Glassnoser
10d ago
It's disputed by the Canadian government, but based on my understanding of international law, we're clearly in the wrong.
Glassnoser
10d ago
Wouldn't cars driving down streets have to stop for pedestrians much more often? Wouldn't that make it really difficult to drive east or west more than one block?
Glassnoser
10d ago
I wrote about this a few years ago. The key point is that congestion pricing, when properly designed, does not work by reducing car traffic. It works by coordinating it in a way that more people can actually use the roads but without getting in each other's way and creating congestion. People would adjust their departure times but no one would need to adjust his arrival time or work schedule nor would he have to use an alternative means of transportation nor take another route.
So this is definitely a good thing, but badly implemented. The congestion charges should only apply at bottlenecks, should continuously vary in price, peaking at the early part of rush hour, and should have no exempted vehicles. The effect should be a huge boon to drivers and bus riders, with fewer people taking the subway as a result.
Glassnoser
10d ago
If this is true, then it will only take a very small toll to eliminate congestion.
Glassnoser
10d ago
In what way did Canada fuck with American politics?
Glassnoser
10d ago
He said he wanted to apply economic pressure for us to join the US.
Despite being your largest trading partner, we subsidize our own industry to billions of dollars a year, then dump product on you and hope you will see it as benign enough to let the con go on for another year.
This is not being a shitty trading partner. This is beneficial to the US and we should stop doing it for our own sake. The US does the same thing by the way.
We let spies from the "near-Arctic" state cruise around the Northwest Passageway and scout out our (few) military installations.
What are you referring to? Under international law, we don't have the right to prevent foreign ships from accessing the Northwest Passage.
But instead of just resigning and letting an immediate election happen, our PM has prorogued Parliament, nakedly to buy time for his party to regroup, meaning that we have no actual functioning government for the next two months and he stays in charge nominally, with no credibility to actually negotiate on our behalf.
We do have a government. The government is not the same as the Parliament. The Parliament shuts down all the time. It doesn't normally sit for the whole year. This just means they can't pass legislation.
Glassnoser
23d ago
Who's Brunel?
Glassnoser
24d ago
Who says they aren't good for their own country?
Glassnoser
24d 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
24d ago
There is pretty good evidence that immigration has next to no effect on wages. It may even be slightly positive. Everyone who complains about immigrants suppressing wages seems to think that labour demand is fixed. Growing the population increases the supply and demand for labour about equally.
The idea that immigrants take up too much physical space also seems absurd given that Americans congregate in places with higher density. Being around people is a net benefit. There is lots of empty space for those who disagree.
Glassnoser
24d ago
What's a directional state U grad? Even if there is bloat (I'm not sure I agree. Twitter has been extremely buggy and full of bots since Elon Musk took over.), it still helps companies to give them more people to choose from.
Glassnoser
24d 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
25d ago
Some people do want to live with them though.
Glassnoser
25d ago
The original population is still there. They weren't replaced.
Glassnoser
25d 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
25d 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
25d ago
They hired a housekeeper to babysit us and clean while my parents worked during the week. They sometimes worked late, but I not usually both on th same night and we had an older sibling who could babysit in the evenings. My grandparents did not live nearby.
Glassnoser
25d ago
Maybe I'm biased by the possibly unusual experiences of my close family members, but my mother for example had four children and that didn't stop her from being highly successful. From what I've heard it, she didn't find pregnancy difficult and couldn't wait to go back to work. But who said it had to be two weeks? You can take more than that off, but it doesn't need to be the whole year that some people take.
This is an argument for children being expensive, not for children being a big drag on women's careers.
Glassnoser
26d ago
Pregnancy only needs to take you out of the economy for a few weeks. I really don't understand why its effect on women's careers is exaggerated so much.
Glassnoser
26d ago
Whenever I go on Google Street view in the UK, I'm shocked by how ugly the houses are. Why is everything so grey and depressing looking? I'm used to thinking of it as a rich country, but the quality of housing appears to be extremely low.
Glassnoser
29d ago
They did this though.
Source?
Glassnoser
29d ago
There is a well known case where a man told another man that he would have killed him had the judges not been in town. He was tried for threatening him and was found not guilty because the judges were in town. This was back when judges circulated between towns to try cases. Based on that case, shouldn't he have been found not guilty?
It tends not to be.
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