domain:philippelemoine.com
Botond173
16m ago
They actually paid money to the Raj government when deploying Indian troops for imperial operations that didn't have to do with the defence of India. The cost of war would be borne by the British treasury, not the Indian treasury.
I feel compelled to quote US historian Mike Davis, via Wikipedia:
"Between 1875–1900—a period that included the worst famines in Indian history—annual grain exports increased from 3 to 10 million tons", equivalent to the annual nutrition of 25m people. "Indeed, by the turn of the century, India was supplying nearly a fifth of Britain's wheat consumption at the cost of its own food security."[6] In addition,
Already saddled with a huge public debt that included reimbursing the stockholders of the East India Company and paying the costs of the 1857 revolt, India also had to finance British military supremacy in Asia. In addition to incessant proxy warfare with Russia on the Afghan frontier, the subcontinent's masses also subsidized such far-flung adventures of the Indian Army as the occupation of Egypt, the invasion of Ethiopia, and the conquest of the Sudan. As a result, military expenditures never comprised less than 25 percent (34 percent including police) of India's annual budget ...[7]
As an example of the effects of both this and of the restructuring of the local economy to suit imperial needs (in Victorian Berar, the acreage of cotton doubled 1875–1900),[8] Davis notes that "During the famine of 1899–1900, when 143,000 Beraris died directly from starvation, the province exported not only thousands of bales of cotton but an incredible 747,000 bushels of grain."
Corvos
50m ago
Depending on how you use the word original, I would argue that’s an inappropriate bar. The majority of people respond well to and express themselves using the forms that they are familiar with.
Somebody creating an utterly unoriginal chocolate-box landscape, AI waifu or Madonna With Child is expressing some kind of internal spirituality and cognition IMO, even if you don’t find the results interesting or impressive. (And you don’t have to! That’s not my point.)
Or am I misunderstanding you and you mean original to be just anything that’s not a literal direct copy?
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1hr ago
Depends on social class. The wife handles budgeting and accounting of day-to-day expenditure (including business expenditure if the family runs a small business which is too small to hire a clerk). For working and lower-middle class families, day-to-day expenditure is the household finances, so the wife handles it all. For the upper-middle class, it would be normal for the wife to handle day-to-day expenditure and the husband to handle major investments. For the upper class, the senior servants handled household finances.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1hr ago
She was going through pre-marriage counseling with her local Catholic priest. She was bemoaing the fact that, on a questionnaire she had her fiancee had to fill out, it asked "who will be handling the household finances?" "Tollbooth!" She steamed, "What am I supposed to do? Just stand barefoot in the kitchen all day with a baby on my hip?"
My understanding is that the correct answer to this question can be anything, as long as both partners are able to give the same answer without thinking. The point isn't that there is a Church-approved answer, it is that you should have discussed this question (and other, similar questions about how the marriage will work) and reached an agreement before you show up for pre-cana.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1hr ago
It also includes STEM grads in healthcare jobs - if you count those as "STEM jobs" the number drops to 62%. And teaching doesn't count as a "STEM job" either - not sure how many maths and science teachers there are or how that affects the numbers.
B-1 visas do allow some types of work - I bet LGES argues that the workers were there "to install, service, or repair equipment/machinery purchased from a foreign company", or "to train U.S. workers to perform these services", both of which are permissible activities under a B-1 visa per CBP's own documentation provided that the workers do not receive compensation from a US source.
If the workers did receive compensation from a US source, that means someone fucked up somewhere, but my guess is what actually happened is that CBP disagrees with LGES about whether the activities these workers engaged in qualify as installing, servicing, or repairing equipment/machinery purchased from a foreign company, and decided that the appropriate course of action was to chain these workers up and make a self-congratulatory press release about it, and that we will hear any follow-ups about the outcomes of this raid in terms of findings of actual wrongdoing.
(Disclaimer: IANAL, TINLA)
ControlsFreak
1hr ago
Yeah, I basically haven't meaningfully read any of these, but every time I skim one, I kick myself more and more for not commenting what I thought when the very first one was posted: "I wonder whether they'll do Jews or Blacks first when they get around to it."
#HlynkaWasRight
OliveTapenade
2hr ago
Sure - I'm an Australian, party discipline is much stronger here, and in practice we all know that we're not really voting for our local MP, but rather for the party that MP represents. Even so, in this system I do believe that MPs of the party in Opposition are democratically justified in opposing the Government's policies. Labor's crushing election victory this year does not obligate the remaining Coalition MPs to cooperate with whatever Labor wants to do; neither did the Coalition's decisive 2013 win obligate Labor to refrain from acting against the Coalition Government. That would go against the whole point of having an Opposition.
The point I'm trying, perhaps clumsily, to make is that I think it's bad faith to use a presidential 'mandate' as a reason for why members of congress should not oppose that president's policies, if they and their party think it necessary to do so.
Based on priors, I am doubtful that they were meaningfully violating the law.
Reuters: Workers say Korea Inc was warned about questionable US visas before Hyundai raid
Many South Korean workers were sent to the U.S. on questionable documents despite their misgivings and warnings about stricter U.S. immigration enforcement before last week's raid on a Hyundai site, according to workers, officials and lawyers.
For years, South Korean companies have said they struggle to obtain short-term work visas for specialists needed in their high-tech plants in the United States, and had come to rely on a grey zone of looser interpretation of visa rules under previous American administrations.
When that changed in the early days of U.S. President Donald Trump's second term, some workers were denied entry to the United States under statuses that did not fully allow work, according to Reuters interviews with more than a dozen workers from various companies, government and company officials, and immigration lawyers.
Many of the people arrested were skilled workers who were sent to the U.S. to install equipment at the near-complete factory on a visa waiver programme, or B-1 business traveller visas, which largely did not allow work, three people said.
"It's extremely difficult to get an H-1B visa, which is needed for the battery engineers. That's why some people got B-1 visas or ESTA," said Park Tae-sung, vice chairman of Korea Battery Industry Association, referring to the Electronic System for Travel Authorization.
One person who works at the Georgia site told Reuters that this had long been a routine practice. "There was a red flag ... They bypass the law and come to work," the person said, asking not to be named because of the sensitivity of the matter.
LG Energy Solution is working with Hyundai to build the factory.
Officials at LGES were aware of the long-standing issues and some of the companies' employees and contractors were reluctant to travel to the United States for fear of being denied entry, two of the sources said.
BahRamYou
3hr ago
We've had sort of a natural experiment on this, in the form of the Great Depression followed by WW2. There was a ton of long-term unemployed people from the depression, and many of them became...not very good people, after years of riding the rails and being homeless/broke. Very high crime rates, and just a general fragmentation of society. Not the sort of person a sane person would want to hire, even if the economy wasn't in the toilet because of the depression.
But then the war happened. Governments started spending money like crazy, causing a surge in demand. Obviously the government needed lots of bodies to fill the army and war industries, but then regular jobs also started needing to get filled, so employers were willing to take a chance on people they'd never normally consider. Including both hobos and housewives who had never worked a regular paid job before.
And for the most part... it worked. Despite all the destruction of the war, countries grew their economies during the war as those long-time unemployed people came back to work. It turns out that people aren't just widgets- if you give them a chance, the right environment, and some training, they can learn and grow to take on a wide variety of tasks.
But in a world where there's high unemployment, and every position comes with large mandatory headcount costs, plus potential lawsuits if anything goes wrong, noone wants to take a chance on a questionable hire.
FistfullOfCrows
3hr ago
You are in the US on a perfectly legal visa but ICE does not like your tattoos? Go to an El Salvador mega-prison without any due process.
I've had this idea bouncing in my brain for some time now, what is the purpose of gang identification tattoos/color matched clothes/hand signs. It's ingroup signaling. Ingroup signaling for a criminal organization. Want to go after gangs? Make gang tattoos illegal, make "wearing the gang uniform" illegal. That way you deny one of the primary benefits of being in a gang. Respect.
What do you mean 'high skill immigrant workers'?
There's a world of difference between 'mid javascript jockey', 'mid accountant', 'mid miscellaneous office worker' and 'fabulously talented UV lithography genius' or 'hypersonic plasma fluid dynamics expert'.
I suspect you don't mean the latter but the former, since you're talking about 'the job pool' rather than 'high powered R&D positions'.
If mass immigration were so great, we'd see the rich countries with the highest immigration rates having huge productivity growth, right? Canada and Australia have been much more aggressive in mass migration than the US. They're fairly free market anglo-derived liberal democracies, the closest analogues to the US. Australia has a points system supposedly targeting skills shortages and 'high skill migrants'. Both Australia and Canada have had a terrible time in terms of prosperity and economic growth, despite (because of) all this immigration. Canadian GDP per capita has been stagnant for about a decade. In truth it's not high-skill immigrant workers that are coming in, many of them just do food delivery. There are a small fraction of actually-high-skill workers and a huge number of people gaming the system to work or gain access to a richer country than their birthplace, which is understandable but not necessarily in the national interest.
The US gets most of the best anyway, since why would anyone really talented think 'I want to move to Australia and start a company there.' Tiny market size, limited capital, great distance from the rest of the world, barren manufacturing sector, high energy prices...
If you're gonna have immigration, better 'high skill migrants' than refugees from shithole countries. But better still to just skim the very best, the actually high skill migrants. If a company wants to bring someone in, charge them 200K as a flat fee to ensure they're really getting their money's worth, that they absolutely need this person. If a university wants to bring someone in, make sure they'd be in the top 5% of domestic students, were they a domestic. The US could cut immigration 98% and do just fine.
See also: https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/brain-drain-as-geopolitical-strategy
jobs programs for the lazy drug addicted idiots being put in roles above their worth
Do we then need jobs programs for the civilizationally impaired, those peoples who couldn't make a rich, safe country themselves? This line of reasoning cuts both ways. If Americans are so lazy, inept and stupid, shouldn't these talented and deserving foreigners stay at home rather than come to babysit these lowlife Americans who don't know how to do anything? Americans invented Javascript, one imagines they can find some mid Javascript developers at home.
confidentcrescent
3hr ago
The cops wanted the body cameras because they thought it would clear up false accusations/spurious complaints.
That doesn't match what I remember. Why did it take a national conversation to get body cameras in place if both police officers and reform advocates wanted them? Who else could have been getting in the way?
Additionally, unions in multiple large cities have demanded raises for wearing body cameras. This would be a very strange move by the unions if officers in these locations wanted body cameras.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
3hr ago
thanks to good old human greed
It's not just greed, is the inability to compromise. Just like with abortion, where neither party is willing to offer a sensible compromise because it angers their extreme wing, is a platform to shit on the other party from, and poses a defection risk from the other party (like with gun control), the ruling parties of the US both acknowledge the shortcomings of H-1B, but can't create a bipartisan bill that reforms it into something that matches its original design (providing short-term high-skilled labor) or its current purpose (naturalization visa for white-collar workers).
Honestly, Trump Mk.1 was the Dems' best chance to run a reform like this through the Congress. Instead, they spent four years making Trump, who struggled with GOP support, their sworn enemy. Now Trump Mk.2 is all about owning the libs and rules by decree.
As any hiring manager knows nowadays, the job pool is mostly incompetents, liars, lazies, addicts, or otherwise unwanted because of a serious flaw.
'Nowadays?'
How long, per chance, do you believe this state of affairs has held before it didn't? Years? Decades? 'They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work' was the joke of an entire economic system of the 20th century, so we're probably looking at centuries.
Did the hiring managers of feudal Europe five hundred years ago think their serf pool as highly competent, honest, diligent people devoid of alcohol addiction or other serious flaws? Chinese mandarins? Byzantine administers? Illiterate tribal chiefs the world over?
aaa
3hr ago
I'd like to push back on the idea that crossing ecclesiastical authority risked death. I feel like that's a model of the Middle Ages that is more conceived on 18th century propaganda instead of the actual historical record. Even when the Papal States had an executioner, he was part of the civil courts, not the ecclesiastical courts. He executed thieves and assassins, not heretics. Ecclesiastical courts were not allowed to kill anyone at all, and there is good reason for that. That's not to say they were infallible bastions of perfect goodness and mercy, but they aren't the opposite either. They were courts.
This is disingenuous. Yes, the church generally didn't execute heretics however heresy was also a secular crime everywhere. This is like saying that judges never imprison anyone because they don't personally run prisons.
The Medieval mind was as convinced about the truth of Christianity as we are about the roundness of the Earth. Those with the intelligence to prove it made sure that this important knowledge was accessible to all. And I believe they did prove the existence of God and that there is more proof today than there was in the past. And that anyone smart enough who goes through 4-6 years of specialized education and spiritual formation (that is very hard to get these days) will agree, if we could just get them to take the opportunity cost to get there.
The standards of "truthness" in a manuscript society, pre-enlightenment society were just very different from our own, it was underpinned by authority. When books were very expensive you had to believe that if something was copied by everyone it was good and that the objection that you found had been addressed by someone somewhere, you had to be the one that was equivocated but you had no way to verify it.
Plenty of falsehoods that could be trivially proven false proliferated. The most important textbook of the middle ages, the etymologies of st. isidor, told you that diamonds were made soft by goat blood and garlic demagnetized magnets, mathematicians studied and believed the aristotelian cosmology despite it being incompatible with the ptolemaic model which they also knew and employed day to day or, for that matter, didn't match geographical knowledge (see for example Alighieri's Questio de Aqua et Terra) or even phisicians who believed in the existence of a rete mirabilis in humans and a spermatic duct connecting the brain to the penis (as Galen said, sperm is stored in the brain) despite presiding over cadaver dissections that had no such things.
I don't think you could convince many people today with medieval arguments because they went like this:
- It is true because every civilized society believes it or is muslim, a chistian heresy (i.e. argument from universal assent). This wasn't true back then, they just didn't know about china, and it isn't true today.
- It is true because the bible, the best historical record through eyewitness account that we have, says it is. This was true back then but now we know the bible is trash when it comes to historical accuracy.
- It is true because [various arguments from classical theology]. Most of these don't hold because we proved actual infinity isn't logically contradictory.
ulyssessword
3hr ago
Let's say the US has X amount of specialized talent and thus they can only do Y amount of productivity with in a year.
How close are you to reaching Y? Is a person's contribution to X fixed at birth (or shortly after), or can it increase through training, education, and experience?
Your argument relies on the idea that X is both largely fixed among the existing population and that it's a relevant near-term constraint on industry, while I'm not sure either is true. Underemployment is rampant, with only 56% of college grads working at a job that needs any degree. Still no perfect candidates? Just hire someone 80% qualified and train them up the rest of the way. Can't handle the last 20% of the job having no competent people? Hire them earlier and train them up before it becomes a critical constraint. Can't plan ahead that far? Sucks to suck, git gud.
odd_primes
4hr ago
It is a fair criticism, for whatever reason the census bureau decided to include social science and psychology in STEM. They do have a very nice visualization though, by clicking on the major it shows the percentage of employees who end up working in STEM jobs, and highlights their placement in different job groups. For computer science and math, it's 51.1%. Engineering is 51.5%. For physical science majors, it's only 27.6%. Those are pretty grim numbers that aren't explained just by management being excluded from the stats.
Government policies that respect the natural law and seek to make obedience to it easier push back against this, and they have the potential to create a literally virtuous cycle between law and custom. They also facilitate human flourishing, which is no small thing. The state can't solve the problem, but it can do better than it has done. I am not optimistic about achieving this as a political matter, but I've been surprised before.
You're not going to inspire a country like the US with 300M+ people to return to good sense where it concerns our shortcomings and failures. That's about right up there with thinking you can solve problems like prostitution through moral lectures. You can't. The State may not be able to completely solve that problem on it's own, but it's all but impossible to solve without it. You need the political mechanisms, coercion and sometimes even the looming threat of intimidation to get people to act and behave right. For me the only reason to be optimistic is where there's a political will for the government to lay down it's iron hand on a number of important issues.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
4hr ago
In theory, yes.
In practice, look at how many votes are strictly on party lines. The US is better than most in this regard for avoiding these but it still happens; there are some countries whose systems only ever vote party line, which means who you actually voted for is completely irrelevant.
Tretiak
4hr ago
I have no idea what lends credence to his argument. The exact opposite has been shown to be true since the end of the 20th century. Fukuyama's 'End of History' thesis was laudably ambitious but most societies that were wrapped up in his prediction went the other direction by almost 180 degrees. They greatly retain and drew their ideas for economic and technological development from their historical traditions. Japanese manufacturing for instance did that with Zen Buddhism in the 20th century at the same time people were declaring the triumph over tradition. Technology has hardly supplanted tradition and I think it's unlikely it will in the near future either.
This relates to the culture war for the simply fact that I think just like the religious piece, most conservatives that ostensibly want to tear down the liberal establishment, actually don't want to give up their liberal freedom and personal autonomy. It's all well and good to make arguments about tradition and the importance of paternal authority etc in the abstract, but personally submitting yourself to someone else's rule (in a very direct way, I understand that we are ruled indirectly now anyway) would, I suspect, be a bridge too far.
No conservative I've ever met has said he wants to tear down liberal institutions. But individual liberty doesn't perform very well when it comes to producing and sustaining constructive, civilizational habits. It has little to provide when it comes to guiding the broader optimality of society and optimizes solely for individual preference. Most of the western legal system over the course of centuries has been nothing short of codified tradition (which is exactly what 'law' is and is inherently what established tradition is). And no one person's personal experience will overturn the collective experience and collected wisdom of the millions among the generations that came before them. To quote a halfway intellectual idol of mine:
Man is instinctively conservative in the sense that probably millions of years of experience have taught him that a stable environment is the best for peace of mind, present and future security, automatism of action, and a ready command of material and artificial circumstances. It is the repeated introduction of new instruments, new weapons, new methods, and needs for fresh adaptations, that makes automatism impossible. And it is the complication of life by novel contributions to life's interests and duties that makes a ready command of circumstances difficult.
To this thesis I have never seen what I regard as an adequate refutation or substantial challenge to conservatism, defined as such.
In addition though, I simply think that modern liberty is good. I'm a sort of reluctant conservative I'll admit, but even in the traditional conservative picture of the world, I think that personal freedoms from the state and even to a certain extent within traditional communities are great. To me, the project of the conservative in the modern world is not to sort of force us via governmental apparatus back into some halycon pre-modernity days. Instead, the conservative impulse should be focused towards explaining and convincing people in a deep and genuine way that living in a more traditional way is better for society, and better for people in particular.
I enjoy my liberty too, but it's a constrained liberty that exists within a very specific and particular context that's defined and guided by our traditions. I would in no way enjoy the unconstrained, every man for himself liberty that a local Somali warlord would have enjoyed decades ago. And most people generally overstate their love for freedom and liberty. If freedom entails responsibility, most people don't want to have 'anything' to do with it. Conservatism has never rejected the importance of liberty. It just doesn't regard it as the highest value and neither do I.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
4hr ago
As any hiring manager knows nowadays, the job pool is mostly incompetents, liars, lazies, addicts, or otherwise unwanted because of a serious flaw.
As both a hiring manager and a grass-toucher, I really do not believe this. Yes, our recruiters, both internal and external, bring in a lot of garbage, but I don't think that's because there are no qualified applicants. It's because in the last ten years, then has been a sharp increase in the offensive capabilities of "bad actors" in the employment market (Indian tech consultancies gaming the visa system, Linkedin spammers) with an especially sharp increase in the last few years due to the adoption of LLMs. It's more difficult for me to judge the quality of an applicant before meeting them by checking their Linkedin, CV, cover letter, or email correspondence. Everyone has learned that all text-based communication can be polished by an LLM, and so typos, poor writing skills, and obvious bullshitting are all easier to avoid (although em-dashes and chatgpt-speak are still giveaways sometimes). I have a lot more screening interviews now that are a waste of time since it's more difficult to vet ahead of a video call.
However, this is probably a temporary state of affairs. Hiring managers and recruiters optimizing for quality will improve their defensive capabilities by inventing new, harder-to-fake vetting procedures. We just aren't there yet, the defense is still catching up.
Let's say the US has X amount of specialized talent and thus they can only do Y amount of productivity with in a year.
I dunno, man. This just does not pass the smell test for me. In a country of nearly 350 million people, there aren't enough bright, talented people to fill jobs? I get that companies want to hire a top 1% intelligence/conscientiousness person for their very important software role, but will it doom American industry and creativity if we force them to use the top 5% of the American talent pool instead of the top 1% of the global talent pool? We may move forward slightly slower, but we will also avoid the negative effects of creating a new class of alien elites who see America as merely an economic zone. If we tied work visas to renunciation of other citizenships and the ability to pass civics test or something, I might change my mind a little.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
4hr ago
I just felt it was worth pointing out (and noting the boundaries of) the big exception where those interest groups are straight-up "the enemy".
Mel Gibson has form. Braveheart is an even better example. (Obviously English are the villains in Braveheart, not British, but I don't think that distinction matters to Irish-Americans.)
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