka or Bangladesh. Talent is not there and good luck convincing any expats to move there in meaningful numbers.

India is real but every company is already there and very little real high end R&D is happening there - it’s all mostly basic outsourcing. I doubt H1B situation changes anything here frankly.

Technically yes but practically no. I did research - there were a few court cases in 60ies but after that gov gave up on trying to recover money.

Those rules are not enforced, every state has free (or almost free) healthcare that fresh immigrants are eligible for but sometimes they need to jump thru a few hoops. Many states have free “healthcare navigators” that will guide you how to jump thru those hoops.

US allows unlimited chain migration for parents with short waiting period. Everyone brings their parents/siblings and put them on Medicaid/Obamacare, Section 8, etc right away. Technically sponsor is supposed to cover those benefits (and signs paper about that) but practically gov never tried to recover benefits (literally never).

In practical terms it means public subsidizing gay lifestyle in US by 28k/year - it’s the only demographic outside of sex workers for whom this drug make sense and will be routinely offered.

It’s just not sustainable.