domain:streamable.com
cjet79
13hr ago
I'm someone that generally sees the two parties as pretty close to each other in actual policy positions. Even if they loudly scream about how different they are.
Not my random opinion. It's what is predicted by public choice economics for a first past the post / two-party system. The party with the median voter wins, so that is where party behavior trends towards.
Lots of people here like to complain about the Democrats being in favor of open borders, but as someone who is actually in favor of open borders I mostly see the Democrats as ok with the current immigration situation, but not interested in opening up things any further.
If you think we have open borders right now .. I think we disagree on too much of base reality and we won't get very far talking with each other.
All of that to say, I would not be surprised if the bill looks semi strict on immigration but basically lacks any real teeth.
SerialStateLineXer
11hr ago
In some ways what we have now is the worst of both worlds. We have open borders for criminals and for low-skilled workers who are willing to work for low wages off the books, but we have tightly restricted immigration for highly skilled workers.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
8hr ago
The US would be well served by adopting the Australian method: A relatively easy points based system to get in if you're a skilled worker plus a guarantee you'll be detained offshore and never be allowed into the US ever again if you arrive illegally.
Rov_Scam
6hr ago
I don't understand the focus on skilled immigration. A lot of what we need is unskilled work. Since the pandemic we've seen reduced hours and increased wages for service jobs that they still can't seem to staff. I suspect part of the reason for the price increases everywhere is that they have to pay 15 bucks an hour for someone to push a cash register, not because of change in the law but because they can't find anyone for less than that, and they're still having trouble staffing these places. US Steel is having trouble finding laborers for mills because even at 80k/year no one wants to work rotating shifts doing manual labor in a dusty environment.
The focus on immigration types is itself unnecessary. Let the market decide. The key is that migrants and their children should have no recourse to US citizenship (by naturalization or birthright), ever. Perhaps for the richest we can allow them to buy in for $5m per (immediate) family, paid in cash to the treasury dept. Everyone else can go home to retire or when the job is done. They can pay to school their children in public schools, and can’t bring over family unless they can financially demonstrate they can support them.
All we need is the Kuwaiti/Emirati system. These are countries where 80% of the population are immigrants, and yet the natives are still in charge because naturalization doesn’t exist.
2rafa
23hr ago
Most advanced civilization was invented by the British and Americans, some by a few other Western Europeans. That didn’t stop plenty of other countries borrowing the technology to start their own industrial and technological revolutions. China didn’t need to invent the car, or the computer, or laundry detergent to use those things. “On their own” isn’t a standard we apply to other modern civilizations.
Sure, African countries are less functional and developed than the West, but many are developing rapidly, living standards are improving, education is increasing, infrastructure is being built, many more are seeing nonviolent leadership transitions - and most of that isn’t the result of charity but of ordinary economic activity. It seems ridiculous pessimistic to think things will never improve. Most African countries are far from being Haiti.
BaronVSS
Sort by controversial
8hr ago
Are there any remaining sufficiently large online spaces that tolerate spicy opinions and aren't jannied into oblivion? I have this unending urge to scream into the void, but don't want to pollute this place and reddit is a non-starter.
Rov_Scam
4hr ago
If only the United States had the foresight to institute such a system a century and a half ago, before the immigrant problem got out of hand. Then they could have just used my great-grandfather's labor in the mines until he decided to retire (coincidentally right around the time Pittsburgh Seam coal started running low), and then deported him back to Galicia just in time for the German invasion. Another great-grandfather would have been shipped back to Calabria some time in the late 40s or early 50s. I don't want to think what the consequences for your family would have been. I'm not sure what the downside was of their being allowed to stay.
2rafa
4hr ago
America is a settler country; all of us except the natives were ‘immigrants once’ (even if before independence). But it is fair for a settler country to decide that permanent settlement is finished. That involves no contradiction or hypocrisy. Manifest destiny is over. The only remaining land is either worthless or protected for nature. 330 million is enough.
"Can cockroaches live in your penis?"
Google AI: Yes! It's totally normal too.
Is there some esoteric force sabotaging Google's AI projects?
First there was the black Vikings, now there are random silly screenshots from their search AI. I suspect much is inspect element related but the meme has been bouncing around. There's a thread here: https://x.com/JeremiahDJohns/status/1794543007129387208
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/cringe-worth-google-ai-overviews
I've been using Brave which has had a similar feature for some time. Brave's AI is generally useful and right 75% of the time, though you can never quite be sure. When it is wrong, it's never 'yes, doctors recommend you to smoke cigarettes while pregnant' tier wrong. I don't ask many questions that could be disturbingly wrong. Those who use google, are the silly results plausible, cherrypicked, invented? Is Microsoft using GPT-5 bots to sabotage the reputation of their competitors?
Started The Killing Star as my falling asleep reading last night, and it reminded me how huge Titanic-mania was in the 80-90s, with the 1997 film release hitting what seems like the crest of the wave.
For a solid decade you'd see raising the Titanic as a random "as you know, we are living in the future" infodump, there were endless books and documentaries about it, people invested millions in building replicas. As late as the 2016 the Chinese were building a full size one (in Sichuan of all places) that seems to have been abandoned during construction.
It was striking because of how absolutely the meme died since 2015 or so. "Draw me like one of your French girls" is the last relic.
A good warning of the dangers of making big investments jumping on cultural bubbles only to be left holding the bag when they burst (cough Sega)
Is anyone old enough to remember the start? Did it just build steadily from the discovery of the wreck? "Raise the Titanic!" was late 70s, and Clive Cussler isn't known for original ideas...
Is it best to try and avoid presentism in your writing, or embrace it and write for your audience/profitable fads rather than for future readers?
Also read Jasper Fforde's "Red Side Story" last night, and regret the wasted time. Dreadful sequel 15 years too late to use the original ideas of the first book.
quiet_NaN
23hr ago
You are technically correct. However, Monsanto was acquired by the pharma giant Bayer, who decided to discontinue the Monsanto brand. If instead they had gone bankrupt or be acquired by a company which imposed a drastically different business model, things would be different, but this looks to me like an acquisition followed by a corporate rebranding while keeping the same business practices.
In a similar vein, I will continue to say "acquired by Google/Facebook" instead of "acquired by Alphabet/Meta", "posted on twitter" instead of "posted on X", "addicted to heroin" (which is a trademark which has not been used for almost a century) instead of "addicted to diacetylmorphine", "Blackwater" instead of "academi" and so on.
hydroacetylene
54m ago
There are plenty of democrats who aren't in favor of open borders and the issue is a huge political liability for democrats.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
4hr ago
America is a settler country; all of us except the natives were ‘immigrants once’ (even if before independence).
Not except for the natives; the ancestors of the modern tribes (the Clovis people) killed and/or drove out an earlier wave of settlement.
TIRM
14hr ago
Is anyone actually trying to enforce bio patents against Indian farmers? Is this a real thing that's really happening, or is it just fantastical speculation?
And isn't golden rice exempted from patent enforcement anyways? The relevant patent holders have agreed to not try to enforce their patents against asset-free 3rd world farmers.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
17hr ago
if you don't mind adding some more spoiler tags, how did
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
17hr ago
You know, I just got through a book about the Irish potato famine and the parallels between the 'Democrats run modern welfare plantations' narrative and Trevelyan are pretty interesting.
In the most general terms, I have to ask: do you believe that the Resource Curse exists?
More specifically, you believe that responses to an acute problem over seven years and a chronic problem lasting since somewhere between 1964 and 1866, depending on where one starts the counting, generate parallels because they both can be summarized as "giving poor people handouts doesn't solve poverty"? The crisis has an obvious, acute source in the one case, which is a crop disease killing all the crops. Is the analogue to the potato blight racism? I'm gonna bet it's racism. But the fact remains that giving poor people handouts has not, in fact, solved poverty, and there is, in fact, a large and by all evidence permanent underclass utterly dependent on the handouts, a problem those proposing the handouts did not predict and those defending them have no idea how to solve. Especially given that black people were not in fact generally suffering a famine when we instituted handouts for them, is your argument that a famine would have resulted anyway if they had not been instituted?
Trevelyan may have been correct that the situation in Ireland was untenable (TFR >4, increasingly small plots of land that necessitated subsistence potato farming, rampant poverty and illiteracy), but his actions directly led to the preventable deaths of 750,000-1,500,000 Irish and the emigration of a million more.
Indeed, which is an excellent argument for why Trevelyan was dead wrong in his case. What does this tell us about our case?
Perhaps more germanely, are you confident that slashing welfare programs in the US would lead to the outcomes you (we?) want, and do you have any examples of underclasses being cut off from welfare and becoming prosperous within a generation or two?
...And this is a good point to ask whether you actually read my comment.
They need tight-knit communities who deliver immediate punishment to defectors, with those continuing to defect written off. "aid from other parts of society" is how this underclass is maintained in its longstanding condition.
Which part of the first sentence do you disagree with? Because this was not, in fact, an argument for cutting welfare subsidies, or even a comment about welfare subsidies specifically. Underclass blacks are born, raised, and die in a system they neither have created nor can effectively control. It's not just the welfare checks, it's the schools, the police, the laws, the economy, every aspect of social structure beyond personal interaction. We made a society for them, and when that society delivers miserable results some of us invite them to place the blame on others of us. Notably, the people targeting the blame are those most involved in implementing those actual social structures, and those of us getting the blame are involved chiefly in paying for it all with our taxes.
You understand that my critique isn't the wastage of money, right? Perpetuating a permanent underclass is a monstrous thing to do! Actual accountability for the results is the only solution I can imagine having any chance of working, and I want a solution because the situation is monstrous!
I have previously proposed Reverse-Segregation: give blacks an area that they control completely, where every public official and government position must be held 100% by black people, by law. Grant this area leave to write its own laws as it sees fit, irrespective of the American constitution, and grant it leave to enforce and adjudicate those laws as it sees fit, completely outside the jurisdiction of the rest of American jurisprudence. Fund it with a per-capita percentage of all outlays legitimately payable to black Americans equivalent to the percentage of black Americans who actually live within it. People, white or black, can move there if they want, and leave if they want; no one can be kept there against their will, and no law-abiding citizen be prevented from going there by the rest of America if they choose to go. Then declare that outside this zone, racism has been solved. Blacks get the exact same legal status as everyone else. No AA, no hate crime laws, no special privileges, we implement pure colorblind enforcement of the letter of the law. Race-based discrimination is equally illegal no matter which race it's applied to. If certain words are evidence of bias, they're evidence regardless of who speaks them. Claims of bias will no longer be entertained unless they come with ironclad evidence. And if anyone doesn't like this, there's a place they can move. Welfare can even continue outside the zone as well, we just use cellphone data to track who's inside and who's outside and apportion the money appropriately. Anyone not-black who wants to can move inside the zone, they just can't hold office or vote for anyone who isn't black, presuming the zone decides to keep voting. Maybe even through in something about the zone expanding if its population rises too high.
Far-fetched, I admit, but I think something along those lines would probably improve our situation immensely. Given the current trajectory of Blue Tribe, it's entirely possible one of their cities would even be willing to implement such a zone in-situ rather than trying to build one from scratch. Chicago, maybe? Detroit? Maybe give it two years' lead time so people can move in or out according to preference. Whaddya think?
...In closing, I'm left with a surprisingly similar impression as by some of @2rafa's comments in the recent thread about the immigration bill, and again when that alt-right article got posted that proved Hlynka was right all along. People keep talking as though it's Reds versus blacks or browns, but I can live with blacks and browns happily enough. It's Blues that are an actual problem.
2rafa
22hr ago
Bayer is going to go bankrupt because of Monsanto; they’ve lost like 80% of their value since 2016 because of Americans suing them for Roundup unknowingly potentially causing cancer and the settlements could be tens of billions. Of course now people are getting scared that if the Roundup business collapses farmers will have to buy weed killer from China, where the manufacturers are safely immune from that kind of frivolity.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
23hr ago
We've still got the same cultural split, and the temperature is getting pretty high, only now, there isn't a firm lynchpin to actually fight over. Nothing to define specific territory as being on one side or the other, nothing to motivate the less-cultural to join the fight and tolerate the sacrifices warfare requires.
There’s an argument to be made that progressive gender stuff - the cluster of political/cultural issues including gay marriage, trans stuff, and abortion - are rapidly becoming the lynchpin. As the religiously conservative parts of the country becoming increasingly retrenched about these issues, it seems the progressive parts are doubling down on embracing the most extreme versions of them as a way to crystallize their differences.
In the most recent episode of Alex Kaschuta’s Subversive podcast, her guest made the interesting argument that part of what is driving the massive and rapid proliferation of people identifying as trans/nonbinary/GNC is simply that people in progressive spheres are adopting these identities as a way to formally mark themselves as distinct from the chuds and firmly loyal to one side of the simmering cultural conflict. “MAGAts won’t shut up about how gross trans people are, how they want to infiltrate women’s and children’s spaces to rape them, etc.? Well, if the chuds hate trans people, the trans must be doing something right! Count me in!”
Similarly, women who thirty years ago would have seen abortion as a deeply tragic last resort (“safe, legal, and rare”) now seem to be flirting with embracing it as a positive good. And not just as a thing we should encourage the underclass to do - the stance of early abortion advocates like Sanger - but as a thing that even affluent high-status people should be able to do freely and without any consequences or even social censure. (No big deal at all!) All as a defensive reactionary instinct triggered by conservative overreach and aggression on the issue.
Crowstep
9hr ago
Golden rice was developed by a non-profit in collaboration with universities. It doesn't have terminator genes (indeed, no crop with terminator genes has ever been sold, the technology was essentially abandoned in the early 2000s).
It does include patented genes, but patent law is national, not international. Only 12 of the patents are applicable outside of America, and all 12 have been waived by their owners. Any farmer who buys golden rice seeds can replant them forever.
Greenpeace isn't opposed to Golden Rice because they're worried about farmers' welfare. They're opposed to it because of their knee-jerk technophobia.
SerialStateLineXer
11hr ago
I think this is a general failing of LLMs. They're just regurgitating remixed training data, and when you ask weird questions like this, the likelihood that the relevant training data are dominated by trolling/joke answers is high.
2rafa
11hr ago
A dark possibility is that the HBD dysfunction of the Irish was indeed very much a thing, but events like the famines exerted a strong selective pressure that over time raised Irish performance significantly, to the point that it now equals other NW Europeans.
Pynewacket
12hr ago
And isn't golden rice exempted from patent enforcement anyways? The relevant patent holders have agreed to not try to enforce their patents against asset-free 3rd world farmers.
what is stopping them from changing their minds in the future when their situations change (revenue streams diminish, are acquired by a more aggresive patent holder, etc.)?
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
13hr ago
Roundup unknowingly potentially causing cancer
Is there any good evidence of the harm of glyphosate in reasonable quantities? I haven't done a literature review myself, but I've seen reports of questionable research on the "causes harm" side, but also that it's anecdotally safer than most of the alternatives.
Following up from the discussion a few weeks ago, Democrats are trying to bring back the border bill from January: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/schumer-says-us-senate-will-try-again-pass-border-bill-2024-05-19/
I said that the bill is obviously something that Democrats want unilaterally, and is no way a compromise or concession that could be offered in exchange for aid or anything else. It seems like this is proven true by the fact that the Democrats still want this as a standalone package.
As to whether or not the package is a trap, I can't see any reason the Democrats would support this unless it furthered their objective of increasing migration. Any alternative explanations here? If it wasn't a trap, is there a reason why Republicans would turn this down?
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