freemcflurry
No bio...
User ID: 106
freemcflurry
4d ago
There's no way the Canadian people can come out ahead here though. Absolute best case is that the sponsor supports them and they never use any healthcare and the net benefit to society is zero (they contributed nothing and took away nothing). In every other set of circumstances it's a net negative because you have to pay for the old person and (in an alternate universe where immigration laws are enforced) pay to punish the sponsor. It's a "heads I lose, tails nothing happens" bet.
freemcflurry
4d ago
He'd pay a small amount of income taxes on his Uber earnings, assuming he exceeded the standard deductible. But Uber doesn't provide health insurance to drivers and since he was over 65 he was very likely on medicare and the cost of that would exceed anything an Uber driver would ever pay in.
freemcflurry
4d ago
If we were really going to be libertarians now I'd have some sympathy for that. In practice the Democrats only ever want more freedom on issues that will benefit groups they like (blacks and immigrants mostly) with things like open borders, getting rid of zoning etc. Everyone else gets a boot on their face with high taxes and totalitarian environmental regulations. I don't want regulations to be repealed only when they will hurt me but left in place in all other cases.
freemcflurry
12d ago
Evidence is a fuzzy thing. Toyota got mugged for millions because some old people stepped on the wrong peddle. Juries love people with dead relatives and they hate big corporations.
freemcflurry
17d ago
No, it's easier to ban meat if there is already an alternative. If there is no substitute then passing a ban is a much higher barrier. Lab grown meat is from the electric car playbook: make an inferior substitute to something people like, gaslight theme into thinking it's just as good and then ban the authentic version.
freemcflurry
26d ago
At the beginning of the conflict western countries accepted Ukrainian refugees on very generous terms but did not accept men fleeing the draft from Russia. Morally this feels right but practically it's completely backwards. If you want Ukraine to win you should only accept their children and old people. You should bribe able bodied Russian men between 18 and 30 to seek asylum which would deprive Russia of both soldiers and workers.
freemcflurry
10d ago
If you're already into paradox games you may as well try EU4, covers the entire planet for 400 years so it's pretty large in scale. Best way to get started is to buy the subscription for a month so you have all the DLC.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
It's more than a little suspicious to me that every solution to climate change is something the left already wanted to do for other, unrelated reasons. What a coincidence that to fight climate change we have to become vegetarians, have fewer kids, demolish the suburbs, redistribute wealth to minorities and abolish capitalism.
freemcflurry
29d ago
But you don't know whether you can prove it or not until you end up in front of a judge. That's got to have some sort of chilling effect.
The other famous case recently was teachers in NYC schools. They proved that the test was fine to one judge and then lost on appeal and had to shell out $2 billion. So it's a pretty arbitrary standard that can go either way depending on the judge.
freemcflurry
10d ago
The Battle Barista.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
It's ironic that, after so many years of dismissing conspiracy theories, the government is telling us that the Russians are shooting energy beams at their brains. Maybe they could wear tinfoil hats to protect themselves.
If you work for the CIA or State Department and ever experience fatigue or headaches there is now a huge financial incentive to blame the Russians for it:
the Biden Administration signed into law the Havana Act, which provides six-figure compensation for confirmed victims of AHIs.
Lenzi, his wife, son, and daughter, were all medevaced from Guangzhou, China in early June 2018 after they each failed brain injury tests. According to Lenzi, he and his family have been compensated by the U.S. government with “more than a million dollars because of our diagnosed traumatic brain injuries” in a combination of civil litigation settlements and Havana Act payments.
freemcflurry
2mo ago
It would be one thing if the auto industry was dying a natural death and Trump wanted to prolong it with tariffs. But that's not all that's going on, the Biden administration is actively trying to kill the industry by effectively outlawing gas cars. The EPA issued regulations that would force 60% of new car sales to be electric by 2030*. That's billions of dollars in capital investment not just for the Big 3 but also for their suppliers and for foreign brands with facilities in the US that will all go up in smoke based on a whim of the EPA. One advantage they have over China is experience in working with gas cars and with their existing capital. They aren't losing in a fair competition where consumers decided they want electric cars, they're losing because of regulations that target US manufacturers but not their Chinese competitors.
So it's not just about Trump passing tariffs to protect Detroit. Biden is shutting down one of America's largest industries by fiat and Trump can stop that from happening, at least temporarily.
*There are rumors that the EPA is going to push that target back a little bit but while it's easy to rewrite the regulations every few months it's not easy to reverse decisions to invest in factories that take years to build.
freemcflurry
13d ago
Those are often paid for by state or federal grants.
https://apnews.com/article/synagogue-security-federal-funds-worship-c687e3e7c15842fc51103479235cbf45
freemcflurry
1mo ago
Make land acknowledgments legally binding. Microsoft says their campus is built on rightfully Suquamish land? Shame on you Microsoft! The county recorder has transferred the title to their tribal elders, please have all of your furniture out by end of day.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
Move a Finn to America and within 5 years he'll fit in. When he has kids you won't be able to tell them apart from anybody else. Move a black person to America and 400 years later they're culture is still wildly divergent and they have different outcomes from white Americans on every measure you could think of.
Anyway I think you're overestimating how much in common you have with black people. Try sending your kid to a 90% black school and ask them how easy it is to fit in because everyone eats peanut butter.
With Europeans you have deep similarities and superficial differences, with other races you have deep differences and superficial similarity.
freemcflurry
28d ago
I thought it depended on the place and time. The sugar producing colonies in the Caribbean were extremely profitable for example. And the Spanish got literal boatloads of silver out of their South and Central American colonies.But then you get into the scramble for Africa in the 19th century and a lot of those were prestige projects that never made any money for the mother country, with the Italians in Abyssinia being the the most egregious example.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
All of those positions predate global warming as a salient issue. The Population Bomb was written in 1968. Orwell complained about vegetarians taking over socialism in the 1940s. Sociologists have been slagging car centered suburbs since they were built after WW2.
in fact, these are prone to being vilified by far left activists for being insufficiently radical
Right, because the activists (the people who matter) have more important goals than cutting emissions.
freemcflurry
24d ago
Did they spend a lot of time executing peasants for no reason? From everything I've read the complaints focussed on taxes, tithes and feudal dues. Louis XVI was barely even using letters de chachet to lock people up when the revolution happened, much less summary executions afaik.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
Agent Burk again indicated that he needed air and said, “Call an ambulance, I’m asking for an ambulance.” However, when Officer Fihe told Agent Burk that they already had a medic coming, Agent Burk then said that he did not need a medic.
When you say you're sick so you can stay home from school but mom calls your bluff
freemcflurry
1mo ago
Mills’ office said the goal is to figure out the best way to harness the economic potential of New Mainers and it has set a target of attracting 75,000 new workers by 2029.
Fifty years ago you would have all of western Europe, now you're saying it's just down to Iceland and Denmark. Running away to increasingly remote places every few years isn't a winning strategy.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
There are at least 6 million refugees and the overwhelming majority are women and children. Even if the fertility rate goes up there are going to be far fewer women of child bearing age left. Some will come back but that portion will only drop with time as they put down roots abroad and the situation in Ukraine deteriorates. I think Ukraine is screwed in the long run. The EU no longer has the economic vitality to build them up like they did Poland.
Me too. Those two categories combined make up about 15% of federal spending. I could live without the rest of it.
If we reduced all federal taxes to 0% we could fund the roads and military with debt and cancel everything else. That would reduce the budget deficit by about 2/3.
freemcflurry
23d ago
Is it just that they have more parties? If 22% of young people support AFD then presumably 78% of them support more left wing parties.
freemcflurry
1mo ago
That article confused me. It feels like it was written from an alternate reality.
The GOP establishment argued in its famous “postmortem” that Republicans could never win enough Hispanics to triumph nationally unless they moderated on immigration, while Tea Party stalwarts and crypto-WNs claimed Latinos would never be conservative, and would just flood the country like Orcs voting for more handouts at the expense of the beleaguered white middle class, who wouldn’t have the numbers to electorally defend themselves. 10 years later it seems all of these factions were comically wrong in their predictions.
No they weren't. Biden won the Hispanic vote by 20+ points as did Clinton.
He's being really smug about this even though he was factually wrong and anyone can easily check it in seconds.
It's insane to me that this is allowed. The justification for immigration is that these are net contributors and we need them to prop up the social safety net but instead actually we're letting in people who will never work again (or not for long) and will almost immediately start collecting benefits. There was a similar deal a while back in the US when a Pakistani Uber driver was killed after his car was hijacked by a couple of, um, youths. The guy was 66 years old and driving for Uber. He had only immigrated a few years previously. The citizens who fund this stuff in the US and Canada are getting fleeced. You work for 40 years and instead of getting to leave it to your kids it all gets sucked away to pay for people who just showed up and never contributed a dime.
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