Glassnoser
6mo ago
This is the first time a single topic has so completely taken over my Twitter feed that I've been driven off it because of how annoying and never ending the discussion has become. Every other Tweet is about Indians or H1B visas, and very little of substance is being said. It's just a lot of anger and dumb takes. One side is mostly just being blatantly racist while the other is getting really pissed off and gloating about the superiority of immigrants. It's incredibly boring.
I would be interested in a conversation about actually improving immigration policy. I find it ridiculous that the US has elements of randomness to its system and isn't blind to national origins.
I'd be curious to know more technical details about Canada's system. There has clearly been a huge drop in the quality of immigrants. I used to think that they just lowered the points threshold for permanent residency in order to raise the immigration rate, but I learned recently that they actually introduced or expanded some different immigration streams that just require employer sponsorships in specific industries which take people directly from community colleges and they actually targeted India first to start with. Apparently, this is being abused with basically fake college programs and sometimes even fake jobs. I'd love to know more about what happened here.
Glassnoser
4mo ago
I think his intelligence is greatly overrated. What is this high opinion many have of him based on? He made an incredibly stupid comment about how a job is worth a million cheap toasters or something and from that point on, I have not thought he is particularly smart. Sure, he might be a bit smarter than your average politician, but that is a low bar.
He seems to me like someone who is interested in ideas and has some half-decent debating skills, but he is not especially good at actually thinking.
Glassnoser
5mo ago
Bail and the cost of legal counsel are not intended to be punishments for crimes.
Glassnoser
6mo ago
If Indian workers are so bad, why do tech companies keep hiring them? I'm not buying that it's because of nepotism. Different groups of Indians don't even seem to like each other much, and these companies have shareholder meetings and boards of directors. They face competition in the marketplace. And in my experience, when programmers have one common belief that seems to be contradicted by the market, the market is always right. Two examples: 1) you used to hear from programmers that they were massively underpaid relative to their value to their employers and 2) more recently, they claim to be more productive working from home, which doesn't appear to be true for most people. Why should I believe these anecdotes about Indian nepotism? Many other industries have the phenomenon of hiring only Indians. Maybe it's just comparative advantage.
Glassnoser
6mo ago
No, one side is saying some Indians are better workers than some Americans. That's not saying Indians are better as a whole.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
This isn't human trafficking.
Glassnoser
3mo ago
Why has the rule enforcement been so lax ever since we moved from /r/themotte? Or is that a false impression?
Glassnoser
6mo ago
Some people do want to live with them though.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
All that's being asked is that you not send innocent people to prison in third world countries. I don't think it's reasonable to reject that. In some cases, foreigners are being invited to come to the US, and then being deported to El Salvador, a country they are not even citizens of. No one is asking for you to give up anything of value. You are being asked to not be inhumane.
Glassnoser
3mo ago
Companies may wish to domicile in your country (especially if you have low corporate income tax rates) in order to access your consumers and/or workforce.
Foreign companies will sell less, not more to Americans, unless they crowd out domestic production (which tariffs necessarily reduce) to sell domestic goods instead of imports, but since overall domestic production would be lower, you don't benefit from this. Tariffs can in no way move production into the country on net. They only change what is produced (e.g. replace services with manufacturing)
If everyone else is doing tariffs except you, then the economy is already distorted; and implementing reciprocal tariffs may "un-distort" the global economy.
No, they can't. They can only add to the trade barriers and add to the distortion. The only way to undistort the economy is by subsidizing trade, effectively paying tariffs for foreign companies, but that just allows other countries to extort you.
If you want to raise revenue and you don't fear a trade war, tariffs may have less of an impact on GDP as other methods of taxation (eg, income tax).
The income tax certainly has a greater impact on GDP because it is easier to avoid buying imported goods than to not work.
If you are going to do protectionism, tariffs are better than subsidies.
Tariffs will change the relative cost of goods, but being a tax they should be net deflationary rather than inflationary.
There is, in effect, very little difference. Subsidies send money to other countries whereas taxes take money from other countries, but most of the tax is incident on the consumers within your country, so the difference is small.
Tariffs allow other taxes to be reduced whole subsidies require other taxes to be raised, so the effect on purchasing power is about the same. If one is more inflationary than the other is unimportant.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
Traffic congestion is caused by a lack of congestion pricing. It's a choice, not a necessary feature of any particular urban layout.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
He has strong opinions about Trump. That doesn't make him partisan or a hack. He's also not a random person but one of the most famous economics bloggers.
It's not inconsistent to condemn human rights abuses abroad while acknowledging that the scope of the US government and its legal system ought to be limited to its citizens only.
Legally - not just morally - the US government's legal system is not limited to its citizens. Non-US citizens have rights in the US and the US prosecutes people outside of its borders, US citizens and non-US citizens alike.
But, returning to earth, it seems that Bukele's policies are widely approved by the people of El Salvador. On what basis can the American government (or, still less, an American judge) deny them?
On the basis that they are cruel and immoral. Popularity is not a justification. Moreover, if something is popular in the US and unpopular in El Salvador, it's popular in the two places considered together, since the US has 50 times El Salvador's population. If that shouldn't imply that the US gets to decide what happens in El Salvador, neither should the popularity of any given policy in either country justify the mistreatment of any minority there that objects.
But more importantly, you are ignoring the fact that the US government is paying El Salvador to imprison people that it is unnecessarily sending to El Salvador. It can stop doing either of these things at any time, yet it refuses.
The fact that the US is not all powerful is not an excuse for neglecting all moral and legal responsibilities to anyone who isn't a US citizen. The US government is not even trying to undo its mistakes. It would be one thing if the US government were taking all reasonable steps to undo the harm it has done to the people it has sent to El Salvador. Instead, it is doing everything it can to achieve the opposite.
We have Trump and Bukele sitting in a room together, amicably, with Bukele telling the press he can't force Trump to take any his prisoners and Trump telling the press he can't force Bukele to release any of his prisoners. Obviously, between the two of them, there exists the power to bring the prisoners to the US. There is no bona fide attempt on either of their parts to solve the problem. Everything you have said are excuses for subjecting people to inhumane treatment, not actual justifications for it.
Glassnoser
6mo ago
Who says they aren't good for their own country?
Glassnoser
7mo ago
Do you have a substantive disagreement with his argument?
Glassnoser
8mo ago
Very few people actually live paycheque to paycheque though. The US economy has done really well and real wages, especially for the poor are up.
Glassnoser
4mo ago
I've never understood the point of cruise control. It doesn't really take any effort to maintain a constant speed.
Glassnoser
6mo ago
It was about religion, not genes. Otherwise, it would make no sense to complain about Irish immigration while pushing for more German immigration.
Glassnoser
7mo ago
If something is self-evidently newsworthy, I don't see why any commentary needs to be included.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
The government can hire more immigration judges. There are extremely few of them.
But you're missing the point. You can deport people without paying to have them imprisoned.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
Presumably, the police would be expected to follow a court order and not prevent someone from being arrested.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
It has the jurisdiction to punish people for committing murder.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
Can't they arrest people for contempt of court?
Glassnoser
2mo ago
How is China more of an adversary than Russia?
Do you have a source for this claim?
For having broken what laws?
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