If you're keeping track, what was the number I gave you the other day from Grok? 30 oil refineries in Russia. And now this would be a handful so far that have been attacked. I don't know if they're operational or not, but they've been attacked. And the estimate that some people said was if half of the oil refineries went offline, Russia's economy would be in serious trouble. Yeah. 20% so far. But you can't really trust any of the numbers coming out of the war zone whether something is destroyed or whether they've rebuilt it in two days. You never know. But clearly Kiev is going on the attacking oil refinery strategy.

Here's what I don't know. Doesn't it seem to you like there should be a lot more of these every day? As in was there really only one oil refinery that got attacked overnight? Why wouldn't they be attacking five to 10 of them every night? Are they running out of drones? Do they not have enough weapons? So I thought that it must be there must be a specialized kind of drones that can get that far and do that kind of damage. So maybe they don't have enough of the specialized ones at that distance. But it seems to me that the inevitable direction is that however many drones are being sent by Ukraine every day, won't that be doubling every 30 days or something? I feel like the numbers should be just doubling every 30 days because they all know that winning is almost entirely a question of how fast you can and how capable your drones are, how fast can you build them and how capable they are. Given that we know that's the plan, are they really not able to put hundreds of drones in the air against refineries every day? So it makes me wonder what it is. I don't know about what's going on over there. Probably a lot.

Meanwhile, Estonia released a map showing the Russian military had apparently intentionally violated Estonian airspace. The belief is that Russia is rattling a saber and scaring them and making them see that they have military dominance over Estonia, which of course they do. But if you don't know about Estonia, Estonia is not like the other places over there. It kind of stands alone because they have a real big emphasis on education and the tech industry. So Estonia is actually a real advanced country. They could do voting on their phones. So in case you're wondering if it's possible, yeah, Estonia does it. They just vote on their phone. I don't see anybody complaining. Maybe there are. But why would Russia be doing that? Are they planning to attack or is it just as soon as they get some comfort away from Ukraine, are they going to take Estonia? I don't know. Don't know what's going on yet. It's not obvious to me how Russia wins by frightening Estonia, unless they actually plan to conquer Estonia. I don't know.

The big news I think is that Trump signed this big H-1B visa fee situation. The H-1B visa people are the workers. Almost all of them, well 75%, come from India. Most of the rest come from China and then a smattering from other places. So it's mostly an India situation. So Indian tech workers come over here, work for big tech companies, and Trump thinks that maybe they should be hiring and training American workers instead. And so he's still going to let the big companies hire their H-1B visa people, but the company will have to pay $100,000 a piece per year to keep these Indian high-tech workers.

And I saw a post by Bindu Reddy who said that US tech dominance takes a massive hit imposing this fee will kill skilled US immigration to America. This fee will also be applied to immigrants graduating from US universities and seeking jobs. There'll be a domino effect and we'll lose our technical dominance to India and China. It's time to panic. What do you think? Do you think that Trump is right? You know, maybe like he might have been right on tariffs. Is it possible that we come out ahead by making sure that we have lots of domestic high-tech people who are well trained and can do the job or are we going to lose so much because the Indian workers are bringing with them insane amounts of talent that we couldn't possibly grow domestically.

I don't know. Probably the court will block it because I guess the court can block it if they didn't do proper notification to allow people to comment on it before it happens. So that alone might delay it or block it until the proper notifications can come and I think there's at least one other reason that the court might get involved and therefore I'm sure it will. So don't assume it's going to happen. The other possibility is there'll be a lot of tweaking. So you can expect that some special industries will say okay can you make us an exception because there is absolutely no way we can do this with Americans. We'll work as fast as we can to make sure there's a day where we can do it with Americans. But right now, honestly, there are no Americans who can do this and we just need a little relief. That will probably happen. And there might be some industries where they're important industries and the government says okay, we can't really wait to get all the Americans trained up. So all right. For now, you're allowed to have more of them. Maybe they'll drop the fee for some cases if there's special cases. So there's going to be a lot of tweaking and adjusting and legal actions and stuff. So we don't know how this is all going to turn out.

But if the thing that happened is a big tech company, they certainly can hire the high-tech people from India, they can still do it. They just have to pay. Would Google be willing to pay $100,000 a year to keep the smartest tech person in India on their payroll? Well, yeah, of course that would be cheap. I don't know what a signing bonus is at Google, but I'll bet it's more than 100,000. And about the bonuses per year for somebody who would be a top technical person, I'm sure that's over $100,000 a year. So what could have happened is Trump created a situation where the big companies are guaranteed to still keep the top of the top of the top. It'll just be expensive, but they can afford it. Small companies won't be able to do it at all, but I don't know how much they were doing. Were small companies doing a lot of H-1B visas? I've never heard of it.

I'll tell you my take from my business experience, which was not as directly related to this topic. I didn't know too many of the H-1B visa people, but I don't believe there are Americans who can come anywhere near the smartest of the immigrant technical workers. I don't think they can get anywhere near it in general. You know, there are exceptions, right? Plenty of exceptions, but in general. So I guess I would agree with Bindu Reddy's first take that if you're looking at the near term it's really dangerous in the near term. In the long term it creates the right set of incentives so that American workers will be trained up and maybe become capable so we can do everything we need.

But let me ask you this. If you said we're going to take the best American tech workers, but only Americans. And then you compete against somebody who says I'm also going to take the best American workers, but I have access to around a billion Indians. And I'm not going to take them all, but I'm going to take the top 200 smartest technical people in India that I can get and then I'll add them to the best people I can get from America and I'm going to compete against somebody who only has Americans. Who wins? Well, what do you think? Do you think that out of a billion extra people to choose from, you couldn't find smarter people there than the people in the US who may be also very smart but have already have jobs and you know they got lots of competition and stuff like that? I feel like it's a no-brainer that just because of the numbers if all you knew is that India's got a billion people whatever the number is around there somewhere. If the only thing you knew is that you could choose from a new pool of a billion people and a lot of them are really well educated, you would do better, right? Both in the short run and the long run, right?

Sorry, my nose is just going crazy today. Anyway, so I'm worried. I'm worried that, here's what I think. This is probably going too far, but I'm just going to say it. I believe that the people who think that we can do just as well by ignoring a billion people, not all technical people but if you have a billion people to choose from and it's from a country with a good education system, your best 1% of them that's a lot of people and they're going to be really good. I don't believe that we can compete as well without that. And what I'm saying is not controversial. It's just 1 plus 1 is 2. If you have three people to choose from and you have to pick a CTO for you