Tag: google

On Medicine Today

by jcafesin, posted in civil rights, politics

Got Covid again last month. Second time, close to a year after my first go-round with it. I’m fully vaxed. Workout 5 miles a day, 5 days a week. No underlying medical conditions. Low-risk age group.

I got Covid the first time at a karaoke bar when the person sitting next to me literally spit in my mouth. Not purposefully. She was singing with the tone deaf performer, along with most of the bar. It lasted 5 days. I had the typical symptoms and I thought it was done, but 4 weeks after I tested negative, I ended up with a vitreous detachment in my right eye. Two weeks after that, I was in the hospital with vertigo.

My husband took me to Emergency, and after throwing up in the empty waiting room for 20 minutes we followed a nurse into a small glass enclosure. She instructed me to get into the bed while she asked me questions I could barely answer, entered my information into her iPad, and left. The doctor came in 30 minutes later and asked the exact same questions as the nurse. The doctor instructed the nurse what medication to give me intravenously, and what prescriptions I should pick up on my way home, then left. I did not see him again, and was released from the hospital half-hour later.

I was at the hospital for about two and a half hrs, 20 minutes of which I spent in the waiting room, and another 30 waiting for the doctor. Besides the nurse, the only other person who came into the enclosure was a woman collecting $350, credit cards accepted into her handheld payment device. I received a saline solution for hydration, and Metoclopramide to curb the nausea, (though by the time it was administered, my nausea had passed). Oh, and I saw the doctor for less than 5 minutes.

The hospital bill for my Emergency visit was over $3,500. I personally paid out-of-pocket close to $1,200, though I am fully insured and pay $700+ monthly for Blue Shield medical insurance.

Getting the picture why I was scared out of my mind of having Covid again?

Beyond the damage to my health the virus was undoubtedly doing, how much was this second round of Covid going to cost me in downtime and money?

I’d heard of Paxlovid from their constant TV commercials. Pfizer, and their like seem to sponsor most network news these days. “If taken within 5 days of symptoms, Paxlovid reduces severe Covid symptoms in high-risk patients by 86%,” the authoritative male voice-over proclaimed. The ad closed with a quick list of all the reported side effects, including, but not limited to death.

The commercial ran through my head as I lay awake with body aches and sweats. Four days into suffering from this new round of Covid, I asked my husband to call the doctor I’d seen only once, the previous year, for my Long Covid symptoms, and get a prescription for Paxlovid. A part of me didn’t think the doctor could legally prescribe the drug since I don’t exactly fit the ‘high-risk’ profile. The on-call doctor who I’ve never met prescribed me Paxlovid, assuring my husband it was the best course of action to shut down the virus and minimize the risk of another round with Long Covid.

Promises. Promises.

During the time DH was procuring the Paxlovid from our local pharmacy, I searched the internet for data from studies on the drug. The first 5 pages of Google returns were from Pfizer and other Big Pharma corps. Big Pharma pays Google billions annually to advertise their offerings, so of course, Google’s top search results are from their highest paying clients. Google’s returns also included a range of ‘medical’ websites, like WebMD, CVS.com, and Medical News Today, supported by pharmaceutical giants through affiliate marketing. Nine out of ten medical sites pulled their content from Pfizer’s website, all proclaiming the wonders of Paxlovid.

Feverish and exhausted, I searched for FACTS. I started crying reading all the lies from Pfizer, and every other site Google returned, all of them dismissing the complaints from people on Reddit or other discussion forums about their horrible reactions to Paxlovid. Pfizer, and therefore every site that got their content from Pfizer, were all spreading PR lies claiming there was no proof the ill effects reported from taking Paxlovid were related to their drug.

Frustrated and desperate to get the TRUTH, I called the doctor who’d given me the prescription. Talking to him was on par with reading Pfizer’s website — he literally quoted their PR, told me everything I’d read already. When I questioned him about, well, anything negative I’d read in my research, he told me, “Don’t get on the internet and look this stuff up. All it’ll do is scare you.” He went on to instruct me to take the Paxlovid for the next 5 days as prescribed, and I’d be fine. “You may get a slight metallic taste in your mouth, but that’s about it, and that hardly happens to anyone, like 3%.” This was a direct quote from Pfizer I’d read many times in my research. My doctor was repeating to me the same bullshit that the sexy, busty, bubble-headed female Pfizer rep sold to him about Paxlovid.

I had almost every side effect, other than dying, (though some moments I wished I would) from taking Paxlovid. The metallic taste in my mouth was so severe it made me sicker than Covid. I could barely eat. It made me dizzy, and nauseous. I had trouble sleeping while on it. But worse, I got Covid again, a third time, 2 weeks after I had a negative test. And Pfizer KNEW I WOULD. They call it “Rebound” cases, and if you look on Reddit, you’ll find MOST WHO TOOK PAXLOVID GOT A REBOUND CASE — meaning they tested positive for Covid again, weeks after they thought it was over. Without Paxlovid, I got over my first round of Covid in 5 days. It took me almost a month to clear my system of the virus on Paxlovid.

Until Covid, I’d been in the hospital 3 times in my life. I wiped out on my bike and screwed up my knee at 23. I ended up at a Public hospital without insurance at the time (staffed by young intern doctors and training nurses relatively clueless about medicine beyond gunshot wounds and ODs). The other two were to birth my kids.

What these recent experiences have taught me:

  • Google returns and promotes LIES. Google is the ONE (and only) SOURCE MOST USED to get their information.
  • Doctors LIE. They are clueless about most new pharms they prescribe. They simply repeat what these pretty young women are selling them, accepting ‘gifts’ of cash and vacation perks; or maybe they’ll check out the link Pfizer sent them about their new ‘targeted’ cure for Covid.
  • Big Pharma LIES. They consistently over-promise and under deliver. They steal from consumers because our govt lets them. Hundreds of billions of our tax dollars go to fund Pfizer and their like. They should be GIVING AWAY THESE DRUGS because U.S. citizens have PAID FOR THEM WITH OUR TAXES. Yet, they charge us fortunes while making themselves billions annually.
  • Our medical system is BROKEN. Medical debt is the #1 reason for bankruptcy in this country. Money for medicine DOES NOT WORK for anyone other than the wealthy, and the U.S. congress, and our elected officials.

What to do with these FACTS?

  1. Get your information from MANY SOURCES, not just Google!
  2. Don’t blindly believe your doctors, as they choose to remain ignorant to the fact that 74% of the 50 new drugs approved by the FDA in 2022 had little proof they actually worked. Research! Reddit. Discord. DuckDuckGo. Bing. White papers, valid medical studies (called Abstracts)…etc.
  3. VOTE BLUE, as Republicans want to take away Medicare, Medicaid, and most social services. They believe in “Trickle Down Economics” which has created more oligarchs than any other socioeconomic practice — loosening regulations and providing tax ‘incentives’ for corporations and individuals with high incomes. Democrats, though not much better as they are still slaves to Corporate America’s lobbyists, at least have an eye out for the middle class in this country. They support more social services, like the Affordable Care Act (‘Obamacare’), mental and reproductive healthcare, Medicaid and Medicare, and lower prescription drug costs. In 2024, close to 69% of the world’s population has some form of Universal Healthcare, while the U.S. still does not. UHC is not socialism. Access to quality medical care regardless of income should be a Civil Right. Let’s do better — serve the many, not just the few! VOTE BLUE.

    The Cost of Convenience

    by jcafesin, posted in saas, social media

    It’s surprising how little I think of my daughter now that she’s living 2,000 miles away at school. We talk on the phone frequently, but since she’s not involved in my daily life anymore, she’s more of an abstraction (when we’re not directly talking), a pleasant thought when she crosses my mind.

    I figured she was having the same experience I was when she went off to college. The thought of me made her feel glad (or angry, or… since I’m her mother and that comes with mixed feelings), but I didn’t consider she thought of me often in her busy life. So, when I recently had exploratory surgery looking for cancer, I did not realize she even remembered me mentioning the appointment on the phone a couple of weeks ago.

    This morning I’m in my office going through my email. I find one from my husband letting me know he and our daughter signed me up for online notifications of my medical records, including test results, last night while I slept. They gave the MyChart app my husband’s phone number and his email because they both know how much I hate putting my data online, never stopping to consider that my husband would be notified of my test results likely before I would by snail mail.

    I’ll be getting my test results by snail mail because I do not want my medical information online. I get that it already is, which my daughter reminded me when I came at her full bore with anger on the phone this morning for signing me up without my permission (after coming unglued on my husband).

    It isn’t just my medical records that shouldn’t be online, sitting in a cloud, accessible to everyone from Walgreens to United Health Care [insurance]. It makes my skin crawl that almost every time I want to access anything on the net now, the site attaches ‘cookies’ to my machine that track my usage. Many sites require I fill out forms for entry, collecting, aggregating and categorizing even more of my personal data to sell and/or exploit with targeted marketing.

    My daughter is on the medical track studying to become a physician. She works as a scribe in a medical practice, and is an intern at Palomar Medical Center and uses MyChart on the job. So do the patients of the practice and the hospital, she assured me. They all love the convenience of being able to look up their medications and/or test results as soon as they’re posted on their e-chart.

    She was trying to sell me on the real world, the one she, and most everyone else lives in daily—perpetually attached to the net via cellphones, laptops and tablets. Banking to paying bills to shopping, my daughter uses these online ‘services’ (which is kind of an oxymoron since these apps make it self-serve), to ‘keep it simple’ while juggling two internships, a job, and a full course load every quarter, including this summer.

    Do you understand there is a cost to convenience? I asked her on the phone, after she apologized for setting up the account without my permission and promised to delete it when we disconnected.

    She did, she assured me. But she really doesn’t. She’s too young, too many generations removed from WWII.

    “The Third Reich was a diagnosis regime, obsessed with sorting the population into categories, cataloging people by race, religion, politics, sexuality, criminality and purported biological, mental and behavioral defects. Nazi officials created massive population indexes that compiled individuals’ medical, financial, educational, criminal and welfare records — even sports club files. By 1942, approx. ten million Reich citizens had been indexed. These files, then, established the grounds for sterilization, deportation and extermination.” (https://lnkd.in/d9txaahS)

    Nothing to hide? I rhetorically asked my daughter on the phone, still admonishing her for signing me up for an online account of my medical information and then giving access to her dad via email. She placated my perceived conspiracy theory with, I get it, Mom! I do. It’s likely dangerous to have all our personal information online, but it already is, Mom.

    1942 may as well be 1642 to my daughter, and [ostensibly] most of her gen— too far back to remember or care.

    I didn’t care about using internet-based services either until the ‘cloud.’ It was mid-2000s and we were all on the free and open information highway when Amazon introduced its cloud-based storage service, but I didn’t get its impact until my bank started offering SaaS [self] ‘services,’ like Direct Deposit and online payments ‘for our convenience.’ At first I didn’t care about that either, as I had no intention of banking online since putting my bank account numbers through unsecured servers didn’t, and still doesn’t seem wise to me. Banking security is another oxymoron, and my internet connection through Xfinity isn’t exactly an impenetrable firewall.

    By the mid-2010s cloud computing had scaled, especially with the advent of the ‘smart’ phone. Bank of America started making it hard to come into their branches in-person, cutting its staff in half and forcing customers to wait in long lines to talk to a teller. Many young people adapted quickly to avoid the hassle the banks created, which left a lot of older folks, and holdouts with old tech cellphones like me, having to wait sometimes 45 minutes to deposit a check.

    I had a red slide phone with a real [small] keyboard and no internet connection until 2021 when AT&T switched to 4G and forced me to “upgrade” to a ‘smart’ phone [like the rest of the known universe did a decade earlier]. I’ve yet to enable an internet connection on my new cellphone, and don’t use location SaaS apps, ever. I navigate using printed maps, or use my memory the second visit to anywhere I’ve been. With my phone offline and not accessing any location services, at least it stops communicating with nearby cell towers so Google and State Farm [car insurance] doesn’t know where I am on the planet (GPS), or how fast I’m driving. They also don’t know whether I’m in my car, or on a plane, through the accelormeter sensor now inside our ‘smart’ phones which detects motion—whether we’re still, walking, biking, driving, flying.

    I used to be among the 2+ billion frequent users of Amazon’s marketplace until every bookstore, hardware store, curio, card and gift shop in my neighborhood closed. And while it’s ‘convenient’ to get things delivered to my front door, not so much when it’s snowing out and UPS won’t deliver to our house on the hill and I need a specific tool to fix my irrigation pipe that froze and busted open. I now drive 12 miles, instead of the 3 it used to be before the local hardware store closed. I’m back to buying my tools directly, in-person, as I do for most everything else I shop for now to support the survival of local businesses.

    Intellectually, I know I am fighting Goliath with a slingshot trying to retain even a modicum of my privacy from the Content Monster we call the ‘cloud.’ Stalking us everywhere we go IRL, and visit online on our devices, to everything we buy, to our marital status and genetic offspring, corporations have created and continue to create—unobstructed by laws or ethics—“massive population indexes that compiles individuals’ medical, financial, educational, criminal and welfare records — even sports club files,” or lack thereof since most Americans don’t exercise. Insta, Google, FB, TicTok, ChatGPT and every other big data SaaS app out there is “sorting the population into categories, cataloging people by race, religion, politics, sexuality, criminality,” including biological and mental characteristics of behavioral and genetic health.

    Many, in fact most large corps these days are marketing us into buying, and believing (religion, politics, social views and values) by targeting their messaging using the very data we give them with every click on a webpage, swipe on a screen, every text or IM, every form we fill out, every poll we take, questionnaire we answer, and every medical exam or procedure we have now is stored on a cloud, and not just one cloud, but many. Redundancy is key in data storage.

    I feel like the Borg is trying to assimilate me into submission of my privacy for the convenience of becoming part of the hive—i.e. ‘cloud’[ed] mind, I tried to explain to my daughter on the phone this morning. And the convenience [of self-service] turns out to be for the corps, killing customer service, tying us up in phone loops, and making their mistakes our problems to fix while continually charging our credit cards their monthly fee. So much for the convenience of AutoPay.

    Mother, my daughter proclaimed in all seriousness, all our information is already online and in the cloud, or separate clouds that are all connected, or whatever, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it. I signed you up for MyChart last night because I want you to get your test results as soon as they’re posted and then share them with me so I can stop worrying, or, at least know what is going on with you. I love you, Mom, and I feel really scared about your biopsy results.

    Heavy sigh. She played the Love card.

    Assimilation is hard to resist when delivered by those you love most.

    I apologized for making her worry, and again felt surprised that my daughter remembered and was concerned about my biopsy. I promised to tell her the test results as soon as I get them, which is likely a lie, unless they’re good. I’ll need to privately process bad results before making her worry even more.

    Regardless of whom I choose to share my biopsy results with, they are mine alone to share, or they should be. The fact is, my insurance company will know if I have cancer before I will. If my doctor prescribes me drugs, Wallgreens will know what kind of cancer before I will by snail mail. Under the Affordable Care Act, my insurance can not charge me more, or exclude coverage for pre-existing conditions, but get another Republican president, and that can change. We’ll go back to leaving diabetics to the disabled uninsured.

    My world growing up was much like my parents. In my day, corporations worked for their customers and clients. With the advent of SaaS and the ‘aide’ of apps, we are now all products of these corporations selling us on using technology with the lie of ‘convenience’ while hording our private information to maximize their profits.

    Nothing to hide? Nazi Germany won’t ever happen here?

    • Trump, and his millions of minions.
    • Fox ‘News.’ Newsmax. Breitbart…etc.
    • Conservative Christians
    • Catholic Supreme Court (8 out of 9 justices)
    • Neo-Nazis
    • White Nationalists/Supremacists/Warriors
    • …etc.

    The Fatal Flaw with AI

    by jcafesin, posted in business, careers, christianity, christians, marketing, recommendation, Silicon Valley, startups, technology

    Saw #60Minutes last night with Google’s CEO #SundarPichai on the current state of #AI.

    The opening bar, the interviewer, #ScottPelley, asked #SissieHsiao, Google’s VP, what Google’s new chatbot, #Bard, is for.

    “It’s really here to help you brainstorm ideas to generate content like a speech or a blog post or an email,” she said with confidence, that made my skin crawl.

    So, she’s suggesting that we shut off our brains, and rely on more software to construct our personal content. Let’s all stop exercising our neural connectivity to do tasks like writing an email, or posting a blog, like this one, that requires disciplines in linear thinking, quantitative and qualitative reasoning, real news research, and engagement of my MIND to construct. Ms Hsiao is suggesting that doing these tasks that demand, and PROMOTE brain power are worthless wastes of our time, and that Google’s AI can not only do better, but quicker.

    So, Ms. Hsiao, where does that leave human brain power, assuming we aren’t all paid the big bucks by Google to fuck up humanity even more than you already do? A hint, honey: STUPID. Do that research Google, and even your software will find recent data that humanity is getting dumber:

    …etc.*

    Next, Scott Pelley was “speechless” that Bard made up a story from Hemingway’s six-word flash piece.** Mr. Pelley was so overwhelmed, he said, “Bard appears to possess the sum of human knowledge.”

    BULLSHIT.

    Bard does not know what it FEELS LIKE to be humiliated, admired, disrespected, loved. It does not know what it FEELS LIKE about anything. It does not know compassion, or empathy, regardless of what words it spits out because these things are ACTIONS! Words, like, “Our hearts and prayers are with the victims,” of the latest mass shooting, are meaningless, like so much of AI.

    Beyond Bard having no knowledge of FEELINGS, it also does NOT have the “sum of human knowledge,” because Google scraps the internet, and every email exchange, and text conversation you have.

    I gave away all my albums when CDs came out, thinking I’d replace them with disks, except I like obscure alternative music, and most of my record collection never made it to CDs. Just like MOST of human knowledge is NOT on the internet, and in our texts. Sorry Google, even YOU don’t have access to MOST OF HUMAN KNOWLEDGE, so your #MachineLearning data sets are woefully inaccurate. Which brings me to the pic for this post…

    In the picture attached about the New Testament, Scott Pelley asked Google’s chatbot, Bard, to “summarize the New Testament.” In 5 seconds, Bard came back with “The New Testament is the story of God’s love for humanity, which was revealed through Jesus Christ.”

    BULLSHIT.

    The actual Bible is filled with a jealous, angry, vengeful god (Corinthians 10:22; 2 Corinthians 11:2), who murders millions of people at his whim. Jesus is hateful to Jews (John 8:44) and others. He tells parables in which beatings, and even killings, of household slaves are affirmed as ‘disciplinary measures’ (Luke 12:45-47). Revelations, the last chapter in the New Testament, tells of God, and Jesus inflicting the “punishment of eternal destruction,” (2 Thessalonians 1:5-10) on anyone who doesn’t agree with, or believe in them. Strip away blind faith, this is called TOTALITARIANISM.

    So why did Google’s Bard call the New Testament a “story of God’s love for humanity?” My human interpretation of the New Testament is, “The New Testament is a collection of violent stories that center around two jealous, angry narcissists who inflicted hardships, loss, plagues, and other forms of gruesome violence on humans.”

    Google’s AI engine is trained on ALL THE DATA ON THE INTERNET, and your texts, and your emails, and everything you do on your phones, and ‘smart’ devices. This includes digital marketing—all those annoying ads—but also what people are saying, via texts, and posts, and blogs…etc., about any given subject. At least 80+%† of the U.S. identify as religious, or spiritual. Christianity alone touts 64% of the U.S. as believers, and, by far, puts out the most advertising. Christian marketing is close to a trillion-dollar a year industry.

    Bard is a combination of Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Deep Learning…etc, algorithms. That’s it. Garbage scraped from the internet and into the AI software, like Christian advertising, and people chatting up their spiritual beliefs, leaders, and groups, led Bard to spew Garbage Out—i.e. its positive, loving spin on the New Testament—even though the book itself, well… isn’t.

    Since 99.999%…etc. of all that data Google’s collecting confirms both Bibles are good, righteous, and loving, Bard LEARNS that these books are, in FACT, what most everyone says they are. Google’s AI WEIGHTS the importance of data by consensus, NOT TRUTH, or even FACTS. Truth by majority consensus, like Germans who became Nazis, or religious believers convinced their religion is the only ‘truth.’ If only 30% of data collected on Christianity, for example, were positive, Bart would likely not have come up with the nonsense it did. If Scott Pelley hadn’t been religious himself, and questioned Bard’s translation of the New Testament, or the CEO of Google had pointed out that their AI is a WEIGHTING SYSTEM, where it places more ‘value’ on the masses than the FACTS, perhaps those of you who’ve read this far will get how dangerous these continuing developments in AI really are.

    Another question from Scott Pelley: “Is Bard safe for society?”

    Sundar Pichai: “I THINK so…”

    —

    **Human Idiocracy:

    • How many of you remember (or ever learned) phone numbers, now that you have them on speed dial. (Why does it matter? Try calling your kid in an emergency without your contacts list).
    • Who remembers, without the help of Google Maps, how to get to a place you’ve only been to once? Or even 20 times? For that matter, which of you even knows how to read a real map?
    • How many of you even know that the “news,” and information you’re getting through Google (or any) Search is only a fraction of what is on the internet, and worse, it is a reflection of how YOU think, delivered to you via recommendation engines that reinforce your own perspective? Essentially rec engines make you THINK you’re smart, but only make you dumber by serving up no other perspective than your own.

    **Bard’s AI story, prompted from the words of Hemingway’s 6-word tale: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn,” missed the subtext of Hemmingway’s words entirely. No one buys baby shoes for a child yet to be born, which Google’s AI story suggests. Hemingway’s story, (and the original he stole it from), is about the loss of a baby already born. Infants get booties. Baby’s get shoes. So, it’s likely the baby was a year or more in age. Bard missed all of this completely, and made up a story virtually unrelated to Heminway’s 6-word tale.

    † People who identify as nonreligious, but claim to be spiritual, are known as “NONES”.

    Reverse Racism IS Racism

    by jcafesin, posted in Uncategorized

    My daughter came home crying from her job as a barista for a local Boba Tea cafe.

    “They don’t like me mom! I’m doing the exact same level of work that all the new kids are, and they keep calling ME out cuz I’m not Asian.”

    Several other barista type jobs at various local businesses to which she applied told her flat out they only hire Asians (which, at least in my neighborhood, includes Indians, from India). Since most of the fast food and convenience stores here are owned by Asians, this has severely limited her choices for simple, flexible, part-time work.

    A month ago, on the first day of this first job my daughter’s ever had, she came home and said, “My manager called me their ‘diversity hire,’ since I’m the only White person who works there. It hurt my feelings. He made me feel like I didn’t get the job cuz I deserved it.” Every day since, she’s come home with other racist comments most of her managers continue to make.

    Our daughter has a 4.3 gpa, is a hard worker academically, and socially. She is the only White person in her small group of all Asian friends. She’s worked very hard, and continues to do so, to be a part of this bunch of kids, to fit into the Asian culture that is now well over 75% of her high school in our East Bay suburb of the San Francisco Bay area.

    My son wasn’t so lucky. Boys going through puberty are all about bravado, one-upping each other. Girls are about connecting, communicating, building their community. Our son was excluded and bullied for not being “A”sian, throughout middle and high school. He had no friends at all, though he tried again and again to ‘fit in’ with them, from Karate to Robotics to Chess club and more. It broke his heart daily, and mine as well, watching my beautiful, open, kind kid ostracized for being White. He will likely struggle with a damaged self-image the rest of his life because of those formative experiences.

    Yet, neither of my children are racists, like so many of their Asian friends and associates. My daughter gets bullied often, even from her ‘friends’ with thoughtless comments: “I only date Asians. I don’t find White girls attractive,” from the 4 out of 5 boys in her group. My daughter would love to get asked to proms, on dates. She watches her Asian girlfriends get asked out. She does not.*

    These are REALITIES for all of us, Asians and Whites, here in the global melting pot of the San Francisco Bay Area, and yet my children are still not racists. Why, when so many are?

    My daughter’s half White, half Chinese best friend had a sleepover the weekend before Thanksgiving. Her BF told me their family didn’t celebrate the holiday. Her mother was a tech-visa transplant from China in her early 20s, and had no association with U.S. traditions. She did not adopt them for her kids, regardless that they are native born here. My daughter’s BF confessed she’d always dreamed of celebrating Thanksgiving. Well, of course I invited her, and her mom and brother, right then. She was so excited she texted her mom the invite, and the girls were jumping up and down, cheering, moments later with her mother’s response.

    The seven of us ate turkey, and stuffing, and shared stories of thanks around the table that night. We played Pictionary after dinner, and laughed and laughed. When the kids exited the scene to play video games, Yi, my husband and I spoke of relationships, politics, religion, ignoring social lines of polite conversation. And though we have radically different perspectives, and I felt no personal connection with few common interests, a profound one existed between us. She was raising two kids, a boy my son’s age, and a girl, my daughter’s best friend, Yi loves her children the exact same way, with the same intensity as I do mine.

    Globalization is a REALITY. It’s happening, right now. Most first world nations are being inundated with immigrants looking for that illusive ‘better life.’ Like it, or not, global integration is here, and, as my husband, and our kids know, it is mandatory, simply must happen, for humanity, and our very small planet to survive.

    My husband is a software architect. He’s been creating and deploying SaaS offerings for over 25 years here in Silicon Valley. Every job he’s ever had in the software industry, and trust me, he’s had a lot of jobs, he’s worked almost exclusively with Asians. While offshore H1B labor has been brought here by the tech industry since 1990, this massive Asian influx into the U.S. was not anticipated. In the last five yrs, the companies he’s worked for in software development, or any other department now, whether the staff is 30 or 3000—60% or more are of Asian descent. And yet, my husband is not racist, though he’s been passed up for many positions by Asians on work visas and H1Bs.**

    “One wish,” my mom asked my sister and me on our drive home from elementary school back in the old days. “Anything you want, what would it be.”

    “World peace,” I’d said. It was the mid-1970s, and a common catch phrase, but I meant it. Without war, or economic disparity, I believed in our creative potential to problem solve, and our unique ability to work together to realize our fantastical visions. I didn’t know about the hunger of greed then, insatiable, and colorblind.

    It has been particularly hard on my kids, this globalization process. It deeply saddens me that they must suffer the slights of blind prejudice, just as the Asians in past generations had to suffer the racism of the ignorant Whites here. It terrifies me—the global competition for fewer jobs my kids will be competing for after college. Yet, I still advocate for globalization. This very small planet must integrate, or we will perish, and likely take much of the life here with us.

    My daughter worries she’ll never meet anyone to date, yet alone marry, but I assure her she likely will. And it’s even likely that man will be Asian, since 60% of the global population are Asian*** and more than half of them are men. “It doesn’t matter where someone came from, what their heritage, or place of origin on the planet,” I’ve preached to my kids. “Choose to be with someone kind.”

    A border wall surrounding the U.S. entirely will not stop Asians from flying in from China and India, Korea, Viet Nam, Indonesia and other emerging Asian nations. Nor will it stop the Middle East, South Americans, Cubans from coming here. Seeking to keep us separate is a fool’s play. Communication is key to build bridges over our differences, allowing us to meet in the middle and mutually benefit from our strengths. Ignorance and mistrust breed with distance. Nationalism is just thinly disguised racism.

    Asians, Latinos, Syrian’s, and Palestinians, are all different cultures, not separate races from Caucasian. We are one race, the human race. Globalization—the blending of cultures—is hard for everyone, scary, new, threatening to our social structure, but a must if humanity is to survive, even thrive. The beauty of interracial marriage is the same thing that bonds Yi and I, as parents. We both passionately love our kids. She can’t possibly hate Whites, since her children are Asian/White. Combine two cultures, at least on a localize level, defeats racism, as most every parent loves their kids with the intensity Yi and I do. It’s one of our best bits about being human—the magnificent, spectacular, all-encompassing love we get to feel, and share as parents.

    —

    *Dating app data (in the U.S. and abroad) shows White men prefer Asian women, though it is unusual to see an Asian man partner with a White woman.

    **Hiring offshore workers for less money, now being exploited by every social network from Facebook to Instagram to YouTube, to Mr. Trump’s summer staff at his Mar-a-Lago estate, lowers the pay rate for all of us. It’s no wonder U.S. income levels have been stagnant for years. There has been 308,613 H1B registrations for 2022, a 12.5% rise over 2021.

    ***Asia Population 2022 (Demographics, Maps, Graphs) (worldpopulationreview.com)