Summary
Vivek Ramaswamy criticized American culture for prioritizing “normalcy” over excellence, which leads tech companies hiring foreign-born workers over Americans.
In a post on X, he argued that U.S. culture celebrates mediocrity and undervalues nerdiness, hard work, and academic achievement.
His comments sparked backlash across the political spectrum, with critics labeling him out of touch with American culture.
The controversy may jeopardize his standing in the Trump administration.
MAGAts will forget. There will be no consequences.
Their amygdilas have been rewired to short out long term memory.
Never met a craftsman in my life who didn’t want to produce excellence.
The reason they don’t is because management at best doesn’t value it, and more often punishes it. This is you and your buddies fault Vivek Ramaswamy, you absolute shit for brains knob.
100%. The amount of times management has derailed a good design of mine for some garbage based on their limited technical understanding and priority of fast and cheap that costs more in the long run
Which is absolutely dumb because you gain a solid reputation for craftsmanship when you consistently make great pieces of work. This drives business up.
I mean yeah I guess management could skimp and cut costs, but if that results in an inferior product, your customers will definitely notice it, and perhaps take their business elsewhere.
I hate short-sighted business decisions, but they’re everywhere in modern life.
I was about to say, you know what happened at every workplace I’ve ever been at when I did excellent work? I got more work piled onto me. I didn’t get a raise, I didn’t get a promotion or any recognition other than that excellent work being recognized as my new baseline.
Eventually, you just decide to stop caring too much and settle for mediocrity because it’s a hell of a lot easier than busting your ass for forty hours a week, so why bother doing that if you aren’t getting anything for actually doing good work?
Let me spare you all some false hope: he wasn’t literally dragged.
Not yet. All it takes is one hero
Dang it
One day
But was he slammed, blasted, or ripped?
North America as a whole - America mostly, but also Canada being not that far behind - has been on a crazy rush to the bottom with cultivated ignorance.
Anything intellectual is mocked and degraded. Children who are smart try to hide it because it’s “not cool”. Adults who are competent and erudite get treated like freaks.
As of late, my longer-form content been frequently flagged as a product of AI because I use “big words” – and the language I use is no more sophisticated as something put together in first or second year university. It’s not sophisticated in the least, but the problem arises because a majority of adult Americans can’t read past a 5th grade level. So when I write at a completely bog-standard adult level, most adults simply cannot keep up.
And this intellectual decline in our culture is hella terrifying.
Sorry — have to downvote you on your rant, as Canada has the highest tertiary education attainment level in the world. And those are 2014 numbers — by 2022, 63% of Canadian adults had a post-secondary education. We are unmatched in global education attainment, and it really isn’t all that close.
Are there pockets of anti-intellectualism? Sure — but get out of your bubble and the reality is vastly different.
Are there pockets of anti-intellectualism?
Yeah, we call those people losers
Hoser clownshow loosers.
Isn’t this the same guy who said “weekends were a mistake”?
People like this have fully infiltrated the US tech sector, and have been kicking and screaming about how the workers there aren’t killing themselves for their jobs anymore. They have completely embraced classism and believe they are at the top of some imaginary tower or food chain that allows them to make idiotic statements like this. Anti-egalitarian at the core.
They’ve already stripped all the benefits of working in tech away from the workers, and are now complaining that the horse won’t pull the cart anymore now that the carrot is gone. Pieces of shit.
Isn’t this the same guy who “weekends were a mistake”?
No, that is Narayana Murthy, the billionaire founder of Infosys - a company that makes its money through indentured servitude by exploiting H1B visas.
Lol. Well that makes total sense. Guess they have similar mindsets then.
Lol first musk, now this guy. These techbro wranglers are about to discover what getting into bed with fascist nationalists really means.
Vivek made his money lying to investors and then fleeing using insider information. Who thinks he would he know about hard work? Nobody in doge ever worked a day in their lives.
US businesses don’t hire foreign workers because they perform better than domestic workers. They do it because they pay less for slave labor. US slaves primarily work in domestic food production, initially as a way to reduce the cost of food, but that turned into corporate profit pretty quickly.
Now we’ve created a massive margin standard on foreign imports as well as domestic food production. The inevitable consequence is that correction would either result in a temporary but substantial domestic business profit loss, or employing more unpaid or underpaid domestic workers.
Take a guess which track the Republicans plan on taking while they begin to fill the detention centers.
And they hire H1Bs because they can’t quit or fired or they get deported.
Conservatives actively killing education be like Y NO ENGIUNERS?!?!!?
Americans train their kids to become engineers, but after they graduate, companies like Musk’s won’t hire them because foreign H1-B engineers work cheaper.
h1-b visas make up a vanishingly small percent of the workforce. There are plenty of reasons to hate immigrants but this ain’t one.
Companies undercutting local workers ≠ hating immigrants.
What really sucks so hard is when you work at a company flooding the place with H-1Bs and not being able to really discuss in frank terms what they are doing. Because there are just enough people that have not really thought things through (as well as the idiots in HR) that will call you a “racist” for pointing out the scam.
He didn’t say anything that implied hatred of immigrants.
The controversy may jeopardize his standing in the Trump administration.
doubt.jpeg
Surprised Pikachu, if ackshually happens.
Somewhat related story, but I’ll share it to put a win for the little guy somewhere in these comments.
When I was in my late teens I worked in the deli of a large supermarket chain. We had a hot food section with reheated frozen crap that was always dried out and gross, and a pizza oven to cook school cafeteria quality pizzas. Needless to say, no one bought anything.
Right next to that was the deli section where I worked evenings. We had the fancy Boarshead stuff, including a bunch of fancy Italian meats. Nobody bought that stuff either cuz we’re not redneck here, but city people kind of treat us like we are, and nobody knew what soppresetta and that kind of thing was.
All this stuff would just sit until it got thrown out from not being sold. I would take bits of it all on its way to the trash, and I started making calzones with the pizza dough and the nice deli meats and ringing myself up for the price of like a quarter pound of meat, which was fair to me and the store. I made them for myself at first, and then some other people in the department.
The one day I made a few and gave samples out to some of my regular customers and of course they liked them because they were made with care and attention and better ingredients than any of the store stuff. I started making them in nights I was in and putting them in the hot bar and they sold decent.
One day the manager came back and cried it wasn’t in the plan-o-gram and blah blah and I had to knock it off.
Maybe a week later, they came back to me again and asked how I had been pricing them and I said I was basically just charging the weight of the deli meat and they tweaked the price a little and I kept making them, as people had been ticked when I said I wasn’t allowed to make them anymore.
I left not too long after, and I can’t say it was due to me or anything, but now all of those sites around here make little calzones and have them in the deli section as a grab and go item to cook at home.
It wasn’t enough to teach me everything I needed to know about how companies treat people that go above, but it definitely contributed to my education about work vs reward. But I’m glad I won that one. I liked saving food from the trash, and I liked seeing people enjoy something that was my idea and made purely by me and my skill. I guess I learned some things about myself as well.
Y u no work harder for the billionaire CEOs who do nothing >:(
Tbf, he’s probably saying a lot of this because he’s experiencing prejudice for being an outsider, kind of like Steve Bannon at Harvard syndrome. People like that just want to burn the world when they find out that conservatives really only favor an in-group of their own kind, and people like them will never truly belong.
That said, hard fucking lol. The only reason India gets so much support is because US wants to prop up a puppet in SE Asia. Indians also get ahead on political fronts in America because they’re currently the “safe minority” and not scary Chinese, Arabs or Latinos. He’s literally a DEI hire for white supremacists.
Also, America has most noble prizes than any country. But dumb cunts like him will never admit that the public education and progressive policies in America favored it a lot. All of these conservatives should FAFO, but their bad ideas will only make it worse for vulnerable people.
lol @ India gets so much support USA started pulling down restrictions around 2009, and even after that it’s been transactional arrangements, rather than support
Wait, Bannon felt like an outsider? That guy gives off such insider energy, but an insider that is aggrieved about very stupid things.
He got close to the bubble by acting the part.
He’s not complaining about us being ba workers. He complaining the average Joe doesn’t treat their manager like a king like in Indian culture.
I worked for an Indian company once, I only made it 12 months before the harassment became too much.
Yep, that’s for sure the culture he wants. Obedience, but excellence.
I’d definitely say that Americans value hard work. To the point of their own detriment. I’d also say they often strive for excellence in product making, but it rarely comes out excellent. When comparing product quality between Europe and the US, Europe almost always comes out ahead. Plus, Europeans value a good balance between work and life. That’s true excellence in my book. The US seems to mostly survive on size and quantity rather than quality.
everyone talks of germany and japan as being efficient but its the US that the priority is efficiency. Thing is we don’t give a fuck about quality which is what allows for such great “efficiency”. What germany and japan were doing was maximizing efficiency while maintaining quality. We had a japanese shipping company bring some stuff for an NTT project. Truck came. Several guys. fully equipped. Got their lift gate going right away and zoom did that stuff get off the truck and right up to the rack and unboxed and man. just full service. incredibly fast and everything in very good condition. Compare that to the typical american shipping with just the one guy driving and unloading. They would often try to lie and say their liftgate was not working (they were worried about the few minutes it took and they had unreasonable schedules breathing down their necks). No handtrucks or belts or any other equipment. Once they got it onto the dock they are gone. So yeah the savings on improperly equiped trucks and only one guy is huge. Economically efficient. Meanwhile the japanese company with several guys and costly equipment is costing more, but they spend about the same amount of time and you get the equipment right to where it belongs and in perfect condition and your just happier about the whole experience. Efficiency while maintaining quality.
