These numbers are no surprise to me: within US companies, native-born people from the US have lost employment, while foreign-born workers have gained employment. The article focuses on the non-college-educated, but even among college-educated people I see this trend. My own employer has been stealth-outsourcing the entire IT department to India, for instance, to the point where I was recently looking at job openings for a friend and counted ~150 out of ~150 opportunities being in Mumbai, with 0 in the United States.
What's weird is how few people complain about this overall nation-wide trend! It used to be that there was justifiable outrage about this kind of thing-- now it's normalized and no one even seems to notice it.
In other news, I really want to get a PlayStation 5 Pro. I think if I trade in my old PlayStation 4 Pro plus my existing PlayStation 5, the system itself will only cost me a couple of hundred dollars. Of course, I'd also need to pop for the disc drive and stand beyond that. To be honest I was shocked that Sony wasn't more aggressive with pricing-- they are clearly selling this thing for profit. But maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, given that with Microsoft's Xbox hardware tanking, Sony is the only game in town.
In a way it's similar to Nvidia on the PC side, with their exorbitantly-priced video cards. The real kick in the pants is that Sony can't even bother to include the plastic stand with the unit. That's shocking, really.
A second attempt at a modded Game Boy Advance should arrive tomorrow. The seller wound up apologizing: the d-pad wasn't working because a tiny piece of paper had wound up on the membrane. The rest of his work was immaculate, so if I'm happy with this new one I will post a link to him on eBay. I also bought these incredible GBA game cases from an Etsy seller. I will do a full blog post, with pictures, hopefully over this weekend showing off the whole thing, with links. It will be a really fun collection to assemble.
Finally, I was Sacristan last weekend at what's called a "First Saturday Mass". The priest asked me: "Ummm, can you serve after Mass for the Adoration?"
Before I knew it I found myself in full server's robes, manning incense, ringing bells, and all the rest! I did ok considering I had less than five minutes of instruction beforehand, although I did fumble trying to place the humeral veil around the priest's shoulders: as I started to unfold it, it became like a parachute it was so huge, and I couldn't find the right-side clasp! The priest just calmly looked over his shoulder and whispered, "I've got it", haha.