Monday, January 25, 2016

Added to reading list - Sold Out by Michelle Malkin and John Miano

I was just browsing amazon the Saturday night and came across Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are Screwing America's Best & Brightest Workers by Michelle Malkin and John Miano.  I am not usually a Malkin fan but this is a subject I am interested in so I picked up the book.

Right now I am about 1/3 of the way thru and it appears pretty well researched.  (I don't have time to check all the references and so far the agree with my pre-existing biases, so yeah let's call it well researched.) My major problem with the book so far is a tendency towards hyperbole, although that does raise readability, and a the linking of disparate bad acts - and example would be something like "Company A, whose CEO once got a DUI after chugging down a fifth of Jack Daniels, beating his wife in front of the church and driving off with an underage teenage prostitute, received 6,000 H-1B visas in 2009.  The company then laid off 4000 Americans while forcing them to train their replacements".  Both things are bad, one maybe moreso than the other, but are they actually related?

OK, here's an actual example from the book although I really liked mine:

"A total of 249 full time AIG employees, plus additional contract workers, lost their jobs to cheap foreign workers imported into the United States.
(...)
Rather than being "highly skilled," the workers supplied by Syntel were blithering incompetents.  The programming work John and his team had to wade through looked like the work of high school-age programmers - and that might very well be an insult to high school students!
About a decade later, AIG had become functionally bankrupt, unable to make insurance payments to those it owed.  In one of the largest bailouts in U.S. history, the Federal Reserve and U.S. Department of Treasury made $182 billion available to AIG so it could meet it's obligations.  Needless to say, no equivalent bailout was given to American workers laid off by AIG."

So far there are a number of examples like that.  Maybe it's just me but I think trying to tie the two together in that manner weakens the arguments being made.

Other than that the book is well written and entertaining in a raise your blood pressure sort of way.  I'll update my opinion when I am done.


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