Wednesday ORT: That's SIR Lewis, Cuba Rolls Over, Indeed Glass, Aliens And, Kramer's Impala

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the guy he beat in the sprint, but was one position ahead in the race, got 3rd place in power rankings. but you knew that would happen, right?

Housekeeping: No NASCAR coverage today because I missed the race. Why did I miss the race? Because I was driving to a NASCAR team headquarters. Yes, sometimes the world is just too complex to understand.

Housekeeping, Part II: Our friend Julius is looking for his forever home. You could do a lot worse than hire him to be your new best friend. Contact me with questions.

British men haven’t been this excited since St. Crispin’s Day, 1415

“I am just not very good at this track,” Charles Leclerc said in an interview, and shrugged. In this case, not very good equated to: beating his teammate in the Sprint and staying ahead of said teammate for a good part of the Grand Prix. In the end, however, Lewis Hamilton got the better of him and finally got a podium. The way the announcers were going on about it during the race, you’d have thought the Iranians were launching Shaheds onto the track. (To prevent that from actually being the case, of course, F1 has canceled its races in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, which leaves us with a five-week gap after the Japanese GP.)

At some point in this most exciting Formula 1 race of all time, of course, George Russell simply drove by both of them to take second place. Ahead of all three was Kimi Antonelli, who recovered from a first-lap collision with Hadjar to win the thing by a country mile. (Antonelli’s attempt to apologize after the race was rejected by Hadjar, who then caustically noted to the press that Antonelli had been given a “rocketship” and that there was no reason to get excited about his win.)

Notes from the weekend:

• Props to the Cadillac F1 drivers, who managed to collide in the distant backfield. Nothing says “General Motors in the Barra era” like bashing up your cars in DFL.

• Surely the championship will be George’s to lose. Could he lose it to Kimi? I think the Russell of 2024 would be absolutely at risk. The current model has his act together, so look for Antonelli to finish a dignified second place.

• McLaren and Red Bull are so awful right now that you can’t say there are four top teams. There are just two, followed by… Haas and Alpine?

• I am not convinced by this back-and-forth racing, derided as “Mario Kart” in more than one driver interview. It feels artificial, it gives the drivers far too much in-car housekeeping, and so far it has led to very little actual racing outside teammates.

• Ollie Bearman is the real deal, isn’t he? When Lewis inevitably fails to capitalize on this mild momentum and he ends up finishing 60 points behind Leclerc, his seat should go to Ollie.

• Speaking of Sir Hamilton: Much has been made of his comment that he does not want to retire until Formula 1 goes to Africa. Lewis called on Africans to “take the continent back,” or something like that, perhaps forgetting that the colonial powers have long vacated Africa. He wondered why there was no race in Africa, perhaps forgetting that Africa did have a race until it was sanctioned out of existence in the Nineties. Lastly, he noted that every other continent has an F1 race, which is not actually true.

• This Aston Martin business is rapidly becoming an embarrassment to all concerned. I don’t even know how it could be resolved. Return to a Mercedes powerplant? Heads should be rolling in Japan right now.

I have to say that I’m disappointed in F1’s decision to cut the Middle Eastern races out without a replacement. There’s room in that five-week downtime to quick-bake at least one race, and there are plenty of European circuits that could host it. They should have an interim race somewhere with no public participation — it’s much harder to plan for the visitors than it is to plan for the teams themselves — and full media coverage. Or they could sack up and go to Saudi Arabia. If NASCAR can run in Chicago…

The socialist revolution works best with capitalists who believe in it

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to smoke a very fancy 110-euro Cohiba cigar straight from Cuba. To my immense dismay, the cigar was very good. I say “immense dismay” because I have no expectation of getting a second one in my hands this year.

Or at least I had no expectation until Cuba’s trade minister indicated that the country was now open to investment from Cuban-Americans and other US-based entities. Sources close to President Trump say he is very interested in opening trade relations with Cuba.

There are two ways to look at this. The first is: the socialist revolution in Cuba is on its last legs and will collapse in fire before too long, which is good. Why prop it up with an influx of American cash, especially if that allows these Guevara-lite scumbags to keep power? The other way to look at it: it’s an island on our doorstep filled with decent people who deserve a chance to make their country better. So what if Cuba ends up being a really nice place with a fully socialist leadership. What do you think is gonna happen here, in the midterms? Minus the “really nice place” part, of course.

At the very least, we will get all our old cars back.

I’d be remiss if I failed to mention that notorious crazy lady Brenda Priddy, the one-time spy photographer who once wrote giddily about supposedly being mistaken, along with her daughter, for “high-class hookers”¹ at a hotel pool, has been doing Cuba tours aimed at various simps and superannuated autowriters for quite some time now. I have no idea if her tours are any good, and no intention of finding out.

What could possibly go wrong

this is after the thumb goes on the scale, too

I got an email the other day informing me that my Indeed and Glassdoor accounts were about to be forcibly merged into one super-account with “Recruit Holdings”, the people who own both brands. I haven’t really used Glassdoor or Indeed to any significant extent, but were I a frequent Indeeder, I would be horrified by this.

For those of you who don’t know: Glassdoor is the site where employees can confidentially reveal working conditions, salaries, and hiring practices at American corporations. Its users are, in theory, both the product (creating reviews of companies) and the consumers (reading reviews to make better decisions). The revenue model is a little fuzzy but I think, as with LinkedIn and the other jagoff lizard-people business websites, you can pay money for more access to data.

Indeed, on the other hand, is a place where companies pay to list their jobs, usually via a pay-per-click model. In this case, the corporations are the clients, and the employees are the product.

Now, you might be the sort of credulous moron who thinks “Recruit Holdings” wouldn’t share Glassdoor information with Indeed customers. Because if you ran a company, you wouldn’t demand to know the confidential activities of would-be applicants to your firm. However, I can assure you that no actual C-suite person has thought this way, ever.

It’s not just that GloboHomoCorpInc, LLC, GmbH doesn’t want to hire people who have disrespected it on Glassdoor. They don’t want to hire anyone who has ever told the truth about where they work. As I noted in one of my more popular pieces a few years ago, if you leave a company for any reason nowadays you are essentially forced to genuflect before them on LinkedIn.

“Well, after 24 years, 11 months, and 27 days at Frottage Media, I’ve had to part ways with the firm. Guess I don’t need that pension after all, lol! Before I walk into the desert and put the first four inches of a Mossberg into my mouth, however, I want to humbly thank my boss who fired me, his boss who got a great bonus this year, his boss who just completed a home renovation in Malibu, the board of directors, and our CEO, whose words of boundless wisdom will continue to inspire me as I learn how to make two meals from a single packet of ramen noodles. I just know that Frottage will continue to be the very best in the business, and I would beg all of you to immediately reward them for firing me by mailing them cash in unmarked envelopes.”

This is highly different from going onto Glassdoor and saying, “The CEO is a closet case, his wife is a demon in (mostly) human flesh who makes people cry on a regular basis, the business model is astoundingly racist, they’ve let go all but the most committed bootlicking lackeys, and the head of PR is a furtive midget who, if he decides to complain about this Glassdoor review to Legal, will quickly find himself in an abandoned building deciding which three of his fingers he will have to eat before I let him go home to bury the smoking bodies of his family.” And yet some people apparently do both, minus the part about the fingers, which is just awful. I regret even writing it down. I got the idea, I think, from watching Bravo TV.

The email I received from Indeed assured me that my privacy would be kept confidential. I don’t believe that and I wouldn’t have bet anything on it anyway. The only Glassdoor review I ever left was for my web hosting cooperative: “The only thing more impressive than their commitment to ethics was the wardrobe of the founder. He was like a father to me. In the evenings we would stroll through the favelas and help random street children do their homework.”

Moral of the story, for the rest of you: Find a provider that lets you have multiple emails. Use that capability to strictly firewall your "LinkedIn life” from your real life. Expect that your information can and will be sold, transferred, merged, folded, spindled, mutilated, as it suits the lizards. Watch your back, always. You might love your job, but it will never love you back.

As if Henry Ford had ordered 479,953 horses right after building the Model T

In the most recent Open Thread, friend of ACF “Sherman McCoy” shared the site jobloss.ai with quite evident delight. He loves the idea of middle-class people losing their “JERBS” to large language models, for the same reason I wouldn’t mind it all that much if every man in the world who was taller and better-looking than I were to suddenly drop dead. (Sorry, “Scott A”.) A business partner of mine just released a highly-shared LinkedIn post about how cutting jobs and increasing “AI leverage” was the only way to increase shareholder value. I would say he’s a moron, but he bought Bitcoin at $100 each back when I was spending my money on Plan B boxes² so if one of us is stupid it’s not him.

If the latest “GovAI” study can be trusted, up to 86% of AI-related job losses will be borne by women. This is, of course, the best possible news — except I don’t believe it. The only thing corporations love more than exalting and enshrining the fringe behaviors of the mentally ill is coming up with do-nothing jobs that let women make “day in the life” and “GRWM for my day” TikToks. In my experience, if a company makes, say, metal boxes, they will fire 90% of the people who make the actual boxes before they fire a single soft-skills office person. Generally, they will fire the oldest, whitest, and most fundamentally competent men first, then go backwards until the firm is nothing but soft-skills 30-something chicks and the one Skeltor-faced white Boomer CEO who loves to give talks about empowering women of color.

Although I do not claim to have the business or investment acumen of “Sherman McCoy”, a thought did wander through my feeble, Dollar-General-oriented white-trash brain that goes something like this: If “AI” can replace workers, it should replace the lowest-skilled, easiest-to-replace people first. And, given that the best and most practical use of AI is in coding, the highest job losses should be found in entry-to-mid-level technology gigs.

As most of you who have ever set foot in the real world know, the worst employees in the American tech middle class are almost entirely H1-Bs. I have been kicking around tech in one guise or another since working for Litel/Qwest in 1997, and I would say that about 85-90% of the H1-Bs I’ve met were somewhere between subpar and abysmal in terms of their ability to resolve problems, implement solutions, and communicate effectively with others. Case in point: I’m not the world’s greatest system designer, but when I left Cardinal Health in 2014 they replaced me with more than a dozen H1-Bs, only to see the pace of delivery slow down. My three-man team at Honda was replaced by perhaps twenty overseas and H1-B resources providing 24/7 “hypercare” — but six months into that experiment, Honda called me and offered me my job back. When I was at NVIDIA, I learned pretty quickly that about half of the US-based H1-B team never completed a single ticket, and the “India team” often would go 10 hours without even picking a ticket up.

The average H1-B cannot complete any task more complicated than a single “point” in a “sprint”. He does not understand computers in any genuine sense. He ignores error messages, he lies about seeing those error messages, he willfully bends reality to the demands and desires of his boss. When he codes, or does “infrastructure as code”, he is worse than ChatGPT or Gemini, let alone Claude.

Therefore, if AI could replace anyone, it would be the $130,000 H1-B who represents the statistical average of visa applications. And were this the case, companies would stop applying for H1-B visas, because they would happily assign those jobs to “AI” rather than go through the expensive and deliberately Byzantine process of bringing some dude and his family all the way from Bangalore.

You’re going to see headlines saying “H1-B applications are down due to AI,” and you might see the above chart used as proof of this. But the reality is very different. 2024 was the last year of the Biden Express, so to speak; the administration opened the floodgates of visas by 50% as a “thank you” to the corporations who had so diligently supported it.

In 2025, the number of permitted visas is back down to where it was in 2021, when most people thought “machine learning” was a science fiction term. But the number of applications? The number of corporations greedily begging to suck the diseased teat of incompetent low-cost headcount? The amount of effort they are willing to put in for The Cause, the sheer cost and hassle of dealing with the Federal Government? It’s up by almost

Fifty. Percent.

Every corporation in America is telling the shareholders and the media that “AI will cut jobs”. And every corporation in America is simultaneously breaking their proverbial dicks off in the gloryhole of anonymous H1-B meat sourcing.

The reduction in H1-B hiring due to “AI”? Zero percent. The reduction in H1-B application due to “AI”? Negative fifty percent.

Why, if you didn’t know any better, you’d think that “AI” was just a pretext to fire more on-shore skilled people and bump up the headcount with foreign labor.

Once again, I quote the great Scott Locklin: When corporations talk about increasing their use of “AI”, they mean “aliens and immigrants”.

The Assman kept it safe

I’m late to the party on this, so I apologize: Remember Cosmo Kramer, the neighbor on “Seinfeld”? He drove a 1973 Chevrolet Impala in that weird seasick green that adorned so many Malaise Era cars… or close to it, more on that shortly. When “Seinfeld” was on, this wasn’t that old of a car, probably celebrating its 21st birthday during filming or thereabouts.

In other words, Kramer’s Impala was a newer car than my LS430 is today.

It was also a(n) historically significant automobile.

Specifically, it was one of the 1,000 1973 Impalas made in that unique shade of green with the ACRS (Air Cushion Restraint System). They had an Oldsmobile dashboard, another change that is kinda of obvious in the above photo. The ACRS system was involved in one fatality — an unbelted infant was killed by the passenger bag — and the bags proved suprisingly durable in testing 20 years after the fact.

How the prop-car provider got hold of a 1973 ACRS Impala is beyond my abiilty to guess. But it’s neat to see. The relevant episode is called “Fusili Jerry”.

Incidentally, I’ve read in several Substacks and X posts that although “Seinfeld” was generally considered to be a little superior to “Friends” when both of them were on the air, it is “Friends” that has retained relevance. You can visit a “Friends Experience” in various malls and retail spaces around the country. It’s on TV pretty much all the time, still. Gen Z people know who the “Friends” are.

By contrast, I don’t know anyone under 35 who thinks of Jerry Seinfeld as anything but a Porsche collector. What did “Friends” have that “Seinfeld” didn’t? It’s sad to say, but I think it’s the fact that “Friends” now feels very aspirational. While both of the shows were about apartment living in New York City, the “Friends” had apartments to die for, they were able to make ends meet on minimum-wage jobs, and they ended up having fulfilling, interesting lives. Young people watch “Friends” the way they might watch “The Brady Bunch”: not as comedy, but as postcards from a world that no longer exists, and wouldn’t have room for them if it did exist.

1. I showed a picture of Priddy to an actual high-end prositute, who laughed so hard she began to dry heave.

2. this is a joke; I never offered to pay for the Plan B.